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As the polls closed on the East Coast of the United States and in the center of the country on Tuesday, President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden began scoring anticipated and expected victories as the most closely contested competitions, in Florida, Georgia. and North Carolina, stayed too close to call.
Biden won Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and elsewhere, while Trump led states across the South, including Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee.
LIVE: Follow the results of the US elections as the drama unfolds
Among the largest states to close that were too early to convene was Texas, a 38-vote electoral college award that has not been a Democrat since 1976. The most intense attention was focused on the indecisive state of Florida and its 29 votes in the electoral College.
There, Trump was topping his 2016 vote totals in populous Miami-Dade County, with more than 512,000 votes counted so far in 2020 compared to 334,000 totals four years ago, a huge improvement.
Biden’s campaign had sent former President Barack Obama to Miami on the eve of the election to try to attract supporters to the polls. “The reason I’m back here in South Florida is that I know some of you haven’t voted yet,” Obama had said Monday.
Voters cast their votes at a polling place for the 2020 U.S. presidential election in Louisville, Kentucky, on Tuesday. Photograph: Scotty Perry / Bloomberg
But Biden was showing strength in other parts of the state and the margins were too narrow to declare a winner. Biden, for example, was leading Duval County, home to the city of Jacksonville, which Trump won in 2016. Florida is a critical part of almost any Electoral College path for Trump to reach the 270 votes needed to secure reelection. Biden is seen to have multiple paths without the state.
Three other states that are critical to Trump’s electoral math – Ohio, Georgia and North Carolina – were too close to call, as turnout across the country appeared to be on track to set a modern record. The polls had also closed in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two of the former “blue wall” Democrats claim that Trump flipped in 2016 but that Biden was aiming to win again in 2020.
Technical problems
Most of the polls in Florida and Georgia closed after 8 p.m. local time Tuesday, and Florida, a must-see battlefield for Trump with 29 electoral votes, seemed to be closing in on the president thanks to his strong support among Latinos in the Miami area.
With Georgia’s count halted by technical problems in Atlanta, all eyes were on Florida, a perennial battlefield that Trump narrowly won four years ago. A major surge for Trump among Cuban-American voters in the Miami-Dade County area appears to have offset Biden’s gains in Tampa and Jacksonville, and two Democratic congressional representatives in the Miami area were struggling to fend off strong challenges from the republicans.
Both Florida and Georgia are expected to release their results relatively quickly. Still, a state judge ordered the polls in Spalding County, Georgia, south of Atlanta, to remain open until 9 p.m. local time after technical problems slowed voting earlier that day.
In a call with reporters Tuesday night, Joe Biden’s campaign described Florida as a “coin toss,” a description that has been adapted to the state for decades. But Georgia, with its rapidly expanding suburbs, is seen as further proof of Biden’s claim that it can expand Hillary Clinton’s map in 2016.
Both the candidates and their surrogates covered the state during the final two weeks of the campaign, with trips from Biden, Obama and Sen. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate. Trump organized a large rally in Rome, Georgia, over the weekend.
“We won Georgia, we won everything,” Biden said at a rally in Atlanta last week.
Historical participation
The first polls have closed in Indiana and Kentucky, although the polls in the western parts of those states will be open for another hour, and the results should start coming in soon. However, they will be incomplete and potentially very unrepresentative of the final numbers, so caution and patience are warranted.
But one thing is already clear: participation in these elections will be historic. We won’t know the final turnout figures for some time, but they are on track to be huge, as evidenced by the fact that at least six states have already surpassed their 2016 vote totals with several hours remaining in many places.
According to the U.S. Election Project, 2020 votes have already exceeded 2016 votes in Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Texas, and Washington state. By the end of the night, the same could easily happen in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Utah, all of which had reported more than 90 percent of their 2016 totals early Tuesday. . .
In Pennsylvania, a crucial watershed state, Democratic officials said they were particularly optimistic about turnout in Philadelphia. With just under 400,000 mail-in ballots cast and lines at hundreds of polling places around the city as of 6.30 a.m. local time, a Democratic official said he thought turnout could exceed 2008 levels seen for the former Obama. .
On the other hand, Bill Bretz, chairman of the Republican Party in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, said turnout had been “exceptionally high” there. We still don’t have enough information to say whether more Democrats or more Republicans voted in most states. Do we know that Democrats had a big advantage in early voting and that Republicans were expected to have an advantage in voting on Election Day? But there are far fewer voting on Election Day this year than in previous years.
“There’s just so much left in the Election Day voting,” said Michael P. McDonald, an election expert at the University of Florida. “That means Trump has to make up ground with a smaller potential group.”
Supporters of US President Donald Trump speak with voters outside Chestnutwold Elementary School, a polling place in Admore, a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Photo: Jennifer Huxta / Bloomberg
Intimidation
A major national voter protection hotline has received more reports of voter intimidation than in 2016, and results will be delayed in Georgia because of: what else would you expect in 2020? – a burst pipe at a site where poll workers counted absentee votes.
But no ballots on the site in Atlanta were damaged by the water, election officials said. Despite the puzzling rise in reports of intimidation, with polls closed in more than half the country, voting and vote counting continue to be more fluid than many advocates of the right to vote feared.
The night is shaping up to be, in other words, a mixed bag.
“I think it’s pretty safe to say that the extraordinary voter protection effort we’ve seen this year, which proved to be strong and robust, combined with litigation that focused laser precision on breaking down the restrictions and burdens that voters faced during the pandemic, has made today a relatively uneventful election day across the country, “Kristen Clarke, president and CEO of the National Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, told reporters.
“In fact, there have been problems and there may be problems as we move into the last hours of Election Day, but we were certainly preparing for the worst and were pleasantly surprised.”
Reports of intimidation include armed Trump supporters standing outside some polling places, including at least one in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the man was eventually arrested, and one in Baker, Louisiana, where voters called the line. direct from the Lawyers Committee to report a man. waving a Trump flag and holding a large gun.
“Isolated incidents of voter intimidation have been problems that we cannot ignore,” Clarke said. “They have not been generalized or systematic, but they have been far greater in number than we have seen in recent elections and are a reflection of the dark times we find ourselves in as a nation.”
Republicans are also, as expected, trying to challenge ballots in some states, particularly Pennsylvania, where they are trying to prevent election officials from contacting voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected on technicalities to offer them provisional ballots. Some machines in Philadelphia malfunctioned early in the day. Voting hours have been extended at some polling places, including Georgia and North Carolina, due to delays.
And yet, despite all the anxiety and abnormality of this election – the masks, the 6-foot splits, more than 100 million people voting before the day started – the voting machines worked, for the most part. . The lines were sometimes long, but they moved quickly, for the most part. – New York Times
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