By Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin

DELWARE – Joe Biden on Friday (6) took the lead in Pennsylvania, where a victory would give him the presidency, and was ahead in three other critical battlegrounds as his campaign focused on a presidential transition process and states worked to tally the remaining votes.

In remarks to the country from Delaware on Friday night, Biden said that the trajectory of the race was clear and that he expected to win all of the uncalled states where he is currently ahead of Trump. He claimed the strength of his support reflected “a mandate for action” to counter the coronavirus pandemic and other crises.

“We’re going to win this race with a clear majority of the nation behind us,” Biden said, pointing to his apparent strength in the historically red states of Georgia and Arizona as evidence of a broad political coalition.

As Biden edged closer to victory, President Donald Trump and his political lieutenants spent the day continuing to float baseless conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of the election, and Republicans in several states threatened or took legal action aimed at slowing or halting the counting of ballots. But there were also mounting indications that Trump would not have the full support of his party if he persisted in a scorched-earth effort to impede the electoral process.

Early Friday, Biden overtook Trump in the vote count in both Pennsylvania and Georgia.

But in both states, as well as in Arizona and Nevada, Biden was not yet leading by a sufficiently wide margin to completely foreclose any possibility — however remote — that the count could still turn against him. On Friday evening, Biden was ahead in Pennsylvania and Georgia by less than 1 percentage point, and by not much more than that in the two Western states.

Should Biden win any combination of two states, or the state of Pennsylvania alone, he would clinch a majority of votes in the Electoral College.

Republican strategists and Trump allies concede that it is highly probable that Biden will cross that threshold soon enough and that he may ultimately carry all four of the states in question. In three of them, the remaining ballots are seen as likelier to favour Biden than Trump; in the fourth, Arizona, Trump gained ground on Biden but perhaps not by a sufficient amount to erase the former vice president’s lead.

As the president continued to hurl false claims of voter fraud, he was dealt another setback Friday when the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and four other aides tested positive for the coronavirus, according to a senior administration official. Meadows, who has repeatedly mocked wearing a mask, is only the latest member of Trump’s inner circle to contract the virus.

Biden’s remarks about the state of the race Friday night were his third in as many days since Election Day. Campaign advisers also indicated that they were ready to begin naming senior officials in an anticipated administration in a matter of days, if the race is called in his favour.

Striking an inclusive tone, Biden urged the country to set aside partisan warfare and “come together as a nation to heal”. Noting the slow pace of the vote count — “it can be numbing,” he said — he sought to reassure anxious Americans waiting for the winner of an election that has now stretched on for days.

“We have to remain calm, patient and let the process work out as we count all the votes,” he said. “Democracy works, your vote will be counted, I don’t care how hard people try to stop it, I will not let them stop it.”

In Georgia, Biden went into the lead overnight Thursday (5), thanks to a vote tally from Clayton County, a Democratic-leaning area near Atlanta. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said the state remained “too close to call” and predicted that it was headed for a recount, given that Biden’s lead stood at a mere 4,000 or so votes out of five million cast.

If Biden ends up winning Georgia, it would be a major breakthrough for the Democratic Party in the Republican-dominated Deep South: Democrats rarely win top state-wide races outside of Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. No Democratic presidential candidate has carried Georgia since 1992, when Bill Clinton narrowly won there.

Biden held a lead of about 30,000 votes in Arizona, after a new tranche of ballots from Maricopa County, the state’s population centre, helped Trump close the gap by about 7,000 votes Friday night.

Katie Hobbs, the Arizona secretary of state, said on CNN that 173,000 ballots remained to be counted statewide, including 92,000 in Maricopa County.

In Nevada, Biden picked up about 2,500 votes in the Las Vegas area, officials said late Friday, giving him a lead of more than 22,000. Tens of thousands of ballots remain to be counted, but they continue to favour Biden.

It was in Pennsylvania, though, where the race seemed to turn emphatically in Biden’s direction. Early Friday morning, a few thousand votes from Philadelphia were posted, vaulting the former vice president into the state-wide lead and setting off joyous celebrations in the city where Biden formally began his campaign last year and which he has long considered a second home. By Friday evening, Biden was leading in the state by about 29,000 votes.

