US election hinges on Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania

US President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden are focused on the three northern industrial states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that could determine who wins the White House.

Four years after Mr Trump became the first Republican in a generation to capture that trio of states, they are again positioned to influence the direction of the presidential election.

Focus has moved to the so-called “rust belt” after Mr Trump carried the prized battleground state of Florida along with the other crucial swing states of Texas, Iowa and Ohio, where Mr Biden had made a strong play in the final stages of the campaign.

Mr Trump and Mr Biden have spent the better part of this year in a heated fight over how to confront those challenges, and each has argued in apocalyptic terms that his opponent would set the country on a devastating path.

By early on Wednesday, neither candidate had the 270 electoral college votes needed to win.

“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election,” Mr Biden said. “That’s the decision of the American people.”

Millions of voters braved their worries about coronavirus – and some long queues — 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.

Mr Biden won several states where Mr Trump sought to compete, including New Hampshire and Minnesota. But Florida was the biggest, fiercely contested battleground on the map, with both campaigns battling over the 29 electoral college votes that went to Mr Trump.

The president adopted Florida as his new home state, wooed its Latino community, particularly Cuban-Americans, and held rallies there incessantly. For his part, Mr Biden deployed his top surrogate – former president Barack Obama – there twice in the campaign’s closing days and benefited from a 100 million US dollar pledge in the state from Michael Bloomberg.

The parties traded a pair of seats in other results. Democratic former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper defeated incumbent senator Cory Gardner, and in Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville beat senator Doug Jones. The House is expected to remain under Democratic control.