Trump and Biden begin to claim states as tense
vote count is under way
US
elections 2020
Trump wins Kentucky while Biden captures Vermont
President and Joe Biden signal confidence before polls
close
David Smith
in Washington and Sam Levine in Philadelphia
Tue 3 Nov
2020 22.34 GMTLast modified on Wed 4 Nov 2020 02.42 GMT
A tense
vote count in the US presidential election got under way on Tuesday night with
Donald Trump and Joe Biden started to notch expected state wins.
The
president won Kentucky, which carried eight votes in the electoral college, and
several other southern states, while Biden captured the safely Democratic state
of Vermont, and several others on the east coast. Results in the crucial
battleground states were not expected for several hours at least.
From New
York to Phoenix, from Detroit to Los Angeles, even as coronavirus cases surged
in swing states, citizens waited patiently to determine whether Trump will
serve a second term in the White House or make way for his Democratic
challenger, Biden.
A record of
more than 100 million people had voted early, with Democrats thought to have
the edge, so Trump, a Republican, was relying on what he called a “red wave” on
election day itself. Experts predicted the final total could be around 160
million, a turnout rate of more than two-thirds of the eligible voting
population – the highest in more than a century.
Both
candidates signaled confidence before polls closed on Tuesday night. Trump, the
first impeached president to run for re-election, expressed faith that the size
of his campaign rallies will prove a more reliable measure of support than
conventional national polling, which has consistently shown Biden leading.
“We’re
feeling very good,” Trump told the conservative Fox News channel, his voice
sounding scratchy after holding 14 rallies in three days in a last-ditch
campaign blitz. “We have crowds like nobody has ever had before. I think that
translates into a lot of votes, and we’re going to see very soon.”
But the
president sounded more downbeat during a visit to his campaign headquarters in
Virginia. “I’m not thinking about concession speech or acceptance speech yet.
Hopefully we’ll be doing only one of those two. And you know, winning is easy.
Losing is never easy. Not for me it’s not.”
1:11
‘Losing is never easy,’ Trump says hours
before voting ends – video
Biden, who
at 77 would be the oldest US president ever elected if he wins, visited his
childhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He wrote in ink on the living room
wall: “From this house to the White House with the Grace of God. Joe Biden
11.3.2020.”
He then
made a last-ditch appeal to voters in the battleground state of Pennsylvania,
grabbing a microphone and addressing an impromptu street gathering in
Philadelphia.
“Trump’s
got a lot of things backwards,” he said through a face mask. “If you elect me,
I’m going to be an American president. There’s going to be no red states or
blue states, just the United States of America.”
Later, back
home in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden was asked about the destabilizing potential
of Trump claiming victory prematurely.
“Presidents
can’t determine what votes are counted and not counted and voters determine
who’s president,” Biden said. “No matter what he does and no matter what he
says, the votes are going to count.”
Concerns
about voter suppression and voter intimidation hung over the election but, as the
day went on, election observers said it went relatively smoothly. This may have
been a result of increased awareness about the issues in addition to so many
people having cast their ballots early, easing pressure on election officials.
Kristen
Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for
Civil Rights Under Law, which runs an election protection hotline, said: “We
are not seeing major systemic barriers that are obstructing voters’ ability to
participate in the process en masse.”
Even so, a
federal judge also ordered the postal service to conduct a last minute sweep of
its facilities to search for nearly 300,000 ballots unaccounted for. The agency
said in a late afternoon court filing it was unable to complete the last-minute
sweep by the court-imposed deadline without disrupting its election day
schedule.
There were
also reports of misinformation. Voters in Flint, Michigan received a robocall
telling them to vote on Wednesday because of long lines, Dana Nessel, the
state’s attorney general, said. New York’s attorney general also said she was
investigating reports that 10m people received a robocall telling them to “stay
safe and stay home”.
