Election Day faces a difficult choice: Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump won the battleground state of North Carolina on Tuesday, fending off a challenge from Kamala Harris, who wanted to flip the state and extend her path to 270 electoral votes.

The former Republican president had made stops at the state in each of the last three days of the campaign to deprive Harris of the pick.

The Democratic vice president's campaign manager, Jen O'Malley Dillon, told staff in a memo after the polls closed that the “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was now the Democrats' “clearest path” to victory, it said in a copy obtained by The Associated Press.

Polls closed in additional polling places – Georgia, Arizona and Nevada – but results in all remaining swing states were too early to be announced.

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

The crowd at Harris' wake party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, began spilling out after midnight on Wednesday. Harris was not expected to speak at the party, according to a person who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose the vice president's schedule.

Trump was expected to speak from an event in Florida early Wednesday.

The Trump campaign assumed it would dent Democrats' traditional strength among black and Latino voters by having the former president appear on male-focused podcasts and make explicitly racist appeals to both groups. Nationally, Black and Latino voters appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than they did four years ago when they supported Joe Biden, and according to AP VoteCast, Trump's support among those voters appeared to increase slightly compared to 2020.

The fate of democracy appeared to be a key driving factor for Harris's supporters, a sign of the Democratic nominee's persistent accusations against Trump in the final days of her campaign be a fascist According to the extensive survey of more than 110,000 voters across the country, the breakthrough may have been achieved. It also revealed a country mired in negativity and desperate for change. Trump's supporters focused primarily on immigration and inflation – two issues the former Republican president has addressed since the start of his campaign.

During his recent visits to North Carolina, Trump seized on the severe damage caused by Hurricane Helene, spread false claims about the federal government's response and used GoFundMe to raise millions in donations for affected residents. Trump initially trumpeted Republican candidate for governor Mark Robinson, praising him as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” but distanced himself after a CNN report that claimed Robinson posted pornography on a message board website posted explicit racist and sexual posts more than a decade ago.

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

Another positive sign for the GOP was the party taking control of the Senate, with Trump-backed Bernie Moreno ousting an Ohio seat that Democrat Sherrod Brown had held since 2007. They picked up another when Republican Jim Justice won a seat in West Virginia that became vacant with the resignation of Sen. Joe Manchin.

Those who voted on election day mostly met a smooth processwith anecdotal reports of problems occurring on a regular basis, including long lines, technical problems and errors in printing ballots. Federal election security officials said there were minor disruptions throughout the day, but there was no evidence of any impact on the voting system. Officials determined that the bomb threats reported in several states were all unreliable and had no impact on voters' ability to cast their ballots.

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

Trump, 78, would be that 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 crime to take the Oval Office.

At a rally in July, he narrowly survived an assassination attempt. Secret service agents foiled a second attempt in September.

Harris cited the warnings of Trump's former advisers, calling him a “fascist” and accusing Trump of endangering women's lives by nominating three of the justices who overturned Roe vs. Wade. She tried to strike a more positive tone in the final hours of the campaign, going all day Monday without mentioning the name of her Republican opponent.

In response to the Supreme Court's 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, voters nationwide also decided thousands of other races that will decide everything from control of Congress to state ballot measures on abortion access.

In Florida, a ballot measure that would have protected abortion rights in the state constitution failed after failing to meet the 60 percent threshold. This was the first time since the repeal of Roe that a measure protecting abortion rights failed. Early Tuesday, Trump refused to say how he voted on the measure, snapping at a reporter and saying, “You should stop talking about it.”

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

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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in Palm Beach, Florida, Darlene Superville and Eric Tucker in Washington, Manuel Valdes in Las Vegas and Marc Levy in Allentown, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.