It is a crucial day in the US battle for the White House and control of Congress, even if the election results could take days or weeks to arrive, given the close qualifications of the Democratic and Republican candidates.
Americans have been voting early for several days. The finish line of the electoral race did not reveal any favorites. In fact, the citizens of the world’s largest economy and military superpower are choosing the lesser of two evils, as is Vice President Kamala Harris and former president donald trump They have abundant political weaknesses.
Harris leads her opponent by 4 percentage points, according to a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll conducted before main election day. The vice president has the support of 51% of those surveyed, while the former president has the support of 47%, this public opinion survey showed. Meanwhile, according to the latest New York Times polls, Harris is just one percentage point ahead of Trump (49% and 48%, respectively).
This does not exclude a long wait for the final results of the elections, especially if one of the candidates resorts to various methods of post-election struggle, including appeals to the courts.
Harris and Trump need at least 270 electoral votes (out of 538 total) to win. Whether each one tips the balance in their favor depends on seven of the so-called swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three Great Lakes states, are part of the Democratic Party’s “Blue Wall,” a term used by political pundits to describe the 18 states and the District of Columbia where Democrats consistently won elections. presidential elections between 1992 and 2012. . year), broken by Trump in 2016, but resisted in 2020 by the president. joe biden. Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina are four electoral battlegrounds in the Sun Belt.
While the election of either candidate would be historic, Tuesday marks equally important issues for many Americans, including five states (Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota) that will vote to repeal abortion bans by introducing amendments to the US Constitution, CNN notes November 5.
Preliminary results in the first hours after polling stations close may not be decisive. States set their own election procedures, and the order in which they count votes cast before Nov. 5 (including by mail) varies across the country. There are also differences in how quickly certain cities, counties and regions report their results.
The “blue wall” are the industrial states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where their respective unions are strong. They used to be more loyal to Democrats, but in recent years their attitude has changed. Trump was able to win over local white voters without a college degree. When he won the White House in 2016, he won all three states. When now-President Biden won in 2020, he also won the three blue wall states.
If Harris performs similarly, she will likely have enough electoral votes to become president. But polls show the race here remains close and unpredictable down to the wire. Voter turnout will be critical, which better suits Harris’ bid for suburban women and Black voters.
The four battlegrounds in the Sun Belt represent states with growing populations: Arizona and Nevada in the west and North Carolina and Georgia in the east. Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina tended to favor Republicans. Trump won North Carolina twice, but narrowly edged out Biden in 2020. The last Democrat to win the game was barack obama in 2008. Biden became the first Democrat to win Georgia since bill clinton in 1992, and in Arizona after Clinton in 1996.
The candidates held their final campaign events in swing states overnight. Harris concluded her 107-day campaign in Pennsylvania, while Trump spoke at a rally in Michigan, where he ended his two previous presidential campaigns.
Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump addressed voters of the so-called Generation Z during their electoral campaigns. Many of them will vote for the first time. Generation Z: Those born, according to various classifications, from approximately the mid-1990s to the early 2010s (lower limits of birth dates 1995 – 1997, upper limits 2009 – 2012).
According to Columbia University’s Columbia Magazine, members of this generation now represent more than 40 million voters in the United States, including eight million new voting citizens. And the influence of social media on these voters cannot be underestimated, according to Aidan Cohn-Murphyfounder of the advocacy group Gen-Z for Change. In conversation with CNN, he pointed out that the social network TikTok has helped inform many young people about the presidential candidates and their campaigns. Key issues for young American voters include “climate, reproductive justice, gun violence and Biden’s incredibly unpopular support for the Israeli government,” the channel’s interlocutor listed.
Thus, observers in the United States associate the outcome of the most unpredictable electoral race in recent decades with the outcome in seven undecided states and the election of Generation Z. Trump has made it clear more than once that he will not simply accept his possible defeat . . The story of the assault on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters in January 2021 is a confirmation of the Republican candidate’s style of escalating confrontation with Democrats at critical moments.
The elections are considered decisive not only in determining the future trajectory of the development of processes in the United States, whose extreme polarization in political terms became more accentuated during this electoral campaign. For two points in the post-Soviet space, many also perceive them in the categories of “fateful”.
The first is Ukraine. The traditional perception of Trump as an American politician less hostile towards Russia and with intentions to lead again remains relevant. If we omit his initially populist statements about the ability to “end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours,” then the former American president will introduce new and very serious changes to the balance of power around the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Of course, if he defeats Harris and returns to the White House after January 20, 2025 (the day of the new president’s inauguration).
However, with Trump’s “pro-Russian” attitude, not everything is so obvious. As political observers in Russia have noted, the tone of Ukrainian political scientists, analysts and commentators has changed in recent weeks when it comes to the US elections. If until recently support for the democrats in kyiv was almost unanimous and unconditional, now positive evaluations of their competitor are beginning to appear more and more frequently and the hope is expressed that it is he who, under certain circumstances, will be able to provide Ukraine the necessary support that is deprived of under the Democrats.
“The logic of this reasoning is the following: Trump is a man of extremes. If during the election campaign he often says things that are pleasant for Russia and unpleasant for Ukraine, that does not mean that at some point the situation will not take a 180-degree turn.” – grades Maxim Yusin on the pages of the Russian publication Kommersant.
The second point is the South Caucasus. In this case, the distribution of preferences regarding the outcome of the US election can be reduced to a conditional ratio of “two to one.”
The Georgian Dream, which won the parliamentary elections on October 26, is clearly unhappy with the presidency of Biden and his possible successor in the person of Harris. For the current Georgian government, which does not want to aggravate relations with Russia and, at the behest of the West, engage in various adventures, Trump is preferable, who also avoids confrontational schemes to do business with Moscow.
Azerbaijan agrees with the politicians making decisions in Tbilisi in this regard. President Ilham Aliyev He previously made it clear who he considers most suitable for Baku as the next president of the United States. This is his former colleague in the White House, whose reign in the fall of 2020 coincided with Azerbaijan’s military success in Karabakh.
The obvious choice of Armenia leaves it in the “minority” compared to the preferences of its Transcaucasian neighbors. The Biden administration is considered by many in the region to be “pro-Armenian.” Yerevan is aware that if Harris wins, she will most likely not defend the government’s interests with the same consistency. Nikol Pashinian in the Euro-Atlantic clubs and give the South Caucasus the same priority that could be observed throughout Biden’s four years in the White House. But the candidate of the American Democrats will continue to consider Armenia as an “island of democracy”, especially in the context of Georgia’s departure from the “democratic values”, which the current US administration attributes to Tbilisi.
