Donald Trump-Joe Biden election shatters turnout records

President Trump’s “America First” movement hung in the balance Tuesday night as voters turned out in record numbers to decide whether to reward Mr. Trump with a second term or switch to Democrat Joseph R. Biden in a year marred by a pandemic, economic lockdowns and street violence.

As the vote totals rolled in past midnight into early Wednesday morning, the president’s prospects for winning reelection appeared to be increasing. Major networks called Ohio for Mr. Trump around midnight, keeping the key swing state won by Mr. Trump in 2016 back in his column.

Early voting data across the sharply divided country suggested turnout would exceed 155 million, easily topping the previous record of 137.1 million in 2016.

Voters were also deciding 35 races for the U.S. Senate, where Republicans were defending a four-seat majority, and all 435 House seats nationwide.

The president received another boost by opening up a seemingly insurmountable lead in must-win Florida, the largest swing state with 29 electoral votes. He earned more than 50% support from Hispanic voters, a significant improvement from 2016, and also got more support from other non-White voters.

Mr. Trump also led among seniors, 52% to 47%, according to early exit polls. He led Mr. Biden in Florida by about 3.5 percentage points with more than 98% of the votes counted, triple his margin of victory from four years ago.

The president was holding a narrow lead of more than 1 percentage point over Mr. Biden in North Carolina, with more than 95 percent of the vote counted. Mr. Trump also won that state in 2016.

Mr. Trump was leading by several hundred thousand votes in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Michigan, and he led by a smaller margin in Wisconsin. One of the few places where Mr. Biden seemed well-positioned to flip a state that Mr. Trump won in 2016 was in Arizona. The Democrat led by about 8 percentage points with 75 percent of the votes reporting.

The former vice president had campaigned in the upper midwest to re-establish the traditionally Democratic “blue wall” of working-class states that Mr. Trump won four years ago. But after midnight, he had won only in Minnesota.

Mr. Biden also appeared to be on his way to losing in Georgia, a key target for Democrats this year.

Businesses boarded up in cities nationwide as merchants and law enforcement officials girded for violent demonstrations, depending on the outcome of the presidential election. More than 3,600 National Guard troops were activated across the country in anticipation of demonstrations and possible violence.

Before sundown, crowds began to gather at Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House, where a newly installed 8-foot-high metal fence surrounded the complex.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 554 points, or more than 2%, on hopes that the election would resolve a stalemate in Washington over a coronavirus relief package.

Biden campaign officials said the result of the presidential race might not be known for days, pending the counting of mail-in ballots in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina. But Mr. Trump stepped up his calls for a decisive result sometime late Tuesday night or early Wednesday.

“We’re going to have tremendous success,” a hoarse president told staffers during an early-afternoon visit to his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. “I think we’re going to have a great night, and much more importantly, we’re going to have a great four years.”

The president, who predicted he would win more than the 306 electoral votes he captured in 2016, invited several hundred guests to an election night party at the White House. Vice President Mike Pence conducted 21 last-minute radio and TV interviews with stations in the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

Mr. Biden, campaigning on Election Day in Pennsylvania, met with supporters in a Philadelphia neighborhood and was greeted with calls of “President Biden.”

The former vice president responded over a bullhorn, “Philly’s the key. Philly is the key.”

Mr. Biden said he was encouraged by early reports of heavy turnout of young voters, women, seniors and Blacks in states such as Georgia and Florida.

“I’m superstitious about predicting what an outcome will be before it happens. That’s sort of who I am and how I’ve always run,” Mr. Biden said. “But I’m hopeful.”

Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said their projections heading into Election Day showed Mr. Biden leading by 8 percentage points among early voters across what the campaign considers “battleground” states.

Ms. O’Malley Dillon said that over “GOTV weekend,” the campaign had more than 4 million “conversations with voters” and had knocked on 1.3 million doors, sent more than 32 million texts and logged more than 600,000 volunteer shifts.

Trump campaign officials said Tuesday that they were encouraged by heavy Republican turnout in key states and that Black voters were not voting in large numbers on Election Day in traditionally Democratic areas.

