Joe Biden took significant strides towards winning the presidency on Wednesday but the Trump campaign vowed to reverse them at the vote count and in the courts, ushering in a potentially prolonged and messy endgame to the election.
Biden was called the winner in the critical battleground of Wisconsin, and was ahead in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, while Trump held leads in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.
If the current standings are sustained, it would take Biden over the 270 votes in the electoral college needed to clinch victory, even without the deadlocked state of Pennsylvania, where a million ballots were yet to be counted by Wednesday afternoon.
Unleashing a long-planned legal campaign, the Trump campaign demanded a recount in Wisconsin and called for the count in Michigan to be halted, on the grounds that its representatives did not have “meaningful access”.
Starting with a television statement after 2am, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed that the routine counting of ballots after election day was somehow fraudulent. In practice Trump campaign officials were on Wednesday supporting continued vote counts where the president was behind and vigorously opposing them where he was ahead.
On Wednesday afternoon, Trump staged a rally of his supporters outside a convention centre in Philadelphia where votes were being counted, echoing Republican tactics to stop the recount in Florida 2000, which helped win the election for George W Bush.
The 2000 election was finally decided by the US supreme court, and on Wednesday afternoon, the Trump campaign also asked the supreme court to rule on its objections to an extended vote count in Pennsylvania.
The Biden camp has assembled its own legal teams at the chief electoral flashpoints, and launched a “fight fund” to finance the effort.
Meanwhile the US Postal Service was criticised by a judge for failing to carry out a sweep of its sorting offices for postal votes that had not yet been delivered to polling stations, amid claims that thousands of ballots were stranded at sorting offices.
As the legal manoeuvring gathered momentum, it was clear the fate of the US presidency was likely to be determined by a few thousand votes in a handful of states, and possibly the decision of an array of judges.
It was also evident the nation had not delivered the decisive “blue sweep” repudiation of Trumpism Democrats had hoped for, nor did it look likely the election would give them control of the Senate.
Even before the counting was finished, Biden had won more votes than any president in history – over 70 million – edging out Barack Obama’s 2008 record and about 2.5 million ahead of Trump, once again highlighting the disparity between the popular vote and the arithmetic of the US electoral college system.
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In the scramble for states and their assigned electoral college votes, Biden failed in his bid to win over Florida and Ohio, but looked likely to flip Arizona, another closely contested state that Trump won in 2016.
As had been predicted, Trump appeared on television from the White House early on Wednesday morning and falsely claimed he had won, describing the vote count “a major fraud on our nation”. Speaking after 2am, he announced he would be taking a case to the US supreme court, saying: “We want all voting to stop.” Voting had stopped by that time, and it appeared he meant to say vote-counting.
Trump’s own campaign officials, briefing the press on Wednesday morning, expressed support for continued vote-counting in states where the president was behind.
Neither the vice-president, Mike Pence, nor the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, echoed Trump’s spurious allegation that late-counted votes were inherently fraudulent.
“We don’t know who won the presidential race yet,” McConnell said, after winning his own re-election battle in Kentucky.
An election observer mission sent by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe criticised the actions of the president, issuing a statement saying: “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions.”
Biden, who appeared on an outdoor stage at a drive-in rally in Wilmington, Delaware, before the president’s remarks, urged patience while the votes were counted, but claimed he was optimistic about his chances.
“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who has won this election,” Biden said. “That’s the decision of the American people.”
In Pennsylvania, one of the states that could decide the presidency, Governor Tom Wolf warned: “There are millions of mail-in ballots that are being counted. And that takes longer than the standard in person voting. So we may not know the results even today, but the most important thing is that we have accurate results.”
In the battle for control of the Senate, Democratic hopes of toppling Republicans in Maine, Iowa, South Carolina, Montana and North Carolina fell short and a Senate Democrat in Alabama, Doug Jones, lost to a former football coach, Tommy Tuberville.
Democrats gained seats in Colorado and Arizona, but their remaining hopes of a 50-50 Senate rested winning at a runoff contest in Georgia, and pulling off wins in close races in Michigan and North Carolina.
One issue that both camps agreed on was that the pollsters had once more got their predictions wrong, in some cases by a wider margin than in 2016, consistently undercounting Trump voters around the country.
