AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EST

Biden, Trump locked in tight races in battleground states

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden were locked in tight races in battleground states across the country Tuesday night as they concluded an epic campaign that will shape America’s response to the surging pandemic and foundational questions of economic fairness and racial justice.

From coast to coast, races were too early to call in the most fiercely contested states on the map, including Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Both candidate each picked up some predictable victories, with Trump taking states including Kansas and North Dakota and Biden’s haul including Colorado and Virginia, two former battlegrounds that have become Democratic strongholds.

Americans made their choices as the nation faced a confluence of historic crises with each candidate declaring the other fundamentally unfit to navigate the challenges. Daily life has been upended by the coronavirus, which has killed more than 232,000 Americans and cost millions of jobs.

Millions of voters put aside worries about the virus — and some long lines — to turn out in person, joining 102 million fellow Americans who voted days or weeks earlier, a record number that represented 73% of the total vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Early results in several key battleground states were in flux as election officials processed a historically large number of mail-in votes. Democrats typically outperform Republicans in mail voting, while the GOP looks to make up ground in Election Day turnout. That means the early margins between the candidates could be influenced by which type of votes — early or Election Day — were being reported by the states.

___

2020 Latest: Biden wins 3 Western states, Trump takes Idaho

The Latest on the presidential campaign (all times local):

11 p.m.

Democrat Joe Biden has won California, Oregon and Washington state, while President Donald Trump has won Idaho.

California, Oregon and Washington are all liberal states, while Idaho is conservative.

California has 55 electoral votes, the biggest haul of any state. It’s also the home of Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris. She served as the San Francisco district attorney and the state’s attorney general before winning election to the Senate in 2016.

___

EXPLAINER: A long night, or more, before president is known

WASHINGTON (AP) — There’s a fair chance Americans won’t know the winner of Tuesday’s presidential election while it’s still Tuesday — or maybe even Wednesday.

The main reason? Many states have made it easier to request a mail ballot amid the coronavirus pandemic and concerns about crowded polling places. But mail ballots generally require more time to process than ballots that are cast in person.

DIFFERENT STATES, DIFFERENT APPROACHES

Some states with extensive experience in using mail-in ballots have adjusted for those extra steps.

In Florida, clerks can start counting ballots 22 days before an election. In North Carolina, beginning five weeks before the election, county boards insert approved ballots into a voting machine, allowing for a prompt tabulation on Election Day.

___

Graham wins, but Democrats pick up Colorado in Senate battle

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans suffered a first setback in the battle for Senate control Tuesday as Democrats picked up a seat in Colorado, but the GOP ousted a Democrat in Alabama. Well-known Republicans held on in South Carolina and Texas.

Republicans sought to retain their Senate majority against a surge of Democrats challenging President Donald Trump’s allies across a vast political map. Both parties saw paths to victory, and the outcome might not be known on election night.

In Colorado, Republican Cory Gardner was among the most endangered senators. His state had shifted leftward in the Trump era, and Democrat John Hickenlooper, a former governor, won the seat.

“It’s time for a different approach,” Hickenlooper said in an live video message posted on Facebook.

White House confidant Lindsey Graham survived the fight of his political life in South Carolina against Democrat Jamie Harrison, whose campaign stunned Washington by drawing more than $100 million in small-scale donations. In Texas, Sen. John Cornyn turned back Democrat MJ Hegar, a former Air Force helicopter pilot, in his hardest-fought election in almost two decades.

___

GOP’s Tuberville defeats US Sen. Jones, flips Alabama seat

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Former college football coach Tommy Tuberville has recaptured a U.S. Senate seat for Republicans by defeating Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama. Jones been widely been considered the Senate’s most endangered Democrat.

Republicans had made taking back the once reliably conservative seat a priority in 2020. Tuberville, who has never held public office and last coached four years ago, aligned himself closely with President Donald Trump and declared in the primary campaign: “God sent us Donald Trump.”

“Alabama, welcome back to the Republican U.S. Senate,” Tuberville shouted after taking the stage to loud cheers at his election night party in downtown Montgomery. He said his victory shows that the seat can’t be bought by donors from other states.

Tuberville took a congratulatory call from Vice-President Mike Pence on stage after his victory was declared. “Thank you for delivering a great victory for President Donald Trump and thank you for sending a great new senator to the United States Senate,” Pence told the crowd after Tuberville put him on speakerphone.

Jones had won the seat during a 2017 special election in which GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore was publicly accused of sexual misconduct involving young women decades ago.

___

AP VoteCast: Voters favour Biden on virus, Trump on economy

WASHINGTON (AP) — Voters in the U.S. presidential election faced a public health crisis and a wounded economy, but neither candidate emerged as the clear choice to handle both of those issues, according to AP Votecast.

