Trump-Biden presidential race goes down to the wire in key battleground states

The presidential race count wore into the night with no result in sight, with a massive surge in early voting across the country pushing an already turbulent election to a nail-biter of a finish with key battleground states hanging in the balance.

Just before midnight, most of the major swing states remained uncalled in the race between the Republican President Trump and Democrat nominee former Vice President Joe Biden, including the key Rust Belt states.

Neither candidate had spoken as of midnight, at which point many of those key states — Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan and Arizona — remained uncalled.

The Associated Press called New Hampshire around 11 p.m. for Biden.

Other calls came in as expected — including Massachusetts, New York and California more quickly going for Biden, and Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia for Trump.

The protracted count comes after a massive surge of early voters turned out to vote in this election both locally and nationally, pushing through the pandemic to get their votes in. Expanded early and mail-in votes helped that along, but made the count trickier to track, as different states handled early votes in various ways — some counting them first, others last or mixed in.

The massive pandemic-driven expansion of early voting pushed the total way up before Tuesday in the race between Trump and Biden. Americans reached nearly 73% of the total votes cast the 2016 presidential contest before Election Day, according to the U.S. Elections Project organization, and the early arriving tallies for various states showed higher turnout numbers across the board.

That’s 101,167,740 total votes, including 35,923,053 in-person early votes and 65,244,687 sent by mail.

Of those votes, 2,352,945 were cast in Massachusetts, per the vote-monitoring organization. More than 9 million people voted early in Florida and Texas, plus 12 million in California.

Many states changed their rules during the pandemic to make voting early and remotely easier. Here in Massachusetts, officials expanded early voting and mail-in voting, including allowing ballots to count that were postmarked by Election Day but arrive in the three days after it. Some key swing states did much the same, including Pennsylvania.

The voting is now over — even if the counting will remain ongoing for days — after a bitterly fought election between Trump and Biden in the middle of a global pandemic.

Both candidates sounded positive notes during the day, as they made final efforts to turn out their voters.

“We believe this to be a tight race. We believe every vote’s going to matter,” Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said on a call with reporters Tuesday evening. “It’s going to come down to turnout. We think we’re better positioned in that type of campaign.”

Stepien said the Democrats “cannibalized their vote” by moving “those who traditionally vote on Election Day to vote early” while Republicans headed to the polls on Tuesday.

Biden capped off a day of last-minute campaigning in his hometown of Scranton, Pa., and in Philadelphia with a couple of local stops in Wilmington, Del.

Biden wasn’t making any predictions about the outcome of the election as the final hours of voting ticked down, saying he’s “superstitious” but remained “hopeful.”

“The things that are happening bode well for the base that has been supporting me — but we’ll see,” he said. Still, he admitted, “It’s just so uncertain” because of how many states are in play.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2HVDDvQ