The Presidential Race
As polls closed across the East Coast and into the middle of the country on Tuesday, President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. began scoring early and expected victories while the most hotly contested contests, in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, remained too close to call.
Mr. Biden was racking up expected wins in Democratic-leaning states: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia. Mr. Trump was posting similar expected victories in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, Wyoming, Indiana and South Carolina.
Among the biggest states to close that was too early to call was Texas, a 38-vote Electoral College prize that has not gone Democratic since 1976.
The most intense attention was on the swing state of Florida and its 29 Electoral College votes. There, Mr. Trump was overperforming his 2016 vote totals in the populous Miami-Dade County, with 526,000-plus votes so far counted in 2020 compared with about 334,000 total four years ago — an enormous improvement.
Florida is a critical part of almost any Electoral College pathway for Mr. Trump to hit the 270 votes needed to secure re-election. Mr. Biden is seen to have multiple paths without the state.
Three other states that are critical to Mr. Trump’s electoral math, Ohio, Georgia and North Carolina, were also too close to call as turnout across the nation appeared on track to set a modern record.
In Ohio, Mr. Biden was demonstrating strength in early tallies considering that the state was not initially considered one of the most competitive battlegrounds. The former vice president made a last-minute trip there on Monday to Cleveland.
Polls had also closed in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two of the previous Democratic “blue wall” states that Mr. Trump flipped in 2016, but that Mr. Biden was aiming to win back in 2020.
Most polls in Florida and Georgia are now closed, and Florida, a must-win battleground for President Trump with 29 electoral votes, appeared to be edging toward the president on the strength of his support among Latinos in the Miami area.
With Georgia’s tally slowed by technical problems in Atlanta, all eyes were on Florida, a perennial battleground Mr. Trump won narrowly four years ago.
A major surge by Mr. Trump among the Cuban-American voters in the Miami-Dade County area seems to have offset gains by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Tampa and Jacksonville — and two Democratic incumbents in the Miami area were having difficulty fending off sharp challenges from Republicans.
In populous Miami-Dade, Mr. Trump was overperforming his 2016 vote totals, with 512,000-plus votes so far counted in 2020 compared with about 334,000 total four years ago — an enormous improvement.
The Biden campaign had sent former President Barack Obama to Miami on the eve of the election to try to rally supporters to the polls.
“The reason why I’m back here in South Florida is that I know some of you have not voted yet,” Mr. Obama had said on Monday.
But Mr. Biden was showing strength in other parts of the state, and the margins were too narrow to declare a winner. Mr. Biden, for instance, was leading in Duval County, home of the city of Jacksonville, which Mr. Trump carried in 2016.
Other key counties were Pinellas, in the Tampa Bay area and Seminole, near Orlando. Also keep an eye on St. Lucie, which went for former President Barack Obama twice and then swung to Mr. Trump in 2016. And for a look at Republican base turnout, there is Sumter County, home to The Villages retirement community.
The most competitive congressional race in the state is in the 26th District, which stretches from the western Miami suburbs to Key West. But there is also an open seat north of Tampa worth monitoring.
Georgia, a light-red state in 2016 that has become a 2020 tossup, is also the site of two hard-fought Senate contests: the incumbent Republican senator, David Perdue, is fending off a stout challenge from Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, and Senator Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to fill a vacant seat, is facing challenges from Representative Doug Collins, a Republican, and the Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, a Democrat.
Both races could result in runoffs next year if the winner does not reach the 50 percent threshold.
In a call with reporters late Tuesday, Mr. Biden’s campaign described Florida as a “coin flip,” a description that has fit the state for decades. But Georgia, with its rapidly expanding suburbs, is considered a new test of Mr. Biden’s claim he can expand Hillary Clinton’s 2016 map.
Both candidates and their surrogates blanketed the state during the closing two weeks of the campaign, with trips there from Mr. Biden, Mr. Obama and Senator Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate. Mr. Trump staged a big rally in Rome, Ga., over the weekend.
“We win Georgia, we win everything,” Biden said at a drive-in rally in Atlanta last week.
Battle for the Senate
Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and majority leader known for his take-no-prisoners tactics, was elected to a seventh term Tuesday, defeating Amy McGrath, a Democrat who struggled to gain ground despite an outpouring of financial support from her party’s supporters around the nation.
