People watch a big screen displaying the live election results in Florida at Black Lives Matter plaza across from the White House on election day in Washington, DC on November 3, 2020. (Photo by Olivier DOULIERY / AFP)
President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden are battling it out for the White House, with polls gradually closing across the United States Tuesday — and then a long night of waiting for results ahead.
The first results are trickling in, with US media projecting wins for the Republican incumbent so far in 19 states including Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee — all states he won in 2016.
Biden has captured 17 states including his home state Delaware and big prizes California and New York, as well as the US capital. As with Trump, so far, all states claimed by Biden were won by Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
So far, that gives Biden 213 electoral votes and Trump a maximum of 138, because Nebraska splits its electoral votes based on congressional district (see note below).
The magic number is 270. Observers expect the hotly contested race for the White House to come down to a handful of key battleground states that have yet to be called.
The following is a list of the states won by each candidate and the corresponding number of electoral votes, based on the projections of US media including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC/NBC News, ABC, CBS and The New York Times.
TRUMP (138)*
Alabama (9)
Arkansas (6)
Idaho (4)
Indiana (11)
Kansas (6)
Kentucky (8)
Louisiana (8)
Mississippi (6)
Missouri (10)
Nebraska (5) *
North Dakota (3)
Ohio (18)
Oklahoma (7)
South Carolina (9)
South Dakota (3)
Tennessee (11)
Utah (6)
West Virginia (5)
Wyoming (3)
BIDEN (213)
California (55)
Colorado (9)
Connecticut (7)
Delaware (3)
District of Columbia (3)
Hawaii (4)
Illinois (20)
Maryland (10)
Massachusetts (11)
New Hampshire (4)
New Jersey (14)
New Mexico (5)
New York (29)
Oregon (7)
Rhode Island (4)
Vermont (3)
Virginia (13)
Washington (12)
* Nebraska splits its five electoral votes — two electors are assigned based on the plurality of votes in the state, and the other three are awarded based on congressional district. Biden could eventually peel at least one of these votes away.
The most polarised US election in decades was on a knife-edge Tuesday as President Donald Trump appeared to have held off predictions of a sweeping Democratic wave but Joe Biden also scored key wins.
Against a backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic that has claimed more than 230,000 lives in the United States, a quick Biden triumph — dreamed of by some Democrats — looked unlikely with key states too close to call.
Trump enjoyed a slim but vital lead in Florida, widely considered a must win to retain the presidency, despite opinion polls that had shown Biden edging even or ahead.
“It’s happening,” Trump senior advisor Jason Miller wrote on Twitter of the election, although only Fox News had so far called Florida for the president.
Exit polls showed Trump capturing swaths of the Latino vote, making strong gains among Cuban-Americans after the Republican tycoon’s relentless attacks against leftist leaders in Latin America and rhetorical attempts to link them to Biden.
Biden’s team has long insisted that it doesn’t need to win Florida and analysts pointed to gains for the Democrat in some Trump areas of the state that might bode well in other big states.
Biden for his part enjoyed early strength in Arizona, which Trump carried four years earlier, and he was neck-and-neck in Ohio and Texas — two states where the Democrat a few weeks ago saw little chance.
And Biden — as expected — collected the biggest prize of the night with a win in solidly Democratic California.
But attention quickly turned to results emerging from Georgia and North Carolina, two more states Biden hopes to wrest away, and the Midwestern trio of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — in which Trump squeaked out surprise 2016 wins over Hillary Clinton that handed him the White House.
With a record more than 100 million Americans having voted ahead of Election Day due to the Covid-19 pandemic, definitive final results could easily take hours or even days to be tabulated.
Networks projected the Democrats to have maintained control of the House of Representatives, as widely expected, but it remains to be seen if they can win back the Senate.
The Democrats flipped one Senate seat from the Republicans in Colorado, with former governor John Hickenlooper projected to triumph, but were also expected to lose an especially vulnerable senator in Alabama.
Trump, 74, expressed confidence as the evening approached, tweeting in all his characteristic all-caps: “WE ARE LOOKING REALLY GOOD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. THANK YOU!”
It was not clear whether Trump — who was holding a watch party at the White House — would speak to the public at some point but he said earlier Tuesday that he wasn’t yet “thinking about a concession speech or acceptance speech.”
“Winning is easy,” he said. “Losing is never easy — not for me.”
Biden, hunkered down with family at home in Delaware, likewise said voter patterns during the day seemed to favor his side.
“What I’m hearing is that there’s overwhelming turnout. And overwhelming turnout particularly of young people, of women, and an overwhelming turnout of African American voters, particularly in Georgia and Florida, over the age of 65,” he told reporters.
“The things that are happening bode well for the base that has been supporting me.”
Trump has repeatedly refused to confirm he will accept the results of the election — a first for a US president. He argues, without offering proof, that the vast number of mail-in ballots could be used to rig the polls against him.
In the final run-up to Election Day, Trump focused especially on Pennsylvania, which allows ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted, even if they arrive afterward.
Trump somewhat dampened fears that he will try to declare victory prematurely, telling Fox News that he will only declare “when there is victory.”
“There is no reason to play games,” he said.
Americans could not be more divided over Trump.
For some he represents a breath of fresh air who brought his business instincts to shake up the Washington establishment. For the other half of the country, he is a corrupt leader who wrecked the US reputation abroad and stoked dangerous racist and nationalist sentiments at home.
In Miami, Juan Carlos Bertran, a 60-year-old Cuban-American mechanic, said Trump “seems better to me for the country’s economy.”
“Now I have two jobs,” he said. “Before I only had one.”
But voting in New York, Megan Byrnes-Borderan, 35, said Trump’s threats to challenge the election results in the courts were “scary.”
“I believe that Trump will go through all odds to try to win the election,” she said.
Outside the White House, a boisterous, peaceful protest in a plaza renamed for the Black Lives Matter movement turned heated as the night wore on, with scuffling after a person appeared to throw a gas cannister.
In Portland, the centre of confrontations this summer between leftist protesters and police, some 400 people marched toward the downtown under a watchful eye of state police.
Biden has tapped into widespread public disapproval for Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more people in the United States than any country.
Trump — who recovered quickly from his own bout with the virus in October — is gambling that Americans want to put the crisis behind them and reopen the economy fully. Biden, in contrast, is preaching caution and accuses the president of having abandoned his basic responsibilities.
“We’re done with the chaos! We’re done with the tweets, the anger, the hate, the failure, the irresponsibility,” Biden said at an election eve rally in Cleveland, Ohio.
Fears of Covid-19 drove the huge flow of early voters, encouraged by Biden. Trump has countered by holding dozens of mass election rallies with no social distancing, underlining his message that it’s time to move on.
One notable win in the Senate was for the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, who easily fended off a challenge in Kentucky.
And in Georgia, Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene — a political newcomer who has promoted the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory — won a seat in the US House of Representatives, giving the widely debunked movement a voice in Congress.
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