More voters — both nationwide and in key battlegrounds — said former Vice-President Joe Biden would be better able to handle the coronavirus pandemic, the top concern for about 4 in 10 voters. But President Donald Trump edged out Biden on the question of who would be better to rebuild an economy besieged by nearly 11 million job losses and small businesses staring down a bleak winter. About 3 in 10 voters nationally ranked the economy as the most pressing issue.

The question of whether the pandemic or the economy mattered more to voters was a heated debate in the campaign. Trump argued that the economy should not be a casualty of the disease and maintained, without evidence, that the nation was “rounding the turn.” Biden has warned that the economy can never fully heal unless the coronavirus is first contained and businesses can fully reopen.

A majority of voters were receptive to that argument. About 6 in 10 voters said the government’s higher priority should be limiting the spread of the coronavirus, even if it damages the economy.

AP VoteCast is a nationwide survey of more than 132,000 voters and nonvoters conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.

___

AP PHOTOS: At churches, schools and stadiums, America votes

Americans are choosing between President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden in what many are calling the most consequential presidential election in a lifetime, with the balloting shadowed by the coronavirus outbreak, economic downturn, racial tension and a sense that the future of democracy itself is at stake.

Voters flocked to polling places around the country before sunrise to cast their ballots on Election Day. They stood at a safe distance from one another in lines that snaked around schools, stadiums and churches.

Because of the huge volume of mail-in votes, the outcome may not be known for days or even weeks and could wind up in in court.

In downtowns ranging from New York to Denver to Minneapolis, workers boarded up businesses lest the vote — or uncertainty about the winner — lead to unrest of the sort that broke out earlier this year amid protests over racial inequality.

Associated Press photographers fanned out across the U.S. to capture voting on Election Day.

___

Virus hospitalizations surge as pandemic shadows US election

Americans went to the polls Tuesday under the shadow of a resurging pandemic, with an alarming increase in cases nationwide and the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 reaching record highs in a growing number of states.

While daily infections were rising in all but three states, the surge was most pronounced in the Midwest and Southwest.

Missouri, Oklahoma, Iowa, Indiana, Nebraska, North Dakota and New Mexico all reported record high hospitalizations this week. Nebraska’s largest hospitals started limiting elective surgeries and looked to bring in nurses from other states to cope with the surge. Hospital officials in Iowa and Missouri warned bed capacity could soon be overwhelmed.

The resurgence loomed over candidates and voters, fearful of both the virus itself and the economic toll of any new shutdowns to control its spread. The debate over how far to take economically costly measures has divided a country already sharply polarized over President Donald Trump’s turbulent four years in office.

The pandemic colored who voters chose at the ballot box and how they did it. While many Americans took advantage of expanded access to mail-in voting, lines were long in many polling places, with record turnout expected and reminders of the pandemic everywhere.

___

Hurricane Eta grinds inland into Nicaragua; at least 3 dead

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) — Hurricane Eta churned inland through northeast Nicaragua Tuesday night with devastating winds and rains that destroyed rooftops, caused rivers to overflow and left at least three people dead in the region.

The hurricane had sustained winds of 105 mph (165 kph), according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, down from an overnight peak of 150 mph (240 kph). Even before it made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, Honduras reported the first death after a mudslide trapped a 12-year-old girl in San Pedro Sula and two miners were killed in a mudslide in Bonanza, Nicaragua.

Tuesday night, the Category 2 hurricane crawled inland from the coast, about 45 miles (70 kilometres) west-southwest of coastal Puerto Cabezas or Bilwi, and it was moving west near 6 mph (9 kph).

Landfall came hours after it had been expected. Eta’s eye had hovered just offshore through the night and Tuesday morning. The unceasing winds uprooted trees and ripped roofs apart, scattering corrugated metal through the streets of Bilwi, the main coastal city in the region. The city’s regional hospital abandoned its building, moving patients to a local technical school campus.

“It was an intense night for everyone in Bilwi, Waspam and the communities along the northern coast,” Yamil Zapata, local Bilwi representative of the ruling Sandinista Front, told local Channel 4 Tuesday.

___

EXPLAINER: Why AP called Virginia for Biden

WHY AP CALLED VIRGINIA FOR BIDEN:

The AP declared Democratic nominee Joe Biden the winner of Virginia at 7:31 p.m. EST, after results from early returns and an AP survey of the electorate showed the former vice-president had beaten President Donald Trump in the state.

With about 53% of the vote counted statewide at 11:00 p.m., completed counts in a representative selection of precincts in communities across Virginia showed Biden comfortably ahead of Trump.

Those results matched data from AP VoteCast and an analysis of early voting statistics. The survey found Biden with a substantial lead in the state. VoteCast, the AP’s wide-ranging survey of the American electorate, captures voters’ choices and why they made them.

Trump jumped out to an early lead in Virginia because many Republican counties reported their results first. But much of the remaining ballots left to be counted were cast in population-dense Democratic areas near Washington D.C., including Fairfax and Prince William counties.