Handful of states will decide presidential race
Nation waits as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia remain undecided with many votes uncounted
There was no blue wave and no red wave on election day Tuesday.
Instead, the presidential campaign that has chugged along for nearly two years — through an impeachment, a pandemic and a racial justice movement — will last at least through Wednesday.
Too many key battleground states remained too close to call late Tuesday as only one battleground state — Arizona, where Joe Biden is leading — appeared it might change hands from 2016. If Biden holds his lead there, Arizona would be the first battleground state to flip from four years ago, and would narrow President Trump’s path to victory.
With threequarters of the vote counted in Arizona, Biden had a solid lead, thanks to a strong showing in Maricopa County, where Phoenix and its suburbs have about 60% of the state’s voters.
Biden was leading by a nearly 2to1 margin among Latinos, who constitute 19% of the Arizona electorate, and was also leading among seniors, who are nearly 1 in every 3 voters there, according to exit polls.
“We’re feeling good about where we are,” Biden told supporters early Wednesday near his home in Delaware. “We believe we’re on track to win this election. We have to be patient. It ain’t over until every vote is counted.”
Trump tweeted: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Poles are closed!”
Twitter placed a warning label on the tweet minutes after Trump posted it, saying, “Some or all of the content in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud Tuesday.
Biden was trailing in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — three typically Democratic battleground states that Trump won in 2016 by a combined 80,000 votes. Biden
likely has no plausible path to victory unless he wins at least two of the three uncalled states, where at least onequarter of the votes remain to be counted.
Trump held a narrow lead in Wisconsin. Votes weren’t expected to be counted Tuesday in Milwaukee County, which is expected to break for Biden. In Pennsylvania, where many of early votes may not be counted until Wednesday or later, Trump was running slightly ahead of Biden.
Biden was hearing better news from Michigan, where election officials in Detroit were expecting the city’s highest turnout in possibly 20 years. Officials there were expecting a turnout of 53% to 55%, which would at least match the record 53% turnout in 2008 for Barack Obama’s first campaign. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received roughly 47,000 fewer votes in the city than Obama did in 2012.
Trump took Florida and was leading in North Carolina, two battleground states he needed to hold onto in his quest for reelection. He also triumphed in Ohio, which has been won by every president since 1960.
In Florida, Trump won more votes than he did four years ago in Miami-Dade County, which is home to much of Florida’s Cuban American population. For months, Trump’s campaign has branded Biden a socialist who supported normalizing relations with Cuba when he was vice president under Obama.
Biden won 52% of the Latino vote, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research. Four years ago, Clinton won 62% of the state’s Latino vote.
Nationally, according to CNN’s early exit polls, twothirds of voters said that the country was going in the wrong direction, which is usually a bad sign for an incumbent. But while more voters said the economy was their top issue, 4 in 10 said they were better off today than they were four years ago, while 2 in 10 said they were doing worse — a good sign for Trump.
In another sign of how divided the nation remains, a slim majority told exit pollsters that the nation’s top priority should be containing the COVID19 pandemic over rebuilding the economy.
Most voters locked in their decisions earlier than they did four years ago, with 3 in 4 voters saying they made their decision before September, according to early exit polls conducted by Edison Research. That is a change from 2016, when 13% made their choice in the final week of the campaign, and most of those went for Trump.
But many others voted early. An unprecedented 103 million voters — or 74% of the total turnout in the 2016 — cast ballots early this year.
Democratic challenger Biden emerged from a pack of two dozen candidates who started the race. He led in polls, largely because of name recognition, from the time he officially announced on April 25, 2019, via a video posted on social media.
Biden said he was moved to run after hearing Trump’s reaction to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017, in which neo-Nazis clashed with counterprotesters. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
“In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,” Biden said in his campaign announcement video. “I wrote at the time that we’re in a battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that’s even more true today.”
Restoring the “soul of the nation” became his campaign’s theme. But many progressive Democrats thought Biden, an older white man from Delaware who had spent nearly four decades in the Senate, didn’t represent the diversity of the party. They favored one of the women or people of color — or Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders — in what was the most diverse field in the party’s history.
