‘Keep the Faith, Folks’: On the Brink of Victory, Biden Urges Calm and Belief in America

Joe Biden reassured the United States about its democratic processes and offered condolences to victims of COVID-19. Trump was cut off by most major networks for lying.

As votes continue to be counted in states across the country, Democrat Joe Biden continues to urge calm and patience in an effort to tamp down conflict and unite the nation—a stark contrast to President Donald Trump’s baseless attempts to cast doubt over the legitimacy of a democratic election.

Biden is currently on track to win the 270 electoral votes he needs to become president, but there are still hundreds of thousands of votes outstanding in Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. While Trump has embraced lying as sport and launched lawsuit after lawsuit to try to halt counting or falsely question the validity of legally-cast ballots, Biden has insisted that every vote be counted. 

“It is the will of the voters, no one, not anything else, that chooses the president of the United States,” Biden said in a speech on Thursday. “Each ballot must be counted and that’s what we’re going to see going through now. And that’s how it should be. Democracy is sometimes messy. It sometimes requires a little patience as well.”

“Stay calm. The process is working, the count is being completed and we will know very soon,” he added.

Biden’s comments are emblematic of his approach over the past 18 months. When Biden first launched his effort, he framed it as a battle for the soul of America and he has repeated that mantra time and time again. In the early months of the campaign, the former vice president cast himself as perhaps the only figure capable of uniting the country following Trump’s divisive presidency. More recently, while Trump has downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, Biden has offered empathy and compassion to a nation currently experiencing its worst surge of cases yet. 

“Cases are on the rise nationwide and nearing 240,000 deaths due to COVID,” Biden said Thursday. “Our hearts go out to each and every family that has lost a loved one to this terrible disease.”

Trump, meanwhile, did not acknowledge the virus at all on Thursday—a day in which the US set a grim new record with more than 116,000 cases reported, according to the COVID Tracking Project. More than 1,100 Americans died yesterday and another 53,322 remain hospitalized. 

Biden has released plan after plan to tackle the coronavirus, climate change, growing inequality, and the nation’s healthcare crisis, but he has nonetheless consistently returned to the key theme of his campaign: Restoring America, or as he puts it: Building Back Better.

On Thursday evening, Trump spoke from the White House, where he lied about election results and launched a dark attack on democracy, unable to accept the will of the American people. Not long after, Biden took to Twitter to once again urge those same people to maintain hope. 

“Keep the faith, folks,” he wrote.