Kamala Harris has lost her bid to become America’s first woman leader, as her Republican rival Donald Trump surged to a decisive victory in the US presidential election.
The vice-president is yet to speak or concede, despite it becoming clear by Wednesday morning that Trump had secured enough votes in key swing states to win.
Harris cancelled her expected election night appearance at Howard University in Washington DC, where she studied as an undergraduate, as Trump began to make steady gains.
He has now won enough key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin, to secure the presidency, with several states left to declare.
Early projections revealed that the key battleground states, which had swung back to the Democrats in the 2020 election, would be won by Trump again. He defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 by demolishing the Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump is also beating Harris in the popular vote – the first Republican to lead nationally since George W Bush in 2004.
As expected, Trump stormed to victory in conservative strongholds across the US, while Harris won liberal states from New York to California.
Harris saw a surge in popularity after she became the Democratic Party’s nominee in June following Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate.
Her team sought to strike a more optimistic vision than the portrait of American decay presented by Trump, focusing heavily on securing abortion rights.
Trump, by contrast, frequently targeted Harris with highly personal attacks during the campaign, variously calling the vice-president “stupid”, “lazy”, and “dumb as a rock”. He also questioned her racial identity during the early stages of the campaign.
The Democrat is expected to speak later on Wednesday. A senior Trump adviser told the BBC’s US partner CBS that they expected Harris to call the president-elect to concede defeat, a step Trump refused to take when he lost the 2020 election.
The vice-president was due to address supporters on Tuesday night, but campaign co-chairman Cedric Richmond announced shortly after midnight on that she would not attend.
“We still have votes to count,” he had said at the time.
The party-like atmosphere of a few hours earlier at Howard had already turned sour as two swing states were called for Trump. At Harris HQ, Democratic fundraiser Lindy Li told the BBC the mood was “pretty grim right now”.
The former California senator was running to become the first woman, black woman and South Asian-American to win the presidency.
CBS exit poll data suggests that the Democratic nominee may have under-performed with women.
Some 54% of female voters cast their ballots for her, below the 57% of women Joe Biden won in 2020.
Black and Latino voters also appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than they were to back Biden four years ago, according to Associated Press exit poll data.
The campaign faced criticism at times for its failure to expand on a a clear economic message, an issue which exit polls showed was extremely important to Americans who have faced several years of rising inflation.
About 86 million voters cast their ballots early during one of the most turbulent campaigns in recent American history.
The Republican party enjoyed a resurgence across the country, winning a number of key congressional battles in key states and taking back control of the Senate.
The Republicans wrested two seats in West Virginia and Ohio from the Democrats and saw off a stiff challenge in Texas.
Neither party seemed to have an overall edge in the House, which Republicans narrowly control.
If the party does regain control of both chambers, it would make it easier for Trump to push through his agenda – which includes mass deportations of illegal migrants and sweeping tax cuts.
Both sides had armies of lawyers on standby for legal challenges on and after election day. Despite some early lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign, the scale of his lead appeared to ward off any prospect of protracted legal battles.
Law enforcement agencies nationwide were also on high alert for potential violence.
About 30 hoax bomb threats targeted election-related locations nationwide on Tuesday, more than half of them in the state of Georgia alone, reports CBS.
North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.
