After wild election, Americans endure night of agony awaiting results

After months of angst and waiting, at the end of an election ride crazier than any in memory, after the assassination attempts and the bloodied ear, Joe Biden’s shock departure and Kamala Harris’s stunning arrival, after the childless cat ladies and the Springfield, Ohio, culinary dogs, after all the vitriol and the gathering sense of doom – at last, it was show time.

Finally, tens of millions of anxious voters were done with the wildest campaign in their lifetimes and found themselves in that next stage of exquisite suffering that is the American way of democracy: the TV election night bubble.

At least it was soothing to hear cable news rivals – as starkly divided as the presidential candidates they cover – find common ground as they opened proceedings.

“It’s election night in America, in one of the closest and most consequential presidential races ever,” proclaimed CNN. “This is it, America! It’s time for you to decide the most unprecedented election of our times,” declared Fox News.

As is traditional with US elections, the news of the first polls to close was as dramatic as watching paint dry. The first-in-the-nation states to wrap up voting were Indiana and Kentucky, both reliably in Trump’s bag.

At 7pm on the east coast the temperature began to rise, with polls closing in six states that control 60 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the White House.

The first of the Big Seven battleground states to close its polling stations was Georgia.

More than 5 million Georgians are projected to have voted, exceeding 70% turnout in what is turning out to be an exceptionally passion-filled race. Early exit polls from Georgia gave some troubling food for thought for the Harris campaign.

While the vice-president did well with Black and young voters, edging up her margins on Biden’s four years ago, the exit polls recorded a sharp swing among independent voters, who make up 31% of the Georgia electorate.

Trump was recorded in the exit polls to be up by 54% to Harris’s 30% among these voters – an eye-popping contrast to 2020, when Biden was favoured by 9% over Trump among independents. It was an early, and isolated, finding – how it pans out through the hours ahead could prove instructive.

North Carolina, a state that has only gone Democratic in presidential races twice since 1976, is another of the battleground which both candidates have frantically sought and a must win for Trump.

And North Carolina did become the first of the contested battlegrounds to be called, while votes in six other swing states were still being counted, as a win for Trump.

As early counts came in, there were signs of Trump also narrowly edging ahead in key counties in Georgia. Should that razor-thin lead firm up, it would leave Harris having to win all three of the all-important Rust belt “blue wall” states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – to keep her hopes alive.

Relatively early in the evening, the North Carolina governor’s race was called for the Democrat, Josh Stein, over the embattled Republican lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, who CNN has linked to an online persona describing himself as a “black NAZI!”.

Robinson has denied the allegations. But the fear in the Trump camp is that his fall from grace may harm the former president’s chances.

As the night wore on, the Trump team expressed bullishness on their chances. Some had begun to talk about winning all three of the blue wall states – a phenomenon which, if it happened, would repeat how Trump tore down the wall in 2016.

Florida continued its relentless march to the ultra-right on election night. As recently as 2016, Florida was seen as one of the pre-eminent battleground states.

How different the Sunshine state looked on Tuesday, its 30 electoral college votes passing seemingly effortlessly to Trump. For the first time since 1988, the Miami region backed the Republican candidate.

That fits the increasingly intense love affair between Trump and Cuban Americans in southern Florida. Whether it speaks of a wider drift of Latino voters from the Democratic party will be closely interrogated in coming days.

Exit polls from Pennsylvania and Michigan both pointed to a similarly dramatic shift in the Hispanic vote towards Trump compared with four years ago, despite the controversy that erupted over the “island of garbage” remark made by a Trump surrogate at his Madison Square Garden rally.

Florida, one of 10 states with abortion rights on their ballot, also rejected an amendment that would have secured the right to an abortion up to fetal viability. That leaves standing the current state law, in which abortions are banned after six weeks, a point at which many women are not even aware they are pregnant.

