‘Keep the faith. We’re gonna win this’: Biden insists he can still win election in speech to supporters

President claims - without evidence - Democrats seeking to steal election

Joe Biden has insisted he is still on track to win the presidency, urging anxious Democrats to “keep the faith”.

In a brief appearance before supporters in Wilmington, Delaware, the former vice president said the evening was going well, despite the battleground state of Florida being bagged by his opponent, Donald Trump. 

“We feel good about where we are, we really do,” he said. “I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we're on track to win this election.”

When he spoke at the Chase Centre in the centre of Wilmington, some time before 1am and appearing with his wife, Jill Biden, some Democrats may have allowed themselves to think he would already have a convincing victory in the bag. Scores of party officials and guests had joined an election watch event.

In truth, it was always likely a conclusive outcome would take many hours, and perhaps even several days. 

The sheer number of absentee ballots and the fact that states such as Pennsylvania do not start counting them until late in the process, always pointed to a drawn out result.

The exception, perhaps, would have been if Democrats had managed to trigger a blue wave, flipping states that the president took in 2016. Yet, as the evening wore on, one state after the other where Democrats had hopes of victory -Florida, Georgia and Texas - stayed red.

The lesson from the evening was that the race was clearly closer than a number of the polls previously suggested. 

One state Democrats did flip was Arizona, with its 11 electoral college votes.

“We knew, because of the unprecedented early vote and the mail-in vote, it was gonna take a while,” said Mr Biden, whose traditional, on-the-ground campaigning was limited as a result of the pandemic.

“We're going to have to be patient until ... the hard work of tallying votes is finished, and it ain't over until every vote is counted, everybody ballot is counted.”

As he spoke Mr Trump, who blasted his way across the country, criss-crossing the heartland states in recent days, was already falsely claiming that Democrats were trying to steal the election.

“We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Mr Trump said on Twitter, which swiftly tagged the tweet as possibly misleading.

“Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process,” the Twitter label reads. 

Later, in an appearance at the White House, he falsely claimed to have already won the election and said he would ask the Supreme Court to order that more ballots should not be counted. At the time he spoke, he was trailing Mr Biden both in electoral college votes and in the popular vote.

Mr Trump has repeatedly and without evidence suggested that an increase in mal-in voting will lead to an increase in fraud, although election experts say that fraud is rare and mail-in ballots are a long-standing feature of American elections.

“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who has won this election,” Mr Biden said. 

“Keep the faith, guys, we’re going to win this. Thank you. Your patience is great.”

Additional reporting by Associated Press