By Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin

With no winner declared in the 2020 presidential race, President Donald Trump appeared in the White House early Wednesday (4) to brazenly claim he had already won the election — and to insist that votes stop being counted even as the ballots of millions of Americans were still being tallied.

Speaking with a mix of defiance, anger and wonder that the election had not yet been called in his favour, the president recounted his standing in an array of battleground states before falsely declaring: “Frankly, we did win this election.”

No major news organizations had declared a winner between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, and a number of closely contested states still had millions of mail-in ballots to count, in part because state and local Republican officials had insisted that they not be counted until Election Day.

Trump said, without offering any explanation, that “we’ll be going to the US Supreme Court,” and added, “We want all voting to stop.”

No elected leader has the right to unilaterally order votes to stop being counted, and Trump’s middle-of-the-night proclamation amounted to a reckless attempt to hijack the electoral process as results in key battleground states were still not final, something without precedent in American politics.

The president contradicted himself about the vote-counting as he claimed he was gaining strength in Arizona, where votes cast on Election Day were breaking in his favour but where mail-in ballots favoured Biden, the Democratic nominee. Trump spoke at times from a teleprompter, but he veered off his prepared remarks to make unfounded claims about voting fraud. “We don’t want them to find any more ballots at 4 in the morning,” he said.

The president made his remarks just after 2:00 a.m. (12:30 PM Sri Lanka) as Biden was leading in Arizona, a battleground that has been trending more toward Democrats in recent years. If Biden were to win there, it would be the first state Trump won in 2016 that flipped to the Democrats this year.

Biden, for his part, adopted a different tone and approach shortly beforehand when he addressed supporters in his home state of Delaware. Biden projected optimism but asked voters for patience. He pointed to Pennsylvania and Michigan, among other battlegrounds, as slow-counting states that he expected to win.

“As I’ve said all along, it’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election,” Biden said. “That’s the decision of the American people. But I’m optimistic about this outcome.”

Biden added: “It ain’t over till every vote is counted.”

Trump’s remarks added another bizarre twist to one of the most extraordinary election cycles in the nation’s history. For weeks leading up to Election Day, and in voting across the country Tuesday (3), Americans overcame their fears of the coronavirus, long lines at the polls and the vexing challenges of a transformed voting system to bring the campaign to a conclusion, with the fate of Trump’s tumultuous White House reign hanging in the balance.

As of early Wednesday morning, the race remained shrouded in uncertainty, as Biden failed to achieve any early breakthroughs, and as Trump clung to a lead in a number of Southern states that Democrats had hoped to flip into their column.

Trump dashed Democrats’ hopes of picking up both Florida and Ohio, two swing states that have tilted to the right in recent years, and that Trump carried four years ago. He also turned back a challenge from Biden in Iowa, a smaller state where Biden made a late effort to pick up its six Electoral College votes.

Trump did not have a clear upper hand, but the prolonged suspense was, at least at the start, something of a victory for the president, who was at risk of being eliminated from contention if one of the big, historically Republican states of the Southeast had defected to Biden. That was still a possibility in North Carolina or Georgia, where the vote tally was closely divided.

In Georgia, there appeared to be a large number of uncounted ballots in the Atlanta metro area, and those votes were expected to tilt solidly to Biden. And in a number of the state’s rural counties, Biden was slightly outperforming the margins posted by Stacey Abrams, a Democrat who lost a race for governor there two years ago by about 55,000 votes.

Vote-counting was moving relatively slowly in some battleground states because of the scale of the turnout, a backlog of absentee ballots received by mail and scattered problems with processing the vote. And each state handled the counting and releasing of their ballots differently.

Ohio, for example, released the results of all of its mail ballots after the polls closed — making the state seem to tilt toward Biden until more Election Day votes were counted. Similarly, Michigan released its day-of votes in the first hours after polls closed, making it seem that Trump enjoyed a wide advantage in a hotly contested state.

Democrats feared that in some cases a Supreme Court now dominated by conservative justices could ultimately limit vote-counting in a way that would aid Trump, a possibility the president raised in his remarks Wednesday morning.

Turnout was expected to easily break the record of 139 million votes set in 2016, and the percentage of eligible Americans who voted might be the highest in more than a century. More than 100 million early votes had already been cast before Election Day dawned, a record.

For all the angst about a potential breakdown in voting procedures in advance of Election Day, there were no prominent reports of technological failures or chaos at the polls, nor was there any evidence of significant civil unrest midway through the evening. There was still the potential for considerable uncertainty in the slower-counting states, and Trump threatened in the days before the election to wage a bitter legal battle in several of them in an effort to impede the results. But none of the numerous doomsday scenarios in the logistics of voting seemed to come to pass.

Biden was outperforming Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 performance in a number of the country’s large metropolitan areas, but Trump was reprising or enlarging his margins in many rural areas. With far less support going to third-party candidates this year, Biden was effectively picking up many of those votes in urban areas while Trump was adding them to his margins in less populated areas.

