U.S. picks Taiwan for first armed drones sale under eased rules
InternationalNov 05. 2020A U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle drone stands on display during the Singapore Airshow at the Changi Exhibition Centre in Singapore on Feb. 11, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by SeongJoon Cho. /Photo by: SeongJoon Cho — Bloomberg Location: Singapore, Singapore
By Syndication The Washington Post, Bloomberg · Iain Marlow, Samson Ellis
The U.S. will sell Taiwan armed Reaper drones in a $600 million deal that will likely further anger China and help lock in a shift in American military support for Taipei during the next presidential administration.
The State Department on Tuesday approved the proposed sale of the four weapons-ready MQ-9B drones from General Atomics — capable of carrying laser and GPS-guided munitions — along with radar, sensors and ground control stations for flying the aircraft. It was the first time the U.S. has approved the sale of armed drones since the Trump administration eased export restrictions in July.
“This proposed sale will improve the recipient’s capability to meet current and future threats by providing timely Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, target acquisition, and counter-land, counter-sea, and anti-submarine strike capabilities for its security and defense,” the State Department said in a statement. “The capability is a deterrent to regional threats and will strengthen the recipient’s self-defense,” it said.
The move comes shortly after similar approval in recent weeks for two arms sales worth a total of $4.2 billion for the democratically controlled island, which Beijing considers part of its territory. The deals leading up to Tuesday’s election in the U.S. continue a notable shift away from the sale of more traditional, expensive weapons platforms — such as warplanes and tanks — toward a so-called “hedgehog” defensive strategy designed to make the costs of a Chinese invasion too high by deploying nimble weapons such as mobile missile systems, mines and drones.
China’s military has continued to pile pressure on Taiwan, with People’s Liberation Army aircraft breaching the island’s air defense identification zone on a near-daily basis. Tensions are also high between the world’s two biggest economies, with China featuring prominently in election rhetoric between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called the latest arms sale a “severe violation” of the one-China principle and urged the U.S. to “immediately cancel its arms sale plans to avoid further damaging China-U.S. relations.”
“It grossly interferes in China’s domestic affairs and gravely undermines China’s sovereignty and security interests,” Wang told a daily briefing in Beijing on Wednesday. He vowed China would “take legitimate and necessary responses in light of the changing developments,” without elaborating.
While the U.S. recently sold Taipei F-16 warplanes and Abrams tanks, military analysts have argued that these expensive acquisitions are particularly vulnerable should China launch a barrage of missiles to knock out the island’s defenses — including parked jets and vehicles, runways and military facilities — ahead of an invasion.
“The trend for U.S. security assistance to Taiwan is to shift away from large platforms and systems like the F-16V fighters and M1A2 Abrams tanks sold to Taiwan in 2019,” said Shirley Kan, an independent specialist in Asian security affairs and a member of the research organization Global Taiwan Institute’s advisory board.
Taiwan has also scrambled around 3,000 jets this year as Chinese military aircraft fly close to the island, and a crash of an aging F-5 fighter has fueled concerns about the age of its fleet.
“The main benefit of these drones will be to improve our surveillance and detection capabilities in the Taiwan Strait,” Shu Hsiao-huang, assistant research fellow at the Taipei-based Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said, citing their ability to stay in the air for long periods. “This will help us maintain stronger surveillance on the areas around Taiwan.”
InternationalNov 04. 2020Voters wait outside West Allis City Hall near Milwaukee, Wis., on Nov. 3, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sara Stathas
By The Washington Post · Jenna Johnson, Jose A. Del Real · NATIONAL, POLITICS
A record number of Americans are expected to have voted in this year’s presidential election, making their voices heard at a time when the country is tensely polarized and battling a deadly pandemic.
First-time voter Quanique Beasley, 33, is excited about voting for the first time on Nov. 3, 2020, in Washington, D.C. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Astrid Riecken
Even before Election Day, more than 100 million Americans had cast their ballots, nearly three-quarters of the total number in 2016. With the stakes high for supporters of both candidates, voters shattered records in several key states.
