Americans head to the polls with a historic election on a knife's edge US elections 2024

Election Day in America has arrived, and on Tuesday tens of millions of voters will go to the polls in one of the closest and most consequential election contests in modern U.S. history.

Democrat Kamala Harris and her Republican opponent Donald Trump appear to be locked in a knife-edge contest, with little light between the two in national opinion polls that have barely moved in weeks.

In the seven crucial swing states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina – the picture was the same. Recent polls have failed to identify a clear pattern or advantage for Harris or Trump in this election, although most experts agree that whoever wins the Rust Belt state of Pennsylvania will likely have a clear advantage.

“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole ball of wax,” Trump, 78, said at a rally in Reading, in the southeastern part of the state, during a hectic final day of campaigning in the state. Later, in Pittsburgh, he described the election as a choice between “a golden age of America” ​​if he returns to the White House or “four more years of misery, failure and disaster” under Harris.

Harris, 60, spent all of Monday in Pennsylvania and ended her event in Philadelphia, where she was joined by singer Lady Gaga and TV personality Oprah Winfrey, who warned of the threat Trump poses to democracy. “We can’t wait this out,” Winfrey said. “If we don’t show up tomorrow, it’s entirely possible we’ll never have the opportunity to cast a vote again.”

It is the swing states that decide the election, because in the complex American political system the outcome is decided not by the nationwide popular vote but by an electoral college in which the number of voters in each state is roughly weighted by population. Each candidate needs 270 Electoral College votes to clinch victory, and the battleground consists of those states where polls suggest a state could go either way.

More than 78 million early ballots have been cast, but the result may not be announced quickly. Due to close polls, it is unlikely that full results in the crucial swing states will be available on Tuesday evening and may not be announced until Wednesday, leaving the US and the world in uncertainty as to who will emerge as America's next president could.

The election caps a remarkable and in many ways unprecedented campaign that has deeply divided American society and increased the stress levels of many of its citizens amid warnings of unrest, especially in a scenario in which Harris wins and Trump challenges the result.

Harris has consistently focused her campaign on the autocratic threat that Trump poses. In her last major signing event, Harris hosted a rally of 75,000 supporters on the Ellipse in Washington – the site where Trump encouraged his supporters to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“If Donald Trump were elected on Day 1, he would walk into his office with an enemies list. If I'm elected, I'm going to come in with a to-do list full of priorities about what I'm going to do for the American people,” Harris told the crowd.

Harris' campaign has tried to portray a sidebar over the Trump era and the threat of his return to the White House. She acknowledged that labeling Trump a fascist was an appropriate reflection of his political beliefs and the intentions of his movement, but stressed that it represented a decision that benefited all sides of America's deeply fractured political landscape.

Trump, meanwhile, has run a campaign driven by a sense of deep personal grief over his legal travails and the perception among many of his supporters of a moribund America under threat from Democrats. This sense of victimhood has been fueled by lies and conspiracy theories that baselessly portrayed Biden and Harris as far-left figures who have ruined the American economy with high inflation and an obsession with identity politics.

Trump has also put immigration and border security at the center of his campaign, portraying America as overrun with crime caused by illegal immigration and often spiraling into outright racism and fear-mongering. He called undocumented immigrants “animals” with “bad genes” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

The vast differences between the two campaigns and the language used by the candidates – particularly from Trump and his allies – have led to widespread fears of violence or unrest as Election Day progresses and particularly as the counting continues. In the run-up to Election Day, ballot boxes used for early voting were destroyed in several US states.

At the same time, it was Trump himself who was the victim of two assassination attempts during the election campaign. At a rally in Pennsylvania, an assassin's bullet grazed his ear, and at a golf course in Florida, a gunman lay in wait for an ambush but was thwarted by a sharp-eyed Secret Service agent before he could open fire. Neither shooter seemed consistently politically motivated or definitively on one side or the other.