The most polarized US election in decades was on a knife-edge Tuesday as President Donald Trump appeared to have held off predictions of a sweeping Democratic wave but Joe Biden also scored key wins. Eight states are still left to be counted, but in the race to achieve the magic figure of 270 to become the US president, Biden has so far bagged 227 electoral votes and Trump 210. Against a backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic that has claimed more than 230,000 lives in the United States, a quick Biden triumph — dreamed of by some Democrats — looked unlikely with key states too close to call.
Trump enjoyed a slim but vital lead in Florida, widely considered a must win to retain the presidency, despite opinion polls that had shown Biden edging even or ahead. “It’s happening,” Trump senior advisor Jason Miller wrote on Twitter of the election, although only Fox News had so far called Florida for the president. Exit polls showed Trump capturing swaths of the Latino vote, making strong gains among Cuban-Americans after the Republican tycoon’s relentless attacks against leftist leaders in Latin America and rhetorical attempts to link them to Biden. Biden’s team has long insisted that it doesn’t need to win Florida and analysts pointed to gains for the Democrat in some Trump areas of the state that might bode well in other big states. Biden for his part enjoyed early strength in Arizona, which Trump carried four years earlier, and he was neck-and-neck in Ohio and Texas — two states where the Democrat a few weeks ago saw little chance. And Biden — as expected — collected the biggest prize of the night with a win in solidly Democratic California. But attention quickly turned to results emerging from Georgia and North Carolina, two more states Biden hopes to wrest away, and the Midwestern trio of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — in which Trump squeaked out surprise 2016 wins over Hillary Clinton that handed him the White House. With a record more than 100 million Americans having voted ahead of Election Day due to the Covid-19 pandemic, definitive final results could easily take hours or even days to be tabulated.
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