In six states, voters cast more ballots during early voting than they did during the entire election in 2016, and then grew those numbers on Election Day. Nine additional states came close to doing the same.
It was still unclear late Tuesday which candidate would benefit most from these increases in a race that was neck and neck.
President Donald Trump took Florida, a perennial battleground, where more than 11 million voted – an increase of nearly 1.6 million compared with 2016. In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, a Democratic stronghold that has a high concentration of Latino voters, Joe Biden led Trump by about 83,000 votes – a far smaller lead than the 290,000-vote margin Clinton had in 2016.
Democratic strategists in Florida had long worried that the national party was not investing enough resources between presidential election cycles to build sustained support among Latino voters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign heavily focused on the state’s Latinos, particularly Cuban Americans, for years.
A different story played out in Arizona, a new battleground state, where Biden was leading with more than 76% of votes counted. Democrats hoped this would be a culmination of a decade of grass-roots political organizing among Latinos. Political activists have insisted that Arizona could have flipped in 2016 if national Democrats had invested more money earlier.
In both of these states, Latinos will probably play a deciding role. Early exit polls suggest that while Biden won the Latino vote 2 to 1 nationally, Trump improved his standing among Latino voters in at least two swing states since 2016: Florida and Georgia.
Some of the largest spikes in voter participation appeared in states that Trump easily won in 2016 but have since become battlegrounds because of rapid changes in their populations: Texas, Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina. All of these states have seen an influx of new arrivals, often Democrats relocating from places such as California, New York and Illinois, and large numbers of young people of color turning 18 each year. There has also been a number of Republicans and right-leaning independents repelled by Trump who were willing to vote for Democrats.
Swing states that have long been key to both campaigns saw different levels of early voting. Pennsylvania, which was decided by just over one percentage point in 2016, had about 2.5 million votes cast early, which was roughly 40% of the total number in 2016. Wisconsin was at about 65% of its 2016 number, and Michigan was at nearly 60%.
Over the past several months, both presidential campaigns targeted voters who didn’t participate in 2016 to try to persuade them to vote this year.
For Trump and Republicans, that meant finding those who liked the president but don’t usually vote, especially men. For Biden and Democrats, that meant connecting with voters who haven’t bothered to vote in many years and people newly eligible, including those who turned 18 since the last presidential election, naturalized citizens, and felons who regained their voting rights.
“Really why I decided to vote this time around was just how divisive the last four years have felt, and a lot of what’s gone on politically feels like tearing people apart and polarizing,” Jana Hainey, 32, an email marketing specialist from Kansas City, Mo., who cast her first-ever ballot this election and voted for Biden. “I kind of really wanted to make sure after the last four years to make sure my voice mattered.”
While much attention has been given to the bursts of new Democratic voters, especially in urban and suburban areas, Trump also inspired a number of first-time voters to get involved.
Brian Dalley, 60, who lives in Cascade, Mich., always thought the country ran just fine without his input. But following heart surgery in April, he more closely followed the news and was alarmed by protests that had turned violent in some cities and the widespread disrespect of the president.
“You’re supposed to get behind your president,” said Dalley, a plumber who was first in line at the polling place near his home Tuesday morning and voted for the first time by filling out a ballot for Trump.
In the final days of the 2020 election, the Biden campaign said it thought its voters would reflect the strength of the “Obama coalition” 12 years ago, which included historic numbers of young people and voters of color.
It was a bullish claim given that Democrat Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 was due, in part, to her difficulty motivating precisely those voters in certain key states. That and a surge of support for third-party candidates delivered, on the margins, an electoral college victory to Trump.
“To me, 2016 was not a story of what Trump did, it was a story of what Hillary Clinton and the Democrats failed to do. They failed to hold on tightly to that Obama coalition,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster. “But it’s too simple to say it was a turnout issue. There is a reason people don’t turn out.”
