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A polarized America goes to the polls: ‘I’m in a house divided’
America had previously always been “somebody else’s country,” said Christopher La Rose, a health researcher, as he waited just before 7am in Pine Lake, a village that’s too small for postal delivery just outside of Atlanta, Georgia.But that changed recently for La Rose, who is of Guyanese descent, when he became an American citizen. He had the jitters on Monday night, before using his first-ever vote in a US election to back Kamala Harris.View image in fullscreen“I am sincerely concerned about the way that the country could devolve if the other chap got into office,” La Rose said. “I’m concerned about the political party that has coalesced around him, and how they have, in my mind, lost their way, and I’m voting to protect my kids.”Georgia is one of the seven swing states where election results are close enough to fight over and voters in all of those states say they definitely feel fought over.At a busy polling place in Scottsdale, Arizona, the conservative youth organization Turning Point brought out a bright pink party bus adorned with “Trump train” signs, which they will use to take voters to other Scottsdale polling places if the lines become too long. The group also put up signs imploring voters to stay put: “stay in line, don’t leave your country behind,” one sign said.View image in fullscreenA man was also gathering signatures for America Pac, Elon Musk’s group that is paying circulators to sign up other people who could win a $1m prize. “Elon Musk needs our help,” the man told one voter.Musk’s controversial effort to drive turnout is late to the race. In many swing states, most people who are going to vote have already done so. More than 80 million people cast ballots before election day across the country, with 4 million in Georgia alone – 80% of Georgia’s 2020 vote total.Georgia’s in-person votes will be counted and announced about an hour after polls close at 7pmlocal time, elections officials said last week. Georgia officials have meticulously tried to avoid giving election integrity denialists something to wrap a grievance around this year. The election interference attempts of 2020 still resonate.View image in fullscreenGabriel Sterling, election operations chief for Georgia’s secretary of state, at midday on Tuesday that all polling locations were working smoothly, with an average wait – if there is a wait – of two minutes and an average check-in time of 49 seconds.Cyndi Keen, a lifelong Republican, voted a straight Republican ticket on Tuesday. “When it comes down to looking at having a better life for my children, for my grandkids and for myself, I like the Republican policies better,” she said. She thought the results will be close – and her household had voted for different candidates. “I’m in a house divided, my sweetie went the other way. He’s straight Republican but he voted for Harris.”View image in fullscreenCathy Garcia, an activist with the Working Families party from Santa Fe, New Mexico, flew to Atlanta this week. Tuesday morning with eight hours to go, she was beating on doors in Atlanta’s south-eastern suburbs, looking to put the last voter in line. She was accompanied by a far-flung team visiting from safe Democratic states – Massachusetts, California, New York – putting in work where it might count the most.They wrestled with the cellphone app showing them where to find clusters of registered voters who had not yet voted. The apartment complex in south DeKalb county gave them some density to work with, but low-income people tend to be more transient … and less likely to be at home in the middle of the day.Their effort demonstrates the effort the campaigns are making to get every last voter they can to a poll.Kamala Harris was spending the day on Tuesday at the Naval Observatory, the vice-president’s residence in Washington. The public is not expected to see the Democratic nominee until Tuesday night, where she is poised to deliver remarks at Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington DC. But she has been blitzing radio stations with calls across the country in a last-effort push for votes.Trump has ratcheted up outrage in the waning days of the election, wrapping himself and Republican voters in the politics of extreme grievance over descriptions of himself and his supporters as “garbage”, Nazis and fascists. And yet, his comments at rallies have included increasingly strident attacks on undocumented people, who he has called “animals” and “monsters”, and personal attacks on Harris.Trump partisans have cheered him on and adopted his tone.“He’s a big daddy. He’ll smack you if you’re an asshole,” said Joanne Kelchner, 77, a retiree from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who voted for Trump had harsh words for Harris. “Why is she not proud of her Brahmin heritage?” Kelchner asked. “I mean the elite class of India and pretending that she’s not Black, whatever … God bless us all.”View image in fullscreenBut partisan rancor abounds.