With 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania is considered a decisive battleground state in the US presidential election. The candidate who wins this state is likely to win the White House. A candidate needs at least 270 electoral votes to win.
Former President Donald Trump's campaign believes they are "on track for a great night." "Early indications are that tonight could go as we hope," Fox News quoted information from Trump's campaign as saying.
Explaining the statement, a campaign official said that early vote counting is still continuing and that Republican voters who voted early have not yet been counted in the total Election Day votes.
Republican turnout was “high” in Philadelphia, where Mr Trump had success in 2016 and 2020, especially in south and northeast Philadelphia, the official said.
Rural voter turnout has also “skyrocketed,” the official said.
Reliable Republican states like Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi were called by Fox News Decision Desk in the early hours since polls began closing while Vice President Kamala Harris was projected to win liberal states like Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
According to AP's updated US election results, as of 11:25 a.m. on November 6, Vietnam time, Mr. Donald Trump had 230 electoral votes and nearly 56 million popular votes, while Ms. Kamala Harris had 187 electoral votes and nearly 51 million popular votes.
The picture in the battleground states, however, remains murky. Harris’s campaign is still focused on the positive signs it is seeing in Pennsylvania, a state that would make the path to 270 electoral votes much easier.
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker told local news outlets that she expected the city's voter turnout for Ms. Harris to be between 650,000 and 750,000, significantly exceeding Mr. Biden's 2020 turnout of around 600,000 votes.
Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, according to Harris' campaign, the three precincts with the largest concentrations of Puerto Rican voters are close to reaching their 2020 turnout.
The campaign believes Mr Trump's comments at a Madison Square Garden rally last week, where a comedian described Puerto Rico as a "floating pile of garbage", have hurt the former president's campaign in its final week.
They hope those comments will sway Puerto Rican voters — nearly 400,000 in Pennsylvania — to support Ms. Harris.
