Biden and Trump trade victories in early results

As polls closed across the East Coast and into the middle of the country Tuesday, President Donald Trump and Joe Biden began scoring early and expected victories while the most hotly contested contests, in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, remained too close to call.

Biden and Trump score early victories as focus centres on Florida, Georgia and North Carolina

Biden was racking up expected wins in Democratic-leaning states: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia. Trump was posting similar expected victories in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, Wyoming, Indiana and South Carolina.

Also see: These states could decide the US presidential election

Among the biggest states to close that was too early to call was Texas, a 38-vote Electoral College prize that has not gone Democratic since 1976.

The most intense attention was on the swing state of Florida and its 29 Electoral College votes. There, Trump was overperforming his 2016 vote totals in populous Miami-Dade County, with 512,000-plus votes so far counted in 2020 compared with about 334,000 total four years ago — an enormous improvement.

Florida is a critical part of almost any Electoral College pathway for Trump to hit the 270 votes needed to secure reelection. Biden is seen to have multiple paths without the state.

Three other states that are critical to Trump’s electoral math, Ohio, Georgia and North Carolina, were also too close to call as turnout across the nation appeared on track to set a modern record.

Polls had also closed in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two of the previous Democratic “blue wall” states that Trump flipped in 2016 but that Biden was aiming to win back in 2020.

Hickenlooper ousts Gardner in Colorado, and Graham Hangs on to his seat

Former Gov. John Hickenlooper defeated Sen. Cory Gardner on Tuesday in the high-profile fight for Colorado’s Senate seat, securing a victory essential to Democrats’ push to take the Senate majority. In South Carolina, Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, hung onto his seat and defeated a Democrat backed by a record-setting onslaught of campaign cash.

The outcome of Hickenlooper’s race, in which the first Senate seat of the night flipped, as called by The Associated Press, was not a surprise since Gardner, who had been considered a rising Republican star when he was elected in 2014, trailed in polls throughout his reelection race. In the end, he was unable to overcome the increasing Democratic tilt of the state and President Donald Trump’s poor standing there, despite some stumbles by Hickenlooper.

For latest updates on the US Presidential Elections 2020, click here

Hickenlooper, 68, a two-term governor and former mayor of Denver, will add an experienced voice to Democrats’ Senate ranks, one with a background in Western energy and environmental issues. After initially professing no interest in running for the Senate, he reconsidered after his 2019 bid in the Democratic presidential primary went nowhere.

In South Carolina, Graham fended off the toughest challenge of his political career from Jaime Harrison, a Black Democrat whose upstart campaign electrified progressives across the country. Graham was expected to hold on to his seat, but had to fight off a record amount of Democratic money funneled into the state by liberal donors who sought to punish him for his loyalty to Trump.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, also fended off a challenge from M.J. Hegar, a former Air Force pilot who Democrats hoped could have an outside chance of winning in the rapidly changing state. And Republicans succeeded in ousting Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., who came to power in a 2017 special election against Roy Moore, who was accused of sexually assaulting and pursuing teenage girls.

Hickenlooper’s victory, though not unexpected, is a critical pickup for Democrats as they seek to wrest control of the Senate from Republicans, who currently hold the majority in the chamber by a margin of 53-47.

In Kentucky, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, easily won reelection, defeating Amy McGrath, a Democrat who struggled to gain ground despite an outpouring of financial support from her party’s supporters around the nation.

In Florida, Trump shows strength with Latino voters

Most polls in Florida and Georgia were closed after 8 pm Tuesday, and Florida, a must-win battleground for President Donald Trump with 29 electoral votes, appeared to be edging toward the president on the strength of his support among Latinos in the Miami area.

With Georgia’s tally slowed by technical problems in Atlanta, all eyes were on Florida, a perennial battleground Trump won narrowly four years ago.

Also read: Trump support eroding among older voters, up with Latinos: Exit polls

A major surge by Trump among Cuban American voters in the Miami-Dade County area seems to have offset gains by Biden in Tampa and Jacksonville — and two Democratic congressional incumbents in the Miami area were having difficulty fending off sharp challenges from Republicans.

