Trump is ahead: Five things you need to know about the US election now

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Trump is ahead: Five things you need to know about the US election now Andreas Ross • 22 min. • 3 minutes reading time All polling stations are closed, and the counting is also going faster in the seven swing states than many feared. An overview of the current state of affairs. Donald Trump is almost impossible to catch... At least if Fox News is right: The conservative broadcaster has decided that Kamala Harris no longer has a chance of getting Pennsylvania's 19 electoral votes. The other broadcasters have also already awarded the Republican two important swing states: North Carolina and Georgia. North Carolina was the only one of the seven particularly contested states that Trump had already won in 2020, when Democrat Joe Biden clearly won the White House. In Georgia, however, Biden won by less than 12,000 votes. Trump is also ahead in all other swing states, but the counting status is still significantly different. In this respect, the political map of the United States currently resembles that of 2016, when Trump won significantly more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton. Trump, who had already won significantly more votes in 2020 than any other Republican presidential candidate before him despite his defeat, was able to significantly increase his result in many dozens of counties, according to preliminary results. ...but Kamala Harris is not yet giving up While Trump's supporters were already cheering in Mar-a-Lago, the Harris campaign practically sent the Democratic supporters to bed at around 11 p.m. Eastern Time (5 a.m. here): they would have to wait for Wednesday morning. They were still hoping that the three swing states in the northeast - Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin - would turn "blue" again as the counting progressed. An hour and a half later, it no longer looks like that. Pennsylvania is the most important swing state because it has 19 electoral votes. The phenomenon of the "Republican fake victory" was evident there in 2020: For a long time it looked like Trump would win, but when the mail-in votes were finally counted, Biden was back in the lead. But early on election night it was unlikely that history would repeat itself: Slightly fewer Americans voted by mail than during the pandemic, and the proportion of Democrats among them is unlikely to be quite as high as in 2020, when Trump consistently demonized mail-in voting. The Republicans already have the Senate in their pocket... Harris and Biden's party suffered a painful defeat when Senator Sherrod Brown was defeated by his Republican challenger Bernie Moreno in Ohio. This means that the Republicans are virtually certain of a narrow majority in the Senate; most recently the Democrats had the say there. As expected, the Democrats also lost the mandate in West Virginia, where the former "right-wing Democrat" Joe Manchin did not run again. If Donald Trump returns to the White House, he can be doubly happy, because the long-time Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has announced that he will not seek the office of majority leader again. McConnell has repeatedly opposed Trump. ...but both can still hope in the House of Representatives So far, the Democrats have been able to celebrate: at least they have been able to win back one of the eagerly awaited congressional districts in the state of New York, where the Republicans took the parliamentary mandate from them two years ago. In other districts, the counting is still ongoing. So it remains very close. In the current Congress, the Republicans have a very narrow majority in the larger chamber. Biden was therefore dependent on compromises with the Republicans. The Republicans are currently hoping to win the White House and a majority in both chambers of Congress, as they did in the 2016 election. The difference from then: today the Republican factions are much more on Trump's course, many prominent Trump opponents have been voted out of office in recent years or did not run again. Kamala Harris has missed important targets The first results of the post-election polls suggest that Kamala Harris has missed important targets. Contrary to what many pollsters expected, she does not appear to have increased her lead among female voters on average nationally. The candidate was apparently not able to win significantly more female voters than Joe Biden in 2020. Polls from some states, such as Georgia, suggest that the black candidate performed slightly worse among black voters than Biden in 2020. And at least in some states, Trump was apparently able to win significantly more votes from Latinos than in 2020.