Trump, Biden in tight race
DEMOCRATIC candidate Joe Biden surged ahead as results of the United States Presidential election trickled in this morning.
As of 5:00am, Biden had secured 209 Electoral College votes to President Donald Trump’s 118.
For a candidate to win, he must secure 270 Electoral College votes.
Results from battleground states with 96 Electoral College votes that would determine the final outcome were being expected.
The states are: Arizona (11), Florida (29), Georgia (16), Iowa (6), Maine 2nd Congressional District (1), North Carolina (15) and Ohio.
The final outcome in not expected until later today.
The Democratic candidate won California (55), Connecticut (with seven Electoral College votes), Delaware (three), Illinois (20), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), New Jersey (14), New Mexico (5), New York (29), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), Virginia (13), Idaho (4) and Colorado (9).
The Republican candidate won in Alabama (with nine Electoral College votes), Arkansas (6), Indiana (11), Kentucky (8), Utah (6), Louisiana (8), Mississippi (6), Nebraska (4), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Carolina (9), South Dakota (3), Tennessee (11), West Virginia (5), Wyoming (3), Arkansas (6) and Missouri (10).
Americans also elected members to the two chambers of Congress – Senate and the House of Representatives.
Thirty-five of the 100 Senate seats were in contest while all the 475 House of Representatives seats were contested.
Across America, businesses closed early and some planned to stay closed for the rest of the week for fear of unrest.
Pre-Election Day voting skyrocketed nationwide despite the ravaging coronavirus pandemic. At least, six states – Texas, Hawaii, Nevada, Washington, Arizona and Montana – surpassed their total turnout from the 2016 general election.
In seven other states, the pre-election vote represents at least 90 per cent of their 2016 total vote. The states are North Carolina, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee.
As Americans voted, the Coronavirus pandemic continued to worsen with 40 states seeing a 25 per cent rise in cases over the last two weeks.
The U.S. has recorded 9.3 million coronavirus cases with more than 232,000 deaths.
Trump made a brief Election Day visit to the Republican National Committee annex office in Arlington, Virginia.
He said he felt good about his chances for victory, predicting that he would register big wins in key states such as Florida and Arizona.
“We feel very good,” a hoarse-voiced President said.
Trump said he expected victory in all the key states that will decide the election, but said he would not “play games” by declaring his win too early.
Biden, 77, is looking to become the president after a five-decade political career including eight years as vice president under Barack Obama. He mounted unsuccessful bids for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008.
The Biden campaign took advantage of the final hours of the campaign to get out the vote in states that Trump won in 2016, whose electoral votes could be the key to winning.
Biden travelled to the battleground state of Pennsylvania and visited his hometown of Scranton, and Philadelphia.
Before leaving for the final events of his campaign, the former vice president and some of his family members attended a church service at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Roman Catholic Church just after 7am ET in Wilmington, Delaware.
He visited his family’s gravesite where his son Beau Biden, who died in 2015 after battling brain cancer, is buried.
Trump is hoping to repeat the type of upset he pulled off in 2016 when he defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton despite losing the national popular vote by about three million ballots. He is aiming to avoid becoming the first incumbent U.S. president to lose a re-election bid since George H.W. Bush in 1992.
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