Trump-Biden race in key states tight, final results may take a few days

The results of the US presidential election are on a knife edge, with Donald Trump and his rival Joe Biden in a close race in key swing states. Over 100 million people cast their ballots in early voting before election day on Tuesday in the country’s highest turnout in a century.

With the nation on edge, the final result may not be known for days as postal votes are tallied. Michigan authorities have said they will not be ready to make an official announcement of the outcome till late Wednesday. Pennsylvania might also not have a result to announce until then.

President Donald Trump won the big-prize state of Florida, which carries as many as 29 electoral votes, after a close contest with Democratic challenger Joe Biden.

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Florida is considered the biggest toss-up state in US presidential polls. A victory here augurs well for Trump because Florida is known as a bellwether state. Since 2000, the candidate who has won the state has gone on to become the President of the country. Moreover no Republican has won the White House without Florida.

In 2016, Trump had won in Florida over Hillary Clinton by just over 1 percentage point. A pert of Trump’s strength in Florida came from an improved showing compared to 2016 in the state’s counties with large Latino population.

But Biden, a Democrat, said he was “on track” to victory, while Trump, a Republican, claimed “a big win”. Biden could snatch Arizona, a once reliably conservative state. The vote caps a long and bitter race.

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Other key states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina are toss-ups.

Neither candidate was anywhere near the winning threshold of 270 electoral college votes. After the first four hours since close of polling, Biden had 213 and Trump 118 in Associate Press’s tracker. Trump held on to Texas and Georgia, the solidly Republican states that Democrats had hoped to flip in a late campaign push.

President Trump was also leading in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the three Democratic states — the Blue Wall states — he had flipped in 2016 to win the presidency. But his leads in these states were expected to change as early votes remained to be counted.

Biden was leading in Arizona, a Republican state that Trump had won in 2016, but has been changing demographically over the years.

Just as Biden had made a play for Georgia and Texas to an extent and failed, Trump had made a go at New Hampshire and Minnesota, both states won by Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and failed.

Jason Miller, a senior member of Trump’s re-election campaign, told reporters on a conference call, earlier on Tuesday: “We feel very, very good about our ground game, we feel very good about where we’re turning out.”