U.S. President Donald Trump was declared the winner in the key battleground states of Florida and Ohio early Wednesday, as he and Democratic challenger Joe Biden were locked in several tight races in battleground states across the country — a nail-biter conclusion to an epic election that will shape the country’s response to the surging pandemic and foundational questions of economic fairness and racial justice.
From coast to coast, races were too early to call in the most fiercely contested states on the map, including North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Georgia — where officials in Fulton County, home to Atlanta and a tenth of all Georgians, warned that its vote count would not be finalized until Wednesday after a burst pipe delayed absentee-by-mail ballot processing for at least two hours, according to local reports.
Both candidates each picked up some predictable victories, with Trump taking Indiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Missouri, Wyoming, Mississippi, Idaho, and Kansas.
Trump was also leading in many of the swing states, making Biden’s bid for the White House much tougher.
Biden entered the night with two paths: winning back the states Hillary Clinton lost in the Midwest in 2016 or winning states in the South and Southeast, some of which haven’t voted Democratic for decades.
“With Trump holding on to Georgia, North Carolina and Florida, that leaves the election to be decided in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,” said CBC polls analyst Éric Grenier. And that’s not likely to happen tonight.
“The delay in counting the votes in Michigan and Wisconsin could push results in the two states until Wednesday morning,” Grenier said, “while the outcome in Pennsylvania might not be known before the end of the week.”
Despite the narrowing path, Biden said he remained optimistic, saying the election would not be decided tonight and would not be final until every vote was counted, keying in on states like Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which he said he would win.
“Keep the faith, guys,” he said to gathered supporters in a parking lot in Wilmington, Del. “We’re gonna win this!”
Biden won Vermont, Connecticut, New York, Delaware, Washington, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Illinois, Colorado, Virginia, Washington, Oregon and California.
The electoral college stood at 205 for Biden, 162 for Trump, with 270 votes needed to win the White House.
Millions of voters put aside worries about the virus — and some long lines — to turn out in person, joining 102 million fellow Americans who voted days or weeks earlier, a record number that represented 73 per cent of the total vote in the 2016 presidential election.
Early results in several key battleground states were in flux as election officials processed a historically large number of mail-in votes. Democrats typically outperform Republicans in mail voting, while the Republicans look to make up ground in election day turnout. That means the early margins between the candidates could be influenced by which type of votes — early or election day — were being reported by the states.
Hours after the first polls closed, they are feeling an overwhelming sense of déjà vu as President Trump builds leads in the South and Democrat Joe Biden’s hopes fall largely on the same states that doomed Hillary Clinton four years ago: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Many Democrats went into the evening “cautiously optimistic” that Biden could defeat Trump. The most hopeful operatives had their eyes on a landslide.
Those hopes began evaporating as Trump built a lead in Florida, and as The New York Times “needles” showed the president overwhelmingly likely to win not only the Sunshine State, but North Carolina and Georgia as well.
House later, none of those states have been called, but Trump is in the lead in all three. Trump also leads in Texas, another state Democrats dreamed of winning.
“I feel the exact same way I felt in 2016: nauseous,” said one former Obama administration official. “It feels the same.”
Another Democratic strategist summed it up this way: “It’s catastrophic.”
“This is so much worse than 2016. In 2016, we were surprised. In 2020, we supposedly learned our lesson,” the strategist said. “And we didn’t.”
The strategist and other Democrats pointed to Trump’s dizzying schedule in recent days where he held multiple events, and they were quick to lay blame at Biden’s strategy of trying to play in red states like Georgia and Texas.
At the same time, Biden allies cautioned that it was still early in the night.
Democrats are feeling optimistic that Biden will flip Arizona, where he has built a lead in the populous Maricopa County.
Counts in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the so-called “blue wall” that Biden had vowed to rebuild, are ongoing. Counts could go on not only for a number of hours in all three states, but perhaps days, particularly in Pennsylvania.
‘We have an enormous opportunity’
The victories began to draw to an end a campaign that was reshaped by the coronavirus and marked by contentiousness. Each candidate declared the other fundamentally unfit to lead a nation grappling with COVID-19, which has killed more than 230,000 Americans, cost millions of jobs and rewritten the norms of everyday life.
Biden entered election day with multiple paths to victory while Trump, playing catch-up in a number of battleground states, had a narrower but still feasible road to clinch 270 electoral college votes.
Control of the Senate was at stake, too: Democrats needed to net three seats if Biden captured the White House to gain control of all of Washington for the first time in a decade. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky won re-election in an early victory for the Republicans, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, fought off a fierce challenge to hang onto his seat. The House was expected to remain under Democratic control.
The momentum from early voting carried into election day, as an energized electorate produced long lines at polling sites throughout the country. Turnout was higher than in 2016 in numerous counties, including all of Florida, nearly every county in North Carolina and more than 100 counties in both Georgia and Texas. That tally seemed sure to increase as more counties reported their turnout figures.
As the results began to come in, the nation braced for what was to come — and an outcome that might not be known for days.
No major problems were reported during voting, and fears of large-scale voter intimidation or harassment had not materialized by the end of the day.