Individuals line as much as vote at a polling station at Better Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, positioned inside Mecklenburg County, on November 5, 2024. (Picture by Grant BALDWIN / AFP)
ERIE, United States — Election Day voting was underway Tuesday after a rare — and for a lot of unnerving — US presidential race that can both make Kamala Harris the primary lady president within the nation’s historical past or hand Donald Trump a comeback that sends shock waves around the globe.
As polling stations opened, Democratic Vice President Harris, 60, and Republican former President Trump, 78, have been dead-even within the tightest and most unstable White Home contest of recent occasions.
The bitter rivals had spent their ultimate day of the marketing campaign frenetically working to get their supporters out to the polls and courting any final undecided voters within the swing states anticipated to determine the end result.
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However regardless of head-spinning twists within the marketing campaign — from Harris’s dramatic entrance when President Joe Biden dropped out in July, to Trump driving out two assassination makes an attempt and a prison conviction — nothing has damaged the opinion ballot impasse.
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Tens of hundreds of thousands of voters are anticipated to solid their ballots, on high of the 83 million who’ve already voted early.
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Lengthy traces
People lined up earlier than daybreak together with in Black Mountain, North Carolina, the place the voting station was a makeshift tent erected after extreme flooding.
Lengthy queues additionally fashioned in Erie, a crucial metropolis in battleground Pennsylvania.
“It’s manner, manner, far more folks right here than the final” election, Marchelle Beason, 46, informed AFP after casting her poll for Harris at an elementary college and placing on an “I voted” sticker.
“We’re so divided proper now, and she or he’s about peace. And all the things that her opponent has to say is basically damaging,” she added.
On the similar college, 56-year-old Darlene Taylor, who mentioned she lives on incapacity advantages, famous her foremost concern is to “shut the border.”
“We don’t want one other 4 extra years of excessive inflation, fuel costs (and) mendacity,” mentioned Taylor, who wore a do-it-yourself Trump shirt.
Management of Congress can also be at stake. All 435 seats within the Home of Representatives are up for grabs, as are 34 of the Senate’s 100 seats.
A ultimate presidential end result is probably not recognized for a number of days if the outcomes are as shut as polls counsel, including to tensions in a deeply divided nation.
And there are fears of turmoil and even violence if Trump loses, after which contests the consequence as he did in 2020. Limitations have been erected across the White Home.
The world is anxiously watching, because the consequence may have main implications for conflicts within the Center East, Russia’s struggle in Ukraine, and tackling local weather change, which Trump calls a hoax.
Harris and Trump are successfully tied within the seven foremost swing states.
On Monday, Harris went all-in on must-win Pennsylvania, rallying on the Philadelphia steps made well-known within the “Rocky” film and declaring: “Momentum is on our aspect.”
Nonetheless “this may very well be one of many closest races in historical past — each single vote issues,” cautioned Harris.
Historical past to be made
Trump — who would grow to be the primary convicted felon and oldest particular person to win the presidency — solid himself as the one resolution to an apocalyptic imaginative and prescient of the nation in terminal decline and overrun by “savage” migrants.
“Together with your vote tomorrow, we will repair each single drawback our nation faces and lead America — certainly, the world — to new heights of glory,” Trump informed his closing rally in Grand Rapids in swing state Michigan.
Harris has hammered dwelling her opposition to Trump-backed abortion bans in a number of states — a key vote-winning place with essential ladies voters.
However she additionally struck an upbeat observe — and notably averted mentioning Trump, after weeks of concentrating on him instantly as a risk to democracy for his darkish rhetoric and repeated threats to precise retribution on his political opponents.
A Trump comeback can be historic — simply the second ever non-consecutive second time period for a US president, since Grover Cleveland in 1893.
Trump’s return would additionally immediately gasoline worldwide instability, with US allies in Europe and NATO alarmed by his isolationist “America First” insurance policies.
Buying and selling companions are nervously watching his vow to impose sweeping import tariffs.
A Harris victory would give America its first Black lady and South Asian president — and finish the Trump period which has dominated US politics for almost a decade.
Trump has mentioned he wouldn’t search election once more in 2028.
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However he additionally hinted he would refuse to simply accept one other loss, and lately has introduced up baseless claims of election fraud whereas saying he ought to “by no means have left” the White Home.
