US Elections 2020 : Millions Of Voters In The United States Began Casting Their Ballots

By TN Ashok

Washington, Nov 05, 2024 Millions of Voters in the United States began casting their ballots Tuesday in an unpredictable razor-edge presidential election that will decide whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump should be sent to the White House in January. Over 75 million voters had already voted in person or through mail in ballots in early voting across 50 states . There are 240 million registered voters, the greater the percentage of voting means the election is going the Democrats way.

Polling stations in eastern states including New York opened at 6 am (1100 GMT), and hour by hour citizens in more states were able to vote.

Harris, the sitting Democratic vice president, and Trump, the Republican former president who is seeking a second four-year term, spent the final frenetic weeks of the campaign making their case to voters in the seven battlegrounds that are likely to pick the winner. Per poll estimates both candidates have 200 votes each in the Blue Wall and Red States and a pre poll estimate turned in 226 votes for Kamala Harris requiring 44 votes in the electoral college to get to the magic 270 to become the 47^th president of the United States.

Trump is estimated to get 219 votes in the electoral college requiring 51 seats to win the election in the electoral college. Irrespective of who wins the popular vote, in 2024 its Kamala Harris like Hilary Clinton in 2016, the winner needs to swing the electoral college. Here is where the seven battlegrounds matter.

Pollsters say neither of the candidates in the battleground states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona – has a clear lead highlighting the great uncertainties of the 2024 presidential elections on who will make it to the finish line by the end of the day. Either Trump or Harris could still comfortably win if the polls are off and several of these states are won by one or the other candidate.

Pollsters say Harris needs to win three battlegrounds – Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin to get there as they total the 44 votes she requires to win. Penn alone has 19 electoral college votes. Trump needs to swing four states to get the 51 votes he requires – he is eyeing Nevada, which seems to be slipping, Michigan, where the two are tied, Pennsylvania, where he has a slender lead, Arizona, where he has a lead, Georgia, where Harris is catching up.

Legal and political analysts warn there is a high likelihood that it could be days, or even weeks, before the next president is known if exceedingly tight races become mired in ballot recounts and legal fights, media reported.

Leaders around the world, not least in Europe, are watching carefully. The US presidential election has an immense impact globally, with the United States playing a key role when it comes to international hotspots such as Ukraine, the Middle East, and Taiwan, as well as in influential bodies such as the NATO military alliance, diplomatic sources said.

Concerns over disputed results and violence

Fears of “election-related violence are not idle speculation,” wrote the International Crisis Group’s Michael Wahid Hanna in a recent briefing, citing the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters trying to disrupt the certification of President Joe Biden’s win in the last election.

“It remains possible that Trump will encourage supporters to sow chaos around vote counting and certification processes, thus attempting to call the results into question and create a pretext for extraordinary procedures to resolve a disputed election in his favor,” he wrote.

Trump himself was targeted in two failed assassination attempts. A shooter at a July campaign rally in Pennsylvania left Trump bloodied but not seriously injured after a bullet grazed his ear.

Weeks later, a man was found lurking with a rifle in the bushes of Trump’s Florida golf course as the former president played a game.

History in the making – for either candidate

Harris, a black and Indian American, made abortion rights and cost of living concerns the centerpieces of her campaign.

But the former prosecutor and senator also focused on the threat she says Trump – who was found guilty in a criminal hush-money trial in May – poses to democracy. She called him a “petty tyrant” who is “out for unchecked power,” in a speech at the same site where Trump had rallied his supporters on the day of the Capitol riot.

Trump’s populist pitch to voters revolved around immigration, inflation and foreign policy, with promises to carry out mass deportations, impose across-the-board tariffs, roll back green energy initiatives and end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours.” The depoirtation costs per government sources could cost the treasury as much $10 BILLION initially and $1 million to round them up and deport them through buses.