Twitter
also flagged several tweets from Mike Roman, a Trump campaign operative,
spreading false information that suggested improper voting practices in
Philadelphia, a key city that will likely shape the outcome of the race.
The
election is widely seen as a hinge moment in history that will decide whether
Trump was an aberration or a direction. After four years of domestic and
international turmoil, Democrats are hoping to seize their chance to halt his
populist-nationalist “Make America great again” movement in its tracks.
If you elect
me, I’m going to be an American president. No red states or blue states, just
the United States of America
Joe Biden
Trump was
hoping for a replay of 2016 when, as a businessman and reality TV star with no
prior political experience, he beat Hillary Clinton in a seismic repudiation of
the Washington establishment and its consensus on issues long assumed settled.
But polls showed Biden significantly better placed than Clinton at the same
stage.
The Trump
camp remained defiant. Jason Miller, a campaign adviser, said: “We feel better
and more confident about our positioning now in 2020 than we did at this exact
moment in 2016.”
But Biden
appeared on course to win the popular vote, as Clinton did, but Trump still had
a narrow path to victory in the electoral college, which determines who takes
the White House. All eyes were on the battlegrounds Pennsylvania, Michigan,
Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina.
Patience
was the watchword, however. TV networks promised to exercise extreme caution to
avoid calling results prematurely, mindful of the confusion that set in during
the disputed 2000 election between George W Bush and Al Gore.
Early
voting includes 64m mail-in ballots, meaning that the count that could take
hours, days or even weeks before producing a definitive winner. There were
fears that Trump could exploit that delay to prematurely declare victory,
spread conspiracy theories and mobilise armed supporters.
On Monday
he threw a match into the tinderbox by suggesting that a supreme court ruling
allowing Pennsylvania to accept mail ballots sent by election day and received
up to three days later will “induce violence in the streets”. Twitter labelled
the tweet with a warning that it “might be misleading about an election or
other civic process”.
Trump
aides, and conservative media, have also been promoting a rosy narrative about
polling and the likelihood of the president achieving victory – raising
concerns that he and his supporters will then assume a defeat can only be
explained in terms of fraud by Democrats.
Chris
Ruddy, a media executive and friend of the president, told the Guardian in a
text message: “He’s a very confident guy and I think nothing is shaking that
confidence.”
Fearful of
potential convulsions, shops were boarded up in cities including Washington,
New York and Raleigh, North Carolina. Concrete barriers and a “non-scalable
fence” were erected outside the White House, where Trump was due to host an
election night party for hundreds of people – yet another potential Covid-19
threat. Biden was set to address the nation from his home city of Wilmington
later in the evening.
Eight state
attorneys general – representing Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New
Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – warned that they will not
tolerate voter intimidation. Grassroots activists were mobilising to protect
the results and ensure every vote is counted.
Both sides
have hired battalions of lawyers for a potential post-election fight. On
Monday, a federal judge in Texas rejected a Republican bid to throw out about
127,000 votes already cast at drive-through voting sites in the
Democratic-leaning Houston area.
The
candidates continued campaigning late into Monday night. Singer Lady Gaga,
wearing a white sweater with the word “Joe”, joined Biden at an event in
Philadelphia. The former vice-president once again excoriated Trump over his
response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 9 million
Americans and killed more than 230,000 – the worst tallies in the world.
In the
final days of the campaign, Trump has continued to downplay the virus and
threatened to fire Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases expert in the
country, even as the virus surged to an all-time high of nearly 100,000 cases per
day.
No
president has won re-election with an approval rating as low as Trump’s average
of 44%. He is in danger of becoming the first incumbent president to lose
re-election since fellow Republican George HW Bush was beaten by Bill Clinton
in 1992.
Former
president Barack Obama, whom Biden served as vice-president for eight years,
said Trump’s push to stop counting votes on election night was undemocratic.
“That’s
what a two-bit dictator does,” he told a rally in Miami on Monday. “If you
believe in democracy, you want every vote counted.”
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