Outside the city’s convention centre, jubilant Biden supporters danced along a blockaded part of the street as a DJ with a speaker system blasted music. They unfurled a banner declaring “The People Have Spoken.”

Pennsylvania Democrats, however, were growing frustrated by the slow count and were eager for Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to post more returns.

In what appeared to be another attempt to create an artificial sense of uncertainty around the vote count, the Pennsylvania Republican Party appealed to the US Supreme Court on Friday, asking it to order state election officials to separate mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day from all the other votes they were tabulating — even though Republicans acknowledged in the filing that Pennsylvania’s secretary of state had already issued an order to that effect.

The attempt to involve the Supreme Court came as part of a larger legal fight over mail-in balloting rules in Pennsylvania, in which the high court has already declined twice to get involved. But state authorities said there were fewer mail-in votes arriving after Tuesday (3) than they had anticipated, suggesting that the stakes in the litigation might be relatively low.

Late Friday, a federal court in Nevada denied an injunction request by Republicans that could have delayed the count there by several days.

So far, lawsuits brought by Trump and other Republicans this week have had no meaningful effect on the tabulation of ballots, and they seem designed largely or even entirely for public-relations purposes.

Campaign officials on Friday met with White House officials, including White House counsel Pat Cipollone, an administration official confirmed, but the legal path forward for Trump to contest the validity of the election results wasn’t resolved. On Friday, Trump vowed to exhaust all legal options available to him, making his case in an emailed statement to the news media by his campaign.

Trump has been as angry in private as he has been in public, people who have spoken to him said. One adviser said the president wants “fighters” defending him and is as concerned with the news media battle as he is with the legal challenges.

Fleeting efforts to gently make him understand that the situation is bleak and unlikely to change haven’t been successful. And he is being egged on by Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, and a small handful of White House advisers.

But another group of advisers have been more candid with Trump. Late Thursday and on Friday afternoon, a handful of aides told the president that they were willing to keep fighting the legal battles but that it was an uphill climb without a likely positive outcome, according to people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss private conversations. Trump, one adviser said, heard what they were saying but was not yet ready to accept it.

On Capitol Hill, some Republican leaders resisted coming to terms with the likelihood of a Biden presidency, at least in their comments for public consumption. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader, firmly aligned himself with Trump. He appeared on Fox News late Thursday to insist that the president had “won this election” and on Friday said, “Republicans will not back down from this battle,” he said.

But a handful of rank-and-file House GOP lawmakers declined to rise to the president’s defence. “Baseless allegations undermine the public’s confidence in our electoral system, which is the foundation of our Republic,” said Rep. Steve Stivers, an Ohioan who was chairman of the House Republican campaign committee two years ago when the midterm backlash against Trump cost the party its majority.

In private, some long-time House Republicans were dismayed, if not surprised, at the president’s handling of the election. Some said they were eager for him to concede, although Trump has told allies he has no plans to do so while states are still counting and the vote isn’t certified. What that means in the longer term is not clear.

Yet in a sign of the hold Trump retains on the party’s hard-line base, few Republicans in either chamber who are not retiring or regular critics of the president would confront him by name. In Kentucky, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, repeatedly evaded questions from reporters about the president’s inflammatory rhetoric, pointing to a statement he had made Friday morning that “every legal vote should be counted”.

There were, however, more indirect signs that Senate Republicans were moving on from the Trump years. Sen. Lindsey Graham, an ally of the president’s who just won re-election in commanding fashion, said he was not assuming that Trump had lost but allowed that he was eager to work on immigration and infrastructure and that he also thought Biden deserved to have his Cabinet confirmed.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Biden the obvious winner in her weekly news conference, telling reporters that he would enter office with a “tremendous mandate” to govern and referring to him as president-elect, even though Biden himself has not yet declared victory.

The Biden campaign struck a dismissive tone Friday toward the president’s digging in and depicted him as a sore loser rather than as a menace to the democratic process.

Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Biden, suggested that if Trump declined to concede an election he had lost, then “the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

-New York Times