Mr. McConnell campaigned on how he had used his position as one of the most powerful figures in Washington to deliver benefits for Kentucky — a consistent theme over his decades in the Senate — and portrayed Ms. McGrath as too liberal and inexperienced for the conservative state.
“I give Kentucky the opportunity to punch above its weight and bring home big wins we would not otherwise get if we had a rookie senator,” Mr. McConnell said in a statement in the closing days of his campaign, noting that he had “steered” more than $17 billion to Kentucky projects since his last election.
His victory came as Mr. McConnell fought to keep the title of majority leader, which has been under threat as Democrats push to claim control of the Senate in competitive races around the country.
With the ability of the next president to pursue his agenda resting on control of the Senate, Republicans are on the defense in an increasingly tight battle, trying to hold off a wave of well-funded Democratic challengers across the map, including in reliably conservative states.
Republicans currently hold the Senate majority by a margin of 53 to 47. A net gain of three seats would put Democrats in control should former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. win the presidency. If President Trump wins re-election, positioning Vice President Mike Pence to cast tiebreaking votes in the Senate, Democrats would need to win four seats in order to win a majority.
Democrats believe they are already on track to win Arizona and Colorado and are on the hunt for a half-dozen others starting with North Carolina, Maine, and Iowa. And with both of the state’s Republican senators at risk, Georgia is looming as a pick up opportunity. Democratic strategists concede that Senator Doug Jones, Democrat of Alabama, will probably lose his seat, and are keeping a close eye on Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, who is facing a serious challenge.
The presidential race will be decided by voters in more than a dozen competitive states, where Joseph R. Biden Jr. and President Trump will focus their efforts to win the 270 electoral votes needed to reach the White House. In the interactive diagram linked below, try building your own coalition of states, which are organized according to Cook Political Report ratings, to see potential outcomes.
A major national voter protection hotline has received more reports of voter intimidation than it did in 2016, and results will be delayed in Georgia because of — what else would you expect in 2020? — a burst pipe at a site where election workers were counting absentee ballots.
But no ballots at the site in Atlanta were damaged by the water, election officials said. And despite the disconcerting increase in intimidation reports, with polls closed in more than half the country, voting and vote-counting continue to go more smoothly than many voting rights advocates had feared.
The night is shaping up to be, in other words, a mixed bag.
“I think it’s fairly safe to say that the extraordinary voter protection effort that we have seen this year, which proved strong and robust — combined with litigation that focused with laser precision on tearing down the restrictions and burdens faced by voters during the pandemic — has made today a relatively smooth Election Day across the country,” Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told reporters around 7 p.m. Eastern time. “There indeed have been issues and may be issues as we move into the final hours of Election Day, but no doubt we were bracing for the worst and have been pleasantly surprised.”
The reports of intimidation include armed Trump supporters standing outside some polling places — including at least one in Charlotte, N.C., where the man was ultimately arrested, and one in Baker, La., where voters called the Lawyers’ Committee’s hotline to report a man waving a Trump flag and holding a large gun.
“The isolated incidents of voter intimidation have been problems that we cannot ignore,” Ms. Clarke said. “They have not been widespread and systematic, but they have been far greater in number than we have seen in recent elections and are a reflection of the dark times we are in as a nation.”
Republicans are also, as expected, trying to challenge ballots in some states — particularly Pennsylvania, where they are attempting to stop election officials from contacting voters whose mail ballots were rejected on technicalities to offer them provisional ballots. Some machines in Philadelphia malfunctioned early in the day. Voting hours were extended at some polling sites, including in Georgia and North Carolina, because of delays.
And yet, for all the anxiety and abnormality of this election — the masks, the six-foot divides, more than 100 million people casting ballots before the day even started — the voting machines worked, for the most part. The lines were at times long, but they moved quickly, for the most part.
The first polls have closed in Indiana and Kentucky — though polls in the western parts of those states will be open for another hour — and results should start trickling in soon. They will be incomplete and potentially very unrepresentative of the final numbers, though, so caution and patience are both warranted.
But one thing is already clear: The turnout in this election will be historic.
We won’t know the final turnout numbers for some time, but they are on track to be enormous, as evidenced by the fact that at least six states have already surpassed their 2016 vote totals with several hours left to go in many places.
