Trump takes the first battleground states.
Georgia, a state that Donald J. Trump narrowly lost in 2020, and North Carolina, a state he narrowly won, moved into the win column for the former president, giving him the first two battleground states in one of the most consequential presidential elections in modern American history.
Republicans also flipped control of the Senate with a string of key victories. In Ohio, Bernie Moreno defeated Senator Sherrod Brown, a resilient red-state Democrat. The retiring Senator Joseph Manchin, an independent, will be replaced by the state’s Republican governor, Jim Justice. And Senator Deb Fischer held off a dark-horse challenge in Nebraska from a blue-collar independent, Dan Osborn, eliminating any path Democrats had toward retaining control of the chamber.
In the presidential race, the so-called blue wall states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — remain too close to call. All three would be crucial to Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid to become the first woman elected president.
By locking down the Southeast, Mr. Trump took a leap toward making history as the first president in more than 120 years to return to the White House after being ousted four years before.
The crowd at Ms. Harris’s election watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C., had already thinned by midnight, and the mood was glum when Cedric Richmond, a co-chairman of the Harris campaign, told those who were left that the vice president would not be coming to campus. Her supporters streamed for the exits.
Though the election is not decided, Mr. Trump is showing strength across the country, winning states like Texas and Florida easily and defying recent polls, such as one in Iowa, that seemed to show a surge of support for Ms Harris. Republican leaders in Florida were also able to defeat ballot initiatives legalizing abortion and marijuana, both of which failed to reach the 60 percent they needed.
Republican-held Senate seats that Democrats had hoped to at least make competitive — such as Ted Cruz’s in Texas and Rick Scott’s in Florida — were not even close.
Still, many of the states that will decide the next president were still undecided.
A largely peaceful Election Day was marred by bomb threats that roiled polling places in Democratic regions of Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. Officials said none of the threats appeared to be credible, but at least in Georgia and Arizona, some polling places stayed open later as a result. Election officials in those states attributed at least some of the threats to Russian actors.
The Democrats did score some landmark wins. For the first time in history, the Senate will have two Black women, both Democrats, serving simultaneously: Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester won her Senate contest in Delaware, while Angela Alsobrooks defeated the moderate former governor Larry Hogan in Maryland. Sarah McBride, a Delaware Democrat, will also be the first transgender member of the House.
In the battle for the House, Republicans were holding their own in key races, leaving control up for grabs.
The Republican turnout machine — largely powered by allied conservative groups — focused on getting reliably conservative voters back to the polls for Trump. It appears their strategy was successful in Georgia, where the G.O.P. notched wins at the presidential level and in a handful of competitive state House seats.
Cedric Richmond, the co-chair of the Harris campaign, said that the campaign would "continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken." He did not offer a concession but gave little indication of optimism.
There was no other marquee race in Georgia this year, unlike in 2020 when two open Senate seats helped galvanize Democratic voters. Republicans used that void to focus on a national message about the economy and immigration. The killing of Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student, also became a rallying cry.
Former President Donald J. Trump won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, according to a New York Times projection, flipping the swing state back to Republicans after Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s landmark victory there in 2020.
Mr. Trump’s victory in the state reaffirmed many conservatives’ beliefs that the Peach State is fundamentally red, despite Democrats’ inroads in recent election cycles. Mr. Trump sees Georgia and another key Sun Belt state, North Carolina, as crucial to his path back to the White House.
He made Georgia the center of his election grievances after losing the 2020 presidential contest, when he fell short by less than 12,000 votes in the state. He falsely claimed that Georgia’s election results were fraudulent after several recounts and pressured two of its most high-profile Republican leaders, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to “find” the votes he did not win. He was indicted in 2023 for his efforts to overturn the election results in the state.
But in the last months of the 2024 contest, Mr. Trump largely pushed aside his claims of election fraud in the state, using his more than a half-dozen visits in the final months of the race to urge his voters to cast ballots early instead of questioning the outcome of the last presidential election.
He also formed an alliance with Mr. Kemp, whose well-funded state political operation enlisted paid canvassers to knock on doors for the Republican ticket alongside a network of conservative groups. Mr. Trump’s campaign and its allies also spent nearly $100 million on advertising in the state before Election Day.
Democrats, for their part, spent almost $130 million on the airwaves in Georgia, confident that a victory there would blunt Mr. Trump’s path back to the White House. Democrats ultimately made some significant gains in counties surrounding Atlanta, Georgia’s biggest city. In Henry County, southeast of Atlanta, Ms. Harris gained by more than 9 percentage points compared with Mr. Biden in 2020.
But Republicans made gains in every other part of the state — even in Democratic enclaves in the counties surrounding major cities such as Macon, Augusta and Savannah. In Clarke County, which encompasses the city of Athens, Mr. Trump gained by 4 points. Mr. Trump even gained slightly in some parts of Atlanta, including DeKalb County and Fulton County — where the former president was booked on racketeering charges last year.
Donald J. Trump, a Republican, wins Georgia’s 16 electoral votes. ›
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/11/05/us/trump-harris-election
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