Trump or Biden? Polls open as fraught US election gets underway

A nervous world turned its gaze to America’s 200 million-strong electorate on Tuesday as it chooses whether to send US President Donald Trump back to the White House or replace him with Democratic fellow septuagenarian Joe Biden.

Polls opened at 6 a.m. local time in the East Coast states of New York, New Jersey, Virginia while polling stations in most states opened their doors an hour later.

Nearly 100 million Americans have voted early and now it falls to Election Day voters to finish the job, ending a campaign that was reshaped by the coronavirus and defined by tensions over who could best address it.

Trump and Biden campaigned into the wee hours of polling day as they fought to sell their starkly different visions for the future of the world’s greatest power.

After a campaign marked by rancor and fear, Americans will select a leader to steer a nation battered by a surging pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 people, cost millions their jobs and reshaped daily life.

Each candidate declared the other fundamentally unfit to lead a nation grappling with COVID-19 and facing foundational questions about racial justice and economic fairness.

At least 98.1 million people had already voted before Election Day — or just shy of 71 percent of the nearly 139 million ballots cast during the 2016 presidential election — as the tiny hamlet of Dixville Notch in New Hampshire opened balloting.

Biden entered Election Day with multiple paths to victory while Trump, playing catch-up in a number of battleground states, had a narrower, but still feasible road to clinch 270 Electoral College votes. Control of the Senate was at stake, too: Democrats needed to net three seats if Biden captured the White House to gain control of all of Washington for the first time in a decade. The House was expected to remain under Democratic control.

Voters braved long lines and the threat of the virus to cast ballots as they chose between two different visions of America for the next four years. The record-setting early vote — and legal skirmishing over how it will be counted — drew unsupported allegations of fraud from Trump, who refused to guarantee he would honor the election’s result.

Fighting to the end for every vote, Biden was headed to Philadelphia and his native Scranton on Tuesday as part of a closing get-out-the-vote effort before awaiting election results in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, was visiting Detroit, a heavily Black city in battleground Michigan. Both of their spouses were headed out, too, as the Democrats reached for a clear victory.

Trump, after a morning appearance on his favored network, Fox News, planned to visit his campaign headquarters in Virginia. He invited hundreds of supporters to an election-night party in the East Room of the White House.

A polling average by tracker site RealClearPolitics gave Biden a 3.6 percentage point national lead, but Trump is closer or even has the advantage in several of the swing states that he must conquer to pull off an upset again.

No results or exit polls will be available before polling stations begin to close on the US East Coast from 7 p.m. (in Israel 2 a.m. Wednesday), and it may be three or more hours after that before the direction of the race becomes clear.

And even then, questions remain. Trump has repeatedly warned that the election is rigged and he has suggested he may not accept the result if not clear by the end of election night.

For Trump, the election stands as a judgment on his four years in office, a term in which he bent Washington to his will, challenged faith in its institutions and changed how America was viewed across the globe.

Biden, for his part, has cast Trump as an incompetent leader in a time of crisis, trying to connect what he saw as the president’s failures in containing the virus and on other matters to the everyday lives of Americans.