Trump vs Harris: A divided America heads to polls in pivotal US election

WASHINGTON:

The dizzying presidential contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris hurtled toward an uncertain finish on Tuesday as millions of Americans lined up at polling stations to choose between two sharply different visions for the country.

A race churned by unprecedented events – two assassination attempts against Trump, President Joe Biden's surprise withdrawal and Harris' rapid rise – remained neck and neck, even after billions of dollars in spending and months of frenetic campaigning.

 

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Trump, who has frequently spread false claims that he won the 2020 presidential election against Biden and whose supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, voted near his home in Palm Beach, Florida.

More than 80 million Americans had already voted before Tuesday, either via mail or in person, and lines at several polling stations on Tuesday were short and orderly.

Some glitches of vote-counting technology were reported in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and a local court granted a request by election officials to extend voting hours by two hours on Tuesday night. Two polling locations in Fulton County, Georgia, were briefly evacuated after false bomb threats.

In Dearborn, Michigan, Nakita Hogue, 50, was joined by her 18-year-old college student daughter, Niemah Hogue, to vote for Harris.

Niemah said she takes birth control to help regulate her period, while her mother recalled needing surgery after she had a miscarriage in her 20s, and both feared efforts by Republican lawmakers to restrict women's health care.

"For my daughter, who is going out into the world and making her own way, I want her to have that choice," Nakita Hogue said. "She should be able to make her own decisions."

At a library in Phoenix, Arizona, Felicia Navajo, 34, and her husband Jesse Miranda, 52, arrived with one of their three young kids to vote for Trump.

Miranda, a union plumber, immigrated to the US from Mexico when he was four years old, and said he believed Trump would do a better job of fighting inflation and controlling immigration.

"I want to see good people come to this town, people that are willing to work, people who are willing to just live the American dream," Miranda said.

Trump's campaign has suggested he may declare victory on election night even while millions of ballots have yet to be counted, as he did four years ago. The former president has repeatedly said any defeat could only stem from widespread fraud, echoing his false claims from 2020.

The winner may not be known for days if the margins in battleground states are as slim as expected. But no matter who wins, history will be made.

Harris, 60, the first female vice president, would become the first woman, Black woman and South Asian American to win the presidency.

Trump, 78, the only president to be impeached twice and the first former president to be criminally convicted, would also become the first president to win non-consecutive terms in more than a century.

Opinion polls show the candidates running neck and neck in each of the seven states likely to determine the winner: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Reuters/Ipsos polling shows Harris leading among women by 12 percentage points and Trump winning among men by seven percentage points. The contest reflects a deeply polarised nation whose divisions have only grown starker during a fiercely competitive race.

Trump has employed increasingly dark and apocalyptic rhetoric on the campaign trail. Harris has urged Americans to come together, warning that a second Trump term would threaten the underpinnings of American democracy.

Control of both chambers of Congress is also up for grabs. Republicans have an easier path in the US Senate, where Democrats are defending several seats in Republican-leaning states, while the House of Representatives looks like a toss-up.