Jen O’Malley Dillon, Joseph R. Biden’s campaign manager, said Wednesday morning the campaign is confident that Mr. Biden will be elected president once all the votes are counted.
“Joe Biden is on track to win this election, and he will be the next president of the United States,” Ms. O’Malley Dillon said at an election briefing. “We think this is already a foregone conclusion.”
She said the public can expect to hear from Mr. Biden himself at some point on Wednesday.
Despite the definitive claim, there were still a significant number of ballots left to be counted as of Wednesday morning in the presidential race.
President Trump was leading Mr. Biden narrowly in North Carolina and Georgia and by a significantly wider margin in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Biden held slight leads in Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada, and The Associated Press had already called Arizona and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District for the Democrat.
In 2016, Mr. Trump carried all those territories except for Nevada.
Mr. Trump and other Republicans disputed the Arizona call.
Ms. O’Malley Dillon said they expect final results for Wisconsin and Michigan to come in Wednesday and said final results for Nevada would likely come in on Thursday.
Nevada officials had already indicated earlier Wednesday that they were pausing the tabulations until Thursday morning.
“We are going to win Wisconsin, recount or no recount,” she said, addressing a prospect raised by the Trump campaign.
She said they expect to win Pennsylvania, citing 1.4 million outstanding ballots that will be counted in the coming days.
“We expect that these ballots will more than overcome Trump’s 600,000-vote margin that he’s carrying right now,” Ms. O’Malley Dillon said, saying the counts look like they will come in at some point on Thursday.
She called Georgia a “toss-up” and said North Carolina is probably leaning toward Mr. Trump at the moment.
The president said some early-morning movement toward Mr. Biden looked suspicious.
“Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the ’pollsters’ got it completely & historically wrong!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter.
Twitter flagged the post as potentially misleading.
In a speech to supporters at the White House earlier Wednesday, Mr. Trump had claimed victory in North Carolina and Georgia and said he was winning in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The president also suggested he might try to take any election disputes to the U.S. Supreme Court.
If he does, Mr. Trump will be in for “one of the most embarrassing defeats a president ever suffered before the highest court of the land,” said Biden campaign adviser Bob Bauer.
Mr. Bauer said they’re ready for GOP legal challenges in “any court.”
“Wherever they go and however they go about it, we have lawyers ready to go, papers ready to go within an hour of hearing of any step that they take,” he said.
Election officials in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were not allowed to start counting mail ballots until Tuesday morning and some counties in Pennsylvania were not going to start the count until Wednesday.
Some cities in Michigan could start processing absentee ballots on Nov. 2.
Mr. Bauer blamed Republican-led legislatures in those states for not allowing the counts to start earlier.
Democrats had placed a heavy emphasis on getting their supporters to embrace vote-by-mail during the coronavirus pandemic and so it was expected that mail-in ballots were likely to break more heavily for Mr. Biden.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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