After the 2016 election, Trump’s strength among White voters without college degrees became a topic of intense focus. But Clinton’s relative strength with White college graduates was also a factor.
“These white college graduates, they were more evenly divided before, and for a while they were Republican. But over time they have moved into the Democratic coalition in a powerful way, led by college-educated white women,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, who said anti-Trump sentiment has accelerated the trend.
Belcher said he thinks White college graduates have become likelier to vote for Democrats in part because they have been disturbed by racial conflict during the Trump administration.
Since the 2016 election, the share of voters without college degrees has fallen by nearly 5% nationally, according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
And some of the most dramatic demographic changes have transpired in battleground states. In Arizona, for example, the share of White voters without college degrees fell by more than five percentage points since the last election, while the share of Hispanic voters increased by more than 6%.
White men without college degrees fell as a percentage of eligible voters by about 3% in Georgia, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania and, to a slightly smaller degree, in Florida, according to that data. White women without college degrees fell as a proportion of the electorate by about 3% in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas.
Meanwhile, the share of Hispanic residents who are eligible to vote grew by 4% in Colorado, 3% in Florida and 3% in Texas – all states that saw a huge increase in voter participation this year.
The burst of first-time voters could be seen in the line that formed at a polling location at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, on Tuesday.
Renna Rebischke-Smith, 18, cast a provisional ballot for Biden because “there are a lot of issues on the table that affect me.” Fiontay Williams, 31, a health-care worker voted for Biden because of Trump’s handling of the pandemic. And Savannah New, 20, voted for Trump because of his support for gun rights.
Across the country, first-time voters for Trump also included Jairo Acedo, a 26-year-old truck driver in Phoenix who worried that a Biden presidency would negatively affect his life, and Ouedia “Exie” Nowling, a 67-year-old living in Pensacola, Fla., who wasn’t interested in politics until Trump was elected.
First-time presidential voters who picked Biden included Leila Ahmed, an 18-year-old college student in Idaho who came to the United States from Kenya in 2005 and who is alarmed by the racism she has seen in the country, and Dejah Wright, a 28-year-old in Atlanta who was not a fan of the former vice president but didn’t want Trump reelected.
In Chicago on Tuesday, there was a block party atmosphere at the United Center, the home of the Bulls and the Blackhawks that was transformed into a polling location. In line was Christian Torres, 19, who was voting for the first time – making him the first in his family to vote in a U.S. election.
His parents and older siblings are from Guadalajara, Mexico, and are undocumented. His younger siblings have yet to turn 18. He voted for Biden, who he hopes will reform the country’s immigration system.
“They don’t have a voice like I do,” he said of his family. “So I want to be their voice.”
Maryland voters turn out in force, say Trump ‘needs to go’
InternationalNov 04. 2020First-time voter Elijah Olsson, 18, waits in line at Tuscarora High School in Frederick, Md., on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Katherine Frey
By The Washington Post · Rebecca Tan, Ovetta Wiggins, Rachel Chason · NATIONAL, POLITICS
Maryland looked set to vote overwhelmingly for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and to approve a statewide measure to legalize sports betting as preliminary election results rolled in late Tuesday night.
Clad in masks and face shields, Marylanders oscillated between feelings of anxiety and determination as they headed to the polls earlier in the day, performing an Election Day ritual made fraught by the pandemic, the president’s allegations of voter fraud and rumblings of post-election unrest.
By the end of the night, more than 2.8 million Marylanders had voted, narrowly exceeding the total in 2016. Most – 2.3 million – had cast their ballots before Election Day through early voting or mail-in voting.
Preliminary results, which were delayed until 11 p.m. because of long lines in rural Calvert County, showed Biden with a 33-point lead over President Donald Trump. Maryland’s eight congressional incumbents were all ahead of their challengers, including Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a Democrat who led Trump-backed Republican Kimberly Klacik by nearly 50 points in the Baltimore-based 7th District.
Statewide measures to legalize sports betting and shift control of the state budget appeared popular, with a majority of tabulated votes indicating approval.