“Donald Trump is crazy. I mean, he’s a lunatic and the people I think that vote for him are lunatics because he is crazy,” said Jeannie Strickland, a retiree from Georgia. “He’s trying to get people revved up to fight for him. I think if they put his butt in jail, like they should have done at least two years ago, it might calm him down a little bit, but they don’t do anything to him. I’m scared he’s going to win, and I might have to find an island somewhere and go live somewhere else, because he likes Hitler, and he liked the things Hitler did.”View image in fullscreenBoth sides have armies of lawyers in anticipation of legal challenges on and after election day. And law enforcement agencies nationwide are on high alert for potential violence.Tensions briefly flared outside a polling site in a library in downtown Phoenix, where a group of men decked out in American flag T-shirts had gathered to wave “Union Yes for Harris Walz” signs. As another man in a truck drove past, he hollered at the men: “Fuck you!”Angel Torres Pina, a 21-year-old who serves in the military and who voted for the first time on Tuesday, wanted politics to become less divisive and fear-based. He was somewhat nervous about voting at the library at all. “Am I making the right decisions? Am I making the wrong decisions? Are people gonna bad-talk about me because I voted for what I believe in?” said Torres Pina, an independent who voted for Harris. “I keep seeing on the news about these riots, these protests, these chaos, and it makes me a bit scared for if I’m voting right or wrong.”While many Americans have described how stressful this election is, Dawn Alter, a 50-year-old sales representative from New Berlin, Wisconsin, was in good spirits on Tuesday morning. Alter was supporting Harris, and thought the vice-president stood a chance in Wisconsin – a key swing state.Alter believes Trump has shed support here since 2020, and viewed herself as evidence: she abandoned Trump after supporting the former president in 2020, saying she was tired of the division and “negativity” he has sowed.“It’s a lot of discord, there’s too much misinformation,” said Alter. “There needs to be change and unity – I think those are the two biggest things for me.”In 2016, Wisconsin voters elected Donald Trump by less than a percentage point, and in 2020, the state flipped for Joe Biden by a similarly narrow margin. Polling suggests the presidential race in Wisconsin is essentially a toss-up, and voters were acutely aware of the uncertainty they face.View image in fullscreenMatt Steigerwald, a college lecturer from Wisconsin, said he was “cautiously optimistic”, adding: “Wisconsin is probably going to be pretty tight.” Steigerwald, who joked that he was a “bleeding-heart liberal”, said that even as a left-of-center voter, he found Trump “especially abhorrent”.“I just don’t know how you can support somebody who’s said and done so many awful things, who treats women so poorly, who treats people of different races so poorly – he’s just an awful human being from my perspective,” said Steigerwald. Additional reporting by Carter Sherman, Alice Herman, Sam Levine and Rachael LeingangRead more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
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Oldest living survivor of Tulsa race massacre casts vote for Kamala Harris
Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa race massacre, cast her ballot in Oklahoma on Tuesday at 110 years old for Kamala Harris.In a photo shared on social media, Fletcher is wearing an “I voted” sticker, and according to CNN journalist Abby Phillip, Fletcher voted for the vice-president, as she had previously said she would.Fletcher was just seven years old in 1921 when a white mob attacked the city’s “Black Wall Street”, killing an estimated 300 African Americans. The mob also robbed and burned more than 1,200 businesses, churches and homes, which left thousands of people homeless.In 2021, 100 years after the massacre occurred, Fletcher and other survivors testified before Congress in support of a lawsuit brought in 2020 aimed at getting reparations for the destruction of Greenwood, a once-thriving Black district.The lawsuit argued that Tulsa’s history of racial division and tension stemmed from the massacre and noted that the city and insurance companies never compensated the victims.The lawsuit also argued that the massacre resulted in racial and economic disparities in the region that still exist today.In 2023, an Oklahoma judge dismissed the lawsuit, undermining efforts to secure some legal justice for the elderly survivors.That same year, Fletcher released her memoir, Don’t Let Them Bury My Story, which details the impact of the Tulsa massacre on her life and advocates for racial justice.Lessie Benningfield Randle, one of other last living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, also cast her vote in the 2024 election this week, according to Essence.Randle, who is 109 years old, told Essence, that if this is her last ballot, “then I’m grateful that it’s for Kamala Harris”.“My grandchildren deserve a world where taking care of their parents isn’t a financial struggle, medication is affordable and women are free,” she said. “And our children deserve a president who will inspire them to learn from history, not a tyrant who will try to erase it.” More
