The US presidential election was heading to a drawn-out finish as Americans woke to uncertainty over results in several battleground states and both Donald Trump and Joe Biden expressed confidence they would emerge victorious.
With millions of absentee ballots still to be counted on Wednesday morning, neither candidate had secured the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.
Mr Trump defied opinion polls that had shown him trailing Mr Biden heading into election day, as his conservative base of supporters turned out in big numbers. The US president won the crucial swing states of Ohio and Florida, as he did in 2016, as well as Texas, which had emerged as a battleground for the first time in decades. He also made gains among Hispanic voters, a crucial voting bloc for Democrats.
But Mr Biden was the victor in Arizona, flipping a state Mr Trump took in 2016, and held on in Minnesota. He also won the traditional Democratic strongholds of California and New York, which award a total of 84 electoral college votes.
On Wednesday morning, both candidates were focused on the swing states that remained in play: Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which accepts mail-in ballots within three days of the poll. Millions of postal ballots are still to be counted and results for some swing states could be delayed for days to come.
Mr Biden can afford to lose more of those battleground states than Mr Trump and still win the White House. The Democratic nominee could lose Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia and still prevail if he clinches Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada. If Mr Trump loses Pennsylvania, he can only afford to also lose Nevada, which Hillary Clinton won in 2016, if he is to still win the election.
Despite fears that the US election could be marked by voter intimidation and disputes over vote tallies, there were no widespread reports of chaos or violence at polling stations. More than 100m Americans had cast ballots before election day, putting the US on track for its highest voter participation rate in more than a century.
But tensions could still rise as the outcome remains unclear. In a statement from the White House early on Wednesday, Mr Trump prematurely claimed he had won the election and threatened to go to the Supreme Court to stop votes being counted, baselessly claiming that counting votes after election day was a “major fraud”.
“It’s a very sad moment,” he said at the White House. “We will win this, and as far as I am concerned we already have.”
Mr Biden accused Mr Trump of making an “outrageous” statement that was a “naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens”.
“If the president makes good on his threat to go to court to try to prevent the proper tabulation of votes, we have legal teams standing by ready to deploy to resist that effort,” Mr Biden said. “And they will prevail.”
Mr Biden had earlier said he believed he would emerge the winner after Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania report their results.
“We feel good about where we are. I am here to tell you tonight that we believe we are on track to win,” he told supporters in Wilmington, Delaware.
Meanwhile, state officials responsible for the vote counts pleaded for patience. Philadelphia city commissioner Al Schmidt said Pennsylvania was likely to “have total results in the next couple of days”, with the state having allowed mailed-in ballots to be received and counted as late as Friday.
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, estimated that vote counting could go on until the end of Wednesday. About 3.5m absentee ballots were cast, along with about 2m to 2.5m in-person voters.
“We are going to count every single vote in the state of Michigan, no matter how long it takes, no matter what candidates say,” she said.
Additional reporting by Aime Williams and Kiran Stacey in Washington
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2020-11-04 11:59:00Z
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