Joe Biden is on the brink of winning the race for the White House after taking a lead over Donald Trump in Pennsylvania that puts him on course to secure more than the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.
Mr Biden was up by more than 12,000 votes in the battleground state on Friday morning as state officials continued to tabulate ballots from the heavily Democratic precincts in and around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city.
If he wins the state’s 20 electoral votes, he would become the next president, starting a new chapter in American history after the turbulence of Mr Trump’s four years in office.
Mr Trump, a New York property developer turned reality television star, took aim at the norms of US politics, pursuing a populist agenda at home that outraged critics and taking an “America First” stance abroad that worried allies.
Mr Biden, a 77-year-old son of working-class Scranton, Pennsylvania, is set to become the oldest candidate elected to the presidency. Having served for nearly four decades in the US Senate and eight years as Barack Obama’s vice-president, Mr Biden ran on a promise to unify the nation. If he wins, his running mate, Kamala Harris, will be the first African-American woman and first person of Indian descent to serve as vice-president.
Mr Biden was leading in Nevada and Georgia, which have yet to be declared, and Arizona, which has been called for Mr Biden by several media organisations, including the Financial Times. Mr Trump’s legal team has challenged the Pennsylvania count in court.
In addition to taking the lead in Pennsylvania, Mr Biden overtook Mr Trump in Georgia on Friday morning, with a margin of more than 1,000 votes, according to the Associated Press and the National Election Pool. Georgia officials predicted that the close race was heading for a recount.
In both swing states, the uncounted votes were predominantly mail-in ballots from Democratic areas that have so far been cast disproportionately for Mr Biden.
Mr Trump, who complained on Thursday that the election was being “stolen” and threatened more legal action, was heading for failure in his attempt to win a second term. He had repeatedly mocked his rival, telling supporters at a rally that he might leave the US if he lost to “Sleepy Joe”, as he calls Mr Biden.
With ballots still being counted across the country, Mr Biden had received more votes than any presidential candidate in history — almost 74m, about 4m more than Mr Trump, who increased his vote compared with 2016. Given Mr Biden’s electoral-college lead, Mr Trump would have had to win Pennsylvania to maintain a potential path to victory.
In a statement on Friday, Mr Trump said that “all legal ballots must be counted and all illegal ballots should not be counted”, and that Democrats had resisted this “basic principle . . . at every turn”.
He said: “This is no longer about any single election. This is about the integrity of our entire election process.”
Mr Biden said on Thursday there was “no doubt” he would be elected the 46th US president.
Mr Trump has made clear he will not concede without a legal fight even if Mr Biden has secured more than 270 electoral college votes. Speaking from the White House podium on Thursday in his first public appearance since election day, Mr Trump said: “If you count the legal votes, I easily win.”
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Without presenting any evidence of misconduct, the president added: “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us, if you count the votes that came in late.” Only a handful of Republicans, such as the ardent loyalist senator Lindsey Graham, have echoed Mr Trump’s claims.
Mr Trump appeared to concede that he was on track to lose in Georgia and Pennsylvania, insisting the election day tally — which did not include most mail-in ballots — should be viewed as definitive. “I won Pennsylvania by a lot, and that gets whittled down,” he said.
But Kathy Boockvar, the Pennsylvania secretary of state, said the number of postal ballots in Pennsylvania that were arriving after election day was quite small, complicating Mr Trump’s strategy of trying to invalidate those votes in an attempt to win the state.
Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Mr Biden’s campaign manager, on Thursday expressed confidence that the former vice-president would win Arizona, but cautioned that the final results might not come until Friday.
Mr Trump took a strong early lead in Georgia as votes were tabulated from conservative parts of the state, which has not voted for a Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992. But Mr Biden caught up as early mail-in votes from the heavily African-American suburban counties in the Atlanta area were counted.
