New York: President-elect Donald Trump has completed a clean sweep of the seven swing states with media announcing him the winner in Arizona, the last state for the results to be known.
With Arizona’s 11 votes in the Electoral College, Trump now leads with 312 seats to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 226.
Based on its analysis of the counting trend, the Associated Press news agency announced on Saturday night the result in Arizona, even though counting was still in progress.
The results were held up by the slow counting in the state’s Maricopa County, parts of which includes a House of Representatives constituency where an Indian American Democrat is locked in a tight race.
The Republican candidate was ahead of Amish Shah by 4.4 per cent of the votes, with 11 per cent still to be counted.
Arizona was the last of the swing states – and the final state – for the results to be known, although Trump had been declared the winner by Wednesday morning when his tally crossed 270 electoral votes in the 538-member Electoral College based on the results from states at that point.
In the Electoral College system, the president is elected not by the number of popular votes but by the seats won in the body.
With the other states almost evenly divided firmly in the the camp of either party, the swing states – also known as the battleground states – have an inordinate influence in determining the winner and Harris and Trump spent most of their energies campaigning there.
The RealClear Polling aggregation of polls showed Trump ahead by only 2.8 per cent of the votes, but the AP tally showed him ahead by 6.1 per cent.
In a rout for pollsters, he carried the elections in all the seven states by larger margins than predicted, including Wisconsin and Michigan, where the aggregation showed Harris winning.
Unlike in 2016, when Trump did not get the majority of the popular votes but won with the number of Electoral College votes, this time he is ahead in popular votes also.
Arizona is a border state where Latinos make up 30.1 per cent of the population.
President Joe Biden had won the state in 2020 by about 10,000 votes, less than 0.5 per cent.
The Harris campaign’s expected that Trump promising firm action against illegal migrants, a majority of whom come from Latin American countries, and some of his supporters’ racist remarks against the community, would rally them to vote for her.
But that did not materialise and nationally Trump has weaned away Latino voters from the Democratic Party, increasing the proportion of votes from them to 46 per cent compared to 35 per cent in the last election, still leaving the Democrats with a small lead, according to AP polling.
The Latino voters are legal immigrants or were born in the US and the immigration issue did not resonate with them as a communal issue that Democrats made it to be.
The common issues of price rise and the economic and social fallout from high illegal migration swung the Latinos.
In the absence of a national election body, by tradition, the AP first declares the results based on the counting trend and the historical data, and the official declaration comes days or weeks later after military and postal votes are cleared.
About its methodology, the AP says it “only declares a winner once it can determine that a trailing candidate can’t close the gap and overtake the vote leader”.
(IANS)