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Jimmy Kimmel on US election: ‘It feels like the country is waiting to get results of a biopsy’
On the eve of election day, late-night hosts talked polls, the exhaustion of an endless campaign cycle and their closing arguments for Kamala Harris.Jimmy Kimmel“We are now one day away from having to wait another week to find out who won the election,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Monday evening. “It feels like the whole country is waiting to get the results of a biopsy.”Donald Trump declared his candidacy nearly two years ago, on 15 November 2022. “And now, 720 days, 88 criminal charges, 34 felony convictions, four indictments, two Democratic opponents and one garbage truck later, here we are. Election day,” said Kimmel.According to most national polls, the race is a dead heat, but Kimmel had harsh words for the pollsters. “These polls? They’re mood rings. That’s all they are,” he said. “They bring you up, they bring you down. Poll is short for bipolar.“There’s no magic involved, it’s heads or tails,” he added. “At the end of this, the pollsters who were wrong will quietly disappear. The other ones will be like ‘I told you, 1%.’ What did you tell us? You called 800 losers who didn’t have enough sense to not answer an unknown call.“I still don’t understand how this race is close,” he continued, referencing recordings obtained by the Daily Beast of Jeffrey Epstein talking about Trump as his “friend”.“Epstein said Trump told him he likes to have sex with the wives of his best friends, to the point where Epstein described Trump as having no ‘moral compass’. Do you know what kind of lowlife you have to be for Jeffrey Epstein to say you have no moral compass?” he fumed. “It’s like if R Kelly got mad at you for leaving the toilet seat up.”Kimmel concluded with his final message regarding the election: “Take a moment to imagine a world in which you wake up in the morning, you check the news, and no one says the words ‘Donald’ or ‘Trump’. Just a bunch of normal, boring stuff. Wouldn’t that be nice? No lawn signs. No red hats. No arguing with your grandfather.“Let’s remove this cancerous polyp from our collective national colon,” he added, “and move on already.”Seth Meyers“None of us can control what happens tomorrow, we can only control how drunk we are when it happens,” said Seth Meyers on Late Night, staring down a batch of polls declaring the election a “toss-up”.“How can so many polls be tied?” he wondered. “Are they doing the first half of the poll at an artisanal coffee shop in Williamsburg and the second half of the poll in a beer line at a Kid Rock concert?“How is it possible that exactly half the country think Trump is an amoral psychopath who would wreck American democracy, and the other half thinks he’s an amoral psychopath who would wreck American democracy … but it’s worth it because he’s an incredible dancer!”Meyers devoted a good chunk of his monologue to reminding voters what they were choosing between. Republicans’ closing message, he argued, was: “Are you going to vote for a woman whose laugh they don’t like, or are you going to vote for a guy who fomented a violent coup attempt after a months-long campaign against the 2020 election, undercut the nation’s response to a deadly pandemic that spiraled out of control because he tried to cover it up, lied about its severity, promoted sham treatments for it, said we could cure it by injecting disinfectant and shining powerful lights inside the body, became the first president since Herbert Hoover to oversee a net job loss?”He listed more disqualifying credentials up to and including January 6 – full transcript here – and concluded with a note of exhaustion. “I’ve been talking about this man for nearly a decade now, as evidenced by the fact that everything I just listed is in my brain still somehow,” he said. “The symptoms that gave rise to him will not immediately go away if he loses tomorrow, but we do have an opportunity to say as a nation that we want him to go away. And I really hope that happens, mainly so I never have to think about this ever again.”Stephen Colbert“After a two-year campaign, we have finally made it through all 20 years,” said Stephen Colbert on Late Night. “We’re all in some true sense about to witness history. Good or bad. I’m guessing this is how the people of Pompeii felt when Vesuvius was trying to get re-elected.”Like Meyers and Kimmel, Colbert was frustrated by the dead-heat polls. “I could get a clearer prediction from a magic 8 ball!” he joked.One ray of light, however, was J Ann Selzer’s highly regarded Des Moines Register poll in Iowa, which found Harris leading Trump by three points, with senior women breaking for the vice-president 63% to 28%. “Oh, senior women are AAR-pissed,” Colbert quipped. “Save me, Gam-Gam!”The Harris campaign cautioned about getting too excited, but “too late!” Colbert chirped. “I have to be excited, because I’ve only got two other choices. Absolute terror or Absolut vodka. I need this. There’s no in between.”Meanwhile, in the final days of the campaign, Trump was “presenting a very good case that his brain done broke”, Colbert quipped. In North Carolina, Trump tried to “out-Tim Walz Tim Walz” with a football pep talk that went awry. “All we have to do is carry that ball over that … thing,” he said.“Oh yes, exactly,” Colbert joked. “Just carry the ball over that … thing.” More