Trump officials also said they hoped to amass enough of a lead in crucial swing states by Tuesday night to dispel the Democrats’ argument that the former vice president would overcome any deficit by adding mail-in ballots to be counted later.

“We think we’re going to get enough votes … that would ultimately result in us getting enough electoral votes to be high enough to where none of this [fight over mail-in ballots] is going to matter,” Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said.

Biden campaign adviser Bob Bauer predicted that last-minute legal activity in states like Pennsylvania to challenge the counting of ballots would be fruitless.

“They will be unsuccessful. I’ve read these lawsuits,” he said. “The attempt of these lawyers to come in [at] the eleventh hour with specious claims and hope to hook the courts on them I think is doomed to failure.”

Mr. Biden, on a visit to his boyhood home in Scranton, said, “The president’s not going to steal this election.”

Mr. Trump again criticized the Supreme Court for allowing Pennsylvania elections officials to count mail-in ballots they receive up to three days after Election Day. He called it an “unfortunate” ruling that could leave the nation without a result and on edge.

“You can’t have these things delayed for many days,” Mr. Trump said. “This country is waiting. The whole world is waiting. We should be entitled to know who won on Nov. 3.”

The president warned that delays in counting votes could lead to “shenanigans.”

Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, said the state already had exceeded 2.4 million mail-in ballots — about 10 times the number four years ago. She and other state officials have been warning the public that it could take days to get to a final count.

In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, County Commissioner Ray D’Agostino, a Republican, said mail-in ballots will be “set aside” after Election Day instead of being counted. He said officials in the heavily Republican county would await “a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court or some other direction.”

His announcement drew complaints that he was disregarding the Supreme Court ruling.

In Philadelphia, at least one man representing the Trump campaign as a poll watcher was denied entry by poll workers, who said the man wasn’t authorized to monitor their specific polling place. It wasn’t clear whether the dispute was resolved.

In hotly contested Michigan, robocalls were wrongly encouraging residents to vote Wednesday because of long lines, said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. State Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said the robocalls were made in “an effort to suppress the vote.”

There were scattered reports of voting machine problems Tuesday in locations including Spalding County in Georgia and Rochester, New York. Department of Homeland Security officials said they were monitoring the situations and urged the public to be wary and patient. They said there were no indications of foreign interference.

Heading into Election Day, a record 100 million people nationwide had already voted as states expanded voting options to address concerns about COVID-19.

The president entered his reelection year riding a manufacturing revival and record-low unemployment through tax cuts and deregulation. He also rewrote trade deals to encourage manufacturing jobs to move back to the U.S. and wielded tariffs to protect U.S. workers and businesses from what he called unfair foreign competition, especially from China.

But all of that economic progress was thrown into turmoil in March when the pandemic forced widespread business shutdowns and restrictions on socializing. The health care crisis, which has claimed more than 230,000 lives and the loss of more than 20 million jobs during spring lockdowns, greatly complicated Mr. Trump’s reelection bid.

Still, the president on Tuesday pointed to the huge turnout at his campaign rallies in the final weeks of the race and what he called “tremendous love” for his movement. He expressed hope that his reelection would “bring unity.”

“I think success brings us together,” Mr. Trump said. “Everybody should come together. There’s a tremendous love going on in this country and really a tremendous unity.”

His tone was a far cry from his final campaign rally in Michigan after midnight Monday, when he told supporters that Mr. Biden and former President Barack Obama had committed “treason” by authorizing the government to spy on his campaign in 2016.

“Every corrupt force in American life that betrayed you and hurt you is supporting Joe Biden,” Mr. Trump told the crowd.

He called Mr. Biden’s candidacy “a fluke” and expressed incredulity that their race was even close.

Mr. Biden said the president is “embarrassing Republicans.”

“Republicans are walking away from him,” the Democrat said.

Mr. Biden scored one of the first victories on Election Day by winning unanimously, 5-0, in tiny Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. The township has created a name for itself as the first-in-the-nation to vote, all its residents casting ballots shortly after midnight as a quirky state law allows.

But Mr. Trump trumped the Democrat’s victory in nearby Millsfield, winning 16-5.