[The Guardian] The battle for the White House appeared set for a nail bitingly close finish on Tuesday, confirming months of public polls that showed Kamala Harris and Donald Trump deadlocked in an election where US democracy itself was on the line.
The initial wave of results offered no real surprises as Harris and Trump both picked up their first wins of the night. The three crucial swing states that are expected to decide the race – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – remained too close to call when polls closed. Early results from other states suggested the winning margins across those three rust belt battlegrounds, known as “the Blue Wall”, may be razor-thin for the third consecutive presidential election.
The southern swing states of Georgia and North Carolina were also too close to call as the night wore on though Trump’s vote appeared to be holding up there. As votes continued to be counted Harris’s path to victory seemed to be narrowing and nervousness was growing among some of her supporters as poll-watchers began to favor a Trump win.
Trump’s adopted home state of Florida gave him his first major victory of the night, with the Associated Press calling the state for the former president. Democrats had hoped to make Florida – a longtime swing state that has drifted to the right in recent years – more competitive this year, but Trump led the vice-president by 13 points with 96% of expected ballots counted.
A measure to enshrine abortion rights into the Florida state constitution, which Democrats had hoped would help boost turnout among its supporters, also fell short of the 60% needed for approval. It marked a rare defeat for reproductive rights advocates since the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, but abortion-related measures in New York and Maryland easily passed.
Harris picked up her first electoral votes from a handful of reliably Democratic states – including Vermont, Maryland and Massachusetts – but she was still waiting to see if she could prevail in the battleground states that powered Joe Biden to victory in 2020.
Trump’s aides projected confidence after analyzing the early results, pointing to the former president’s performance in the former Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade county in Florida as evidence of his prospects. Some of Trump’s senior advisers indicated that they thought he could win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to people familiar with the matter.
But the Harris campaign leaned on reports of long lines at college campuses and solid numbers in suburban areas to bolster its case for optimism, as the vice-president’s team appeared to prepare for a long night of vote-counting.
With race calls starting to trickle in, exit polls showed that concerns over the state of the economy and the future of US democracy weighed heavily on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots.
According to the AP Votecast survey, four in 10 voters named the economy and jobs as the most important problem facing the country, a potentially hopeful sign for Trump given that Republicans generally receive higher marks on their handling of the economy. But roughly half of voters cited the fate of democracy, which has become a focal point of Harris’s campaign, as their largest concern this year.
Another exit poll from CNN confirmed predictions of a large gender gap in the results, with Harris leading by 11 points among female voters while Trump held a 10-point advantage among male voters.
Harris, 60, was among more than 82 million people who voted early, having mailed her ballot to California. From her vice-presidential residence in Washington DC, now secured by 8ft-high metal fences, she conducted phone interviews with radio stations in battleground states. Harris then took part in a phone bank event at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
Trump, 78, voted on Tuesday near his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, and said he was feeling “very confident”. Wearing a red “Make America great again” cap, he told reporters: “It looks like Republicans have shown up in force.” The former president said he had not prepared a speech about the outcome, adding: “I’m not a Democrat. I’m able to make a speech on very short notice.”
Trump has been told by some advisers that he should prematurely declare victory on election night if he is sufficiently ahead of Harris in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, according to people close to him. Meanwhile the New York Times reported that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who has spent at least $119m in support of Trump, would watch the results with him at Mar-a-Lago.
It is the swing states that will decide the election because, under the complex American political system, the result is decided not by the national popular vote but an electoral college in which each state’s number of electors is weighed roughly by the size of its population.
Each candidate needs 270 votes in the electoral college to clinch victory, and the battleground is formed of those states where polls indicate a state could go either way. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections but lost out to George W Bush and Trump in the electoral college.
The toss-up race will only fuel jitters in foreign capitals where the election is being watched closely. Harris would probably follow Biden’s foreign policy playbook, focusing on alliances and maintaining the defence of Ukraine, where victory for Trump’s “America first” ethos would boost rightwing populists in Europe and elsewhere.
Tuesday’s election brought the curtain down on a remarkable and historic election campaign that deeply divided American society and upped the stress levels of many of its citizens amid warnings of civil unrest, especially in a scenario where Harris wins and Trump contests the result.
