Tens of millions of voters went to the polls in America on Tuesday, torn between fear and hope, sending one of the closest and most consequential presidential elections to an uncertain conclusion.
Democrat Kamala Harris and her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, appeared locked in a razor-sharp battle with barely any daylight between the pair in national polls that have barely changed in weeks.
From coast to coast, in sprawling cities and small towns, in churches and gyms, people waited patiently in line to play their part in the world’s most powerful democracy and choose between two starkly different visions of America. They mostly experienced a smooth process, with isolated reports of glitches, including long lines, technical problems and errors printing ballots.
Harris, 60, was among more than 82 million people who voted early after mailing her ballot to California. From her vice presidential residence in Washington, now secured by 8-foot-high metal fences, she conducted telephone interviews with radio stations in war zones. Harris then took part in a phone bank event at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
Trump, 78, voted near his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday, saying he felt “very confident.” Wearing a red “Make America Great Again” cap, he told reporters: “It looks like the Republicans have shown up in droves.” The former president said he had not prepared a speech on the outcome, adding: “I am not a Democrat. I can give a speech at very short notice.”
Trump has been told by some advisers that he should declare victory early on election night if he is sufficiently ahead of Harris in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, according to people close to him. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who has spent at least $119 million supporting Trump, would join him in watching the results at Mar-a-Lago.
After billions of dollars in spending and months of frantic campaigning in seven crucial swing states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina — the candidates appeared to be at an impasse. Recent polls have failed to discern a clear pattern or advantage for Harris or Trump in this electoral battleground, although most experts agree that whoever wins the Rust Belt state of Pennsylvania will likely have a clear advantage.
Robert Brady, chairman of the Democratic party in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city, said turnout at polling places was “extremely high” and that “is great for us.” But elsewhere in the state, Tiana Peters, a 39-year-old Democrat from Allentown, voted for Trump. “Nothing really good has happened in the last four years,” she said. “Giving away free money to people who can’t afford a house, that doesn’t work financially, you know.”
It is the swing states that will decide the election because, under the complex American political system, the outcome is determined not by the national popular vote, but by an electoral college in which the number of electors from each state is roughly weighted by the size of the population.
Each candidate needs 270 electoral college votes to win, and the battleground is those states where polls indicate a state could go either way. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, but lost in the electoral college to George W. Bush and Trump.
The result may not be known soon. With polls so tight, full results in crucial swing states are unlikely to be available on Tuesday evening and may not even be known on Wednesday, leaving the US in uncertainty over who will become America’s next president.
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That will only increase jitters in foreign capitals where the elections are closely watched. Harris would likely follow Joe Biden’s foreign policy playbook, focusing on alliances and maintaining defenses of Ukraine, where victory for Trump’s “America first” ethos would galvanize right-wing populists in Europe and elsewhere.
Tuesday’s elections brought down the curtain on a remarkable and historic election campaign that deeply divided American society and increased the stress levels of many of its citizens amid warnings of civil unrest, especially in a scenario where Harris wins and Trump contests the outcome.
Harris launched a dazzling campaign in just over a hundred days after 81-year-old Biden stepped aside. She is pushing to become the first woman, the first black woman and the first woman of South Asian descent to be elected president, but unlike Hillary Clinton in 2008, she downplayed the historic nature of her candidacy.
She focused her campaign on the autocratic threat that Trump represents. In her last major signature event, Harris hosted a rally of 75,000 supporters at the Ellipse in Washington — the site where Trump helped encourage his supporters to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“If he were elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office on day one with a list of enemies. If elected, I will come in with a to-do list full of priorities about what I am going to get done for the American people,” Harris told the crowd.
Harris’ campaign has tried to represent a page focused on the Trump era and the threat of his return to the White House. She has acknowledged that calling Trump a fascist is an honest reflection of his political beliefs and the intentions of his movement, while emphasizing that she represents a choice that will serve all sides of America’s deeply fragmented political landscape.
The vice president also highlighted reproductive freedom in the first presidential election since the Supreme Court, with three Trump appointees, ended the constitutional right to abortion. Opinion polls suggest a record gender gap, with men supporting Trump and women supporting Harris.
Trump, meanwhile, 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 crime to take over the Oval Office.
He ran a campaign fueled by a deep sense of resentment, both personal, over his legal troubles, and by the perception among many of his supporters of an ailing America threatened by the Democrats.
That sense of victimhood has been fueled by lies and conspiracy theories that have baselessly portrayed Biden and Harris as far-left figures who have devastated the US economy with high inflation and an obsession with identity politics.
The former president told his supporters: “I am your retaliation” and threatened to prosecute political enemies, journalists and others. He also proposed turning the U.S. military against what he calls “the enemy within.”
Trump put immigration and border security at the center of his campaign talk, painting a picture of America overrun by crime caused by illegal immigration, with language that has often veered into outright racism and fear-mongering. He has described undocumented immigrants as “animals” with “bad genes” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Read more about the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
During the campaign, Trump promised to replace thousands of federal workers with loyalists, impose sweeping tariffs on allies and enemies alike and stage the largest deportation operation in US history.
The deep divisions between the two campaigns and the language used by the candidates — especially Trump and his allies — have led to widespread fears of violence or unrest as voting day progresses and especially as the counting progresses. In the run-up to Election Day, ballot boxes used for early voting were destroyed in several US states.
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, told the Washington Post newspaper: “There is a chance of small flare-ups in our state and other states – small fires everywhere. Collectively, they could become a massive firestorm that will be harder to control as the embers burn across the country.”
At the same time, however, it was Trump himself who was the subject of two assassination attempts during the campaign. At a rally in Pennsylvania, an assassin’s bullet grazed his ear, and on a golf course in Florida, a gunman lay in wait for an ambush but was foiled by an eagle-eyed Secret Service agent before he could open fire. Neither gunman seemed coherently politically motivated or definitively affiliated with one side or the other.
Tuesday would not only decide the presidency. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives were up for grabs, along with 34 of the 100 seats in the Senate. Thirteen state and territorial governorships and numerous other state and local elections also took place. Ten states, including Arizona, Colorado and Florida, had abortion-related measures on the ballot.
Additional reporting by Sam Levine in Allentown, Pennsylvania and Hugo Lowell in West Palm Beach, Florida
