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 — with Mr. Biden prevailing in New Hampshire, a state Mr. Trump has recently mused about capturing.
But the most hotly contested contests, in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, remained too close to call — and Democratic dreams of a sweeping victory akin to the 2018 midterms, or even an early resolution of the race, began to dwindle as the data poured in.
Mr. Biden was racking up expected wins in Democratic-leaning states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.
Mr. Trump was posting similar expected victories in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, 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.
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.
Battle for the Senate
Former Gov. John Hickenlooper defeated Senator Cory Gardner on Tuesday in the high-profile fight for Colorado’s Senate seat, securing a victory essential to Democrats’ push to take the Senate majority. In South Carolina, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, hung onto his seat and defeated a Democrat backed by a record-setting onslaught of campaign cash.
The outcome of Mr. Hickenlooper’s race, in which the first Senate seat of the night flipped, as called by The Associated Press, was not a surprise since Mr. Gardner, who had been considered a rising Republican star when he was elected in 2014, trailed in polls throughout his re-election race. In the end, he was unable to overcome the increasing Democratic tilt of the state and President Trump’s poor standing there, despite some stumbles by Mr. Hickenlooper.
Mr. Hickenlooper, 68, a two-term governor and former mayor of Denver, will add an experienced voice to Democrats’ Senate ranks, one with a background in Western energy and environmental issues. After initially professing no interest in running for the Senate, he reconsidered after his 2019 bid in the Democratic presidential primary went nowhere.
In South Carolina, Mr. Graham fended off the toughest challenge of his political career from Jaime Harrison, a Black Democrat whose upstart campaign electrified progressives across the country. Mr. Graham was expected to hold on to his seat, but had to fight off a record amount of Democratic money funneled into the state by liberal donors who sought to punish him for his loyalty to Mr. Trump.
Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, also fended off a challenge from M.J. Hegar, a former Air Force pilot who Democrats hoped could have an outside chance of winning in the rapidly changing state. And Republicans succeeded in ousting Senator Doug Jones, Democrat of Alabama, who came to power in a 2017 special election against Roy S. Moore, who was accused of sexually assaulting and pursuing teenage girls.
Mr. Hickenlooper’s victory, though not unexpected, is a critical pickup for Democrats as they seek to wrest control of the Senate from Republicans, who currently hold the majority in the chamber 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 to win a majority.
Democrats believe they are on track to win a seat in Arizona and are on the hunt for a half-dozen others starting with ones in Maine and Iowa. And with both of the state’s Republican senators at risk, Georgia is looming as a pick up opportunity. Democratic strategists are keeping a close eye on Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, who is facing a serious challenge.
In Kentucky, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, easily won re-election, defeating Amy McGrath, a Democrat who struggled to gain ground despite an outpouring of financial support from her party’s supporters around the nation.
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.
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.
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.
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