Harris’ dream of becoming America’s 1st female president crushed as Trump stages historic comeback
Donald Trump is on the brink of the most stunning and improbable comeback in U.S. political history as he won the three battleground states of North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Trump looked set to return to the White House four years after narrowly losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, and after surviving an assassination attempt in which he was shot in the ear.
Trump told supporters in Florida, “This will truly be the new golden age of America. This is a magnificent victory for the American people.”
Meanwhile, Republicans were also celebrating retaking control of the Senate for the first time in four years.
There were scenes of devastation at Kamala Harris’ watch party in Washington D.C. as the Democrat’s chances of becoming America’s first female president slipped away.
READ ALSO: God Spared My Life For A Reason: Trump Promises Americans ‘Golden Age’ in victory speech
North Carolina was called for Trump by the Associated Press at 11.19pm Eastern time. Just over an hour later, it also called Georgia for Trump, followed by Pennsylvania.
Fox News became the first network to declare Trump the winner of the presidential election.
“Donald Trump elected as the next president of the United States,” declared the front page of the Fox News website.
In a memo seen by Dailymail.com, Harris’ campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told staff: ‘It takes time for all the votes to be counted – and all the votes will be counted.
“What we do know is this race is not going to come into focus until the early morning hours.’
A series of positive signals for Trump began shortly after 7pm Eastern time when polling stations closed in Georgia.
An exit poll there showed him winning 54 percent of independent voters compared to Harris’s 43 percent.
An exit poll there showed him winning 54 percent of independent voters compared to Harris’s 43 percent.
In 2020 Trump had lost Georgia independents by nine points to Joe Biden. On CNN, an anchor looked visibly stunned as the finding was announced.
Meanwhile, exit polling also showed Trump had dramatically improved among Hispanic voters nationally by 13 points from 2020. That included even bigger swings among the group in the key states of Pennsylvania and Michigan.
It suggested Harris had won the Latino vote by only 53 percent to 45 percent nationally, despite a massive pre-election controversy when a comedian at a Trump rally compared Puerto Rico to a ‘floating island of garbage’.
Another encouraging early sign for Trump came out of Florida, where he became the first Republican since 1988 to win Miami-Dade county.
And in the battleground state of Wisconsin, exit polls showed his share of the black vote more than doubling to 20 percent from nine percent in 2020.
Harris won 54 percent of women voters nationwide, and 86 percent of black voters, according to exit polling.
She also narrowly beat Trump by one point among voters aged over 65, with Trump’s share down three points from 2020.
It came after a day of voting in which polling stations were hit by hoax Russian bomb threats and ballot machines malfunctioned throughout an entire county in Pennsylvania.
The National Guard was activated in more than a dozen states amid fears of violence.
Trump was joined by wife Melania as he cast his vote in Palm Beach, Florida. He said: ‘I don’t even want to think about the losing part.’
Harris stopped by the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington D.C., giving a box of Doritos to volunteers.
The closeness of the race and the number of states in play raised the likelihood that, once again, a victor might not be known on election night. In 2020, it took four days to declare a winner.
More than 86 million voters cast their ballots early and strong Election Day turnout was also reported.
The national exit poll offered further clues to what might be driving voters.
It found that 35 percent of voters said ‘democracy’ was the top issue, followed by 31 percent who said the economy, 14 percent abortion, and 11 percent immigration.
That appeared to favor Harris who had made the argument that Trump represents a ‘threat to democracy’ a central plank of her campaign.
However, only 26 percent said they were ‘enthusiastic’ or ‘satisfied’ with the ‘way things are going’ in the country while 43 percent were ‘dissatisfied’ and 29 percent were ‘angry’.
In the key state of Pennsylvania, 83 percent of voters were white, up from 81 percent in 2020.
The seven key battleground states set to decide the election by razor-thin margins were the ‘rust belt’ industrial powerhouses of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and the so-called ‘sun belt’ states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina.
As voters went to the polls, the FBI warned of bomb threats at polling stations in ‘multiple’ states, adding that none were credible but many appeared to originate from Russia.
In Georgia, authorities said bomb threats had briefly disrupted voting.
It was the culmination of an astonishing presidential election unlike any other, with both candidates accusing the other of posing an existential threat to the future of the United States.
The campaign saw an explosive chain of events that no one could have predicted, including two assassination attempts against Trump, Joe Biden being ruthlessly cast aside by his own party, and a last-ditch Democrat bid to propel Harris to the White House.
In the end, a blizzard of polls showed the electorate split down the middle, both nationally and in the seven battleground states.
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