According to the United States Election Project, 2020 votes have already exceeded 2016 votes in Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Texas and Washington State.
By the end of the night, the same could easily be true in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina and Utah, all of which had reported more than 90 percent of their 2016 totals by earlier today.
Michael P. McDonald, a University of Florida professor who compiles data from across the nation, said that the country appeared to be on track for roughly 160 million total votes cast. That would mean a turnout rate of about 67 percent of the eligible voting population — higher than the United States has seen in more than a century.
Around the nation, Black voters were on pace to greatly surpass their turnout from 2016, according to voter data analyzed and released Tuesday by the Collective PAC, which is dedicated to electing Black lawmakers.
Quentin James, the founder of the PAC, said more than 616,000 Black people had already cast ballots in Texas — more than the 582,000 who voted in 2016 — and that the turnout of Black voters in Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona was on pace to easily overtake 2016 levels.
In Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state, Democratic officials said they felt particularly bullish about turnout in Philadelphia. With just under 400,000 mail ballots cast and lines at hundreds of polling places around the city starting at 6:30 a.m., one Democratic official said he thought the turnout could surge past levels seen in 2008 for former President Barack Obama.
On the other side, Bill Bretz, chairman of the Republican Party in Westmoreland County, Pa., which includes eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh, said turnout had been “exceptionally high” there.
We don’t have enough information yet to say whether more Democrats or more Republicans voted in most states. We do know that Democrats had a strong advantage in early voting, and that Republicans were expected to have an advantage in Election Day voting — but there is much less Election Day voting this year than in past years.
“There’s only so much left in the Election Day vote,” said Michael P. McDonald, an elections expert at the University of Florida. “That means that Trump’s got to make up ground with a smaller potential pool.”
CONTROL OF THE HOUSE
Bolstered by eroding support for President Trump in critical battlegrounds, House Democrats are poised to expand their majority, using a stunning cash-on-hand advantage and wave of liberal enthusiasm to push into districts Republicans have not lost in decades.
Citing a dismal national environment and a revolt of affluent, suburban voters in traditional conservative strongholds thronging the country from the Midwest to Texas, Republican strategists privately predict losing anywhere from a handful of seats to 20, and have focused their efforts on offsetting their losses in largely rural, white working-class districts.
Antipathy toward Mr. Trump’s handling of the pandemic and his inflammatory brand of politics has dragged down congressional Republicans across the nation, opening up once unfathomable inroads for Democrats in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Omaha, St. Louis and Phoenix. In a sign of their prospects, Democrats are storming once ruby-red parts of Texas, positioning themselves in striking distance of picking up as many as five seats on the outskirts of Houston and Dallas.
Republicans, looking to limit the reach of a potential Democratic sweep, are targeting several incumbents locked in tight races in rural areas of central New York, New Mexico, and Minnesota, and traditionally conservative seats in Utah, Oklahoma and South Carolina that Democrats captured in 2018.
But the terrain all but ensures there will be at least one foothold of Democratic power in Washington, and solidifies Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s grip on her gavel, positioning her to either remain a check on a Trump presidency or as a key ally to a Biden administration.
Although many winners may quickly be evident on election night, the increase in mail voting because of the pandemic is expected to push back the release of full results in many key states.
The New York Times asked officials in every state and the District of Columbia about their reporting processes and what share of votes they expect to be counted by noon on Wednesday, Nov. 4. There is a fair amount of uncertainty surrounding results in any election, but here’s what they said to expect:
Many states will not have complete results tonight.
Even once the early and in-person ballots are counted, a significant number of votes could still be outstanding. Only nine states expect to have at least 98 percent of unofficial results reported by noon the day after the election. Officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two key battleground states, have said full official counts could take several days.
The increase in mail voting could also lead to more provisional votes cast, increasing the number of ballots counted later.
Results are never official until final certification, which occurs in each state in the weeks following the election.
The results at the beginning and at the end of the night will be skewed in some places.
The order in which different types of votes are reported could also make one party look stronger at various points in the night. Democrats are more likely to vote by mail this year, so in states where those will be the first type of ballots released, like Arizona, Florida and North Carolina, initial results could skew in favor of Joseph R. Biden Jr. Places that report in-person Election Day votes first, like most parts of Virginia, will probably look better for President Trump.