Georgia, a light-red state in 2016 that has become a 2020 tossup, is also the site of two hard-fought Senate contests: the incumbent Republican senator, David Perdue, is fending off a stout challenge from Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, and Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to fill a vacant seat, is facing challenges from Rep. Doug Collins, a Republican, and the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock, a Democrat.

Both races could result in runoffs next year if the winner does not reach the 50 per cent threshold.

Both Florida and Georgia are expected to release their results relatively quickly. Still, a state judge ordered polls in Spalding County, Georgia, south of Atlanta, to remain open until 9 pm after technical problems slowed balloting earlier in the day.

The first polls are closing

The first polls have closed in Indiana and Kentucky — though polls in the western parts of those states will be open for another hour — and results should start trickling in soon. They will be incomplete and potentially very unrepresentative of the final numbers, though, so caution and patience are both warranted.

But one thing is already clear: The turnout in this election will be historic. We won’t know the final turnout numbers for some time, but they are on track to be enormous, as evidenced by the fact that at least six states have already surpassed their 2016 vote totals with several hours left to go in many places.

According to the United States Election Project, 2020 votes have already exceeded 2016 votes in Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Texas and Washington state.

By the end of the night, the same could easily be true in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina and Utah, all of which had reported more than 90 per cent of their 2016 totals by earlier Tuesday.

In Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state, Democratic officials said they felt particularly bullish about turnout in Philadelphia. With just under 400,000 mail ballots cast and lines at hundreds of polling places around the city starting at 6:30 am, one Democratic official said he thought the turnout could surge past levels seen in 2008 for former President Barack Obama.

US Election 2020 Live Updates on DH

On the other side, Bill Bretz, chairman of the Republican Party in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, said turnout had been “exceptionally high” there.

We don’t have enough information yet to say whether more Democrats or more Republicans voted in most states. We do know that Democrats had a strong advantage in early voting, and that Republicans were expected to have an advantage in Election Day voting — but there is much less Election Day voting this year than in past years.

“There’s only so much left in the Election Day vote,” said Michael P. McDonald, an elections expert at the University of Florida. “That means that Trump’s got to make up ground with a smaller potential pool.”

Voting and vote-counting have been mostly smooth, but reports of voter intimidation are up

A major national voter protection hotline has received more reports of voter intimidation than it did in 2016, and results will be delayed in Georgia because of — what else would you expect in 2020? — a burst pipe at a site where election workers were counting absentee ballots.

But no ballots at the site in Atlanta were damaged by the water, election officials said. And despite the disconcerting increase in intimidation reports, with polls closed in more than half the country, voting and vote-counting continue to go more smoothly than many voting rights advocates had feared.

The night is shaping up to be, in other words, a mixed bag.

“I think it’s fairly safe to say that the extraordinary voter protection effort that we have seen this year, which proved strong and robust — combined with litigation that focused with laser precision on tearing down the restrictions and burdens faced by voters during the pandemic — has made today a relatively smooth Election Day across the country,” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told reporters around 7 pm Eastern time. “There indeed have been issues and may be issues as we move into the final hours of Election Day, but no doubt we were bracing for the worst and have been pleasantly surprised.”

The reports of intimidation include armed Trump supporters standing outside some polling places — including at least one in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the man was ultimately arrested, and one in Baker, Louisiana, where voters called the Lawyers’ Committee’s hotline to report a man waving a Trump flag and holding a large gun.

“The isolated incidents of voter intimidation have been problems that we cannot ignore,” Clarke said. “They have not been widespread and systematic, but they have been far greater in number than we have seen in recent elections and are a reflection of the dark times we are in as a nation.”

Republicans are also, as expected, trying to challenge ballots in some states — particularly Pennsylvania, where they are attempting to stop election officials from contacting voters whose mail ballots were rejected on technicalities to offer them provisional ballots. Some machines in Philadelphia malfunctioned early in the day. Voting hours were extended at some polling sites, including in Georgia and North Carolina, because of delays.

And yet, for all the anxiety and abnormality of this election — the masks, the 6-foot divides, more than 100 million people casting ballots before the day even started — the voting machines worked, for the most part. The lines were at times long, but they moved quickly, for the most part.