With three days still left for the 2020 election day, more than 90 million Americans have already cast their ballots in the contest between President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
The pandemic appears to be leading the U.S. to a much higher voter turnout in this Tuesday’s poll than in previous elections. Both candidates are in an overdrive mode to win over undecided voters in swing states.
A survey of election officials in all 50 states and Washington, DC, carried out jointly by CNN, Edison Research, and Catalist, discloses that nearly 43% of registered voters have nationally already cast their ballots – through in-person early voting or mail-in ballots.
According to a CNN report, fourteen states have reported more than half of their voters have cast their ballots while Texas and Hawaii have already overtaken their 2016 election turnout.
In pre-election surveys, Trump trails Biden in national opinion polls due mainly to us response to the pandemic. The U.S. has lost more than 228,000 people to the pandemic that swept the country early this year.
Trump, who this month recovered from COVID-19, claims the US is “rounding the curve” on coronavirus.
“There’s no nation in the world that’s recovered like we’ve recovered,” Trump told a political rally on Friday night.
Biden, on the other hand, continues to attack Trump’s record, saying his failures have made life harder for the middle class and resulted in a healthcare disaster.
There are around a dozen battleground states that could go either way and decide the outcome in the extraordinary circumstances created by the coronavirus pandemic. Apart from the massive health and economic challenges, race issue could be the decisive factors.
In the backdrop of the Trump Administration’s policies, several communities including African Americans, Hispanics and Muslims are reported taking part in the election vigorously in several states.
More than 3.45 million Muslims live across the United States in a population of over 328 million. In the November 3 election, 240 million eligible to vote.
“Muslim Americans have become so politicized,” an official of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, Dalia Mogahed, says.
“They command way more attention than their numbers would suggest makes any sense. They’re oner percent of the population, yet talked about, discussed, scapegoated so often. So, it’s really important that if they’re going to be talked about that they also have a voice, that they also have a place at the table,” Dalia said, according to a report.
In September, Biden said this about Trump accepting the election results: “I will accept it, and he will, too. You know why? Because once the winner is declared once all the ballots are counted, that’ll be the end of it.”
Though there may be some uncertainty about the results’ timing, there is no ambiguity about the process followed to determine the winner.
A Real Clear Politics indicates Biden comfortably placed to win more than 270 electoral votes from a college of 538 electorates, elected by the people.
But swing states like Florida with 29 votes and Pennsylvania with 20 votes, which are neither blue nor red and which Trump won in 2016, could decide the election.