In Baltimore, Democrat Brandon Scott, 36, was poised to become the city’s youngest mayor, while in Montgomery County, voters leaned toward passing two county-backed ballot initiatives that would change property taxes and the council’s structure. There were also some local school board and municipal races.
Election officials had counted about 70% of votes cast by the end of the night, but it may take until Thursday to finish tabulating the deluge of mail-in ballots that were submitted.
Deep-blue Maryland, which has 10 electoral college votes, had been expected to vote for Biden and to return its incumbent representatives to Congress.
Results were initially less certain for down-ballot initiatives, such as the proposal to legalize sports betting. Gambling companies spent millions supporting the measure, which lawmakers say could generate up to $40 million in tax revenue for public education. But polling from February showed Marylanders deeply divided on the issue.
In the nine days of in-person voting, those who flocked to the polls in the heavily Democratic suburbs bordering Washington were mostly focused on one task: getting rid of the incumbent president.
“He needs to go,” said Gladis Richardson, 63, who waited in line for more than an hour with a broken ankle to vote for Biden in Prince George’s County. “I’m excited about Joe, and the man could not be worse than what we have now.”
In neighboring Montgomery County, Dijana Trajkovic, 42, said her plan to vote against Trump was four years in the making. Originally from Bosnia, Trajkovic applied for citizenship days after Trump was elected, with the aim of voting him out of office. She had moved to the United States 16 years ago but never felt urgency to become a citizen until 2016, she said.
Not all voters made up their minds about Trump four years ago. Some said they were apolitical or disenchanted during the last election, but became driven to participate this year because of Trump’s record. Biden supporters cited the president’s insults toward military veterans, his crackdown on immigrant communities and his handling of the coronavirus crisis; Trump supporters pointed to his foreign policy, which they see as effective.
“The guy gets stuff done,” said Tim Dull, a Republican in Howard County who said he voted for Trump this year but not in 2016. “Peace in the Middle East, nobody said he could do it,” said Dull, 64. “Nobody pushed back on the Chinese until he did.”
David Rucker, 51, said he was among the 1.4 million eligible voters in Maryland who sat out the 2016 election. He had “trust issues” with both candidates, he said, but has since grown increasingly alarmed by Trump’s proposals to change Social Security.
“Hopefully this makes a difference,” Rucker said before casting his vote for Biden.
Sandra Anaya O’Brien, 56, and her daughter Isabel O’Brien, 18, also held out hope that their votes would matter as they left a polling site in Silver Spring on Friday. As Trump supporters, they know they are a minority in liberal Montgomery County and try to avoid airing their political views in public. But amid such a divisive election, the older O’Brien said, they wanted their votes to show that Montgomery is not as monolithic as some might assume.
“It’s important that people know we live here,” she said. As an immigrant from El Salvador and a devout Catholic, O’Brien said, she balances her ambivalence toward Trump’s immigration policies with her support of his antiabortion views.
When it comes to the U.S. House, all eight incumbents in Maryland – seven Democrats and one Republican – were expected to pull off reelection smoothly.
The race in the 7th District, formerly represented by Rep. Elijah Cummings, garnered national attention after one of Klacik’s provocative campaign ads went viral, earning her a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. But Mfume, a seasoned figure in Maryland politics, defeated her with nearly 75% of the vote during a special election in April and was expected to win again.
A 45-year-old woman who went by the name Queen said before voting in Baltimore on Monday that she was undecided on the presidential election but supported Mfume.
“I have only seen or heard from Kimberly Klacik for the past three months,” she said. “And while I have some issues with Mfume, he graduated from Morgan [State University] and knows this community.”
More than the presidential or congressional races, the statewide measure to approve sports betting drew divided perspectives from voters at the polls.
Potomac residents Shruti and Frank Abbato, 48 and 47, both voted for Biden but were split on sports betting.
