It’s not exactly a stampede, but the number of Republicans willing to acknowledge President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr’s victory is growing, with governor Mike DeWine of Ohio and the veteran party operative Karl Rove, who served as an adviser to the Trump campaign, urging the President to accept defeat.

While only four sitting senators in the President’s party have publicly congratulated Biden, other Republicans are creeping gingerly in that direction, and Republican state elections officials are pushing back against the Trump campaign’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

“We need to consider the former vice-president as the President-elect. Joe Biden is the President-elect,” DeWine told CNN early on Thursday.

Earlier this week, the governor — who represents a one-time toss-up state that has swung decisively for President Trump twice — had signalled that he wanted to wait for Trump’s legal challenges to be adjudicated before going all the way.

On Wednesday night, Rove, a ferocious partisan fighter who was a key player in President George W. Bush’s campaigns, wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal titled “This Election Result Won’t Be Overturned” pointing out that recounts often change hundreds but seldom thousands of votes, and never in the multiple states that Trump would need to overturn to claim victory.

“The President’s efforts are unlikely to move a single state from Biden’s column, and certainly they’re not enough to change the final outcome,” wrote Rove, who provided strategic advice to Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale.