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‘In America, the Vote Is Sacred,’ Biden Says

At a news conference on Thursday, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee for president, said he felt confident about his chances, but stopped short of declaring himself the winner of the election.

In America, the vote is sacred. It’s how people of this nation express their will. And it is the will of the voters. No one, not anything else, that chooses the president of United States of America. So each ballot must be counted. And that’s what we’re going to see going through now. And that’s how it should be. Democracy is sometimes messy. It sometimes requires a little patience as well. But that patience has been rewarded, now for more than 240 years, with a system of governance. And that’s been the envy of the world. We continue to feel — Senator and I — we continue to feel very good about where things stand. We have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I will be declared the winners. So I ask everyone to stay calm. All the people to stay calm. The process is working. The count is being completed, and we’ll know very soon.

With the winner of the presidency yet to be declared, attention shifted Thursday to a handful of states that remained too close to call but where, on balance, Joseph R. Biden Jr. seemed to have an advantage. President Trump’s campaign pressed ahead with lawsuits challenging the validity of the count in several states, and protests erupted in cities and outside some elections offices.

With Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump in the popular vote by more than 3.8 million votes — which, if it holds, will make this the second election where Mr. Trump lost the popular vote — the attention of both campaigns was riveted on the handful of undecided states that will decide which candidate wins the electoral votes needed to win.

Mr. Biden was 17 electoral votes shy of reaching the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, while Mr. Trump was 56 electoral votes away from the threshold. As results trickled in from the remaining undecided states Mr. Biden increased his lead in Nevada by about 4,000 votes and was eroding Mr. Trump’s leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania, while holding on to his modest lead in Arizona.

Both campaigns tried to project optimism, and asked for patience.

“Democracy is sometimes messy,” Mr. Biden told reporters Thursday in Wilmington, Del., where he called for every ballot to be counted. “It sometimes requires a little patience as well. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign team said that it would likely be filing additional legal actions. Bill Stepien, the campaign manager, accused people of prematurely writing Mr. Trump off at various junctures since the 2016 presidential primaries.

“Donald Trump is alive and well,” he said.

Speaking a day earlier, Mr. Biden had stopped short of declaring victory, as Mr. Trump did prematurely on election night, and sought to strike a conciliatory note as he addressed the nation. But he also had something of a warning for the Trump team.

“Power can’t be taken or asserted,” he said. “It flows from the people. And it’s their will that determines who will be the president of the United States, and their will alone.”

Mr. Trump issued a written statement on Thursday afternoon through his campaign in which he made baseless claims that there could be fraud in the late votes, writing that “if you count the illegal and late votes, they can steal the election from us!” The statement, which was written in all capital letters, resembled one of his tweets — but by issuing it through the campaign, the president avoided getting a warning label from Twitter, which has flagged many of his recent tweets as potentially misleading.

With Mr. Trump’s political path growing more precarious, his team increasingly turned to the courts, filing lawsuits in several states and demanding a recount in Wisconsin. But judges in Georgia and Michigan ruled against his campaign, while it notched a modest win in a Pennsylvania case.

The Trump campaign’s bid to stave off defeat stretched to the Supreme Court, where it intervened in a case challenging Pennsylvania’s plan to count ballots received for up to three days after Election Day.

In a fraught moment for supporters of both candidates, the tensions occasionally started to spill into the streets.

Calling on election officials to “count every vote,” protesters marched through the streets of several American cities on Wednesday, with protests in Minneapolis, Seattle, Phoenix, Philadelphia, New York City and Portland, Ore.

At the same time, supporters of Mr. Trump descended on vote-counting facilities in several contested states. In Phoenix, about 150 pro-Trump protesters, some of them armed, gathered outside the county recorder’s office where a closely watched count of votes that could help determine the outcome of the election was being conducted.

And in Detroit, another group of pro-Trump poll watchers gathered earlier in the day outside a ballot-counting center, demanding that officials “stop the count” of ballots after the Trump campaign filed suit to halt the count in Michigan.

But inside, the democratic process continued to play out as election workers — socially distanced and wearing masks — went about their job: counting the votes.