Donald Trump wins Pennsylvania, leaving him 3 electoral votes shy of clinching the White House

Donald Trump won Pennsylvania early Wednesday, putting him just three electoral votes shy of defeating Kamala Harris to win the White House.

A win in Alaska or any of the outstanding battleground states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona or Nevada — would send the Republican former president back to the Oval Office.

Pennsylvania, a part of the once-reliable Democratic stronghold known as the “blue wall” with Michigan and Wisconsin, was carried by Trump when he first won the White House in 2016 and then flipped back to Democrats in 2020. Trump also flipped Georgia, which had voted for Democrats four years ago, and retained the closely contested state of North Carolina.

Trump’s gains sharply curtailed Harris’ path to victory.

The crowd at Harris’ watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, began to file out after midnight after a top Harris ally sent supporters home, with no plans for the Democratic vice president to speak.

“We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted. That every voice has spoken,” Cedric Richmond, co-chair of the Harris campaign said. “So you won’t hear from the vice president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow. She will be back here tomorrow.”

Trump was set to address supporters early Wednesday from his campaign’s watch party in Florida.

Trump also won Florida, a one-time battleground that has shifted heavily to Republicans in recent elections. He also notched early wins in reliably Republican states such as Texas, South Carolina and Indiana. Harris won Virginia, a state Trump visited in the final days of the campaign, and took Democratic strongholds like New York, New Mexico and California. Harris also won New Hampshire and an Electoral College vote in Nebraska that was contested by Republicans.

The Trump campaign bet that it would cut into Democrats’ traditional strength with Black and Latino voters, with the former president going on male-centric podcasts and making explicit racial appeals to both groups. Nationally, Black and Latino voters appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than they were to back Joe Biden four years ago, and Trump’s support among those voters appeared to rise slightly compared to 2020, according to AP VoteCast.

The fate of democracy appeared to be a primary driver for Harris’ supporters, a sign that the Democratic nominee’s persistent messaging in her campaign’s closing days accusing Trump of being a fascist may have broken through, according to the expansive survey of more than 110,000 voters nationwide. It also found a country mired in negativity and desperate for change. Trump’s supporters were largely focused on immigration and inflation — two issues that the former Republican president has been hammering since the start of his campaign.

In his recent visits to North Carolina, Trump seized on the heavy damage caused Hurricane Helene, spreading false claims about the federal government’s response and using GoFundMe to collect millions in donations for impacted residents. Trump initially trumpeted the Republican nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, and hailed him as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” but distanced himself after a CNN report that alleged Robinson had made explicit racial and sexual posts on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago.

Robinson, who lost his race Tuesday to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, denied writing the messages and sued CNN for defamation last month.

In another positive sign for the GOP, the party took control of the Senate, with Trump-backed Bernie Moreno flipping a seat in Ohio held by Democrat Sherrod Brown since 2007. They picked up another when Republican Jim Justice won a West Virginia seat that opened up with Sen. Joe Manchin’s retirement.

Those casting Election Day ballots mostly encountered a smooth process, with isolated reports of hiccups that regularly happen, including long lines, technical issues and ballot printing errors. Federal election security officials said there were minor disruptions throughout the day but there was no evidence of any impact to the election system. Officials determined that bomb threats that were reported in multiple states were all not credible and did not impact the ability of voters to cast their ballots.

Harris, 60, would be the first woman, Black woman and person of South Asian descent to serve as president. She also would be the first sitting vice president to win the White House in 36 years.

Trump, 78, would be the oldest president ever elected. He would also be the first defeated president in 132 years to win another term in the White House, and the first person convicted of a felony to take over the Oval Office.

He survived one assassination attempt by millimeters at a July rally. Secret Service agents foiled a second attempt in September.

Harris, pointing to the warnings of Trump’s former aides, has labeled him a “fascist” and blamed Trump for putting women’s lives in danger by nominating three of the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. In the closing hours of the campaign, she tried to strike a more positive tone and went all of Monday without saying her Republican opponent’s name.

Voters nationwide also were deciding thousands of other races that will decide everything from control of Congress to state ballot measures on abortion access in response to the Supreme Court’s vote in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade.

In Florida, a ballot measure that would have protected abortion rights in the state constitution failed after not meeting the 60% threshold to pass, marking the first time a measure protecting abortion rights failed since Roe was overturned. Earlier Tuesday, Trump refused to say how he voted on the measure and snapped at a reporter, saying, “You should stop talking about that.”

In reliably Democratic New York, Colorado and Maryland, voters approved ballot measures aimed at protecting abortion rights in their state constitutions.

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Trump’s Huge Gains With Black Men Demonstrate Power of His Populist Party Realignment

Former President Donald Trump really is building a multiracial populist coalition that is remaking American politics.

Of all the trends on Tuesday night that stand out, one of the most remarkable ones is the shift in the black vote to the right. The shift was especially pronounced with black men.

Trump appears to have made significant inroads with black Americans, at least according to some of the preliminary exit-polling data. Several state exit polls show the former president picking up a much larger percentage of the black vote than he did in either 2020 or 2016.

Early exit polls released by CNN and Fox News showed Trump winning about 20% of black men in North Carolina and Georgia, and getting double digits among black voters in general. According to Politico, that’s a significant shift from 2020, “when Trump won 11% of black voters in Georgia and just 7% in North Carolina.”

It wasn’t just Georgia and North Carolina, however. Exit polls from NBC indicated a large shift in the black vote toward Trump in Wisconsin, as well.

“This year, Trump is pulling about 20% of the black vote, versus 78% for Harris,” NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns wrote on X. “Four years ago, Trump won only about 8% of black voters in the Badger State.”

While there will certainly be more data in the days to come, there’s little doubt that at least some shift in the black vote has taken place. That’s after years of hysterical media screeching about how Trump is a racist and that Republicans want Jim Crow 2.0.

It turns out that the man who Democrats tried to portray as fascist and Hitler in their closing arguments to the American people did very well with a long list of minorities.

Maybe the bigger issue here is the increasing irrelevancy of the corporate media to drive narratives, but that’s a longer discussion for another day.

Something is happening in American politics that goes beyond Trump doing better with black men, who have actually just followed the general trend of men leaning toward the GOP.

What Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini and others have called a “multiracial populist coalition” is remaking American politics.

No longer can racial blocs be counted on to monolithically vote Democrat. Our politics are being de-racialized, despite the relentless attempts by elite institutions to fit Americans into narrow categories and pit them against each other.

Janiyah Thomas, the Trump campaign’s director of black media, explained what Trump’s message was to black voters before the election.

“Trump and Team Trump have been dedicated to the black community, meeting in our neighborhoods, listening to our voices, hopes and fears as we work to make America great again, not only for us, but for future generations,” Thomas said in the video, according to The Hill. “To President Trump, you are not just voters. You are the heart and very soul of this great nation.”

Thomas criticized former President Barack Obama, who chastised black men for not supporting Vice President Kamala Harris.

“That isn’t empowerment; it’s intimidation. It’s a direct insult to our intelligence, and they are questioning our ability to think for ourselves,” she said. “Black people deserve a leader who empowers us, not a leader who wants to control us. We deserve more than words. We deserve a leader who delivers results. [Vice President Kamala Harris] may have broken our country, but Trump will fix it.”

Maybe, just like other Americans, there are a lot of black men who are also fed up with the chaos brought about by the Biden-Harris administration’s open-borders policies. Maybe there are black Americans who are dealing with the rising cost of living and inflation.

And while Democrats are obsessed with capital “D” diversity and cultural revolution, Trump offered them a positive vision for success. 

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