"Whenever Kamala's name is mentioned on screen, it's met with boos" ::::::: Elon Musk, wrote on his X platform, "Game, set and match"

Is the game won ??

Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s close friend who is with him tonight, just said - there is "a strong feeling of excitement and purpose," adding -- "we will win decisively tonight".

The world’s richest man and Donald Trump donor, 

Elon Musk, just wrote on his X platform, "Game, set and match".

The campaign is feeling confident that they will win as supporters here continue to wait for a final result, feeling emboldened. The crowd has just broken into a dance celebration to the song "YMCA".

The crowd is reacting to every bit of good news for Donald Trump as it's broadcast from the large screens at the Republican candidate's watch party in Florida.

They were especially ecstatic about positive margins so far out of states like Georgia and North Carolina.

While they are cautiously optimistic, they feel they have momentum.

One supporter in the sea of red Maga hats tells me he thinks Trump has it. He and his partner say they are waiting until an absolute final result, but are feeling great.

Whenever Kamala Harris’s name is mentioned on screen, it's met with boos.

Trump takes North Carolina in first swing state result ........ "What stands .. is segregation of political tribes" ::::::::: Kamala Harris bags New York .... but Donald Trump projected winner in Texas, Ohio, 14 others ::::: "He is gifted with a malign kind of charisma" 

While North Carolina's win is big for Republicans, it is in line with how the state has voted in the past: Trump won North Carolina in both 2016, with a margin of 3.66%, and 2020, with a smaller margin of 1.34%.

The last Democratic candidate to win the state was Barack Obama in 2008. 

Obama later lost the state in his 2012 re-election bid to Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

As per the Associated Press tracker, Donald Trump is leading Harris 177 to 99

Donald Trump, the Republican contender, is attempting to win a second stint at the White House, Kamala Harris -- the incumbent Vice President and Democratic nominee -- is vying to create history by becoming first female President of the US.

The seven battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania will play a key role in deciding the fate of Harris and Trump. The two will need at least 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.

Republican Donald Trump is projected to win the electoral vote tied to Nebraska’s vast, rural 3rd Congressional District on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. The former president easily defeated Democratic candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris in the state’s most conservative of its three districts, covering 80 counties and two time zones.

The district is also one of the most conservative in the country and supported Trump by about 3-to-1 in both 2016 and 2020. The last time the district voted for a Democrat to represent it in the US House was in 1958. 

Is there something to worry about US politics ?

Donald Trump’s record of refusal to concede defeat after the last US election should have disqualified him from running in this one. 

His criminal indictments should have meant banishment from mainstream politics. His campaign rhetoric – a rambling litany of bigotry and spite – should not have carried beyond the paranoid fringe.

But what use are should and shouldn’t against the brute force of can and does?- says Rafael Behr in his piece for 'The Guardian'. 

Things that are supposed to be self-evident in a constitutional democracy have ceased to be obvious to millions of Americans. 

We don’t need to wait for all votes to be counted to wish for a stronger cultural inoculation against tyranny.

A healthier body politic would not have been infected by Trump’s candidacy. How did the democratic immune system fail? 

He is gifted with a malign kind of charisma, but it needed a confluence of economic stagnation, cultural polarisation and technological revolution over many years to achieve maximum contagion. !!

That way of conducting politics is not obsolete, but it is rooted in analogue systems. It relies on real-life interactions, deliberations, clunky old institutions, meandering conversations, small talk. It is the stuff of people mingling in assemblies and town halls, breaking bread together. 

It is the opposite of politics played in digital mode where the platforms on which debate is conducted are also engines of radicalisation; where differences of opinion are accelerated into irreconcilable enmities, the article says.  

"What stands out as a uniquely 21st-century innovation is the segregation of political tribes into discrete and self-reinforcing information silos. Formerly, even in times of fierce political division, there were institutions and rules that governed debate," he points out.