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Harris’s home town is hopeful she will make history: ‘she is going to win big’
As the extremely divisive election over who will next lead the United States wrapped up, California’s Bay Area was enveloped in a quiet calm. Far from the massive political rallies and the rousing rhetoric that has overtaken battleground states many voters here are decided; the communities to the east of San Francisco were among the counties that voted most strongly for Joe Biden in 2020, and they will show up again hoping to defeat Donald Trump.Even so, some ballots in Oakland and Berkeley will be cast with an extra sense of pride. In the towns where Kamala Harris was born and raised, locals are hopeful their hometown hero will make history.“Words cannot express how excited I am for Kamala Harris to become the first woman president, the first Black woman president and the first south Asian woman president,” said Oakland resident Kim Thompson. “She will also be the first president from Oakland, California,” Thompson added.Not all voters in the mid-sized cities that hug the shores of the San Francisco Bay are aware that the Democratic nominee got her start there. But as the self-proclaimed “daughter of Oakland”, Harris staged her campaign around her connection to the area, claiming the diverse city that’s steeped in cultural and political history with pride.View image in fullscreenThose are also the attributes that drew Thompson to lay down roots and raise her family in Oakland after moving there in 1987. As a Black woman and a lawyer who is deeply connected to civic life in the city, she delights in its ties to a potentially historic moment should Harris be elected.“How great would it be for Oakland if the rest of the country looks to us and says, ‘Wow. That is not just the birthplace of the Black Panthers, not just a place that stood side by side with San Francisco and Berkeley where a lot of the civil rights movement started,’” she said. She’s looking ahead to a future where a presidential library is hosted in the town. “That will be such a positive mark on our city – we are the place where it all began for her.”Born in a Kaiser hospital near the heart of Oakland, Harris and her small family moved frequently in her early years, settling in the midwest and in Montreal in between spells in California. But Harris left a mark on the places where she grew up that still lingers today.A mural depicting her alongside the civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, female education activist Malala Yousafzai and other impactful women now stands in the tree-lined neighborhood where she attended elementary school in north Berkeley, bussed across town from her apartment as part of a 1967 plan to desegregate schools.View image in fullscreenBerkeley and Oakland each offer lists of important sites for Harris-themed tours, including where she launched her first bid for the presidency – one she ended before primaries began back in 2019 – in front of roughly 20,000 people near the steps of Oakland’s city hall.These towns left an indelible mark on her too. Those early years, which she chronicles in her memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, are filled with remembrances of joy but also the budding awareness about injustice, the fight for equality and rich cultural traditions of activism and art.Harris credits her upbringing, including trips to the Rainbow Sign, a once vibrant African American cultural center in Berkeley that she attended with her mother, Shyamala, and her sister, Maya, for seeding her political ambitions.View image in fullscreen“Being from a place that’s so diverse it helps shape our ideals and our morals and to accept people for their differences,” said Derreck Johnson, an Oakland resident and close childhood friend of Harris. And, he said, even if Harris hasn’t devoted a lot of campaign time to the area, understandably focusing resources and face time in areas where votes are harder-won, she hasn’t forgotten about her home town or the friends who still live there.When Johnson opened his restaurant, Home of Chicken and Waffles, she called to congratulate him. He returned the favor, driving to Nevada to join her in the crucial final days of campaigning. He’s also planning to add a temporary menu item that bears her name – chicken lasagne cooked with collard greens – for those back home.“I am overwhelmed with joy – I don’t even know how to describe it,” he said. “I feel she is going to win. I feel she is going to win big.”
