US Election Day: Donald Trump and Joe Biden Yield the Stage to Voters for Election Day Verdict

LAST CHOICE
• Everything you need to know: hours, how the voting system works
• Jack Tame: You have heard that the American elections are divisive. On the ground, it’s scarier
• Joe Biden: Why it’s your choice to lose
• Oliver Hartwich: neither Trump nor Biden are good economic options
• Elections in the USA: Explanation of today’s four possible scenarios

After a campaign marked by rancor and fear, Americans today decide between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, selecting a leader to lead a nation hit by a growing pandemic that has killed more than 231,000 people, cost millions of their jobs and remodeled daily life.

Nearly 100 million Americans voted early, and now it’s up to Election Day voters to finish the job, ending a campaign that was disrupted by the coronavirus and defined by tensions over who could best tackle it. Each candidate declared the other fundamentally unfit to lead a nation struggling with Covid-19 and facing fundamental questions about racial justice and economic equity.

First Lady Melania Trump cast her vote at the Morton and Barbara Mandel Recreation Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. “It’s Election Day so I wanted to come here to vote today,” Melania Trump told reporters.

According to the pool report, she was the only person at the polling place not wearing a mask.

Biden entered Election Day with multiple paths to victory, while Trump, catching up on various battle states, had a narrower but still feasible path to garnering 270 Electoral College votes. Control of the Senate was also at stake: Democrats needed to win three seats if Biden took over the White House to take control of all of Washington for the first time in a decade. The House was expected to remain under Democratic control.

Voters braved long lines and the threat of the virus to cast their votes as they chose between two completely different visions of America over the next four years. The unprecedented early voting, and legal skirmishes over how it will be counted, sparked unsubstantiated allegations of fraud from Trump, who refused to guarantee that he would honor the election result.

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Fighting to the last for every vote, Biden made his way to Philadelphia and stopped at a carpenters union and visited his childhood home in his native Scranton on Tuesday as part of a closing effort to get the vote before waiting for the results. from the elections in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, was visiting Detroit, a heavily black city on the Michigan battlefield. Both of his spouses also left, while the Democrats sought a clear victory.

Biden and his wife, Jill, started the day with a stop at St. Joseph’s in Brandywine in Wilmington, Delaware, with two of their grandchildren in tow. After a brief visit to the church, the four walked to the grave of their late son Beau Biden, in the church cemetery. Beau, a former Delaware attorney general, died of brain cancer in 2015 and had encouraged the former vice president to pursue another run in the White House.

Trump made a morning appearance on Fox and friends, where she predicted she would win by a greater electoral margin than in 2016, when she added 306 votes in the electoral college compared to 232 for Democrat Hillary Clinton. The president, who returned to the White House after 3 a.m. on the campaign trail, also planned to visit his campaign headquarters in Virginia. He invited hundreds of supporters to an election night party in the East Room of the White House.

The first polls close at 6 p.m. ET in swaths of Indiana and Kentucky, followed by a steady stream of polls closings every 30 minutes to an hour throughout the night. The last polls in Alaska closed at 1 a.m. ET on Wednesday.

The tight campaign left voters on both sides eager to move on.

“I think there is a lot of division and separation,” said Kelvin Hardnett, who was among more than two dozen voters who lined up more than an hour before the voting center opened at the Cobb County Civic Center on the outskirts of Atlanta Tuesday morning. “And I think once we get past the names and titles and personal agendas, then, you know, we can focus on some real issues.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she is “absolutely certain” that Democrats will “hold tight” to the majority of the House.

In a teleconference with reporters on Election Day, the California Democrat said that “this election is nothing less than reclaiming the soul of America, whether our nation will follow the voices of fear or whether we will choose hope.”

Pelosi and Republican Cheri Bustos say the party is reaching deep into Trump’s country to win seats. Bustos is chairman of the campaign arm of the House of Representatives Democrats, who are well positioned to try to add long-time Republican seats in Long Island, Arkansas, Indiana and rural Virginia.

Bustos says Democrats “are going to see some wins in those deep red districts.” Pelosi says she is confident that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden will win the White House over President Donald Trump. Biden has spent the day visiting Pennsylvania. Trump had a telephone interview on Fox News Channel.

On their last full day of campaigning, Trump and Biden abruptly broke with the mechanics of voting itself while visiting the most contested battlefield, Pennsylvania.

The Republican president threatened to take legal action to block the counting of ballots received after Election Day. If the counting of Pennsylvania ballots takes several days, as is allowed, Trump asserted without evidence that “cheating can happen like never before.”

In fact, there are approximately 20 states that allow mail ballots received after Election Day to be counted, up to nine days or more in some states. Litigation has focused on only a few where states have made changes largely due to the coronavirus.

Biden told voters in Pennsylvania that the very fabric of the nation was at stake and offered his own election as the strongest rebuke possible to a president who said he had spent “four years dividing us at every turn.”

“Tomorrow is the beginning of a new day. Tomorrow we can end a president who has left hard-working Americans in the cold!” Biden said in Pittsburgh. “If I am elected president, I will act to heal this country.”

Trump argued, at a stop in Wisconsin, that Biden “was not what our country needs.” She added, “It’s not about … yeah, it’s about me I guess when you think about it.”

The nation braced for what was to come, and an outcome that might not be known for days.
A new anti-scale fence was erected around the White House. And in urban centers ranging from New York to Denver to Minneapolis, workers closed businesses fearing the vote would lead to riots like the ones that erupted earlier this year amid protests over racial inequality.

Just steps from the White House, block after block, the stores had their windows and doors covered. Some kept the front door open in hopes of attracting a small business.
Both candidates voted early and First Lady Melania Trump cast her vote Tuesday near Mar-a-Lago, the couple’s Palm Beach, Florida property.

In Atlanta, 29-year-old occupational therapist Justin Windom said he wasn’t sure if he would even vote until last night. But after speaking with his parents and one of his patients, he said he decided to get up at dawn and cast his vote for Biden as the “lesser of two evils.”

Whoever wins will have to contend with an anxious nation, reeling from a health crisis unique in a century that has closed schools and businesses and worsens as the weather turns cold.

Trump in Grand Rapids insisted again that the nation was “turning around” the virus. But Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, broke with the president and joined a chorus of scientists from the Trump administration who sounded the alarm about the current rise in infections.

“We are entering the most worrying and deadly phase of this pandemic,” Birx wrote in a memo distributed to top administration officials. He added that the nation was not implementing the “balanced” measures necessary to slow the spread of the virus. One recipient confirmed the content initially reported by the Washington Post on Monday.

The campaign has largely been a referendum on Trump’s handling of the virus.

In Concord, New Hampshire, Linda Eastman, 70, said she was casting her vote for Trump, saying, “Maybe he wasn’t perfect with the coronavirus, but I think he did the best he could with what he had.” “

In Virginia Beach, it was a vote for Biden from Gabriella Cochrane, 54, who said she thought the former vice president would “surround himself with the best and the brightest” to fight the pandemic.

The challenge of counting a record early voting added a layer of uncertainty to an election marked by suspicions fueled by an incumbent who has consistently lagged behind in the polls.

In West Philadelphia, James “Sekou” Jenkins, 68, a retired carpenter and mechanic, said he didn’t want to risk the mail and cast his vote in person for Biden.

“I don’t want to see any mail carrier,” said Jenkins, who waited in line for about an hour to cast his vote. “I like being here, seeing my own people, waiting in line and doing my civil duty.”

Trump, in Pennsylvania, focused on the state’s process for counting mail-in votes that arrive after Election Day, vowing that we will “go to our attorneys” as soon as the polls close.

– AP