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WASHINGTON – Polls began opening across the United States on Tuesday (Nov. 3), the end of a tumultuous election season marked by an increase in early voting, legal challenges over counting and, increasingly, fears of violence afterward. on Election Day.
As Americans headed to the polls, the country seemed poised for record turnout, testament to how excited the electorate is amid a growing pandemic and after a summer of protests for racial justice.
Nearly 100 million voters had already cast their ballots before Election Day by mail or in person through early voting, more than 70 percent of the total in 2016. That election had set the current record of 139 million voters . Some 240 million Americans are eligible to vote this year, out of a population of approximately 330 million.
President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden spent election eve giving a final push in the key, mostly Midwestern states that Trump won by narrow margins in 2016 that could push either of them above the threshold of 270. electoral votes needed to win the White House.
Trump ran a whirlwind of five demonstrations in the four battlefield states of North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, telling his supporters that he would win and warning of violence from the losing side.
“Biden’s far-left supporters threaten to loot and rob tomorrow if they don’t get their way,” he said, adding that they would be harshly prosecuted.
Biden held three events in Pennsylvania and one in Ohio, criticizing Trump’s divisive presidency and vowing to control the coronavirus. The United States posted its second-highest single-day total of more than 91,300 new cases on Monday, as the virus surges in the same Midwestern states that Trump needs to win.
“We are going to beat this virus. We are going to get it under control. And the first step to beat this virus is to beat Donald Trump,” Biden said.
Although Biden is the favorite to win, things are still up in the air. The latest opinion polls continue to have Biden ahead of Trump nationally, but his lead has narrowed slightly, with the race increasingly tight in some key states on the battlefield.
Like Monday, Biden had a 6½-to-eight point lead over Trump nationwide, a margin of about one point less than seven days earlier, according to polling aggregator RealClearPolitics and polling site FiveThirtyEight.
Both men are tied in Arizona and North Carolina, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll that also showed Biden was ahead in Florida. Meanwhile, a Quinnipiac poll also showed a small Biden lead in Florida, as well as Ohio, while a Monmouth University poll found that Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania had shrunk.
“We’re going to win Florida. If we win Pennsylvania, we win it all,” Trump told supporters in North Carolina.
Both sides are also fighting over which ballots should be counted. On Monday, a federal judge ruled against a Republican push to reject 127,000 ballots cast in drive-thru tents in recent days in Harris County, Texas, a Democratic-leaning county in a red-trending state.
On Monday, Trump criticized an earlier Supreme Court decision allowing mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania and North Carolina to be received and counted after Election Day, provided they were postmarked for Election Day.
“It will allow rampant and uncontrolled deception and undermine our entire system of laws. It will also induce violence in the streets. Something must be done!” Trump said in a tweet that Twitter marked as misleading.
But the prospect of unrest has the nation on edge. Retail stores were walled up with plywood in cities from Washington DC, a few blocks from the White House, to Manhattan and Southern California.
States, including Massachusetts and Oregon, put their National Guard on hold in case post-election protests turn violent.
Whether a winner is called on Election Night may depend on how close the contest is, although candidates can declare victory before it is a certainty.
Trump has urged that votes received after Nov. 3 not be counted, with Axios reporting Sunday that Trump could declare victory Tuesday night if he appears to be ahead.
Biden’s campaign said in a briefing Monday that “under no circumstances” would Trump be declared the winner on election night, arguing that Biden had more paths to the presidency.
“When Donald Trump says ballots counted after midnight should be invalidated, he is just making it up,” said Biden’s campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon.
“There is no historical precedent for any of our elections to have taken place and been fully counted and verified on election night. We do not expect that to happen in 2020.”
For live results and updates, follow our live coverage of the US elections.
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