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US election as it happened: National Guard on standby over fears of unrest as Donald Trump and Joe Biden hit last day of campaign trail in swing states

Updated November 3, 2020 — 10:09pm,first published November 3, 2020 — 6:37am

Summary

President Donald Trump and Democrat presidential hopeful Joe Biden embarked on their final day of campaigning. Biden focused his efforts on Pennsylvania and Ohio while Trump held five rallies across North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Also on the campaign trail was former president Barack Obama. He campaigned for Biden in Georgia and Florida on Monday, US time, criticising Trump's coronavirus response and attitude towards race issues.
Two tiny New Hampshire communities that vote just after the stroke of midnight on election day have cast their ballots. The results in Dixville Notch, on the Canadian border, were a sweep for Biden who won the town's five votes. In nearby Millsfield, Trump won 16 votes to Biden's five.
More than 98 million Americans have cast their votes early in the 2020 presidential election, according to a University of Florida tally. The figure is about 71 per cent of the total vote recorded in 2016.
Trump has indicated he would take legal action to stop the tabulation of ballots arriving after election day. But on Monday (US time), Texas ruled 127,000 drive-in ballots would be counted after Republicans questioned their legality. The President also suggested to supporters he would fire the country's top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci after he criticised the government.

10.09pm on Nov 3, 2020

Time to vote: Americans brace for an election day unlike any other

Thank you for joining us today as President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden made their final charges across battleground states in America's midwest and their final pitches to voters.

This is where I will leave you tonight. My colleagues Megan Levy and Latika Bourke will bring you the latest developments from the US from 8am local time (midnight AEDT). Head over here to join them.

Millions of Americans will cast ballots tomorrow (Tuesday, US time) in an election day unlike any other, braving the threat of COVID-19 and the potential for violence and intimidation after one of the most polarising presidential races in US history.

In and around polling places across the country, reminders of a 2020 election year shaped by pandemic, civil unrest and bruising political partisanship will greet voters, although more than 98 million ballots have been already submitted in an unprecedented wave of early voting.

Many will wear masks to the polls — either by choice or by official mandate — with the coronavirus outbreak raging in many parts of the country.

Some voters in major US cities will see businesses boarded up as a precaution against politically motivated vandalism, an extraordinary sight on election day in the United States, where voting is typically peaceful in the modern era.

In New York City, the Macy's department store and the skyscraper that houses the Trump-favoured Fox News channel are among the buildings that have been boarded up. On Rodeo Drive, one of the most expensive shopping streets in California's Beverley Hills, staff have stripped the display windows at Tiffany & Co. and Van Cleef & Arpels of their jewels.

The tensions surrounding this year's presidential election were in the air today in the gun section of the Buchanan Trail Sporters store in the small town of McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania.

"No matter who gets in they have a feeling there will be some civil unrest," said Sally Hoover, the shop's co-owner.

Hoover is supporting President Donald Trump.

"These people around here aren't going to go looking for the fight," Hoover said. "But if the fight comes to them, they are going to defend their property and way of life."

with Reuters

10.04pm on Nov 3, 2020

Recap: The final sprint to election day

After a campaign marked by rancour and fear, Americans will tomorrow (Tuesday, US time) decide between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, selecting a leader to steer a nation battered by a surging pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 people, cost millions their jobs and reshaped daily life.

Let's look back at what happened on this final day of campaigning:

There is a good chance that the result of the election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump won't be known on November 3.Shutterstock

There was the legal wrangling that has been a feature of this campaign even before election day, with a federal judge in Texas on Monday rejecting Republican efforts to invalidate more than 127,000 votes that were cast at drive-through locations in a Democratic stronghold.
There was the plywood going up in Washington and other cities around the country, amid fears that the passions being stirred up by the campaign could lead to unrest or even violence, with some states readying members of the National Guard.
And there were efforts to set expectations, as the Biden campaign and social media giants like Facebook and Twitter reminded voters that the results of the election may not be known on Tuesday.
Dr Deborah Birx, who helps lead the Trump administration’s coronavirus response, delivered a stark private warning to White House officials on Monday, telling them that the pandemic is entering a new and "deadly phase" that demands a more aggressive approach.
The President, meanwhile, stuck to his usual campaign playback of blitzing from rally to rally and state to state. He appeared in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and then returned to Michigan for one final, late-night push, in the same place he ended his 2016 campaign.
At his fifth and final rally of the day in Michigan, Trump promised America will land the first woman on the moon, and land an astronaut on Mars.
"We're going to have a red wave. They call it a great red wave, like nobody's ever seen before. I think we're going to win everything," Trump told his ardent supporters.
Biden appeared in the battlegrounds of Ohio and Pennsylvania, where he ended the day with a live-streamed drive-in rally event held alongside his running mate Kamala Harris with performances from Lady Gaga and John Legend.
"Tomorrow we have an opportunity to put an end to a presidency that’s divided this nation," Biden said. "Tomorrow we can put an end to a presidency that has failed to protect this nation. And tomorrow we can put an end to a presidency that’s fanned the flames of hate all across this country."

