Polls have closed in nearly all states in the U.S. presidential race between U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump after millions of Americans cast their votes Tuesday, but it remained too early to declare a winner.
Preliminary exit poll results released in the final hours of voting showed the economy, immigration and the state of democracy were key issues driving people to vote in the highly-consequential election that will determine control of the White House and Congress.
The latest state polls closed at 11 p.m. ET on the west coast, but all eyes were on seven battleground states that are seen as crucial for either Trump or Harris to win.
Georgia was the first of those swing states to begin reporting after polls closed at 7 p.m. ET. However, some polling places in the state were allowed to remain open for slightly longer due to hoax bomb threats that delayed voting earlier Tuesday.
The Associated Press has so far declared Trump will win 23 traditionally Republican states including Texas, South Carolina and Florida. Harris is projected to take 13 solidly Democratic states such as California, New York and Illinois, as well as the District of Columbia, the nation’s capital. Neither candidate has flipped a state from the 2020 results so far.
The critical battleground states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada remained too close to call.
As of 11 p.m. ET, Trump was winning the popular vote by nearly six million ballots counted so far.
Among the states called for Trump was Iowa, despite a shocking poll released days before Election Day that suggested Harris could win there.
Exit polls showed a highly anxious electorate, with large majorities of voters surveyed expressing negative views of the current state of the country.
About three-quarters of voters surveyed in the AP VoteCast, CNN, NBC News, and ABC News exit polls said they were disappointed and even angry about how things were going in the country. Yet CNN’s poll noted that over 60 per cent of respondents believe “America’s best days are in the future.”
The exit polls found between three and four in 10 voters ranked economy as their top issue in this election, followed by around 20 per cent who said immigration. Between 10 and 20 per cent said abortion was their number one issue.
Yet the same polls all found the future of democracy outweighed all those issues as a motivator for voting. Across each exit poll, more than a third to half of voters said democracy was the single most important factor.
Tens of millions of Americans on Tuesday added their ballots to the 84 million cast early as they chose between two candidates with drastically different temperaments and visions for the country. Those casting Election Day ballots mostly encountered a smooth process, with isolated reports of hiccups that regularly happen, including long lines, technical issues and ballot printing errors.
Multiple bomb threats reported at polling places in critical states like Georgia and Pennsylvania were deemed to be hoaxes emanating from Russian email accounts, according to the FBI.
Turnout is expected to be high and could break the record set in the 2020 election, when over 66 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot.
In Congress, Republicans flipped the Senate seat in West Virginia as former governor Jim Justice won the race to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. The pick-up puts Republicans one step closer toward retaking the Senate majority.
Democrats are looking to flip control of the U.S. House of Representatives from Republicans, who went into Tuesday with a razor-thin majority.
The extremely close race for the presidency is expected to come down to the seven battleground or swing states that will decide the winner of the Electoral College, which is used to elect the U.S. president. Trump and Harris have focused most of their time campaigning in those states, particularly Pennsylvania.
A result may not be declared Tuesday night due to how close the race is and how long it could take to count millions of mail-in ballots, which in some states could not be opened until Election Day. In 2020, which saw a steep increase in mail-in voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic that overwhelmed some counting stations, a winner was not declared until four days later.
Harris stands to be the first female president if elected and has promised to work across the aisle to tackle economic worries and other issues without radically departing from the course set by U.S. President Joe Biden. Trump has vowed to replace thousands of federal workers with loyalists, impose sweeping tariffs on all foreign imports, and stage the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.
Either result would have major implications for Canada, particularly on the economy and immigration but also on foreign policy.
Canada is also bracing for the possibility of unrest and violence in the days following the vote.
Yet David Cohen, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, told Global News he expects the Canada-U.S. relationship to remain strong regardless of who wins, and that American democracy will survive either result.
“I understand the concern, (but) the United States has been an enduring democracy for almost 250 years,” he said.
“I certainly do not think you can judge the quality of a nation’s democracy based on the outcome and the conduct of one election, among hundreds of elections that are being held today.”
Trump, who has frequently spread false claims that he won the 2020 presidential election and whose supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, posted claims of “cheating” in Pennsylvania without evidence on his Truth Social media account as voting continued Tuesday.
In response, Pennsylvania District Attorney Larry Krasner said there is “no factual basis whatsoever within law enforcement to support this wild allegation.”
“If Donald J. Trump has any facts to support his wild allegations, we want them now. Right now. We are not holding our breath,” Krasner said in a statement provided by his office.
Harris, who had earlier sent in her ballot by mail to her home state of California, spent some of Tuesday in radio interviews encouraging listeners to vote.
Election Day closed out one of the most eventful and contentious campaigns in modern American history, which saw Trump alone survive two assassination attempts and get convicted on multiple criminal charges in his old home state of New York.
Harris was thrust to the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden ended his bid for re-election this summer, following a disastrous debate performance against Trump in June that called the 81-year-old president’s health and fitness into question.
—with files from the Associated Press and Reuters