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However appalling, this shouldn’t come as a great surprise. After Black people were brought to the New World as slaves, Black disenfranchisement was overt and uncontroversial.

The past decade has brought a resurgence of the practice, fueled by a Supreme Court decision and a President who thrives on racial division. And so today, amid a national reckoning about racial injustice, Trump’s re-election may hinge on the success of his efforts to suppress the voices of Black voters.

In June 2013, the Supreme Court overturned key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, declaring that measures in question were meant to address “decades-old problems” and that the Constitution was “not designed to punish for the past.”

Within hours, North Carolina GOP officials touted plans for a new law to curtail early voting, require ID at polling places and end same-day voter registration–all policies they understood would impact Black voters.

Over the past four years, such measures have become central tactics for Trump allies in the strategically critical state.

Maneuvers like these could be key to a Trump victory across the country, voting-rights advocates say. Black Americans are less likely to have the identification required by the wave of voter-ID laws enacted by Republican legislatures in the past decade.

Predominantly Black neighborhoods are more likely to face long lines on Election Day. Republican-aligned groups have spread misinformation to discourage Black voters, like the claim that early-voting data would be used for debt collection. The list goes on.

There’s more at stake in this election than whether this regression helps deliver a win to Trump. Racial voter suppression, once primarily a regional blight, has “metastasized across the country,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “On the table will be whether this is in fact a sound democracy.”

There will be a few later-night states out West that are worth keeping in mind: Nevada, which Mr. Trump has sought to pull back from the Democrats, and Arizona, which Mr. Biden has been trying to put into the Democratic column.

If Mr. Biden does not win any of those three states (or Texas, where most of the state polls close at 8 p.m.), that will ratchet up the importance of the so-called blue wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which Mr. Trump flipped from Democrats in 2016 and where polls show Mr. Biden ahead.

Florida officials have already processed the state’s record-breaking early vote, which has been almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.

Now, with the president expecting no definitive winner on Tuesday night, and his campaign lawyers trying to use state rules to stop the counting of mail-in votes after Election Day, he has no plans to deliver any sort of concession.

. A win in Florida would keep him in the race, but attention would then turn immediately to the Northern battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

The White House has invited 400 people to the East Room and was planning for everyone attending to be tested for the coronavirus. There was no official invitation sent to many guests invited: The president’s secretary called them to extend the invitation personally. But officials said they expected a lot of attrition and were not certain how many people would show up.

Many people in the president’s circle think he is likely to lose. A brief burst of optimism a few weeks ago has settled into concern about their own careers, post-Trump. Coupled with expectations of large protests around the White House, and the coronavirus, it was not seen by all invitees as the see-and-be-seen event of the year.

Mr. Biden is expected to deliver remarks sometime late Tuesday night or Wednesday morning from Wilmington, Del., but if the result remains in flux he may wait.

Mr. Biden, after a campaign premised largely on the idea of returning to presidential norms, would be stepping far out of character if he too called himself the winner before results were known in enough states.

Control of the Senate is also among the biggest issues being decided Tuesday, with the result going a long way toward determining the contours of the federal government for at least the next two years.

Polling suggests Democrats are favored to pick up seats held by Senators Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona, and lose the one held by Senator Doug Jones of Alabama.The other big tossup contests are in Maine and North Carolina, where the Republican Senators Susan Collins and Thom Tillis face fierce challenges from the Democrats Sara Gideon and Cal Cunningham.

With control of the House unlikely to change, the ability of Democratic candidates for Senate in these states to outrun Mr. Biden may determine the shape of Congress next year.

The first thing to watch for is what the two candidates do if Mr. Biden wins Florida.

If Mr. Trump holds on to Florida, watch out for the lawyers. There are likely to be legal challenges — mainly from Mr. Trump — to early votes cast across the country. Mr. Trump has laid the groundwork with his unfounded warnings about voter fraud and by dispatching lawyers ready to challenge the legitimacy of votes cast. And if Pennsylvania is close, expect that state to be ground zero for legal action that could keep this election unresolved right through Thanksgiving.

"It changes the result of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County," Giuliani said

Giuliani's team is also making absurd claims of a massive, centralized, Democratic conspiracy involving long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Cuba, China, the Clinton Foundation and George Soros to throw the election.

"The problem is, he's speaking for the President of the United States," veteran Republican elections lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg told CNN's Wolf Blitzer."It is a sweeping, totally unsubstantiated attack on one of the basic foundations of the country -- our free elections."

"I am worried that any lawmakers who attend this ridiculous meet and greet are really attending a conspiratorial meeting to steal the election," Tribe told CNN's Erin Burnett. "There's no question that the meeting that is being held is illegal. There is no question that it really is designed quite corruptly to take away people's right to vote."

