With millions of votes still not counted and results in half a dozen states yet to be called, former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign seeks to allay the concern of his supporters that the results of the Tuesday’s tight presidential election could lead to a redux of 2016.
“After a long night of counting, it is clear that we are winning enough states to achieve the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency,” Biden told supporters in Wilmington, Delaware on Wednesday afternoon. “I’m not here to declare that we won,” Biden continued, but once the votes are cast, “we think we’ll be the winners.”
Noting that his own margins in Wisconsin and Michigan are currently wider than President Donald Trump’s final victory margins in 2016 and are expected to increase, Biden called on Americans to – once the election is finalized – heal the wounds of a bitter campaign to deal with. the crises facing the nation.
“It will be time for us to do what we’ve always done as Americans – put the campaign’s tough rhetoric behind us,” Biden said. “Getting along again, respecting and caring for each other.”
“To progress, we must stop treating our adversaries as enemies.”
The state of the race is strained. While The Associated Press called a handful of battlegrounds in Biden’s favor – including Arizona and Wisconsin, both brought down from President Donald Trump’s victory column of four years ago – a wave Seemingly bogus legal challenges to the president’s campaign and a protracted count process in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania have dashed hopes for a speedy resolution.
Still, Biden’s campaign has insisted publicly and privately that there remains a solid path to 270 electoral votes – although it may take at least another day to be summoned by the independent press.
Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon on a call with reporters and supporters: “Joe Biden is on his way to winning this election, and he will be the next President of the United States.”
“Joe Biden is on track to win this election, and he will be the next President of the United States,” Campaign Director Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters at an election security briefing Wednesday morning. “The Vice President will fight to make sure every vote is counted … we are confident that Vice President Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States.”
The Trump campaign, which keeps the president’s election promise not to accept election results that did not lead to a second term, has had a scattered response to persistent delays in results. In states like Arizona and Nevada, the president’s team lobbied for the vote count to continue; in states where it is barely ahead, including Pennsylvania, they had called for an end to all recounting. Minutes before Biden’s remarks, Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepian made the unprecedented move to win in Pennsylvania, where nearly a million ballots go without count, citing “math” .
“We are declaring a victory in Pennsylvania,” Stepian told reporters. “It’s not based on gut or feeling. This is based on math. “
The Biden campaign had braced itself in the final days of the campaign for the possibility that Trump would use the slowdown caused by a record number of mail-in and mail-out ballots to stir up trouble in the election. But while the former vice president’s team scared his much-vaunted campaign legal team from day one after the election, the public message to supporters was calm and consistent: “Keep the faith.” .
“We are winning the elections, we have won the elections and we are going to defend these elections,” Bob Bauer, the campaign’s senior legal adviser, said in the morning briefing.
That message was enough to appease many supporters, although some in the campaign’s orbit express frustration that the richest campaign in modern history does not have more accurate poll data. With promising public and private figures showing states like Texas as within Biden’s grasp, they made their way to The Daily Beast, which led to the king’s ransom being spent in places Trump won fairly easily – at the expense other states.
“The real loser, as we all know, is the pollsters – again,” one of the top fundraisers told The Daily Beast on Wednesday morning. “As a donor I’m pissed off. Over $ 200 million was probably spent on Texas, Georgia, and Florida. “
#calm #count #votes