Biden was mediocre at best in the first few Democratic debates. His campaign looked doomed after he finished fourth in the Iowa caucuses, fifth in the New Hampshire primary and a distant second to Sanders in the Nevada caucuses.
Then his floundering campaign was thrown a lifeline. Democratic Rep. James Clyburn, South Carolina’s most powerful Black elected official, endorsed him before that state’s primary in February, and South Carolina’s substantial African American vote favored Biden.
Four days later, voters in most of the Super Tuesday states — California was an exception — followed South Carolina’s lead, and Biden was suddenly on his way to locking up the nomination.
Trump had no opposition to speak of for the GOP nomination, as Republicans have overwhelmingly approved of him throughout his term. They loved his conservative judicial appointments, which now include three Supreme Court justices, and his 2017 tax cut. They liked his strongman persona, and how he removed America from international agreements like the Paris climate accord.
Even though Trump’s approval rating rarely climbed above 45% during his term and he survived being impeached in 2019 by the Democraticled House, he always appeared to have a solid shot at reelection, supported by a strong economy and low unemployment rates. Unemployment among Black people and Latinos reached record lows at the end of 2019.
But in mid-March, the coronavirus pandemic had transformed both the nation and the campaigns.
Inperson campaigning shifted online. For the first few months, Biden campaigned largely from his home in Delaware, bowing to safety precautions. Some Democrats, while respectful of his approach, wondered whether he should have done more socially distanced events earlier in the year.
Trump took the opposite approach, rarely wearing a mask in public and predicting that the virus would “go away” shortly. It never did, killing more than 232,000 people and infecting 9.3 million by election day.
Over the summer, the focus of many voters shifted to Trump’s handling of the pandemic. They didn’t like what they saw.
In March in Wisconsin, a battleground state that Trump narrowly won in 2016, 51% of likely voters said they approved of the way the president was handling the coronavirus, while 46% disapproved, according to a Marquette University Law School Poll. By September, a Marquette survey showed just 41% approved of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, while 56% disapproved — and Biden was leading polls in the state.
In September, veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” reported that Trump had intentionally minimized the threat of the pandemic. Woodward quoted Trump as acknowledging in February that the coronavirus was “deadly stuff” that was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” even as he was telling the American people there was nothing to worry about.
While Trump lost ground with seniors and some suburban voters over his handling of the pandemic, other parts of his Trump’s core supporters — whites without college degrees and people living in rural and exurban areas — remained with him. Battleground state polls remained tight, and the race remained largely static until election day. Despite the economy tanking during the pandemic, voters continued to prefer Trump when it came to handling the economy.
The videotaped killing of George Floyd in May by a Minneapolis police officer and the nationwide racial justice movement that blossomed afterward chipped away at some of Trump’s support, particularly among suburban women, who disliked his divisive rhetoric over race. A June Monmouth University poll found that 3 out of 4 Americans — including 71% of white people — felt racism was “a big problem.” Fewer than half felt that way in 2015.
Trump, who was endorsed by most law enforcement groups, tried to say that Biden supported the “defund the police” movement that grew after Floyd’s death, but the Democratic nominee never publicly backed it.
Meanwhile, Trump struggled to figure out how to attack Biden. Tagging him as a “radical” didn’t resonate with viewers who knew him as moderate senator for decades and later as Barack Obama’s vice president. Neither did trolling him as “sleepy Joe,” particularly after their first debate in September when Biden withstood Trump’s constant interruptions.
Trump’s cacophonous performance hurt him, as his poll numbers dipped slightly. Days later, he was diagnosed with COVID19. He spent a few days in the hospital and emerged seemingly unscathed, telling a skeptical nation that America was “rounding the turn” on the pandemic — even as the infection rate was reaching highs in parts of the Midwest and elsewhere.
But Biden couldn’t pull away from the president, either. Even though polls showed voters preferred him to Trump when it came to issues ranging from racial relations to health care, he struggled with many voters to convince them that he was best on economic issues.