"It's quite clear that Republican, as well as Democratic judges, are going to follow the law when there is no ambiguity," Tribe said. "The only guy who seems to be uninterested in the law is Rudy Giuliani, and God knows what he is auditioning for."

Trump would need to cancel out Biden's victories in multiple states to come anywhere near the 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency.

CNN election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on his website that the President's meddling with the Wayne County election officials "is very dangerous for our democracy, as it is an attempt to thwart the will of the voters through political pressure from the President."

Republicans, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have given the President latitude to challenge the result without mounting a credible case, now begin to look as though they are facilitating his most extreme assault yet on US democracy.

"That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're lucky," Krebs wrote.

President-elect Biden, watching from Wilmington, Delaware, as he builds out his Cabinet, said that Trump was sending "incredibly damaging messages" to the rest of the world about how democracy works.

"It's going to be another incident where he will go down in history as being one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history. ... It's just outrageous what he's doing."

The US on Thursday hit another one-day record for new cases -- more than 182,000, according to tallies from Johns Hopkins University.

while the optimism of officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx over a coming vaccine were genuine, their warnings that Americans should not gather this Thanksgiving as the virus rages comprehensively debunked Trump's claims the pandemic is already over.

After hundreds of voters called into the canvass board Zoom meeting to express outrage about the potential effort to disenfranchise Detroit-area voters, the two GOP board members relented and voted to certify the results Tuesday night, but they then filed affidavits Wednesday asking to "rescind" their action -- which is not expected to have any practical effect on the certification.

CNN's Dana Bash and Gloria Borger, for instance, quoted sources as saying that the President, who believes that the Russia investigation dented his own legitimacy, is now trying to ruin Biden's presidency. And in the end, the courts -- and the institutional system that Trump has relentlessly pummeled over the last four years -- still seem likely to hold firm against his power-hungry schemes.

He made a racist argument that election results should be overturned by tossing out hundreds of thousands of votes in large cities dominated by Black voters, including Detroit and Philadelphia, where he claimed the number of voter fraud cases "could fill a library."

"The only surprise I would have found in this is that Philadelphia hadn't cheated in this election, because for the last 60 years, they've cheated in just about every single election. You could say the same thing about Detroit," Giuliani said at one point. "Each one of these cities are cities that are controlled by Democrats, which means they can get away with anything they want to do."

One affidavit Giuliani highlighted has already been rejected by a judge, and many have been vague, contradictory and devoid of evidence, showing isolated incidents or suspicions of illegal behavior not rooted in facts.

Highlighting the Trump campaign's naked effort to disenfranchise voters, the judge explicitly noted that there was no evidence of fraud related to the ballots the Trump campaign was seeking to throw out: "There exists no evidence of any fraud, misconduct, or any impropriety with respect to the challenged ballots," Baldi wrote in his opinion. "There is nothing in the record and nothing alleged that would lead to the conclusion that any of the challenged ballots were submitted by someone not qualified or entitled to vote in this election."

"Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election," Romney said in a statement posted to Twitter.

"It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President."

But Michigan alone would not be enough for Mr. Trump. He would also need at least two other states to fold to his pressure. The most likely candidates are Georgia and Arizona, which both went for Mr. Trump in 2016 and have Republican-controlled legislatures and Republican governors.

In just that time, Mr. Trump has fired the federal election official who has challenged his false claims of fraud, tried to halt the vote-certification process in Detroit to disenfranchise an overwhelmingly Black electorate that voted against him, and now is misusing the powers of his office in his effort to take Michigan’s 16 electoral votes away from Mr. Biden.

“Now if that’s true, I really want to know who the people are who pulled this off,” he said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “We need to hire them at the C.I.A.”

General Austin called the younger Mr. Biden, who died in 2015, “a very special person, and a true patriot, and a good friend to all who knew him,”

To be confirmed, however, General Austin will need to win a congressional exemption from a 1947 law requiring that military veterans be retired from active duty for at least seven years before leading the Defense Department. General Austin retired from the Army in April 2016.

But a vote by both chambers of Congress can waive the requirement, as has happened twice before

On Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, also declared her support for General Austin in a statement that did not address his recent retirement.

But many Democrats still have qualms.“As Democrats, we just spent four years watching these kinds of rules be violated,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey and a former State Department official. “It really does feel as if a waiver would turn the exception into a rule.”

General Austin’s intended nomination won ringing endorsements on Wednesday from two leading national security figures who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“It’s symbolic — all of these thoughts and choices have gone into that piece,” she said. “It’s making fashion out of something that’s already existed. It’s saying there’s value in something that’s been discarded.”

“It’s not like we use every ounce of fabric. There are fabrics that we have to sell back off. But in every choice that we make, we just try.”