President Donald Trump won Florida, the nation’s most prized battleground state, as he and Democrat Joe Biden on Tuesday battled to the finish of an epic campaign that will shape America’s response to the surging pandemic and foundational questions of economic fairness and racial justice.
The two men were locked in tight races across the country, with Trump also claiming the battlegrounds of Ohio and Iowa while Biden won Minnesota and Iowa, two modest prizes the president had hoped to steal.
Florida has 29 electoral votes, the biggest prize among the perennial battlegrounds. Ohio has 18 electoral votes, and Biden had tightened the race in recent months.
A victory in Florida means reelection is within Trump’s grasp. A loss in the state would have made it nearly impossible for Trump to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to retain the White House.
Democrat Joe Biden’s campaign had hoped the devastating toll of the coronavirus pandemic, particularly among older adults, would put him in a strong position in a state popular with retirees.
Races were too early to call in some of other fiercely contested and critical states on the map, including North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The president, by early Wednesday, had retained many states he won in 2016 and, as long predicted, the race in part seemed to rest on the three northern industrial states where Trump most surprised the Democrats four year ago Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
In 2016, Trump saw notable support from blue-collar manufacturing and mining communities disenchanted with his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, and buoyed by the Republican’s promise to bring back jobs to their hard-hit communities.
Biden saw the gap as overly daunting early on but seized an opening in the closing months amid Trump’s softening support among college-educated suburban women. The campaign responded with a summer ad blitz and string of in-person campaign appearances.
Florida was the biggest, fiercely contested battleground on the map, with both campaigns battling over its 29 Electoral College votes.
Trump adopted Florida as his new home state, wooed its Latino community, particularly Cuban-Americans, and held rallies there incessantly. For his part, Biden deployed his top surrogate — President Barack Obama — there twice in the campaign’s closing days and benefitted from a $100 million pledge in the state from Michael Bloomberg.