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In the Bay Area, whether voting with hometown pride, a desire to see history made or a dedication to progressive values – perhaps even all three – large numbers are expected to cast their support. Close to 80% of Alameda county, of which both Berkeley and Oakland are part, voted for Biden in 2020, the landmark election that made her the first female vice-president.View image in fullscreenStill, “everybody’s holding their collective breath and that’s all we can do”, said Joyce Gardner, who has owned a women’s clothing shop in Rockridge, one of Oakland’s lively shopping districts for more than two decades. She’s dedicated her storefront to depictions of the candidate, adding Harris’s face to mannequins clad in classy suits and adorning it with cardboard cutouts.For Gardner though, Harris’s hometown heritage isn’t the draw.“It’s not about her connections to here,” she said. “It’s about what she’s going to do to lift up people.” Gardner is one of many who is voting in this election with a specific purpose: to ensure Trump doesn’t get another shot at the White House.“We need this country to move forward with a decent human being who cares about people, and not just lining his pockets,” she said.“We will see,” she added. “I believe this country is going to do the right thing.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverageWhen do polls close?
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‘If Harris wins, it’s because of abortion’: election tests fallout from Roe reversal
Leslie Lemus’s top issue in the 2024 election is probably the economy. But she has a close second: “Them fucking with abortion.”Really, for the 26-year-old Arizona native, the two issues are one and the same. On Monday, she got an abortion at Camelback Family Planning, one of the last abortion clinics in Arizona, in large part because Lemus feels like she can’t financially care for a child right now.“I look at the world and it’s not very pretty. I’m not ready for that yet, to bring a child into the world right now, where the economy is not OK,” said Lemus, who said she lived paycheck to paycheck. Some months, she has to choose between making her car payments and paying off her credit card debt. “Everybody’s struggling left and right.”View image in fullscreenLemus is registered to vote in Maricopa county, which is home to 60% of the Arizona electorate and may determine whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins the valuable swing state. Harris has made access to reproductive rights a key part of her policy platform – particularly as a contrast to Trump, who appointed three of the US supreme court justices who overturned Roe v Wade and who has toggled between branding himself as a champion of reproductive rights and as “the most pro-life president”.Lemus is a passionate supporter of Harris, who she calls “my homegirl”.Majorities of Americans have backed abortion access and Roe v Wade for decades, but it was rarely their top issue in the voting booth. Now that the US supreme court has overturned Roe, permitting more than a dozen states to ban almost all abortions and several more to ban it at six, 12, or – as in Arizona – 15 weeks, abortion may become the deciding issue of the 2024 election. It is now the most important issue for women under 45, like Lemus.“If Harris wins the election, it will be because of abortion and women voting for her in large part because of that issue,” said Tresa Undem, a pollster who’s been surveying people about abortion for more than two decades.On Monday, Camelback had about 40 patients to see; at least one had traveled in from Texas, which bans almost all abortions. Visitors to the lobby were greeted by a sign urging them to register to vote while they waited for their abortion. The sign advised: “The health of our democracy is in our hands.”‘That gives me hope’On Tuesday, Arizona will become one of 10 states where voters will decide whether to amend their state constitutions to add or expand abortion protections. (In one of those states, Nebraska, voters will vote on both a ballot measure that could expand abortion rights and on the nation’s sole anti-abortion measure.) Five of those states, including Arizona, have some kind of abortion ban on the books. If any of the measures supporting abortion rights pass, it would be the first time that a state has overturned a post-Roe v Wade ban.Democrats have long hoped these measures would boost turnout among their base, but the rosy polling for the measures in steadfastly red states indicates that a significant swath of voters are essentially splitting their votes by supporting both abortion rights and Republicans, the party that helped engineer Roe’s downfall. Although the measure looks likely to pass in Arizona, for example, polling suggests that Trump will win the state.View image in fullscreenJulio Morera helped collect signatures at the Arizona state fair in order to get the measure on the ballot. His group’s booth, he recalled, was set up next to a man who was hawking rightwing memorabilia adorned with eagles, guns and the slogan “Don’t Tread On Me”. When asked to sign the petition, the man demurred. “I got customers to think about,” he said.But at the very end of the fair, Morera said, the man added his signature.