Donald Trump has stormed into the lead in the US presidential election, winning two of the key swing states in early voting returns.
The Republican candidate has won the battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia, as well as having the advantage in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Kamala Harris would need to win all three of the latter, the so-called “Blue Wall”, to survive.
Raucous cheers went up in the Trump campaign headquarters as he won in Iowa, overturning an influential poll which had predicted his defeat.
In Mar-A-Lago, the Florida resort where Trump was holding an election night party, the mood was buoyant as the 78-year-old former president appeared to be outperforming polls which had long put the race on a knife edge.
The price of Bitcoin surged to a record $75,000 (£58,000), as crypto-currency investors leant towards an expected Trump win.
The Harris campaign placed its hopes on overturning Trump’s advantage in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, pointing out that many urban centres likely to lean Democrat had not yet had their votes counted.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris campaign chief, told staffers to go home and get some sleep late on Tuesday night as she did not expect the race to be called for several hours.
While some attendees at a Democrat party in Allentown, Pennsylvania, tried to remain positive, others have been more candid about how things are looking for Ms Harris.
One Harris campaign source looked morose as he watched a CNN screen with a scotch and soda in his hand.
“It’s not feeling great at the moment”, he said, grimacing.
Harris supporters rapidly left the watch party at Howard University, the Democratic candidate’s alma matter, on Tuesday night.
Ms Harris has decided not to address the crowd, her campaign said.
Trump’s senior advisors pointed to a significant increase in the Latino vote for their candidate, with one exit poll indicating a surge among men in particular, with Trump rising 18 points to a majority of 54 per cent.
Early results in Florida show a large jump in Latino support for Republicans.
In counties with over 60 per cent Hispanic electorates, the Republican has seen his vote share increase by four points.
In the bellwether county of Pinellas, where over 80 per cent of the vote has been tallied, Trump has secured 52 per cent of the total, a three-point jump on 2020.
Pinellas has predicted the winner of every election since 2004.
Trump’s success with Latinos comes despite a major campaign gaffe last month where a comedian at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden compared Puerto Rico to a floating island of “garbage”.
Trump also appeared to be making gains with black voters, a further constituency targeted by his campaign.
In another key bellwether of Baldwin County, Georgia, an area with a large black population that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Trump was in the lead.
According to an NBC exit poll in Wisconsin, one of the key swing states, Trump won 20 per cent of black voters.
In 2020, he secured only 8 per cent.
Meanwhile, the Democrats hold on the “Blue Wall” appeared to be slipping.
In Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, which includes Joe Biden’s home town of Scranton, the vote has swung to the Republicans by around 5 points in early voting returns.
According to an exit poll from NBC, Trump has a six-point advantage among independents in Pennsylvania, which carries 19 electoral college votes.
It meant that as America’s eastern seaboard approached midnight, it appeared increasingly likely that Mr Trump would win the Presidency.
The New York Times put his chances as high as 89 per cent.
Such a result would make history in becoming the first time a former president who had been voted out of office returned to the White House while preventing the historic moment of the first female US president.
It came amid a sombre mood at Democrat headquarters, at Howard University, in Washington DC, where boos rang out earlier as a live CNN broadcast was projected onto big screens that reported Trump’s early lead in the polls.
The Vice President secured the nomination unopposed late in the race after Joe Biden was persuaded to withdraw, meaning she was not subjected to the scrutiny of a primary process.
Democrat hopes had been raised earlier in the night by an exit poll indicating that abortion was a more important issue to many voters than immigration.
The red shift among Latino voters is complex, but analysts believe that Trump’s two main campaign issues ─ the economy and immigration ─ are main concerns of that group.
Latinos are more likely to be economically insecure and earn less than white voters, which has made them vulnerable to high levels of inflation during the Biden administration.
He has also said that he will “seal” the southern US border, which some Latinos believe would give them greater job security.
In other electoral races, Sarah McBride, a Delaware state legislator, won her contest for the House of Representatives, making her the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.
Meanwhile, vote counting in Nevada has been thrown into chaos because young people cannot sign their own names, a state official has said.
Mail-in ballots in the state require voters’ signatures to match with signatures that officials already have on file in state or federal databases.
Many teenagers and people in their 20s have only signed their names electronically – and the versions they have written in by hand do not match up.
