For the first time since the year 2000, the Americans woke up on Wednesday, without knowing the identity of the next president, after a poll that witnessed a record turnout with the continuation of the counting of votes in seven major states, which did not prevent Donald Trump who considered himself the winner against Joe Biden.
These elections witnessed the largest turnout since women were allowed to vote. 160 million Americans cast their ballots, with an estimated turnout of 66.9 percent, compared to 59.2 percent in 2016, according to US Elections Project.
Many states have found themselves under a huge amount of mail ballots, and it can take several days to open envelopes and scan cards with a scanner in some cities.
Al Schmid, an official in the city of Philadelphia, which is a bastion of Democrats in the state of Pennsylvania, told CNN, "If the pace continues, we will reach full results in the next two days."
The two candidates made two brief statements overnight.
At around 2 pm, the US president made a vague statement from the White House threatening to go to the Supreme Court to stop the vote count.
"Frankly, we won the elections," Trump said, but later spoke of "fraud" without presenting any concrete evidence. "We will go to the Supreme Court and we want to stop (counting) the votes," he added.
This prompted a response from the Biden camp, which considered the Republican president´s words "scandalous" and "unprecedented."
"It is a deliberate attempt to deprive American citizens of their democratic rights," the Democratic candidate´s campaign team said, stressing that he is ready for a "judicial" battle if Trump turns to the Supreme Court.
"This argument is totally baseless," said Republican Chris Christie, a former federal attorney general who advised Donald Trump in preparation for the presidential debates.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, expressed his optimism and stressed that he is on the path to victory, calling on the Americans to be patient. "Keep your faith, we will win!" He told supporters in his stronghold of Wilmington, Delaware.
The specter of uncertainty looms for long days and raging judicial battles, currently the largest power in the world is experiencing mainly major health, economic and social crises.
And the identity of the next president, who will be sworn in on January 20, depends on the results of several key mandates.
This scenario is more complicated than the year 2000, when the result depended on the state of Florida alone. During that period, the Supreme Court intervened more than a month after the elections to put an end to the procedures for recounting and counting the votes and deciding in favor of Republican George W. Bush.
But the sure thing is that the democratic tide that some were hoping for in the Biden camp to record historic victories in North Carolina or Texas, did not materialize.
The Republican president kept Florida, which he won in 2016, denying opinion poll results, and Ohio, who won in it since 1964, won all the candidates who had reached the presidency. He also conquered the once-threatening Republican stronghold of Texas.
But the road to a second term remains difficult, as he has yet to win the bulk of the other major states that contributed to his surprise 2016 victory.
In the American system, the American president is elected by indirect universal suffrage, meaning that the voters in each state select the major voters, and the candidate needs 270 votes from the votes of the major voters to win the US presidential elections out of 538.
So far, Trump has had 213 senior voters, slightly behind Biden (238).
Biden has different scenarios for victory. The Democratic candidate in Arizona, a former conservative bastion, and the first state to move from one camp to another, won this election compared to 2016.
Biden´s road to the White House passes through the country´s industrial north. And he has yet to win at least two of the three disputed states in the industrial north (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin), which the American billionaire won four years ago.
But in these states, the vote count may last until Wednesday or for several days, especially due to the record level of mail voting.
In the industrialized North (Wisconsin and Michigan), the gap between Trump and Biden was narrowing as ballots arrived in the mail.
In these states as well as in Pennsylvania, analysts expect that the majority of the cards not yet issued will belong to the Democratic candidate.
In Pennsylvania, Trump was leading Wednesday by nearly 700,000 votes, but 1.4 million mailed ballot papers were still unsorted. Biden has so far won 78% of the vote by mail.
Trump wants to go to the Supreme Court in this regard in particular.
Before the elections, several complaints about voting by mail were filed with the Supreme Court. Republicans in Pennsylvania asked her to prohibit the counting of cards that are sent in the mail before Tuesday evening, but that they arrive in the three days following the election date.
The country´s highest court refused to decide this complaint in a hurry, but in the event that the outcome is very close, it must examine the substance of the case and say whether the cards received between Wednesday and Friday should be counted.
As expected, the Democrats retained control of the House of Representatives, but their hopes of wresting the Senate from the Republicans began to fade.
The Democrats grabbed two seats from the Republicans in Colorado and Arizona, but they lost one in Alabama. The previous majority were 53 Republicans, compared to 47 Democrats and their allies.
Without major surprises, Trump and Biden quickly won the states they were expected to win. Indiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Idaho and Tennessee voted among other states for Donald Trump, while California, Virginia, New York, Colorado and Delaware voted for Biden.
Polling took place in all parts of the country without any incidents or pressure, as had been feared for several days.
In a clear sign of the anxiety caused by the vote, several stores in major cities including Washington, Los Angeles and New York have fortified their windows in anticipation of the violence that could follow the elections.
For months, Donald Trump signaled the danger of a "radical left" coming to power, bent on turning the world´s largest economy into "Venezuela on a large scale."
On the other hand, Joe Biden, supported by Barack Obama, intensified his warnings of the consequences that could be devastating for democratic institutions in the event that Trump wins a second term, describing him as "the worst president in the contemporary history of the United States."
Biden, the moderate Democrat, also made the elections a referendum on the Trump administration for the Covid-19 pandemic.