with The New York Times, AP

9.24pm on Nov 3, 2020

Election unprecedented some ways, in others not

The election of 2020 has been called many things: extraordinary, bizarre, unprecedented.

It’s all true, in some ways, though the election is still being held on the first Tuesday (US time) after the first Monday of November, and a Democrat or a Republican will win it.

The differences start with a couple of future trivia answers:

This is the first time a Black woman has been nominated by a major party.
It’s the first time both presidential nominees have been in their 70s.
It is the first time a presidential election has been held in the throes of a deadly pandemic that has affected every corner of the country. (A 1918 midterm election, in the midst of the Spanish flu pandemic, saw voter participation drop 20 per ceng — although the fact that 2 million men were fighting in World War I also had an effect. By the time Republican Warren G. Harding won in 1920, the flu had passed.)

Democratic vice presidential-candidate Kamala Harris - the first Black woman to be nominated for the position.AP

This year, the pandemic has sparked an unmatched shift to early voting, by mail or otherwise, and rising expectations that days or weeks might pass before the outcome is known.

While Americans have become accustomed to learning who would be their next president on election night, that would be far from unprecedented. Until 1937, presidents were inaugurated in March, partly because it took so long to report and count the vote.

And of course, the 2000 election was not resolved until December 12, when the US Supreme Court made George W. Bush the winner by ruling that Florida must stop counting votes.

President Donald Trump has seized on concern about mail voting to repeatedly suggest that the election is beset by fraud - the first time a major candidate, let alone a sitting president, has sought to undermine faith in the electoral process.

One more pandemic-inspired departure from the norm: While Trump has campaigned furiously, jetting from town to town, until recently Biden stayed in or near his home in Delaware, sparing himself and his followers the risk of contracting COVID-19.

That’s unheard of in recent years, but it also was a throwback to the front-porch campaigns of James A. Garfield, Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley in the 19th century — and Harding in the 20th. Like Biden, they did not go out to campaign. The campaign came to them.

9.17pm on Nov 3, 2020

They lost the popular vote, but won the elections

Five times in US history, candidates have lost the popular vote but won the presidency — most recently in 2016. Could Donald Trump be the first to do it twice?

A look at an American political anomaly:

Republican George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by more than 500,000 votes.AP

1824: Andrew Jackson won pluralities of both the popular vote and the Electoral College, but not a majority, sending the election to the House of Representatives. There were three other candidates: John Quincy Adams, William Crawford and Henry Clay. Clay threw his support to Adams, sealing the victory for Adams, who made Clay his secretary of state. Irate at this “corrupt bargain,” Jackson quit the Senate and ran again for president in 1828. That time, he won easily.

1876: Democrat Samuel Tilden beat Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by more than 200,000 votes. But he needed 185 Electoral College votes and got only 184 to Hayes’s 165; 20 votes in Florida, Louisiana, Oregon and South Carolina were disputed. Congress set up a commission composed of representatives of both parties to decide the winner. On March 2, three days before the inauguration, they chose Hayes - a compromise the Democrats agreed to in exchange for a promise to pull federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction.

1888: The campaign was riddled with corruption, including charges that votes were bought and Black votes suppressed. It ended with Democratic President Grover Cleveland winning the popular vote by more than 90,000 votes over Republican Benjamin Harrison, but losing the electoral vote 233 to 168. Cleveland would take back the office in the next presidential election.

2000: Republican George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by more than 500,000 votes. But the Electoral College vote was tight, and it all came down to Florida, where a recount devolved into disputes over the markings on individual ballots. On December 12, the US Supreme Court stopped the recount with Bush ahead in Florida, giving the election to the former Texas governor. Bush won 271 electoral votes, Gore 266.

2016: Trump won the Electoral College, 304 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton’s 227 — but lost the popular count by 2.8 million votes. Though the electorate has of course grown over the years, Trump lost the popular vote by a greater margin than anyone ever elected president.

