President Trump won a series of key battlegrounds early on Wednesday morning, including Florida, Ohio and Iowa, as Joseph R Biden Jr expressed confidence he would ultimately prevail across key Northern states and Arizona as the presidential contest turned into a state-by-state slog that could drag deeper into the week.
“We believe we are on track to win this election,” Mr. Biden said in a brief speech after 12:30 am Eastern, saying he was “optimistic” about the outcome once all the votes were counted. No full states had yet flipped from their 2016 results as of 1 am, but several key states had huge portions of ballots still to be counted. Biden did flip a single Electoral College vote that Trump had won in 2016, carrying Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes Omaha.
With millions of legitimate votes still waiting to be counted, Trump prematurely and recklessly declared that he won the election. Appearing at the White House, he pressed for more vote counting in Arizona, where he is behind, and called to stop the count where he is ahead as he baselessly declared the election “a fraud on the American public.”
In an unprecedented move that drew bipartisan condemnation, the president said he intended to go to the Supreme Court to intervene to halt the legitimate counting of the vote.
‘Outrageous and unprecedented’: Biden campaign responds to Trump
Joe Biden’s campaign team has responded to President Trump’s premature and unsubstantiated statement of victory. Biden for President Campaign Manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said Trump’s statement about the legitimacy of yet-to-be-counted ballots “was outrageous, unprecedented, and incorrect”. “It was outrageous because it is a naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens,” she said. “It was unprecedented because never before in our history has a president of the United States sought to strip Americans of their voice in a national election.” Trump’s statement was incorrect, O’Malley Dillon said, because the law requires every legitimate vote to be counted.
Sources: BBC,REUTERS and The New York Times
