Category: World

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he said early on Wednesday to a roaring crowd of supporters at the Palm Beach County Convention Center.

Harris did not speak to her supporters, who had gathered at her alma mater Howard University. Her campaign co-chair, Cedric Richmond, briefly addressed the crowd after midnight, saying Harris would speak publicly on Wednesday.

“We still have votes to count,” he said.

The former president was showing strength across broad swaths of the country, improving on his 2020 performance everywhere from rural areas to urban centers.

Trump went into Election Day with a 50-50 chance of reclaiming the White House, a remarkable turnaround from Jan. 6, 2021, when many pundits pronounced his political career to be over. That day, a mob of his supporters stormed Congress in a violent attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Trump picked up more support from Hispanics, traditionally Democratic voters, and among lower-income households that have keenly felt the sting of price rises since the last presidential election in 2020, according to exit polls from Edison.

Trump won 45% of Hispanic voters nationwide, trailing Harris with 53% but up 13 percentage points from 2020.

About 31% of voters said the economy was their top issue, and they voted for Trump by a 79%-to-20% margin, according to exit polls. Some 45% of voters across the country said their family’s financial situation was worse off today than four years ago, and they favored Trump 80% to 17%.

At Howard University, where a large watch party was being held for Harris, supporters were leaving in droves, anticipating that the vice president would not address the crowd on Tuesday night.

Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of the Harris campaign, briefly addressed the crowd and said Harris would not speak. “We still have votes to count,” he said. “We still have states that haven’t been called yet.”

TRUMP OUTPERFORMS 2020

Trump was earning a bigger share of the vote than he did four years ago in nearly every corner of the country.

By 12:30 a.m. ET, officials had nearly completed their count of ballots in more than 1,600 counties – about half the country – and Trump’s share was up about 2 percentage points compared to 2020, reflecting a broad if not especially deep shift in Americans’ support for the president they ousted four years ago.

He improved his numbers in suburban counties, rural regions and even some large cities that are historically bastions of Democratic support; in high-income counties and low-income ones; and in places where unemployment was comparatively high and in places where it is now at record lows.

Harris had banked on big margins among urban and suburban voters, but her support in those places was running well behind President Joe Biden’s in the 2020 election.

Hours before polls closed, Trump claimed on his Truth Social site without evidence that there was “a lot of talk about massive CHEATING” in Philadelphia, echoing his false claims in 2020 that fraud had occurred in large, Democratic-dominated cities. In a subsequent post, he also asserted there was fraud in Detroit.

“I don’t respond to nonsense,” Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey told Reuters.

A Philadelphia city commissioner, Seth Bluestein, replied on X, “There is absolutely no truth to this allegation.”

DIZZYING CAMPAIGN

Trump voted earlier near his home in Palm Beach, Florida.

“If I lose an election, if it’s a fair election, I’m gonna be the first one to acknowledge it,” Trump told reporters.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a prominent Trump backer, watched the results at Mar-a-Lago with Trump.

Tuesday’s vote capped a dizzying race churned by unprecedented events, including two assassination attempts against Trump, Biden’s surprise withdrawal and Harris’ rapid rise.

No matter who wins, history will be made.

Harris, 60, the first female vice president, would become the first woman, Black woman and South Asian American to win the presidency. Trump, 78, the only president to be impeached twice and the first former president to be criminally convicted, would also become the first president to win non-consecutive terms in more than a century.

As ballots are counted, one candidate may appear to be leading based on early returns, only for a rival to close the gap as more votes are tallied.

In 2020, some states experienced a “red mirage,” in which Trump appeared to be leading on election night, before a “blue shift” saw Democrat Joe Biden overtake him, a phenomenon Trump used to amplify his false claims that the election was stolen.

Nothing untoward had occurred. Democrats tend to live in more populous urban areas, where counting votes takes longer. Democrats also have embraced mail voting more readily than Republicans after Trump’s false claims that mail ballots are untrustworthy, and those ballots take longer to count than Election Day votes. Trump has both encouraged and criticized early and mail-in voting in 2024.

Democrats are outpacing Republicans in mail ballots once again this year, according to an early vote tracker maintained by the University of Florida’s Election Lab, though Republicans have narrowed the gap.

ARIZONA

Voting by mail is extremely popular in Arizona; nearly 90% of voters cast their ballots early, most by mail, in 2020. Election officials in Arizona can begin processing and tabulating mail ballots upon receipt, but results cannot be released until one hour after polls close.

