America Turns Red as Harris’ Path to Victory Grows Less Forgiving

By The Associated Press

All 2024 election polls are now closed, leaving voters to wait and see whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win a historic presidential election.

As the election stretched into Wednesday, Republicans are seeing a map trending positively for their party, began to point to a shift in demographic support among key voting groups who often lean Democrat.

Preliminary AP Vote Cast data suggested a shift among Black and Latino voters, who appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than they were to back Biden four years ago. About 8 in 10 Black voters backed Harris, down from the roughly 9 in 10 who backed Biden.

More than half of Hispanic voters supported Harris, but that was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 who backed Biden in 2020. Trump’s support among those groups appeared to rise slightly compared to 2020.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio told AP at Trump’s election watch party in West Palm Beach, Florida, that he’s excited for the exit polling in states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, where Republicans are already seeing overperformance compared to this time in the election in 2020.

“I’m just really excited not just because I think it’s going to be a victory but about how we won,” the Florida lawmaker said.

There are noticeable similarities between then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s election night in 2016 and the one that Harris had planned for tonight at Howard University.

Neither Clinton nor Harris, appeared at their election night party, despite both heading into Election Day believing they were about to defeat Donald Trump.

Both sent top aides to inform the demoralized audience that the woman would not speak. And there were noticeable similarities between what each man said.

“We still have votes to count. We still have states that have not been called yet. We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted,” Cedric Richmond, Harris’ campaign co-chair, told the audience Tuesday. “So you won’t hear from the vice president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow.”

“We’re still counting votes,” John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, said in 2016. “And every vote should count. Several states are too close to call. So we’re not going to have anything more to say tonight.”

Even the mood of the events — and the trajectory they took over the course of the night — was similar. The vibe at Clinton’s event at Javits Center started jubilantly, with people dancing, smiling and eager to make history — the campaign had even planned to launch reflective confetti in the air when Clinton won to resemble a glass ceiling shattering. The same was true for Harris, with the event resembling a dance party on the campus of the Democrat’s alma mater.

By the time Podesta and Richmond had taken the stage, the party had stopped, people had left, and those who remained looked forlorn.

Harris still has a path to the White House through the Northern battleground states, but the map is getting less forgiving.

Harris’ campaign has long said her surest way to 270 electoral votes was through Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states Trump won in 2016 and Biden captured narrowly in 2020.

Harris cannot lose Pennsylvania and reach 270 electoral votes. However, she can lose pieces of the blue wall — so named for its longtime reputation as a Democratic firewall — and still reach 270.

If she loses Michigan, she can make it up by winning Arizona and Nevada. She can lose Wisconsin and make up for it with Arizona.

But the map has surely shrunk for Harris, who cannot lose more than one in the three-state northern arc.

With Trump’s victory in Georgia, the state becomes the first to flip from the 2020 results.

Trump lost Georgia four years ago to Democrat Joe Biden by 11,779 votes — a number that became memorable after he pleaded with Georgia election officials to help him find one more vote than that to overtake Biden’s victory.

He was later charged criminally in Georgia in a sweeping racketeering indictment and has pleaded not guilty.