Shruti Abbato approved of legalization because she had read that the generated tax revenue would help pay for an elaborate but expensive plan to improve the state’s public school system. Her husband disagreed: “Gambling distributes money from the poor to the rich,” he said. “I’m against that.”
After a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, dozens of jurisdictions across the country have legalized sports betting, including the District of Columbia, Virginia and West Virginia.
Voting in Rockville on Election Day, Nathan Barash, 31, said Maryland could lose business and tax revenue by keeping sports betting illegal.
“If people want to bet, then they’re going to,” said Barash, who voted “yes” on the measure. “Those dollars are going to be spent somewhere. Why not here?”
Jorge Perez, president of MGM National Harbor in Prince George’s County, said the corporation spent $500,000 to persuade voters to approve the measure. Recent surveys suggest the effort was effective.
“It’s not a guarantee,” Perez said Monday. “But things are looking optimistic.”
In Montgomery, voters were also deciding on four local ballot initiatives. Questions A and B were competing proposals on how to calculate property taxes. Questions C and D were competing measures on how to change the structure of the council.
Current and former politicians led a broad coalition of groups to rally support for the council-backed options – Questions A and C – which appeared to prevail when early voting data was released. At the polls, however, many voters seemed undecided or unaware of all the ballot initiatives. Some said after voting that they indicated “yes” on all four questions, even though they presented conflicting proposals.
Stephen Kim, of Rockville, said he voted against both measures to change the council structure because he worried that they would add more red tape to the legislative process. While advocates say increasing the council size would improve representation for a county that has grown in population, Kim, 40, said, “That’s just a political tool.”
Council member Evan Glass, D-At Large, who spearheaded Question C, said it was unfortunate that the presidential election drowned out attention for down-ballot initiatives that have the potential to more directly affect residents.
Nonetheless, he added, “I will always put my faith in the voters. . . . Ultimately, they’ll make the right decision.”
Key states too close to call as results may take days
InternationalNov 04. 2020Voters lined up early in Cranberry, Pa., at the Cranberry Highlands Golf Course on Tuesday. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson
By The Washington Post · Philip Rucker, Toluse Olorunnipa, Annie Linskey · NATIONAL, POLITICS
WASHINGTON – The presidential election in a country convulsed by crisis was headed toward a potential legal showdown early Wednesday morning, with President Donald Trump prematurely declaring he had won even as Democratic nominee Joe Biden had paths to victory and key states continued to tally votes.
Democratic hopes for a resounding coast-to-coast repudiation of Trump over his management of the coronavirus pandemic, the economy and race relations did not immediately materialize.
Instead, Trump was buoyed by projected victories in Florida and Ohio, while also keeping his margins with Biden tight in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas – all of them too tight to declare a winner as of 1 a.m.
Still, Biden showed strength with an early lead in Arizona, a traditionally Republican state where Trump was especially vulnerable. And Biden’s clearest path to clinching a majority of electoral college votes remained in sight: A trio of Rust Belt states that both campaigns had prioritized.
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were slow to report returns Tuesday night, especially from cities and suburban areas populated with Democrats. Both campaigns were prepared for legal challenges over ballots, meaning the result may not be clear until Wednesday or later.
Addressing the nation from the White House about 2:30 a.m., Trump challenged the integrity of the vote to an unprecedented and breathtaking degree. The president said the ongoing vote count in Georgia, Pennsylvania and other key battleground states amounted to “a major fraud on our nation,” and he vowed to file lawsuits to stop it.
Claiming a conspiracy to keep from declaring him the victor, Trump said, “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
The president claimed, “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.” He added, “We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”
Each state has its own election laws, and challenges to their procedures and practices would be filed in lower level courts.
Earlier in the morning, Biden addressed supporters at an outdoor drive-in rally in his hometown of Wilmington, Del., where he urged Democrats to “keep the faith” and projected confidence that he ultimately would prevail.
“We knew this was going to go on, but who knew we were going to go into maybe tomorrow morning, maybe even longer?” Biden said at an outdoor drive-in rally in his hometown of Wilmington, Del. “But look, we feel good about where we are. We really do. I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we’re on track to win this election.”
