Joseph R. Biden Jr. stood on the cusp of the presidency on Friday, seizing a lead over President Donald Trump in both Pennsylvania and Georgia and drawing ever closer to securing the 270 electoral votes needed to lay claim to the White House.

Biden, who has 253 electoral votes, pulled ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania by about 13,400 votes on Friday afternoon. If his lead holds — and it is expected to — the state’s 20 electoral votes would vault him past the threshold to win the election.

Biden had already begun to project the image of a man preparing to assume the mantle of office, meeting on Thursday with his economic and health advisers to be briefed on the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking briefly to reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden urged the public to show a “little patience” as the vote counting in battleground states continued.

“Democracy,” he said, “can sometimes be messy.”

Biden’s appeal to let the process play out contrasted with that of Trump, who took the lectern in the White House briefing room to falsely claim that the election was riddled with fraud, as part of an elaborate coast-to-coast conspiracy by Democrats, the news media and Silicon Valley to deny him a second term.

As the number of outstanding ballots slowly dwindled, Trump was left increasingly with only legal challenges to forestall defeat, while Biden was betting on the steady accumulation of mail-in ballots to keep him on top in Pennsylvania.

Georgia, which has not elected a Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992, was headed for a photo finish that could supply an extra cushion of electoral votes to Biden.
Inside the candidates’ campaign war rooms, staffers were briefed by their field operations to see where the outstanding votes were and how they would break for the candidates.

In Georgia, Biden’s total vaulted above Trump’s, giving the former Vice-President a 1,500-vote lead. A small margin can set the stage for a recount. But if the eastern battlegrounds were trending towards Biden, the Trump campaign drew some comfort from the west.

In Arizona, the continuing count whittled Biden’s early lead in the state to roughly 43,700 votes. After a delay in counting the remaining ballots from Maricopa County early Thursday, election officials continued to plough through tens of thousands of ballots from Phoenix and its sprawling suburbs.

New York Times News Service