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WASHINGTON — Joe Biden, on the cusp of winning the White House on Friday night after overtaking President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania and Georgia, touted his record-breaking vote haul as evidence of a solid mandate and an irrefutable if still impending victory.

Trump had signaled that he won’t readily concede, and stuck by baseless claims that the election was being stolen through fraudulent mail ballots.

Pennsylvania alone would put Biden over the top, and the former vice president gained ground with each fresh batch of reports from absentee ballots.

“We don’t have a final declaration of victory yet. But the numbers tell us a clear and convincing story. We’re going to win this race,” Biden told supporters late Friday in his hometown of Wilmington, Del., in a speech crafted to quash any doubts that he will replace Trump as president on Jan. 20. “The purpose of our politics is not total, unrelenting, unending warfare….We have to put the anger and the demonization behind us.”

Biden’s vow to lance the rancor in the nation’s politics will depend more than a little on how Trump handles the next 11 weeks.

The race hinged on four battlegrounds that remained unresolved late Friday: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, that latter of which was likely to end up in Trump’s column.

Victory in any of those would put Biden over the top, as long as he hung on in Arizona, where his lead had narrowed since the Associated Press and Fox News declared him the winner early Wednesday.

Without Arizona, Biden needed Pennsylvania to cement victory. Otherwise he needed a combination of other states.

“We are going to win this race with a clear majority of the nation behind us,” Biden said, tripping over his words a bit just before 11 p.m. “They’ve given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism. They made it clear they want the country to come together, not continue to pull apart. The people spoke. More the 74 million Americans spoke loudly for our ticket.”

That’s more than any presidential candidate in history.

And Biden noted that he topped Trump by 4 million, giving him something Trump himself lacked when he won the electoral vote four years ago: a majority of the popular vote.

The security cordon around Biden tightened noticeably on Friday, with an expanded Secret Service presence and the airspace over his home declared off limits as a matter of national security.

Biden ended by saying “I hope to be talking to you tomorrow” – that is, once he’d hit the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch.

Defeat would make Trump the first one-term president since the elder George Bush lost in 1992 to Bill Clinton, whose wife, Hillary Clinton, Trump edged past four years ago.

He would be the 10th presidential incumbent to lose an election.

Intense partisanship drove the record turnout. So did the flexibility states offered to cast ballots by mail during the COVID-19 outbreak, which few expect to disappear by Inauguration Day.

The challenges ahead are daunting, including a pandemic that has cost 235,000 American lives, the most of any country. Biden would have to navigate a deeply rancorous post-Trump era with Trump unlikely to retreat from public view.

‘Phony claim’

Earlier Friday, Trump campaign’s general counsel, Matt Morgan, referred to Biden’s “phony claim on the White House” and vowed to unleash lawsuits and recounts that independent election law experts said had little merit or chance to shift the outcome in any state.

“This election is not over,” Morgan said. “The false projection of Joe Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final.”

He cited “many irregularities” in Pennsylvania, including a lack of “meaningful access” for observers at vote-counting sites. In Nevada, he said, “thousands” may have “improperly cast mail ballots.” And in Georgia, he said, “we are confident we will find ballots improperly harvested” — the language signaling that such evidence did not yet exist.

Trump remained out of sight all day, tweeting late afternoon that “Joe Biden should not wrongfully claim the office of the President. I could make that claim also. Legal proceedings are just now beginning!”

During the campaign, Trump threatened not to cede power even if he lost.

Biden spokesman Andrew Bates tartly noted Friday that “the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

Biden turns 78 on Nov. 20 and would be the oldest person ever elected president. Sen. Kamala Harris, 56, would be the first woman and the first person of color to serve as vice president, the post Biden held for eight years under Barack Obama.

“It’s a happy day for our country, because Joe Biden is a unifier,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaking in terms of victory on Friday morning after Biden had pulled ahead in Pennsylvania and Georgia. “President-elect Biden has a strong mandate to lead. He will have a strong Democratic House with him and many Democrats in the Senate.”

Calls grew louder through the day from prominent Republicans for Trump to tone down the rhetoric.

Some reprimanded him for baselessly questioning the legitimacy of the election and inflaming supporters.

“The President is within his rights to request recounts, to call for investigation of alleged voting irregularities where evidence exists, and to exhaust legal remedies,” tweeted Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 nominee for president. “He is wrong to say that the election was rigged, corrupt and stolen. Doing so damages the cause of freedom here and around the world, weakens the institutions that lie at the foundation of the Republic and recklessly inflames destructive and dangerous passions.”

Those were precisely Trump’s extraordinary allegations Thursday night from the White House briefing room: “They’re trying to steal an election. They’re trying to rig an election.”

Much of the GOP focus was on Philadelphia, where Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, rejected allegations of fraud.

“What the president needs to do is, frankly, put his big boy pants on. He needs to acknowledge the fact that he lost, and he needs to congratulate the winner,” as Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Al Gore did, he said. “Stop this and let us move forward as a country.”

No evidence of fraud

No evidence has surfaced to support Trump’s claims. Republicans across the country fared well — often better than polls projected — in races for Congress and state-level offices, belying allegations of irregularities.

Nineteen former U.S. attorneys who served Republican presidents, including Dallas lawyer Matt Orwig, the chief federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Texas for six years under George W. Bush, denounced Trump’s claims as “premature, baseless and reckless.”

As of 10:30 p.m. Dallas time Friday:

• In Georgia, Biden led by 4,395 votes out of nearly 5 million cast, a 0.1% lead and a huge turnaround from the initial Trump lead late Tuesday. The state has no automatic recount provision, but Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that “with a margin that small, there will be a recount in Georgia.”
• In Arizona, Biden led by 29,861 out of 3.2 million. The continuing count favored Trump, whose aides argued that the state remained too close to call, though The Associated Press and Fox News had called the state for Biden early Wednesday.
• In Nevada, Biden’s lead began to grow Friday night, to 22,657 out of 1.2 million, doubling from the night before.
• In Pennsylvania, Biden led by 28,833 votes out of 6.6 million as mail ballots from Philadelphia’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate were processed, and he was gaining ground with each tally update. He had lagged by 24,000 as Thursday turned into Friday.

“We were up by nearly 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania. I won Pennsylvania by a lot, and that gets whittled down,” Trump complained the night before. “It’s a corrupt system. … They want to find out how many votes they need, and then they seem to be able to find them.”

But the order in which ballots are tabulated makes no difference.

There was nothing sinister or unexpected in the fact that Trump leads, based on partial returns, melted away once absentee ballots were counted. Democrats were much more likely to have voted by mail.

U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, a conservative Republican who has distanced himself from Trump before, issued a blistering denunciation of the unfounded allegations. “Voter fraud is poison to self-government, so these are major allegations,” he said. “If the president’s legal team has real evidence, they need to present it immediately to both the public and the courts.”

Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, rejected Trump’s aspersions on the integrity of ballot-counting in his state.

“The president’s allegations of large-scale fraud and theft of the election are just not substantiated. I’m not aware of any significant wrongdoing here,” he said on NBC’s Today show.

For Democrats, Trump’s refusal to accept the will of the electorate was just one more political norm he had smashed.

“I hope Republicans will turn the chapter on a dark part of American political history and a dark chapter in the history of the Republican Party, and turn the page on Donald Trump,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat who leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

As Democrats were already referring to Biden as president-elect, the Trump campaign was still blasting out fundraising appeals crying fraud.