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Democrat Joe Biden said he was confident of victory and President Donald Trump accused Democrats of trying to steal the election on Wednesday when a close race for the White House was narrowed to a handful of states where vote counting could take hours or hours. days.
Trump won the battlefields of Florida, Ohio and Texas, dashing Biden’s hopes for a decisive early defeat of the president, but Biden said he was on his way to winning the White House by taking three key Rust Belt states.
The 77-year-old Biden was looking at the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that sent the 74-year-old Trump to the White House in 2016 looking for possible breakthroughs once those states finish counting the votes previously cast by. mail and in person.
In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and much of Michigan, mail-in ballots were not processed until Election Day Tuesday.
“We feel good about where we are,” Biden said in his home state of Delaware, shouting over a roar of supporters in cars honking their horns in approval. “We believe that we are on the way to winning this election.”
Winning those three states would be enough to give Biden an Electoral College victory. Fox News projected that Biden would win Arizona, another state that voted for Trump in 2016, giving him more options to reach 270 votes in the Electoral College.
Even without Pennsylvania, Biden’s victories in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, along with his projected victory in a Congressional district in Nebraska, which distributes electoral votes by district, would place him in the White House, as long as he also has the states. in which Trump lost in 2016.
“We are in a BIG time, but they are trying to STEAL the election. We will never let them do that. No votes can be cast after the polls close!” Trump said on Twitter, that he was quick to label the tweet as possibly misleading.
Trump has repeatedly and without evidence suggested that an increase in vote-by-mail will lead to an increase in fraud, although election experts say fraud is rare and ballots by mail are a long-standing feature in American elections.
In Pennsylvania, of the 4.5 million votes counted so far, only 750,000 were absentee votes, or just 17%. According to Edison Research, more than 2.4 million early votes were cast in the state, of which nearly 1.6 million were from Democrats and approximately 555,000 from Republicans.
In Georgia, Trump had a 52-48% lead at 1:40 a.m., but several hundred thousand ballots remained to be counted early Wednesday in Atlanta and its suburban counties. Many of those areas had favored Democrats in the past, and many of the votes that remained to be counted were those cast before the election.
Supporters of both candidates called the election a referendum on Trump and his tumultuous first term. The winner will lead a nation strained by a pandemic that has killed more than 231,000 people and left millions more without jobs, racial tensions and political polarization that has only worsened during a virulent campaign.
Trump monitored the election results with members of his family in the living room of the White House residence. Walking in and out of the room were First Lady Melania Trump, her son-in-law Jared Kushner and their daughter Ivanka, among others. “It’s calm, creepy,” said a source familiar with the scene.
A senior Trump aide, watching the returns at the White House, described the mood there in a text: “Good. But nervous.”
Cheers broke out in the East Room of the White House, where 200 Trump supporters drank and ate chicken wings, sliders and cookies when Fox News called Florida for Trump, a source in the room said.
“The place just blew up,” said the source, who said the mood was “extraordinarily positive” and “cautiously optimistic.” “Everyone started cheering.” Florida was a must-have state for any Trump path to victory.
Voters also had to decide which political party controls the United States Congress for the next two years, with Democrats heavily favored to regain a majority in the Senate and maintain control of the House of Representatives.
NO EARLY SURPRISES
There were no early surprises as the two contenders split the already projected US states. Trump captured conservative states like Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee, while Democratic-leaning Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont went to Biden, according to projections from the television networks and Edison Research.
Trump’s strong performance in Florida was driven by his best numbers with Latinos. Their participation in the votes in counties with large Latino populations was higher than in the 2016 election.
For months there were complaints from Latino Democratic activists that Biden was ignoring Hispanic voters and lavishing attention instead on black voters in large Midwestern cities. Opinion polls in key states showed that Biden performed poorly with Latinos in the weeks leading up to the election.
Many younger Hispanics were ardent supporters of Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders during the party’s primary campaign, but in opinion polls they expressed little enthusiasm for Biden, considering him too moderate and disconnected.
In the Miami area, Latinos are predominantly Cuban-American, where generations of families have fled the communist government in Cuba. Trump’s message that Biden is a socialist seemed to work with them and with the Venezuelans there despite Biden’s denials.
Edison’s national exit poll showed that while Biden led Trump among non-white voters, Trump received a slightly higher proportion of non-white votes than in 2016. The poll showed that approximately 11% of African Americans, 31 % of Hispanics and 30% of Asians Americans voted for Trump, 3 percentage points more than in 2016 in all three groups.
Edison’s national exit poll also found that support for Trump decreased by about 3 points among older white voters, compared to 2016.
The survey found that Biden made significant progress in the suburbs.
In 42 suburban counties spread across 13 states where the majority of votes had been counted, Biden was getting about 5 percentage points better than Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2012.
US stock futures rose late Tuesday as Trump’s performance improved, but were volatile and lasted 0.25% at 1:50 am ET (0650 GMT).
“I think the markets shook a bit because of how close the race seems now. We are seeing a small flight-to-safety response in some asset classes, ”said Mona Mahajan, senior US investment strategist at Allianz Global Investors, New York.
On the betting website Smarkets, the odds reflected a 74% chance that Trump would win, up from 33% earlier in the day.
Voters, many wearing masks and maintaining social distancing to protect against the spread of the coronavirus, flocked to polling places across the country during the day, experiencing long lines in some locations and short waits in many other locations. There were no signs of disruptions or violence at polling places, as some officials feared.
Biden, the former Democratic vice president, placed Trump’s handling of the pandemic at the center of his campaign and had maintained a consistent lead in national opinion polls over the Republican president.
But a third of American voters listed the economy as the issue that mattered most to them when deciding their choice for president, while two in 10 cited COVID-19, according to an Edison Research exit poll on Tuesday.
In the national exit poll, four out of 10 voters said they thought the effort to contain the virus was “very bad.” In the battleground states of Florida and North Carolina, which could decide the election, five out of 10 voters said the national response to the pandemic was “somewhat or very badly.”
Trump seeks another term in office after four chaotic years marked by the coronavirus crisis, an economy hit by pandemic stoppages, an impeachment drama, investigations into Russian electoral interference, America’s racial tensions and political controversies in the United States. immigration.
Biden is seeking to win the presidency in his third attempt after a five-decade political career, including eight years as vice president under Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.
Biden has promised a renewed effort to combat the public health crisis, fix the economy, and bridge America’s political divide. This year, the country was also rocked by months of protests against racism and police brutality.
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