Trumps” speeches were filled with personal insults to Harris, whom he described as “lazy” and “dumb as a rock.” In one of his most inflammatory attacks, the former president falsely said she had misled voters about her racial identity. “So I don’t know? Is she Indian or is she black?” he asked.

Harris, 60, has played down her race and gender. But if she succeeds, the daughter of an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father would become the first female president in the history of the United States. Of the 45 men who have held the job, none have been of Asian descent and only one has been black.

A Trump victory would also be history-making. Only one other president – Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century – has succeeded in winning non-consecutive terms. The US Constitution would prevent Trump from seeking a third term.

Another win for the 78-year-old real-estate tycoon, reality TV star and convicted felon would also make him the oldest person ever elected president.

Voters given unlikely choice

Few would have expected the showdown between Trump and Harris a year ago. Trump’s grave legal troubles, which include his efforts to subvert the results of the last election, had many convinced that the Republican Party would not line up again behind the twice-impeached former president.

But he easily knocked out his opponents in the party primaries to secure the nomination. He overhauled the Republican National Convention and packed it with his Yes Men. He even went to the extent of getting his daughter in law elected as the vice chair of the RNC, Laurel Trump.

When President Joe Biden sought reelection for the Democrats, a rerun of 2020 seemed to loom in the horizon only to be unlocked by powerful democrats who thought he was a liability with his cognitive functions failing and forced him to nominate another in his place, he caved in and nominated his most trusted deputy VP Kamala Harris, who had been in perfect sync with his thinkig and policies and proved to be his staunch ally.

Obama tried to jockey in his wife Michelle Obama counting on the race card, but ultimately gave into Biden and threw in his lot with Biden who was his trusted deputy as VP for eight years in the Surprisingly the two most successful past presidents in the White House – Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are far youngers than Donald trump even after of years being in the shade, Obama is only 63 and Clinton in his early 70s.

In an unprecedented move, the 81-year-old Biden dropped out of the race on July 21 following a disastrous TV debate performance nationally televised from the Atlanta studios of CNN watched by some 37 million people casting doubts over his cognitive functions. Biden stumbled, rambled, and dozed off during the debate while Trump was steady as a rock for his age – though he peddled lies after lies which fact check proved by the CNN and he was the winner of the day.

Because in presidential debates, the people are often swayed by how a candidate articulates his views rather than the contents of what he says. Biden spoke the truth but lost in articulation. Democrats got jittery asking him to drop out. The democratic party is not as authoritarian as republican where many asked Trump to drop out because of his legal cases but he bamboozled is way into the reckoning for the ticket overshadowing all liberal Republicans.

Democrats quickly coalesced around the vice president, a figure who most Americans told pollsters they knew little about. But Harris generated enthusiasm among previously demoralized Democrats and she was able to close Biden’s poll deficit with Trump. Biden was trailing by 4.1 % but Harris quickly closed the gap before the Democratic National Convention and even surged a whopping 5% points, rattling a confident Trump. But he managed to erase that lead in the final stretch before November 05, and that’s important.

All Americans readied to go to the polls on Tuesday even as the contest clearly became a dead heat.

Around 240 million people are eligible to vote in the election, which will also decide the make-up of the two houses of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. Which party controls those will have a major impact on the policy agenda of the incoming president.

But Election Day is not what it used to be. More than 75 million Americans have already cast their ballots by post or in-person early voting. That includes Biden, who voted in his home state of Delaware last month. Harris has sent in her mail in ballot to her home state California and crossed her fingers to say “I hope it reaches on time”. Mail in ballots have a deadline.

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TN Ashok Contributor, IANS – Washington DC/New York Executive Editor, Corporate Tycoons – Pune, IndiaExecutive Editor, The Flag Post – Bengaluru, IndiaContributor, The Statesman, Hindu Business Line, Sarkaritel.com, Diplomacyindia.com
Former Economics Editor, PTI – New Delhi, IndiaFormer Communications Advisor, Alstom Group of Companies, SA – France/Belgium