“We’re going to have to be patient until the hard work of tallying votes is finished,” Biden added. “And it ain’t over till every vote is counted.”
With voter turnout on pace to break historic records, Biden wagered that legions of women and minority voters who have recoiled from Trump’s divisive conduct in office would bring an end to his tumultuous presidency. The former vice president offered himself as a healer with the compassion and empathy he said was needed to usher in an era of civility and restore the soul of America.
Biden also sought to make history with Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate. A daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, she was trying to become the country’s first female, first Black and first Asian American to hold the No. 2 job.
But as the electoral prize of Florida appeared to slip out of reach, Biden and his aides settled in for a long slog, with aides pointing to silver linings and bracing for an extended wait as results are slowly reported in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump, meanwhile, sought to overcome his deficit in the polls all year with an energetic final burst of campaigning in which he demonized Biden, embellished his record and promised to end the pandemic and revitalize the economy.
In the run-up to Tuesday, Trump complained about a potentially drawn-out vote count that would not be completed on election night, repeatedly attacking the Supreme Court in recent days for its rulings allowing some states to continue accepting ballots if they arrive after Election Day. He has exhibited a special focus on Pennsylvania.
Trump told supporters such a scenario could be “physically dangerous” for the country, and he has threatened to challenge late-arriving ballots. “We’re going to go in night of, as soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers,” Trump told reporters Sunday, bemoaning the potential for the counting of late-arriving ballots to delay the election results.
With the pandemic still raging across the country, more than 100 million Americans voted early in person or by mail – by far a record – and overall turnout was expected to exceed the 136.7 million who voted in the 2016 presidential campaign.
In many key states, Biden led in early vote totals, a recognition of his campaign’s push for Democrats to vote early. But Election Day voters broke for Trump, in some places by wide margins, according to preliminary exit poll data.
Also at stake in Tuesday’s elections was the battle for control of both houses of Congress. Democrats were expected to maintain or even expand the House majority they secured in 2018, but Republican control of the Senate appeared in jeopardy.
Democrats would need three seats to gain control of the upper chamber if Biden wins and four if Trump prevails. In Colorado, Democrat John Hickenlooper, a former governor, was projected to defeat Sen. Cory Gardner, R, in a state that Biden also was projected to win.
In South Carolina, where Democrat Jaime Harrison’s fierce challenge to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R, drew national attention and record-breaking fundraising, Graham was projected to hold on to win another term.
And in Kentucky, home to another nationally watched race, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R, was projected to win reelection and easily dispatch a challenge from well-financed Democrat Amy McGrath.
Early returns showed Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., trailing Democrat Mark Kelly, while other Republican incumbents faced stiff challenges in Iowa, Maine, Montana and North Carolina.
Republicans picked up at least one Senate seat and had hopes of winning a second. Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., was projected to lose to Republican challenger Tommy Tuberville in a heavily Republican state. And in Michigan, Democratic incumbent Gary Peters was trying to fend off a spirited challenge from Republican John James.
At Biden’s election night event in Wilmington, where Democrats had prepared to possibly celebrate an early landslide victory, campaign aides played down the national ramifications of his disappointment in Florida, where he was projected to lose the state after significantly underperforming in the vote-rich Miami area.
“I always knew this was going to be a tough race,” said Sen. Christopher Coons, D-Del., a Biden supporter. “We can all hope for an immediate early answer. But I think we need to be patient and wait for every vote to be counted.” Coons added that Biden had “campaigned his heart out.”
Though Biden did not have to win Florida to secure the 270 electoral college votes required to win the presidency, he invested heavily in the state and dispatched the Democratic Party’s most popular figure, former president Barack Obama, to campaign in Miami on Monday night.
