Trump or Biden? Big turnout, few hiccups as voters choose
WASHINGTON (AP) — Voters were deciding between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden on Tuesday, closing an epic campaign marked by rancor and fear that will influence how the nation confronts a surging pandemic and foundational questions of economic fairness and racial justice.
The first set of polls closed, beginning to draw to an end a campaign that was reshaped by the coronavirus and marked by contentiousness. Each candidate declared the other fundamentally unfit to lead a nation grappling with COVID-19, a virus that has killed more than 230,000 Americans, cost millions of jobs and rewritten the norms of everyday life.
The night began with predictable victories for
each candidate, Trump taking Kentucky and Biden winning Vermont. It was
too early to call Georgia, the battleground state with the earliest poll
close time.
Millions of voters put aside worries about the virus
— and some long lines — to turn out in person, joining 102 million
fellow Americans who voted days or weeks earlier, a record number that
represented 73% of the total vote in the 2016 presidential election.
Biden
entered Election Day with multiple paths to victory, while Trump,
playing catch-up in a number of battleground states, had a narrower but
still feasible road to clinch 270 Electoral College votes. Control of the Senate
was at stake, too: Democrats needed to net three seats if Biden
captured the White House to gain control of all of Washington for the
first time in a decade. The House was expected to remain under
Democratic control.
The nation braced for what was to come — and a result that might not be known for days.
A
new anti-scaling fence was erected around the White House, and in
downtowns from New York to Denver to Minneapolis, workers boarded up
businesses lest the vote lead to unrest.
With the worst public health crisis in a century still fiercely present, the pandemic — and Trump’s handling of it — was the inescapable focus for 2020.
For
Trump, the election stood as a judgment on his four years in office, a
term in which he bent Washington to his will, challenged faith in its
institutions and changed how America was viewed across the globe. Rarely
trying to unite a country divided along lines of race and class, he has
often acted as an insurgent against the government he led while
undermining the nation’s scientists, bureaucracy and media.
At
the White House Tuesday night, more than 100 family members, friends,
donors and staff were set to watch returns from the East Room. Trump was
watching votes come in upstairs in the residence with a few close
aides. Most top campaign officials were monitoring returns from a “war
room” set up in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Biden
spent the day last-minute campaigning in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where
he was born, and in Philadelphia with a couple of local stops in
Wilmington, Delaware, where he was spending Election Night.
The
president began his day on an upbeat note, predicting that he’d do even
better than in 2016. But during a midday visit to his campaign
headquarters, he spoke in a gravelly, subdued tone.
“Winning is easy,” Trump told reporters. “Losing is never easy, not for me it’s not.”
Trump
left open the possibility of addressing the nation Tuesday night, even
if a winner hadn’t been determined. Biden was also scheduled to give a
nighttime speech from Wilmington.
“I’m superstitious about
predicting what an outcome’s gonna be until it happens … but I’m
hopeful,” said Biden. “It’s just so uncertain … you can’t think of an
election in the recent past where so many states were up for grabs.”
With
the coronavirus now surging anew, voters ranked the pandemic and the
economy as top concerns in the race between Trump and Biden, according
to AP VoteCast, a national survey of the electorate.
Voters
were especially likely to call the public health crisis the nation’s
most important issue, with the economy following close behind. Fewer
named health care, racism, law enforcement, immigration or climate
change
The survey found that Trump’s leadership loomed large in
voters’ decision-making. Nearly two-thirds of voters said their vote was
about Trump — either for him or against him.
The momentum from
early voting carried into Election Day, as an energized electorate
produced long lines at polling sites throughout the country. Voters
braved worries of the coronavirus, threats of polling place intimidation
and expectations of long lines caused by changes to voting systems, but
appeared undeterred as turnout appeared it would easily surpass the 139
million ballots cast four years ago.
No major problems arose on
Tuesday, outside the typical glitches of a presidential election: Some
polling places opened late, robocalls provided false information to
voters in Iowa and Michigan, and machines or software malfunctioned in
some counties in the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia
and Texas.
The cybersecurity agency at the Department of Homeland
Security said there were no outward signs by midday of any malicious
activity.
The record-setting early vote — and legal skirmishing over how it would be counted — drew unsupported allegations of fraud from Trump, who had repeatedly refused to guarantee he would honor the election’s result.
Jaffe reported from Pittsburgh. Miller reported from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Associated Press writers Robert Burns, Kevin Freking, Aamer Madhani, Deb Riechmann and Will Weissert in Washington, Bill Barrow and Haleluya Hadero in Atlanta, Jeff Martin in Cobb County, Georgia, Juan Lozano in Houston, Corey Williams in West Bloomfield, Michigan, Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire, and Natalie Pompilio contributed to this report.