WASHINGTON: The most polarized U.S. elections in decades were at a razor’s edge Tuesday as president Donald trump It seemed to have curbed predictions of a sweeping Democratic wave, but Joe Biden also scored key victories.
Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic that has claimed more than 230,000 lives in the United States, a quick win for Biden, dreamed of by some Democrats, seemed unlikely with key states too close to call.
Trump enjoyed a small but vital advantage in Florida, widely regarded as a must-have triumph to retain the presidency, despite opinion polls that had shown Biden was on par or ahead.
“It’s happening,” Trump’s senior adviser Jason Miller wrote on Twitter about the election, although so far only Fox News had called Florida for president.
Exit polls showed Trump captured swaths of the Latino vote, making strong gains among Cuban Americans after the Republican mogul’s relentless attacks on left-wing leaders in Latin America and rhetorical attempts to link them to Biden.
Biden’s team has long insisted that he doesn’t need to win Florida, and analysts pointed to gains for the Democrat in some Trump areas of the state that could bode well in other large states.
Biden, for his part, enjoyed the initial strength in Arizona, which Trump had been four years earlier, and went head-to-head in Ohio and Texas, two states where the Democrat a few weeks ago saw little chance.
And Biden, as expected, picked up the biggest award of the night with a win in solid Democratic California.
But attention quickly turned to the results that emerged from Georgia and North Carolina, two more states Biden hopes to snatch, and the Midwestern trio of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, in which Trump threw surprise victories in 2016 over Hillary Clinton that handed him the White House.
With a record of more than 100 million Americans voting before Election Day due to the Covid-19 pandemic, final final results could easily take hours or even days to tabulate.
Networks projected that Democrats would have retained control of the House of Representatives, as expected, but it remains to be seen if they can win back the Senate.
Democrats took a Senate seat from Republicans in Colorado, and former Gov. John Hickenlooper was projected to win, but he was also expected to lose an especially vulnerable senator in Alabama.
Trump, 74, expressed his confidence as the evening approached, tweeting in all his capital letters: “WE SEE YOU VERY GOOD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. THANK YOU!”
It was unclear if Trump, who was holding a White House surveillance party, would speak to the public at some point, but he said Tuesday that he was not yet “thinking of a concession or acceptance speech.
“Winning is easy,” he said. “Losing is never easy, not for me.”
Biden, huddled with his family at their home in Delaware, also said voting patterns during the day seemed to favor his side.
“What I hear is that there is an overwhelming turnout. And an overwhelming turnout, particularly from young people, from women, and an overwhelming turnout from African American voters, particularly in Georgia and Florida, over 65,” he told reporters.
“The things that are happening bode well for the base that has been supporting me.”
Trump has repeatedly refused to confirm that he will accept the election results, a first for a US president. He argues, without offering evidence, that the large number of mail-in ballots could be used to rig the polls against him.
In the run-up to Election Day, Trump was especially focused on Pennsylvania, which allows ballots postmarked on Election Day to be counted, even if they arrive later.
Trump dampened fears that he will try to declare victory prematurely, telling Fox News that he will only declare “when there is victory.”
“There is no reason to play,” he said.
Americans couldn’t be more divided on Trump.
For some, it represents a breath of fresh air that brought their entrepreneurial instincts to shake the Washington establishment. For the other half of the country, he is a corrupt leader who ruined America’s reputation abroad and fueled dangerous racist and nationalist sentiments at home.
In Miami, Juan Carlos Bertran, a 60-year-old Cuban-American mechanic, said that Trump “seems better to me for the country’s economy.”
“Now I have two jobs,” he said. “Before I only had one.”
But while voting in New York, Megan Byrnes-Borderan, 35, said that Trump’s threats to question the election results in court were “terrifying.”
“I think Trump will go through all the difficulties to try to win the election,” he said.
Outside the White House, a loud and peaceful protest in a square renamed by the Black Lives Matter movement turned heated as the night wore on, with skirmishes after one person appeared to drop a gas canister.
In Portland, the center of clashes this summer between left-wing protesters and police officers, some 400 people marched into the city center under the watchful eye of state police.
Biden has taken advantage of widespread public disapproval of Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more people in the United States than in any other country.
Trump, who quickly recovered from his own attack with the virus in October, is betting that Americans want to leave the crisis behind and reopen the economy entirely. Biden, by contrast, preaches caution and accuses the president of having abandoned his basic responsibilities.
“We end the chaos! We end the tweets, the anger, the hatred, the failure, the irresponsibility,” Biden said at a rally on the eve of the election in Cleveland, Ohio.
Covid-19 fears fueled the large influx of early voters, encouraged by Biden. Trump has responded by holding dozens of mass election rallies without social distancing, underscoring his message that it is time to move on.
A notable victory in the Senate went to Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who easily dodged a challenge in Kentucky.
And in Georgia, Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, a political newcomer who has promoted the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon, won a seat in the United States House of Representatives, giving the widely discredited movement a voice. in Congress.
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