WILMINGTON, Del. — Joe Biden predicted Wednesday that he would win the 2020 election over President Donald Trump when the final votes were counted.
“After a long night of counting, it’s clear we’re winning enough states to win 270 electoral votes to win the presidency,” Biden told a small group of reporters at the Chase Center on the Riverfront in Wilmington, Delaware.
“When the count is finished, we will be the winners,” Biden said.
Biden noted he was “not here to declare we won,” but added he’d speak again “tonight or tomorrow.”
Standing beside his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., the Democratic nominee ran through his electoral prospects in a series of critical battleground states.
Biden noted he’d won Wisconsin, where NBC News has declared him the apparent winner. That means NBC News projects he has won the race, but the results are close enough that the outcome might depend on a potential recount or confirmation of the accuracy of the results.
Biden noted that he led Trump in Michigan by tens of thousands of votes and said “it is growing.” Moments after Biden spoke, NBC News projected Biden as the winner in that state.
Following NBC News' Michigan projection, Biden led Trump 253 to 214 in the projected Electoral College vote tally kept by the news agency. To win the presidency, a candidate must win 270 or more Electoral College votes.
Biden said he felt “very good” about his chances in Pennsylvania, noting that a large portion of the outstanding ballots there were mailed in and that he’d performed strongly among voters who cast ballots by mail in the state.
Biden demanded that "every vote must be counted,” and without specifically mentioning Trump — whose campaign turned to the courts Wednesday as part of a ramped up strategy to litigate the election results — added that “no one is going to take our democracy away from us.”
“I’m confident we’ll emerge victorious,” he said.
Biden also spent time in his remarks casting an image of how he would govern in the opening days of a prospective presidency that would have been won in the Electoral College by a thin margin, promising to unite a divided nation.
“Once this election is finalized and behind us, it’ll be time to … put the harsh rhetoric of the campaign behind us, to lower the temperature, to see each other again, to listen to one another,” he said.