But the initial skew in a state’s results may last only a short while, and it will be influenced by which counties or precincts in the state are the fastest to report.
After election night, there could also be misleadingly positive results for Mr. Trump in certain states, with mail ballots trickling in over the following days favoring Mr. Biden.
A Federal District Court judge on Tuesday ordered an immediate sweep of 12 postal districts searching for undelivered ballots after the Postal Service said in court that some 300,000 ballots it had received had not been scanned for delivery.
The dramatic Election Day order came as record numbers of Americans have voted by mail this year, as many voters were anxious to avoid crowds at the polls during the pandemic — and at the end of a campaign season in which fears that recent Postal Service changes had caused extensive mail delays that could imperil ballots.
The judge, Emmet G. Sullivan of the District of Columbia, ordered the sweep to begin before 3 p.m. to “ensure that no ballots have been held up and that any identified ballots are immediately sent out for delivery.” He said he was particularly concerned about ballot delivery in districts where there has been slow processing of ballots for days, including Central Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and Detroit.
He ordered the Postal Service to provide him with an update on the sweep by 4:30 p.m. certifying that “sweeps were conducted and that no ballots were left behind.”
Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. and a plaintiff in the suit, said he believed the Postal Service would complete the sweeps before Election Day ended rather than risk being held in contempt of court.
“It was a victory for individual voters,” Mr. Johnson said of the order. “There will have to be remediation if they’re unable to address the order. I’m sure the Postal Service does not want to be held in contempt of the judge’s order.”
Roughly 300,000 ballots that the U.S. Postal Service says it processed show no scan confirming their delivery to ballot-counting sites, according to data filed today in federal court in Washington, D.C., leaving voter-rights advocates concerned as low on-time delivery scores for mail ballots continue to plague some key swing districts.
Postal officials say just because a ballot never received a final scan before going out for delivery doesn’t mean, necessarily, that it wasn’t delivered. A machine scanning ballots for final processing can sometimes miss ballots that are stuck together or whose bar codes are smudged. And hand-sorted ballots typically do not receive a final scan before delivery.
The Postal Service has also authorized expedited delivery of ballots that forego the normal process, but voting-rights advocates are concerned that, without a scan verifying the ballots went out for delivery, some could be sitting uncounted at various postal facilities around the country.
Data the Postal Service filed on Election Day showed continued low on-time processing scores for ballots delivered Monday in several battleground postal districts, including 69 percent in Central Pennsylvania, 79 percent in Philadelphia, 78 percent in Detroit, 61 percent in Atlanta and 74 percent in South Florida.
All states require that mail ballots be postmarked by Election Day in order to count, but some allow a grace period for the ballots to arrive in the hands of elections officials. Pennsylvania, for instance, has a three-day window to receive ballots as long as they are postmarked by Nov. 3, but that is the subject of litigation.
The ballots in question should have been postmarked upon entering a postal facility, but the sweep will help determine whether any fell through the cracks, according to Shankar Duraiswamy, the lead attorney for the nonprofit coalition Vote Forward, which is suing the Postal Service to try to ensure all ballots are delivered.
He asked for an order from Judge Sullivan requiring the Postal Service to verify by 3 p.m. that an inspector has visited facilities at all “hot spot” jurisdictions to “ensure that no ballots remain in the facility and that all ballots that were there earlier today are out for delivery this afternoon.”
Mr. Duraiswamy said the order focuses on states that don’t have a statutory grace period for receiving ballots after Election Day. “No voter should be disenfranchised for something that is outside of his or her control,” he said. “These are districts we’ve identified as chronically underperforming.”
Judge Sullivan ordered the Postal Service on Friday to undertake “extraordinary measures” to deliver the ballots in 22 districts where on-time delivery of ballots dipped below a rate of 90 percent for two days last week.
The Postal Service reported it had discovered 180,000 pieces of delayed mail in Miami-Dade County in Florida, including more than 40 ballots, after a video taken inside a post office in disarray in the city of Homestead went viral of Friday. However, it said all but one of those ballots had now been delivered to elections officials.
American intelligence officials are watching for stepped-up foreign election interference if the results of the presidential race take days to emerge, including whether adversarial countries try to foment violence inside the United States, the head of the National Security Agency said on Tuesday.
