In addition to the White House, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are at stake.
Washington:
Americans voted Tuesday under the shadow of a growing coronavirus pandemic to decide whether to re-elect Republican Donald Trump, one of the most polarized presidents in US history, or send Democrat Joe Biden to the White House.
A record number of early votes, some 100 million, have already been cast in elections that have the country on the edge and are being closely watched in capitals around the world.
Biden, 77, who served eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president, leads Trump in national polls and in many of the states on the battlefield that will decide the White House.
The former Delaware senator, who is making his third run for president, began his day with a visit to the church in Wilmington, Delaware, where his son Beau Biden and his first wife and daughter are buried.
The 74-year-old Trump, who is seeking to become the first US president to win re-election after being impeached, dismissed polls that show him behind Biden.
“I think we have a great chance of winning,” he said Tuesday morning on “Fox and Friends.” “We think we are doing very well everywhere. The crowd has been incredible.”
“Our country can never be the same country if it wins,” Trump said, adding that the United States would become a “socialist” nation.
At the same time, Trump has called into question the integrity of the election and threatened legal challenges, claiming the only way he can lose is if the results are “rigged.”
Casting her vote in New York, Megan Byrnes-Borderan, 35, said Trump’s threats were “part of why it’s so scary.”
“I think Trump will go through all the difficulties to try to win the election,” he said.
Trump has campaigned against vote-by-mail for months, claiming it could lead to fraud and that all ballots must be tabulated on Election Day.
Several states, including the battlefields of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, do not begin counting mail-in ballots until Election Day.
Finished with the chaos!
In addition to the White House, all 435 House seats are up for grabs, and Democrats are expected to maintain and possibly expand their majority in the House.
Roughly a third of the Senate is up for grabs, and Republicans risk losing their 53-47 majority.
The bitter divisions and passions unleashed by the hard-hitting election campaign are sure to leave disappointed aside and have sparked fears of unrest.
In Washington and many other cities, stores have been boarded and police are on high alert.
In a tweet marked with a warning tag by Twitter, Trump said a slow vote count in crucial Pennsylvania could lead to “rampant and uncontrolled cheating.”
“It will also induce violence in the streets. Something must be done!” tweeted.
Biden has focused his attacks on Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has left more than 231,000 dead in the United States, and the divisive nature of his presidency.
“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.
“Tomorrow we will come together for a great victory,” Biden said in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where pop superstar Lady Gaga was joined. “It is time to get up and take back our democracy.”
Biden, like Hillary Clinton in 2016, is expected to win the popular vote, but all eyes are on the 538-member Electoral College that ultimately determines the winner of the contest.
A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win and may depend on voters in the states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
Trump won 306 electoral votes in 2016 and predicted Tuesday that he would do even better this time. “I think we will get over it,” he said.
Trump, who was briefly knocked out of the election campaign in early October over a fight with Covid-19, concluded his campaign with a whirlwind of demonstrations, addressing his supporters twice in Michigan and making stopovers in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. .
He finished in the early hours of Tuesday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the same place where his 2016 campaign against all odds ended.
“How could he not win?”
While Tuesday is formally Election Day, Americans have actually been voting for weeks.
With a huge expansion in voting by mail to protect against the Covid-19 pandemic, some 100 million people have already made their decision.
Trump has lost ground among suburban women, who favor Biden by a double-digit margin, and his “law and order” response to the racial justice protests may have put off many black voters.
Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has also led to a possible loss of support among older people.
In one of the big political bets in U.S. history, Biden stuck to socially distant gatherings with small crowds, while Trump held large rallies where few fans wore masks.
Many of the first votes are believed to have been cast by Democrats, with Trump’s side expecting a massive wave of Republican supporters to vote in person on Tuesday.
“When you come to one of these rallies, all you think is, how could I not win?” said Kolleen Wall, who happened to cheer on Trump in Grand Rapids.
As voters went to the polls in the United States, the eyes of the world were on the fate of a president who broke the rules with the campaign slogan “America first.”
Trump’s first term featured tense relations with NATO allies, withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization, and renouncing the nuclear deal with Iran.
Relations with China have also become increasingly strained, as Trump blames Beijing for the Covid-19 pandemic.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
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