Any mail ballots dropped off on Election Day itself cannot be processed until the polls have closed. That is often a sizable number – in 2022, those “late early” votes comprised one-fifth of all ballots in Maricopa County, the state’s largest – and can take days to count.

The initial results on election night should be mostly early votes, which could favor Harris, before the numbers shift toward Trump as Election Day votes are tallied.

GEORGIA

Early in-person voting is popular in Georgia, where officials expect 65% to 70% of ballots to be cast at early poll locations. Absentee or mail ballots, which may comprise around 5% of the vote, can be processed – which includes steps such as verifying signatures – starting two weeks before the election, though workers must wait until Election Day to begin counting them.

All early votes – in-person and mail – must be counted and reported by 8 p.m. ET (0000 GMT) on election night, according to state law, which could create a “blue mirage” in Harris’ favor at first. Officials are aiming to have all votes, including those from Election Day, tallied by midnight.

Ballots from overseas and military voters will be accepted up to three days after the election if postmarked by Nov. 5. There were more than 21,000 such ballots requested, so an extremely close election might not be resolved until those votes are tabulated.

MICHIGAN

Since the 2020 election, Michigan has instituted early in-person voting for the first time and begun permitting jurisdictions with more than 5,000 people to begin processing and tabulating mail ballots eight days before Election Day. Smaller jurisdictions can do so the day before Nov. 5.

Officials hope those changes will allow the state to report results more quickly than in 2020, when mail ballots could not be processed in advance. That created a “red mirage” on election night, when the state’s early counts of Election Day votes favored Trump. Biden eventually surpassed Trump on the strength of mail ballots, which took longer to tally. Trump falsely claimed he was the victim of fraud.

NEVADA

Nevada’s slow vote counting in 2020 – news outlets did not call the state for Biden until five days after Election Day – launched countless memes, but officials say changes since then should speed up the process.

Most notably, counties were permitted to begin processing and counting mail ballots on Oct. 21. In addition, workers can start tabulating early in-person votes at 8 a.m. PT (1500 GMT) on Election Day, rather than waiting until polls close.

But Nevada still might not get called right away. Mail voting has grown popular in the state, and it is the only battleground that accepts late-arriving mail ballots. That could also create a “blue shift” as more votes are counted.

Any ballot postmarked by Nov. 5 will still be counted if it arrives within four days. Those late ballots historically favor Democrats, so a shift toward Harris could occur as votes are counted after Election Day.

NORTH CAROLINA

Election officials start processing and scanning mail ballots ahead of Election Day. After polls close, the first reported results will likely be mostly mail ballots as well as early in-person votes. Election Day votes will be counted and reported throughout the evening, with full results expected by midnight.

Harris may appear to lead early thanks to mail ballots, while Trump could close the gap as Election Day votes are counted.

If the election is as close as polls suggest, the outcome in North Carolina may remain unclear for a week or more. Absentee ballots that arrive on Nov. 5, as well as ballots from overseas and military voters, are tallied during the 10-day canvass period that follows Election Day. In 2020, media outlets did not call North Carolina for Trump until Nov. 13, 10 days after the election.

PENNSYLVANIA

Perhaps the most important battleground, Pennsylvania did not have a clear winner in 2020 for four days after Election Day, as officials sifted through a huge backlog of mail ballots. The state is among only a handful that do not permit election workers to process or tabulate mail ballots until 7 a.m. ET on Election Day, which means it will likely again take days before the outcome is known.

With more Democrats than Republicans voting by mail, the early results – based on in-person Election Day votes – will probably show Trump ahead, but his lead will likely shrink as more mail ballots are counted.

That pattern in 2020 prompted Trump to falsely claim fraud. This year, a new law requires most counties to announce at midnight on election night how many mail ballots remain to be counted in an effort to forestall conspiracy theories.

WISCONSIN

Like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin is among the few states that do not allow election officials to process or count mail ballots until the morning of the election, which means there can be a delay in reporting the results of those early votes.

In addition, many of the state’s largest cities transport mail ballots to a centralized location for processing and tabulating. That can lead to significant batches of votes getting reported all at once in the early morning after polls close.

In 2020, Trump and his allies falsely claimed fraud after Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, reported nearly 170,000 absentee ballots around 3:30 a.m. CT (0830 GMT), giving Biden a huge spike that moved him into the lead for the first time. But that increase was expected due to the way the city processes those ballots and the fact that Democrats were more likely to vote by mail. A similar pattern is probable in 2024.