Foreign powers considering whether to try to influence the outcome of the race will change their calculations if “there is a clearly defined winner” by Wednesday, the official, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, told reporters. But vote-counting that takes days or weeks to determine a winner could likely prompt more foreign interference efforts, he said.
“There is a period of time where we are watching this carefully to see if our adversaries are going to try to take advantage if there is a close vote,” he said.
In the past several days and weeks, foreign countries interfered less than they had leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, General Nakasone also said. But, he added, more nations overall were trying to interfere than in past elections.
Foreign powers including Russia, Iran or China could try to sow doubt about the integrity of the vote count or security of the election through influence operations or hacking attempts, current and former officials have said.
American officials retaliated in recent days against an operation last month by Iranian hackers who sent spoofed emails to voters in Florida and other states, according to two officials briefed on the response. The Washington Post earlier reported the operation.
American officials had learned of the playbook Iran had mapped out to conduct further interference efforts, but the retaliatory operation appeared to succeed, hampering the Iranian group’s ability to conduct further such operations ahead of Election Day, the officials said. General Nakasone declined to discuss specific operations.
He did raise the prospect that foreign powers could try to stoke violence with extreme domestic groups if the results are close and tensions are high. Russia and other foreign governments have repeatedly tried to amplify unrest in the United States, including after far-right rallies and counterprotests in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, that killed a woman and injured dozens, intelligence officials have said.
The night the nation has been waiting for — and in some quarters dreading — is finally here.
Polls will begin closing at 6 p.m. Eastern in parts of Kentucky and Indiana, and the first results will begin rolling in soon after that. Both states are securely in the Trump column.
After that, there are a few states that may determine early on whether this election might be resolved Tuesday night — or whether we are in for a long week or (yikes) month.
If Mr. Biden wins Georgia, Florida or North Carolina, Mr. Trump has an even slimmer path to victory.
Polls begin closing in Florida at 7 p.m. Eastern. Florida officials have already processed the state’s record-breaking early vote, which has been almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. Watch for those votes to be announced shortly after 8 p.m.
Unless the margin is razor thin, there is a good chance that the state will be called before bedtime on the East Coast.
Polls in Georgia also close at 7 p.m. Final results could be known within a few hours as well.
North Carolina’s polls close at 7:30 p.m. Most of the early vote there has already been counted, so this is another state that is likely to be called Tuesday, unless it is very close. The state’s Board of Elections said that the reporting of results will be delayed by 45 minutes, till 8:15 p.m. on Tuesday, because of delayed openings at four polling sites.
If Mr. Biden does not win any of those three states (or Texas, where most of the state’s polls close at 8 p.m.), that will ratchet up the importance of the so-called blue wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
It all may come down to Pennsylvania. Polls there close at 8 p.m., but Pennsylvania won’t begin counting its early votes until Wednesday morning. The in-person voting is expected to be overwhelmingly Republican, so Mr. Trump may jump out to an early-night lead.
Don’t get misled; the early voting has been overwhelmingly Democratic. Polling shows Mr. Biden with a narrow lead in Pennsylvania, though Mr. Trump’s poll-defying victory there in 2016 — and the effort by his campaign this time to turn out first-time voters who Republicans say have been overlooked by pollsters — has made this state one of the big mysteries of the night. It could take days to finish counting Pennsylvania’s votes.
Polls in Wisconsin close at 9 p.m. Eastern, but the state’s municipal clerks did not start counting early votes until the polls open the morning of Election Day; a tight race might mean it will take a day or more before a winner is declared.
The final poll closing in Michigan is 9 p.m. as well, though most of the state’s polls will be closed at 8 p.m. Early voting has been heavy here as well, and counting those votes didn’t begin until Monday. This is another one that could take awhile.
The New York Times has assigned a team of more than 50 photographers to capture the scene in 22 states. See our full visual story on Election Day.
The campaign isn’t over until polls are closed. President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. made final visits to supporters on Tuesday. Around the country, candidates for local and national offices made their final pitch to voters. See how Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden spent the rest of 2020.
The pandemic threatened to upend the country’s election infrastructure, which is primarily run by older Americans who serve as clerks and poll workers. This age group is most likely to suffer the worst effects of the coronavirus. Many states recruited a younger generation of poll workers.
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