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As Randy Cortez said, “democracy is at stake.”
The 36-year-old voted at the famous Los Angeles Dodger Stadium on Tuesday, just one voter in what will likely be a record turnout in America’s nervous and extraordinary elections.
An incredible 100 million votes had already been cast at the beginning of a contest that has been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic and a split that no one can remember.
It was clear that Cortez was among those who expected Joe Biden to end Trump’s presidency. “We have a man in office who creates more division than anyone and allows bigotry and racism to continue in this country. I am hopeful that things will change. “
Earlier in the day, when Monday turned into Tuesday at midnight in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Donald Trump appeared at his last rally of the 2020 campaign.
Thousands of supporters trudged through muddy fields and waited in endless lines to hear the president speak, on the eve of what could be his defeat, or the beginning of another four years in power.
Trump delivered his speech in a critical state in which the president expects a repeat of 2016, when he unexpectedly beat Hillary Clinton.
In the dark when temperatures dropped to 40 ° F (4 ° C), Trump supporters were optimistic, but many also said they expected riots in the wake of the election.
“There will be violence either way,” whether Trump or Biden win, said Angela Young, 43. As a small-town Michigan gun owner, she said she was not concerned about her personal safety, but added the prospect of elections. Violence related to violence in the United States was “directly unacceptable.”
Tensions are high, captured by news reports of bricked-up storefronts and buildings in major cities. Police departments have canceled time off for officers.
But no major problems were reported at the polls on Tuesday and fears of bullying or harassment of voters on a large scale had not materialized by noon. Officials warned that ballot counts could take days due to a flood of mail-in ballots that take longer to process and could result in another round of court battles.
Millions of people across the country wore masks as they formed socially estranged lines and went to the polls.
Passions are also high, with states like Texas, Arizona, and Nevada having already surpassed their total turnout in the 2016 election only by early voting.
Trump closed Election Day with a visit to his campaign headquarters in Virginia before heading to an Election Night Party at the White House with several hundred guests, behind a freshly “non-scalable” perimeter fence. installed. Meanwhile, Biden started the day at church, where he visited the graves of his first wife and son Beau, before seeing the results pour in from their home in Wilmington, Delaware.
As television news channels cautiously approached election night, knowing that results could be delayed by a massive early voting amid the pandemic in several critical states, one of the first important parts. intelligence was obtained from exit polls. In CNN’s top exit poll results, weighted among both early and Election Day voters, top of the electorate’s list of concerns was the economy, at 34%.
The coronavirus, which Biden has made the centerpiece of his claim for the highest office, came in a striking third place (at 18%) after racial inequality (21%). Trump’s attempt to rile voters with his “law and order” speech amid the Black Lives Matter protests appears to have not gained much traction, also hitting 18%, though Biden’s core health care issue it dropped even further to 11%.
Perhaps most surprising of all, 48% of those surveyed by CNN’s exit poll said they thought Trump’s efforts to contain the pandemic were going well, compared with 51% bad. In fact, the coronavirus is emerging across large swaths of the nation with about 100,000 new cases per day.
National opinion polls have consistently shown a clear advantage for Biden, the former Democratic vice president who has framed the election as a “battle for the soul of the nation.” Trump is in danger of becoming the first president of the United States to lose re-election since Bill Clinton defeated fellow Republican George HW Bush in 1992. However, the vagaries of the American electoral college and the legal attempts of Republicans to restricting the votes cast are crucial. Indecisive states add uncertainty to the outcome of an election that Trump has repeatedly and baselessly claimed to be riddled with voter fraud.
In battle states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Biden has the upper hand in voting, mailed ballots are not counted until Election Day, while early counting is allowed in North Carolina and Florida, others. key states.
Both campaigns, voting rights organizations and conservative groups have assembled armies of lawyers to scrutinize the counts in various counties.
But as election night progressed, the background music stayed quiet. The leader of a group of 42,000 legal volunteers deployed for the elections said so far there have been “no major systemic problems or attempts to obstruct the vote.”
Kristen Clarke, president and CEO of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, said, “It appears at this stage that we are on our way to a relatively successful election day.”
The committee operates the Voting Protection Hotline, which provides information and assistance to Americans who are having trouble voting.
“The problems we’ve seen have been mostly isolated and sporadic,” Clarke said.
Anxiety remained high among voters because problems could still arise. “There is a massive divide that seems to keep growing and growing and no one will be happy with their results if their side doesn’t win,” said Christopher Henson, a voter in Ravenna, Ohio. “There is a lot of civil unrest and it will probably get worse, regardless of how the elections turn out.”
Marcos Antonio Valero, who voted for Trump in Miami, said he was voting in person because he did not trust mail-in ballots, but was unsure of the outcome. “It is a secret, a mystery,” he said. “No one knows how it will end until we all know.”
In a sign of America’s faltering democratic structures, Trump objected when asked to confirm that he would hand over power peacefully should he lose. This stance has led his predecessor, Barack Obama, to compare the president to a “two-bit dictator” when he went on the campaign trail in recent days to confront his former vice president.
In his latest sweep of the electoral map before Tuesday’s election, Trump has held rallies in Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio, with attendees close together despite the risk of coronavirus infections. Besieged by criticism of his handling of the pandemic and bad polls, Trump used his closing rallies to claim that Biden would turn America into a “prison state that will lock him in, while letting far-left rioters roam free to loot. and burn “. In a wide spread of grievances, Trump also took aim at Lady Gaga, the singer who has campaigned for Biden, and suggested he would fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert.
Fauci drew the president’s ire after warning that the United States faces “a whole world of pain” during the winter amid rampant rates of Covid infections in parts of the country. The United States has already suffered more than 230,000 deaths from the pandemic, the worst figure in the world, and Fauci warned that the country may begin to experience 100,000 new cases a day as people flock indoors in the colder months. .
Biden’s campaign has focused on Trump’s handling of the pandemic, where the president has repeatedly downplayed or downplayed the severity of the virus and refused to fully endorse the use of masks, a key method of stopping its spread. “Pick me and I’m going to hire Dr. Fauci. And we’re going to fire Donald Trump, ”Biden said in one of his last campaign stops in Cleveland. Biden said it was time for Trump to “pack his bags”, adding that “we are done with tweets, anger, hatred, failure, irresponsibility.”
Whether this momentous election evicts Trump will depend on places like Philadelphia, a heavily Democratic city in one state, Pennsylvania, which will be key in deciding the fate of the candidates. The large number of early votes in Philadelphia could mean a full recount won’t be completed until Friday.
A line of voters circled a block at the Kimmel Center in Center City, Philadelphia, shortly after the polls opened at 7 a.m. Tuesday. With poll workers handing out hand sanitizer, the wait in the cold didn’t seem to bother at least some people in line, who said they intentionally chose to cast their votes in person to make sure they were counted.
“It’s a bit exhilarating. I know it sounds crazy to stand in line in the cold, ”said Lauren Killian, one of the voters. He added that he was concerned about how long it would take to count all the ballots in Pennsylvania.
“I am concerned about how long it will take to find out how long the president will be. Or even when something is resolved in any way, will it be invalidated? “
Additional reporting Lois Beckett
