US Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he is winning the 2020 election but sitting President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump resorted to legal means to remain in office.

Gains in Michigan and Wisconsin gave Biden, a former vice-president who has spent five decades in public life, a critical boost in the race to obtain 270 electoral votes in the state-by-state Electoral College needed to win the White House.

Trump, who won both states in 2016, now has fewer options to secure a second four-year term. With the count still under way, he has falsely declared victory, accused the Democrats of trying to steal the election and vowed to fight the states in court.

“It’s clear that we’re winning enough states to reach (the) 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency,” Biden, appearing with his running mate Kamala Harris, said in his home state of Delaware. “I’m not here to declare that we’ve won. But I am here to report that when the count is finished we believe we will be the winners.”

Trump has spent months seeking to undermine the credibility of the voting process in case he lost and accusing Democrats, without evidence, of seeking to steal the election.

His campaign fought to keep Trump’s chances alive with lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania to stop vote counting, complaining that it “has not been provided with meaningful access to numerous counting locations to observe the opening of ballots and the counting process.”

The campaign has also said that it will request a recount in Wisconsin, where Biden is forecast to have another victory by a small edge, and that it is suing to halt counting in Pennsylvania until “there is meaningful transparency.”

The campaign asked the United States Supreme Court to allow Trump to join a pending lawsuit filed by Pennsylvania Republicans over whether the battleground state, which was still counting hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots, should be permitted to accept late-arriving ballots sent by Election Day on Nov 3.

The maneuvers amounted to a broad effort to contest the results of a still undecided election a day after millions of Americans went to the polls during the coronavirus pandemic that has upended daily life.

While fighting to stop the count in states where he feared losing, Trump blasted news organizations that projected losses in Arizona and Nevada, states he thought he should be winning.

Biden said, “Every vote must be counted. No one’s going to take our democracy away for us, not now, not ever. America’s come too far, America’s fought too many battles, America has endured too much to ever let that happen.”

Trump is trying to avoid becoming the first incumbent US president to lose a re-election bid since George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Biden won Michigan by 67,000 votes, or 1.2 percent, while he was ahead in Wisconsin by just over 20,000 ballots, or 0.6 percent, according to figures from Edison Research, which projected Biden as the winner in Michigan. Several news outlets projected Biden as the winner in Wisconsin, though Edison did not, citing the pending recount.

Wisconsin law allows a candidate to request a recount if the margin is below 1 percent, which the Trump campaign said it would do.

Results in the six states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Alaska come in later.

Among other decisive states, Trump managed to fend off attacks from Biden and will hold Florida and Ohio, according to projections. Biden was forecast to flip Arizona, becoming the first Democrat to do so since 1996. The two candidates expressed confidence in their own victories.

“We did win this election,” Trump said from the East Room at the White House. He said his re-election campaign has produced “phenomenal” results and is “winning everything.”

However, Biden told his supporters that “it’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election.”

Xinhua, Zhao Huanxin in Washington and Heng Weili in 

New York contributed to this story.