“That gives me hope that this is gonna pass,” Morera said. “There are quite a few people that may not be Democrats or left-leaning who would support this access to abortion.”A vote for Trump, however, may ultimately cancel out a vote for a ballot measure. If Trump wins the presidency, he will be able to skirt Congress and use a 19th-century anti-vice law known as the Comstock Act to ban the mailing of all abortion-related materials – which would result in a de facto national abortion ban and render these measures’ successes moot.Project 2025, an influential policy playbook for the next conservative administration, suggests using the Comstock Act to at least ban the mailing of abortion pills, which account for roughly two-thirds of US abortions. It also suggests rolling back privacy protections for abortion patients and reshaping the nation’s largest family planning program, which would curtail access to contraception, among a bevy of other anti-abortion policies.Harris, meanwhile, has forcefully defended abortion rights. “Over these past two years, the impact of Trump abortion bans has been devastating,” she told a rally in Texas in October. “We see the horrific reality that women and families face every single day.”For Lemus, abortion bans all come down to one thing: “Men being in control of women.”View image in fullscreenThe economy was not the only reason that Lemus sought an abortion on Monday. She is also worried about the mental toll of having a child. At 18, Lemus gave birth to a son who was born prematurely and died just a month after birth.“I was there with all the medical stuff, seeing my child in the incubator until he passed away,” she said quietly. Eight years later, Lemus is not ready to have another one.“We fought so hard to have choices,” she said. “Why do they feel like we can’t have a choice?”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
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Red or blue? The bellwether counties that could swing the US election
With recent election polling showing a dead heat – or slim victory for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris within the statistical margin of error – seven swing states are all but certain to decide the race.As pollsters scramble to make sense of these results, amid questions about reliability given bad calls over support for Trump in 2016 and 2020, analysts are taking an even more granular approach in interpreting battleground state voters, focusing on a handful of counties in these hotly contested regions.They are often referred to as bellwether counties. This in effect means counties that could tip the scale in determining a swing state’s outcome.Here are the counties that analysts – ranging from seasoned election-watchers to Wall Street financiers – are focused on.Maricopa county, ArizonaIn 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump in Arizona by a mere 10,000 votes. Biden’s victory was bolstered by voters in Maricopa county, which encompasses the Phoenix metro area.View image in fullscreenFour years ago, Maricopa comprised more than 60% of Arizona ballots. Biden won Maricopa by 45,000 votes – with 50.3% of voters casting their ballots for him – underscoring just how important this county is. The Associated Press explained the importance of this: “In states where voters are so overwhelmingly concentrated in a single county, even a narrow win can produce big shifts in the statewide numbers.”Also worth pointing out: Maricopa has large proportion of demographics both campaigns have courted aggressively, such as centrist suburban Republicans, Latino voters, and senior citizens, per US News & World Report.Miami-Dade county, FloridaThe Sunshine state has taken a sharp right turn in recent election cycles. Trump boasts almost a double-digit advantage over Harris. Florida, once a purplish swing state, is bright red.Analysts are keeping an eye on Miami-Dade county, which includes Miami and many surrounding communities. Long a Democratic stronghold, with Hillary Clinton winning the county by a 30-point margin in 2016, it has since moved right.View image in fullscreenBiden beat Trump by seven points in 2020. But, the state’s most populous county is expected to post results “relatively early” after polls close at 7pm, Reuters notes.Some analysts believe Miami-Dade could foreshadow Harris’s overall results. If she underperforms, especially among Latinos, this could bode poorly for her overall, the news outlet said.Metro Atlanta counties in GeorgiaThe Atlanta, Georgia, metropolitan area is considered by virtually every analyst as integral to deciding this swing state. Some have focused on Forsyth county, located 40 miles from Atlanta, as the decisive county, while others have insisted that a collection of suburban and exurban counties will determine the race.In addition to Forsyth, analysts have pointed to Cobb, Gwinnett, and DeKalb counties as potentially decisive. Of course, Fulton county, which encompasses Atlanta, is seen as key.View image in fullscreenOn a recent episode of Pod Save America, NBC’s election expert Steve Kornacki noted that nine counties, which he referred to as the “blue blob”, comprised more than 40% of Georgia’s vote. This region “is just getting bluer and bluer every election”.Kornacki said this race could indicate whether it’s expanding.