While Biden built up a large lead in early and absentee voting in Florida in October, Republicans gained ground as Election Day neared, with Trump winning about two-thirds of Election Day voters, according to preliminary exit polls. With almost 11 million votes counted – a significant jump from the 9.4 million total in 2016 – Trump led 51.3% to 47.8% late Tuesday.
Trump showed surprising strength in Miami-Dade County, the most populous in Florida and one that traditionally leans Democratic and is home to a large community of Cuban Americans and immigrants from Venezuela. Trump’s message to that community and to other Hispanic voters appeared to prove pivotal, as he relentlessly branded Biden as a “socialist.”
In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton won Miami-Dade County by a margin of almost 30 percentage points, but on Tuesday, Trump appeared to have narrowed Biden’s lead there to less than 10 points.
Meanwhile, in Central Florida, where Puerto Rican voters are a large and powerful voting bloc, Biden performed better than Clinton, but it was not enough to make up for Trump’s surge in the Miami area. Additionally, strong turnout among the state’s smaller, more rural counties also boosted Trump’s vote total, allowing him to overcome Democrats’ advantage in the state’s large cities.
Biden campaign officials said other signs from Florida could bode well. One official pointed to gains in suburban parts of the state, adding that similar movements were being seen elsewhere nationally. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also said that Cuban Americans tend to vote differently from other Hispanic voters, making the Miami-Dade result less representative of national dynamics.
A quadrennial swing state that awards a whopping 29 electoral college votes, Florida drew hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign advertising this year, more than any other state.
Emotions were running high among Florida voters, according to preliminary exit poll data. About 2 in 3 Biden voters said they would be “scared” if Trump were to be reelected, while more than half of Trump voters said the same about the possibility of a Biden presidency.
The Biden campaign was seeing early signs it liked elsewhere, including outperforming Clinton’s 2016 margins in suburban counties in Ohio and in two Kentucky counties that surround Cincinnati, which they see as an indicator of how he might perform in Pennsylvania’s all-important suburban counties.
Before polls closed Tuesday, both candidates sounded notes of optimism, though they were anticipating a close finish – especially in Pennsylvania, a new bellwether that both campaigns considered key in their paths to 270 electoral votes.
“Philly’s the key! Philly is the key!” Biden said as he thanked volunteers in Philadelphia, the state’s largest city, where he was hoping to drive up turnout among Black voters and other Democrats to offset Trump’s rural strongholds.
Biden and his campaign advisers have said carrying Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was their clearest path to victory. But with Trump on the defensive in the closing days of the campaign, the Biden campaign made a late push for a possible landslide that would include four states that traditionally lean Republican: Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.
“Look, you can’t think of an election in the recent past where so many states are up for grabs,” Biden said. “The idea I’m in play in Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida – I mean, come on.”
Trump, his voice raspy from long days of addressing back-to-back outdoor rallies, sounded confident of victory in a morning interview but later was wistful and even downbeat as he visited with campaign staffers at their headquarters in Arlington, Va.
“Winning is easy. Losing is never easy. Not for me, it’s not,” Trump said, making what for him is a rare public admission that he might not come out on top.
The election took place amid a once-in-a-century pandemic that has killed more than 232,000 people in the United States and upended the economy. The number of cases has surged across the country, including in many of the political battleground states, and public health experts have been warning that the spread could worsen heading into winter.
But Trump – whose handling of the crisis is a top reason he had trailed Biden in the polls for so many months – has been insisting on the campaign trail that the country is “rounding the curve” on the virus. The president also has been promising that a vaccine and various therapeutics will soon be widely available, which is more optimistic than the timelines provided by health officials.
Preliminary exit polls showed about a third of voters said the economy was the most important issue in their vote, while roughly 2 in 10 listed the coronavirus or racial inequality. Smaller shares named crime or health-care policy, according to the polls, conducted by Edison Research.
Among Trump supporters, the most important issue was the economy, which about 6 in 10 named. Among Biden supporters, meanwhile, roughly a third said racial inequality was the most important issue to their vote, while slightly fewer named the pandemic.