9.08pm on Nov 3, 2020

'One shot, one opportunity': New Biden ad uses Eminem classic

Eminem has revealed his support for Biden, allowing his hit single Lose Yourself to be used in the latest campaign ad for the Democratic nominee.

The ad, filmed in black and white, features the rapper's famous lyrics:

You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime.

8.55pm on Nov 3, 2020

'I voted': Plastic cover protects Susan Anthony's headstone

Americans putting "I Voted" stickers on women's suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony's headstone will see something new this year: a plastic cover.

Her headstone, in a cemetery in Rochester, New York, now has a shield to prevent further degradation to the marble from the stickers' glue and glue remover, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported.

Gavin Neville, 72, places an 'I Voted' sticker on the grave of women's rights advocate Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, New York, today (Monday, US time).AP

Her sister Mary's headstone, just next to hers, has also been protected.

The sticker trend became popular on election day 2016, said Patricia Corcoran, president of the non-profit Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery. That day, as many as 12,000 people visited Mount Hope Cemetery, the sisters' final resting place, to honour the work done by Anthony to win women's suffrage and to memorialise the first time Americans could vote for a female major-party presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.

A restoration effort earlier this year revealed the damage done to the marble marker by the stickers, Corcoran said.

The non-profit's main mission is the cemetery’s preservation, "so above all we wanted to protect this iconic gravesite," she said.

The headstone could be a popular destination this year, too, because it's the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

It's also the 200th anniversary of Anthony’s birth, and Kamala Harris, Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s running mate, is the first woman of colour to be nominated for national office by a major party.

All reasons to stick an "I voted" on the headstone.

8.52pm on Nov 3, 2020

The history of the 'blue belt' in the South

American radio host and science journalist, Latif Nasser, who is best known for hosting Netflix web documentary Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything, has shared a fascinating story behind the Democratic "blue belt" in America's South.

The so-called blue belt is a thin line of states (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and into the Carolinas) that have long voted Democrat, surrounded by a sea of red Republican states.

View post on X

Geoscientist Steve Dutch noticed the significance of the blue line in 2000, Nasser explains on Twitter. "My geologist’s eye was immediately drawn to this arc," Dutch wrote, because it seemed to follow the shoreline of North America back in the Cretaceous period.

(The Cretaceous was a period with a relatively warm climate, resulting in high eustatic sea levels that created numerous shallow inland seas. These oceans and seas were populated with now-extinct marine reptiles.)

Nasser notes that the blue line exists where farmers flocked in the 1800s to set up vast cotton plantations on the highly fertile soils where that shoreline once was.

View post on X

"They force enslaved people of African descent to work as long as 18 hour days picking cotton," Nasser writes.

"Booker T Washington summed it up: 'The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers' ...

"By emancipation, many African-American families stayed in the Black Belt, despite conditions barely changing for them. I asked historian Bertis English why they stayed. He told me that many didn’t know where else to go, and even if they did, were too poor to get there ...

"And yes, since most African Americans vote and have voted Democrat, the reason the swoosh appears election after election for the last 50 years or so is … the descendants of enslaved people.

8.34pm on Nov 3, 2020

Experiencing a revival: Election cake, a forgotten recipe

For a baking project that will keep you from US election day doom-scrolling, look to a centuries-old American tradition: the election cake. The cake, which has become more obscure in recent years, has seen an increase in Google searches in the past few days.

In the past, the cake was served after voters did their civic duty.

A recipe for election cake appeared in American Cookery, a cookbook published in 1796. The above is much more recent.James Ransom/The New York Times

The finished product falls somewhere between a panettone and a dense fruitcake. (The earliest election cakes are said to have weighed as much as 5.4 kilograms, according to the society.)

This cake is also designed to keep well, a strong selling point for this particular election as results are expected to take a while.

Find the recipe here.

The New York Times

8.30pm on Nov 3, 2020

Twitter and Facebook to label early victory posts

In order to curb misinformation, Twitter and Facebook will label posts claiming an early victory in the US Presidential election.

8.24pm on Nov 3, 2020

Media's fascination with 'The Donald' knows no bounds

If you had any doubts over the level of media interest in US politics, consider this.

Donald Trump has appeared in more Australian media items this year than Prime Minister Scott Morrison, according to analysis by realtime media monitoring firm Streem.

Donald Trump, right, has appeared more in Australian media than our Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Trump overtook the PM in October, after his hospitalisation with coronavirus. He was the subject of 26,000 distinct media items last month alone, the highest monthly figure for any leader in 2020.

It was 35 per cent more than Mr Morrison in March, when a coronavirus-lockdown was first implemented.