As the first polls closed on the eastern seaboard, Trump and Harris retreated into their caves to await the coming storm. Both professed to have boundless confidence, though upon what basis was left to the imagination.

Trump, who voted in Palm Beach, Florida, near his Mar-a-Lago home-cum-club, had limped towards the finishing line, a final blitz of rallies across multiple battleground states leaving him sounding hoarse and looking haggard. No wonder – he has been at it for the past 721 days since he announced his presidential run, making Harris’s 92-day sprint seem like a cake-walk.

Even as he concluded his pitch for the presidency, Trump watered the seeds of potential election denial that he has planted in a chilling repetition of 2020. “If it’s a fair election, I’d be the first one to acknowledge it,” he told reporters as he emerged from the polling station, that “if” reverberating ominously in the air.

Harris spent election day at the Naval Observatory, the vice-president’s residence in Washington, enjoying a few hours out of the public glare until Tuesday night, when she was poised to deliver remarks at Howard University, her alma mater, in the same city.

As they awaited the people’s will, each candidate nursed their unique claim to history-in-the-making. Harris, 60, was bidding to be the first woman and woman of colour to occupy the Oval Office.

Trump, at 78, would be the oldest president in the same space. He would also be the first defeated president in 132 years to re-enter the White House, not to mention that most inconvenient truth – that he would be the first convicted felon to hold the most powerful job on earth.

The first tentative clues as to where the country might be headed were gleaned shortly after 5pm eastern time when an initial flurry of national exit poll data gave pundits something to talk about. Yet, typically for this most infuriatingly hard-to-read election cycle, there was plenty of red meat for both sides to chew on.

For Harris and her cohort of millions of terrified Americans, convinced that a second Trump presidency would usher in an era of authoritarian rule, there was the affirming result that voters placed “democracy” at the top of their list of concerns. At 35%, the category came in above even that perennial electoral priority, the economy, stupid (on 31%).

Abortion came in third at 14% – a warning sign for Trump, having orchestrated the abolition of the right to an abortion in Roe v Wade. Meanwhile, immigration, the issue that above all others Trump has hammered on the campaign trail for months, with his hordes of murdering, drug dealing “illegals” swamping the country, came in a lackluster fourth on 11%.

The Harris campaign will also have been heartened by a gaping gender gap revealed by exit polls, with the vice-president winning women by a whopping 12 points (55% to 43%). Trump was conversely ahead with men by nine points, but the telling difference is that women tend to vote in slightly larger proportions.

Democracy, abortion, the relatively low standing of immigration, gender gap. So game over?

Not so fast.

Over in Trumpworld, there were plenty of other contrasting reasons to be cheerful. Though the economy came in second in the list of voters’ issues, the figures beneath the headline were not good for Harris given her role as vice-president in the Biden administration.

Asked how they rated the state of the US economy, two-thirds of voters in the exit poll said not so good or poor. Three-quarters said they had experienced moderate or severe hardship from inflation.

Most punishingly for the Democratic candidate, asked whether voters felt better or worse off than four years ago – the exact same question with which Trump began every one of his Make Aamerica great again (Maga) rallies – 45% said worse off, with only 24% better off and 30% no change.

As a long night got into its stride, firm indications of the future that lies ahead remained elusive. That left plenty of room for anxieties to fester about what comes next.

At 4.39pm on election day, before any state had closed its polling stations, Trump began cranking up his election denial playbook, just as he had done in 2020. “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia,” he screeched on his platform Truth Social, alluding to a false claim that fake ballots had been distributed in the sate. “Law enforcement coming!!!”

“There is absolutely no truth to this allegation,” a Philadelphia election official, Seth Bluestein, promptly retorted.

Both sides have armies of lawyers at the ready, in anticipation of legal challenges on and after election day. And law enforcement agencies nationwide are on high alert for potential violence.

It all points to much more angst and waiting ahead for beleaguered American voters – whatever, and whenever we know, the outcome.

Maanvi Singh contributed reporting

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage