Trump edges closer to the White House after winning North Carolina and Georgia
Donald Trump has won the battleground state of Georgia, the once Republican stronghold that voted for Democrats four years ago.
The Georgia victory further narrows Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s pathway to victory after Mr Trump earlier won in the swing state of North Carolina.
The victory leaves Ms Harris heavily reliant on the “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to have a credible path to the White House. The crowd at Ms Harris’s watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington DC, began to file out after midnight.
A top Harris ally sent supporters home from her rally, with no plans for the Democratic vice president to speak.
“We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted. That every voice has spoken,” Cedric Richmond, co-chairman of the Harris campaign said. “So you won’t hear from the vice president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow. She will be back here tomorrow.”
Battleground
Meanwhile, the Republican former president was set to address supporters early on Wednesday from his campaign’s watch party in Florida.
Mr Trump also won Florida, a one-time battleground that has shifted heavily to Republicans in recent elections. He also notched early wins in reliably Republican states such as Texas, South Carolina and Indiana. Ms Harris won Virginia, a state Mr Trump visited in the final days of the campaign, and took Democratic strongholds like New York, New Mexico and California. Ms Harris also won an Electoral College vote in Nebraska that was contested by Republicans.
The Trump campaign bet that it would cut into Democrats’ traditional strength with black and Latino voters, with the former president going on male-centric podcasts and making explicit racial appeals to both groups. Nationally, black and Latino voters appeared slightly less likely to support Ms Harris than they were to back Joe Biden four years ago, and Mr Trump’s support among those voters appeared to rise slightly compared to 2020, according to AP VoteCast.
The fate of democracy appeared to be a primary driver for Ms Harris’s supporters, a sign that the Democratic nominee’s persistent messaging in her campaign’s closing days accusing Mr Trump of being a fascist may have broken through, according to the expansive survey of more than 110,000 voters nationwide.
It also found a country mired in negativity and desperate for change. Mr Trump’s supporters were largely focused on immigration and inflation – two issues that the former Republican president has been hammering since the start of his campaign.
In his recent visits to North Carolina, Mr Trump seized on the heavy damage caused by Hurricane Helene, spreading false claims about the federal government’s response and using GoFundMe to collect millions in donations for affected residents. Mr Trump initially trumpeted the Republican nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, and hailed him as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” but distanced himself after a report by US news channel CNN that alleged Mr Robinson had made explicit racial and sexual posts on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago.
Mr Robinson, who lost his race on Tuesday to Democratic attorney general Josh Stein, denied writing the messages and sued CNN for defamation last month.
Senate
In another positive sign for the Republicans, the party took control of the Senate, with Trump-backed Bernie Moreno flipping a seat in Ohio held by Democrat Sherrod Brown since 2007. They picked up another when Republican Jim Justice won a West Virginia seat that opened up with senator Joe Manchin’s retirement.
Those casting Election Day ballots mostly encountered a smooth process, with isolated reports of hiccups that regularly happen, including long queues, technical issues and ballot printing errors. Federal election security officials said there were minor disruptions throughout the day but there was no evidence of any impact to the election system. Officials determined that bomb threats that were reported in multiple states were all not credible and did not affect the ability of voters to cast their ballots.
Ms Harris, 60, would be the first woman, black woman and person of South Asian descent to serve as president. She also would be the first sitting vice president to win the White House in 36 years.
Mr Trump, 78, would be the oldest president ever elected. He would also be the first defeated president in 132 years to win another term in the White House, and the first person convicted of a felony to take over the Oval Office.
He survived one assassination attempt by millimetres at a July rally. Secret Service agents foiled a second attempt in September.
Key quotes
– Former prime minister Boris Johnson:
“Nobody knows what is going to happen, it’s a fantastic thing, it’s a beautiful thing because there are countries where they have democratic elections where they know full well what is going to happen.
“The thing that really worries me right now is Ukraine and the future of democracy in that country. I think there is a risk whatever happens in this election that there will be a disaster in Ukraine.”
– Democrats Abroad UK chairwoman Kristin Wolfe:
“I’m so confident she’s gonna do it. She’s got everything. She’s an exceptional candidate.
“We’ve got the right policies that Americans care about and we’ve got a ground game that is second to none, including right here in the UK. This is happening all over the world – we are turning out overseas voters. We’re going to win this thing.”
– Chairman of the Republicans Overseas UK group Greg Swenson:
“There is considerable Republican optimism in Mar a Lago and out in the swing states, for two reasons.
“One is that the campaign is confident in winning on the issues, especially when comparing the track record of Trump vs the failures of Biden/Harris.
“The second reason is the dramatic change in early voting and the GOP ground game. The party has closed the gap or overtaken the Democrats in early voting. For the first time we have embraced mail-in and early voting and it’s paid off.
“It’s still too close to call, but we feel voters will choose prosperity and security through common sense over the negative outcomes of the left’s radical progressive agenda.”
– Elon Musk:
“Game set and match.”
– Claxton MP Nigel Farage:
“You think (the election) is just about America, it’s much bigger than that. It’s about leadership of the Western world. It’s about what signal gets sent to dictators all over the world, launching wars, causing problems. This is a very, very important moment.
“Amongst a lot of young people, to be Conservative is cool. It’s trendy. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s real, because it links into ambition. It links into bettering yourself. I think after the (Trump) win tonight… there is a chance to build something that could last for, I think, many years.”
-Harris campaign co-chairman Cedric Richmond
“We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted and every voice has spoken so you won’t hear from the VP tonight.”
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