The preliminary data showed voters nationally are divided about the state of the economy. Roughly half rated it negatively, with about 2 in 10 voters calling the economy “poor” – the lowest rating available to survey takers. About half of voters rated the economy positively, with about 1 in 10 calling it “excellent.”
In 2016, by contrast, exit polling found 62% of voters rated the economy negatively, with 21% rating it “poor.”
The early exit poll data also showed that voters are divided over whether U.S. efforts to contain the coronavirus were going “well” or “badly.”
In the three “blue wall” Rust Belt states that Barack Obama carried in his 2008 and 2012 campaigns but Trump won in 2016 – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – the economy rated as the top issue, with roughly a third of voters citing it as the issue that mattered most, according to preliminary exit polls.
In all three states, Trump voters were far more likely to cite the economy than Biden voters, roughly a third of whom pointed instead to the pandemic as their top issue.
The outcome of the race carried especially high stakes for Trump, whose presidency has polarized the country on a wide range of fronts, including assaults on immigration and the rule of law.
With a string of unfulfilled promises and a number of national crises that have occurred on his watch, the president made a feverish effort to secure a second term and prevent his time in public office from ending in failure.
The president closed the campaign with a mad dash of boisterous rallies that defied public health guidelines and showcased the personal grievances he had amassed over the past four years.
While Trump sought to drive home a message that despite being the incumbent president, he was a political outsider with the tenacity to take on the establishment, he regularly drifted from his core pitch to court controversy. He accused doctors of profiteering from the coronavirus crisis by inflating the death count, declined multiple opportunities to disavow fringe right-wing groups, praised supporters for using pickup trucks to ambush a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway, made baseless allegations of electoral fraud and threatened to fire the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci.
It was a distillation of a presidency that catered to a political base that represents a minority of the public and stoked battles with an ever-growing list of foes.
Throughout the campaign, Biden pitched himself to voters as a uniter who would usher in an era of civility, restore norms, repair foreign alliances and respect democratic institutions. His slogan, emblazoned on campaign buses, signs and T-shirts, was “restore the soul of the nation.”
We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020
A U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle drone stands on display during the Singapore Airshow at the Changi Exhibition Centre in Singapore on Feb. 11, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by SeongJoon Cho. /Photo by: SeongJoon Cho — Bloomberg Location: Singapore, Singapore 
Voters wait outside West Allis City Hall near Milwaukee, Wis., on Nov. 3, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sara Stathas 
First-time voter Elijah Olsson, 18, waits in line at Tuscarora High School in Frederick, Md., on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Katherine Frey 
Voters lined up early in Cranberry, Pa., at the Cranberry Highlands Golf Course on Tuesday. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson 
โดนัลด์ ทรัมป์ มั่นใจคว้าตำแหน่งปธน. โวยไบเดนขโมยผลการเลือกตั้ง
แนวโน้มผู้ชนะระหว่างการนับคะแนนโดย The Associated Press เวลา 12.45 น. ตามเวลาประเทศไทย
ตลาดเงินและตลาดทุนเก็งว่า โจ ไบเดน จะชนะการเลือกตั้งประธานาธิบดีสหรัฐส่งผลให้ดาวโจนส์พุ่ง 500 จุด ขณะที่ดอลลาร์อ่อนค่าลงเล็กน้อย
หลายคนเริ่มพูดถึงเรื่องที่ไม่น่าจะเป็นไปได้อย่างการที่ผู้สมัครชิงตำแหน่งประธานาธิบดีไม่ยอมรับผลการเลือกตั้ง ซึ่งเป็นเรื่องที่เหนือความคาดหมายอย่างมาก
เผยยอดซื้อปืนสหรัฐพุ่งกว่าปีที่แล้ว หวั่นเกิดจลาจลหลังเลือกตั้ง
ห้างร้านในกรุงวอชิงตันดีซีนำแผ่นกระดานไม้มาปิดประตู หน้าต่างร้าน หวั่นเกิดจลาจลในคืนเลือกตั้ง