The absence of a decisive shift toward Biden in the conservative-leaning states that reported their votes earliest raised the prospect of a drawn-out wait for clarity in the Northern battlegrounds, where both parties expected him to run stronger.

In several of the largest swing states on the map, including Michigan and Pennsylvania, local officials were strictly limited in their ability to process ballots cast before Election Day.

Still, the possibility of victory by Biden appeared far slimmer than it did going into Election Day, based on a mountain of public polling data that showed him to be a clear front-runner across virtually the entire map.

Biden, 77, appeared to be underperforming with Latino voters, especially in the critical battleground of Florida, where he led Trump by only single digits in the group, according to exit polls. Clinton won Latinos in the state by a wider margin four years ago; Trump’s improvement appeared to reflect the success of his insistent anti-socialist message in South Florida, where Cuban Americans and other immigrant communities are wary of far-left policies.

In a band of Southern states, including North Carolina and Georgia, early returns showed Biden doing well in metropolitan areas but struggling in rural areas.

As states began to be called there were no early surprises. Biden picked up states throughout the Northeast as well as Virginia and Illinois, and the reliable Democratic prizes of New York and California, according to The Associated Press. Trump won in parts of the South, as well as conservative-leaning Indiana and West Virginia and states in the Northern Plains.

Biden carried New Hampshire, a small state Clinton won by a tiny margin four years ago. Trump had tried to seize the mercurial Northeastern state this time, but fell well short of doing so.

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the winter recast the election as a referendum on Trump’s leadership in a crisis, restricted the activities of candidates up and down the ballot and upended the voting habits of tens of millions of Americans.

To the end, Trump insisted that the pandemic was quickly dissipating, despite mountains of evidence that the virus was spreading more rapidly than ever throughout the country. He blamed Democrats and the news media for overhyping the threat from the virus, and never formulated a factual rebuttal to Biden’s charge that his passivity and ineptitude had led to thousands of needless deaths.

Trump campaigned vigorously across battleground states in the final days, hoping that a robust turnout from late-voting Republicans and rural white people would help him overcome the advantages Biden had built across a diverse coalition, especially with white suburban women.

Biden, who held a steady lead in the polls throughout the general election, maintained a more modest pace with smaller gatherings that showcased his emphasis on public safety in a health crisis. He spent the final days of the race denouncing Trump’s failure to control the pandemic and his public attacks on scientists in his own administration.

Biden’s candidacy also had the potential to create a history-making moment for his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent; she was seeking to become the first woman on a winning presidential ticket. And Biden would be only the second Catholic president, along with John F. Kennedy.

According to recent polls, Biden appeared to have succeeded in making himself a kind of safe harbour for a wide array of voters unhappy with Trump, including women, white voters with college degrees, people of colour, young people and seniors. But Biden’s coalition was more impressive for its breadth than its depth, and despite its size and diversity, most voters supporting him appeared more excited to reject Trump than to install Biden in his place.

Trump, by contrast, was relying on a far narrower base of support: rural and less educated white voters, and especially men, who continued to embrace his message of hard-edge nationalism and cultural grievance even as the economic downturn deprived Trump of the chance to campaign on several years of comfortable growth.

Even as they have suffered through the pandemic, most working-class white voters saw Trump as a trustworthy pugilist who would take their side against any adversary — whether China or Mexico, the national news media or Black Lives Matter protesters, or the Democratic Party.

Even aside from the pandemic, the 2020 campaign unfolded against a backdrop of national tumult unequalled in recent history, including the House’s vote to impeach the president less than a year ago, a remarkable wave of racial justice protests in the spring, spasms of civil unrest throughout the summer, the death of a Supreme Court justice in September, the hospitalization of the president in October.

As a result, Election Day arrived with the nation on edge, confused in some places about new voting systems and court battles over the electoral process, and worried about flare-ups of violence in the aftermath of a disputed result.

Trump, 74, encouraged those fears, and the underlying social divisions that fostered them: On the eve of the election, he made a baseless claim that a court decision on Pennsylvania’s ballot-counting procedures would lead to street violence. No American presidential race in half a century or more has featured the same scale of civil unrest and uncertainty about the legitimacy of the political process, and no modern campaign has been so defined by an incumbent president who seemed to relish both factors the way Trump has.

Republicans answered a surge in mail voting partly by bringing numerous lawsuits aimed at restricting access to the polls, asking courts to limit steps taken in various places to make voting easier during the pandemic.

The legal skirmishes continued into Election Day, breaking out in Philadelphia soon after the polls opened. The Trump campaign pressed complaints that city election workers were not giving their observers — known as poll monitors — enough access to ballot counting areas.

Recent opinion surveys found that Biden had a strong advantage among people who had already voted. For Trump, catching up would depend on turning out voters in large numbers on Election Day and winning them by a sizable margin.

The race was the most expensive presidential campaign ever, and Trump’s much-lauded messaging apparatus was quickly eclipsed by a behemoth Biden operation that caught and far surpassed the Trump campaign in fundraising. In the final month of the campaign, Biden’s spending surged, giving him a more than 2-1 advantage on the airwaves and online, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm.

-New York Times