“There’s one county in that area, it’s been moving dramatically towards Democrats but just missed – Fayette county – the last time around,” he said. “If the Democrats are flipping that this time around and expanding that blob, I think that’s a sign, because that’s talking about enthusiasm in the suburbs.”Saginaw county, MichiganLocated in the Great Lakes Bay Region of Michigan, Saginaw county is considered the pre-eminent swing county in the most decisive swing state. There are multiple reasons for this, among them Saginaw’s voting record.Barack Obama landed Saginaw in 2008 and 2012. In 2016, Trump bested Hillary Clinton by just over 1,000 votes. The margin thinned still more in 2020, when Biden won by a mere 303 ballots.View image in fullscreenBiden’s 2020 win in Saginaw, however, was complicated by Trump’s votes actually increasing in that county. His loss was also attributed to Democrats who didn’t vote in 2016 but decided in 2020 to boot Trump out.Harris could need the same voter turnout in Saginaw to win. The outcome of this county could well reflect national trends, as voters’ concerns there echo that of those in other crucial contests.Clark county, NevadaBiden beat Trump by just three points in Nevada’s 2020 presidential race. Clark county, which is home to Las Vegas, has approximately 50% of Nevada’s population.If Trump wants to win Nevada, he would have to sap Democratic votes in Clark county, Reuters explains. Observers are also paying attention to Washoe county; this is Nevada’s second-largest population center, containing the city of Reno.Similar to Las Vegas, Trump would have to chip away at Democratic margins in the Reno area as well. As a testament to the tension surrounding Washoe, observers from both sides of the aisle have been closely monitoring the count following recent controversies over voting there.The Republican county commissioners recently voted against certifying results in this year’s primary, prompting legal action, before they reversed course. The elections office, meanwhile, has been answering an onslaught of questions and public information requests, in an effort to allay the public’s concerns about the election.While Democrats have won every presidential vote in Nevada since 2008, economic stressors – such as increased prices and decreased affordable housing – have spurred questions about working-class voters’ leanings.Mecklenburg county, North CarolinaRepublicans have won every presidential election in North Carolina since Obama’s run in 2008. Reuters notes that tight polling has turned North Carolina into a swing state this year.Mecklenberg county, which includes Charlotte, is strongly Democratic. Analysts are also eyeing adjacent Cabarrus county: Trump beat Biden there in 2020, but his lead slimmed by 10 points compared to 2016, Reuters noted.Wake county, which contains the highly educated city of Raleigh, is similarly drawing attention. This higher-than-average income county once skewed Republican but has favored Democratic presidential candidates since 2008 “by generally increasing margins”, US News & World Report notes.Erie county, PennsylvaniaErie county, which contains the city of Erie, has been described as “a bellwether area in a bellwether state”. Per US News, “No county in Pennsylvania – and possibly in the country – is as consistently swingy as Erie county.”Indeed, Trump won the working-class county in 2016, followed by a slim Biden win there in 2020. Some analysts are also paying attention to Lackawanna county.Scranton, Pennsylvania – Biden’s birthplace – is in this county. Unlike Erie county, Lackawanna has become more Republican of late. If Trump performs well in Lackawanna, it could spell broader success for him across this pivotal state.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
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Here is what my final polling data says about the US presidential election | John Zogby
The final six public polls that have been released pretty much tell the same story as each other and the previous polls in October. The race to become the 47th president of the United States is on a razor-thin margin. Three of those last six polls were actual ties; one has Kamala Harris ahead by three points; the others have Donald Trump up by one point and two points.My own firm, John Zogby Strategies, just released a final survey for our clients of 1,005 decided voters nationwide showing Harris leading with 49.3% of the vote and Trump polling at 45.6% of the vote – a margin, or difference, of 3.7 percentage points.That is close, and even more of a squeeze because of the current relationship of the popular vote to the electoral college. Harris is certain to receive millions of “excess” votes in large states such as California, New York, Illinois and Massachusetts which will beef up her total popular vote nationwide but not do anything for her in key battleground states such as Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – all of which are too close to call as we approach election day.Harris’s lead in the John Zogby Strategies