Harris backers dejected as they leave watch party after disappointing night for VP

Kamala Harris’s pathway to the White House looks all but over, as early voting totals across the US pointed to big Republican wins on Tuesday night and saw Donald Trump secure three key swing states.

The Republican presidential nominee currently stands within four Electoral College points of victory and has addressed his supporters at his campaign headquarters in Florida, declaring: “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”

Trump thanked his wife Melania and his children, who joined him on stage with their partners, also hailing his running mate JD Vance, campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles plus Robert F Kennedy Jr, UFC boss Dana White and golfer Bryson DeChambeau, who had championed his cause.

At the Democrat’s watch party at Howard University in Washington, campaign officials told the dwindling crowd late on Tuesday that the Vice President would not appear until tomorrow, with Harris never leaving her Naval Observatory residence.

The dour mood at Howard grew as Trump took quick leads in the Sun Belt states of North Carolina and Georgia, with most observers eventually calling them for the Republican, before the former president was projected to win pivotal Pennsylvania, a potential hammer blow to Harris’s hopes if it proves to be correct.

Meanwhile, The New York Times election needle projects there’s a 95 percent of a Trump victory based on current data, with the Republican forecast to win 306 out of the 270 necessary Electoral College votes.

The Times also currently forecasts Trump winning the swing states of Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Across 1,300 counties with 95 percent or more of their votes counted, Trump improved on his margins in at least 92 percent of them over 2020, according to a Politico analysis, though most of these counties aren’t in battlegrounds.

The red wave had top Trump backers like Elon Musk celebrating.

“Game, set and match,” he wrote on X on Tuesday evening, as he joined the former president’s election night watch party in Florida.

Harris had hoped to sweep the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to secure the White House, although that prospect now looks far from assured.

At the moment, Trump is leading Harris in Michigan 52.3 percent to 46 percent, with 59.4 percent of expected votes factored in.

The state, the cradle of the US auto industry, was seen as a key test of both candidates’ industrial bona fides, as well as a litmus test for how Michigan’s large population of Muslim and Arab-American voters would factor in each candidate’s position on the Israel-Hamas conflict and alleged genocide in Gaza.

In Wisconsin, meanwhile, Trump leads Harris 51.4 to 47.2, with 85 percent of votes in.

The Harris campaign said on Tuesday it hasn’t lost faith entirely.

“While we continue to see data trickle in from the Sun Belt states, we have known all along that our clearest path to 270 electoral votes lies through the Blue Wall states,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in an email to staff obtained by The Independent late Tuesday.

“And we feel good about what we’re seeing.”

The email said Harris was overperforming in turnout expectations in must-win Philadelphia, to the point it might top 2020 levels, and was expecting “strong turnout” in Detroit, where election results won’t be reported out until later tonight.

The Democratic campaign is also still awaiting results from parts of hotly contested Wisconsin, as well as West Coast battleground states Nevada and Arizona.

Trump is currently leading in both southwestern battlegrounds.

Elsewhere, despite warnings from famed Democratic strategist James Carville about the strength of some Trump performances in suburban areas such as Loudon County, Virginia, observers have called that state for Harris.