poll is within the margin-of-sampling error, but it reveals some dynamics that portend changing demographic support for both the Democratic and Republican parties. These are some findings and possible trend lines that not only explain what may happen once the votes are counted, but also suggest possibly significant realignments within both parties.For one, Harris appears to have underperformed with 18- to 29-year-olds nationally; in contrast Trump is leading among them, capturing 47% of the vote, while Harris polls at 45%. Ironically, in our poll, she did best among those over 65 with a 58%-39% margin. Those age cohorts usually produce opposite results, with older voters tending to be more conservative. The gen Z and millennial voters also revealed a huge “gender gap” of well over 60 points between men and women.There is also a substantial “marriage gap”: Trump won married voters by four points – not as big as in 2020 (seven points), but Harris won among non-married people by eight points (51%-43%), not as much as Joe Biden’s 18-point victory, but still enough to see that marital status is a key to how people vote. Notably, married women, who usually tend to be on the conservative side, chose Harris in our poll.Harris leads among voters who identify as independents by 13 points (51% of independents polled say they will vote for her, compared with just 38% saying they will vote for Trump), about the same as Biden, who received 54% of independent votes, compared with Trump getting 41% of their vote in 2020.The candidates chose messages and styles that aimed at different groups of voters. Trump stayed with his dark and isolationist theme, focusing on rallying his base first, then hoping to pick up more moderate independents who feel that the Biden-Harris team have led the US down the wrong path. Harris opted for directing her campaign with an appeal to those who were tired of Trump’s negativity and, at times, bizarre behavior. Her approach appears to have paid off, as she leads with 56% of self-described moderate voters. That puts her 19 points ahead with moderates than Trump, who polls at 37. This was a group that Biden won by 30 points last time.Harris did, as was suggested throughout the year’s polling, underperform in our poll among Black voters (73% said they would vote for her, and 19% said Trump) and Hispanic voters (Trump polls at 48% with Hispanic voters, Harris at 44%), but she is doing much better among white voters – down by only five (she polls at 46% and Trump polls at 51%), compared with Trump’s 17-point victory in 2020, where 58% voted for him and 41% voted for Biden.Harris is down considerably among Catholics (43% back her, compared with 55% backing Trump) and Protestants (36% back her, compared with 59% backing Trump), but scores well among those with no religious affiliation and with atheists. Democrats have been getting 30% or so of born-again evangelical voters in recent elections, but Harris only shows 24% in our poll.Harris not only leads in cities (53% of city-dwellers back her, compared with 43% backing Trump) but also in the suburbs (she was backed by 50% of the suburban voters polled, compared with 44% backing Trump) – the latter powered by a solid performance among suburban women. Biden won both in 2020: he won 60% of votes in cities (while Trump only got 38% of the vote in cities), but barely scraped by in suburbs, where only 50% voted for him, compared with 48% voting for Trump.There is a wide “education gap” in US politics. Harris has the backing of 57% of those with college degrees, compared with 39% for Trump. In 2020, Biden won the same group by 12 points (he received 55% of their vote, while Trump received 43%). Trump leads among those without degrees (50% of voters without college degrees back him, compared with 44% backing Harris). That was 50% for Biden and 48% for Trump last time.The gender gap propels Harris’s lead, with 49% of Trump voters being men versus 43% of Harris voters being men. (In 2020, 45% of Trump voters were men, while 53% of Biden voters were men.) Women back Harris by 12 points, with 55% of women supporting her to 43% supporting Trump (Biden won 57% of women, while Trump only received 42% of the women’s vote). There is in our poll an 18-point gender point gap.All of these “gaps” suggest a very real issues gap between Harris and Trump supporters. For those selecting Harris, the top issues are abortion (45%), the economy/Inflation (39%), democracy (37%) and climate change (19%). For those backing Trump, the top are the economy/inflation (68%), immigration (61%), keeping the US out of war (15%) and crime (14%). Two different worlds.Some key states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, both hotly contested, will not finish counting ballots until later in the week, and other states likely to be very close will have automatic recounts. It is not likely that we will know who won for a while. Our poll is thus far the only one that polled through Sunday 3 November; we left the lights on longer to try to capture late-breaking trends.
John Zogby is senior partner at the polling firm of John Zogby Strategies and is author of Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read the Polls and Why We Should More
