President-elect Donald Trump has finalized a clean sweep of the seven swing states with media announcing him the winner in Arizona, the last state for the results to be known.
With Arizona's 11 votes in the Electoral College, Trump now leads with 312 seats to Vice President Kamala Harris's 226.
Based on its analysis of the counting trend, Associated Press news agency announced the result in Arizona even on Saturday night when the counting was still in progress.
The results were held up by the slow counting in the state's Maricopa County, parts of which include a House of Representatives constituency where an Indian American Democrat is locked in a tight race.
The Republican candidate is ahead of Amish Shah by 4.4% votes with 11% votes still being processed.
Arizona was the last of the swing states-and the last state-for the results to be known, although Trump had been declared the winner by Wednesday morning when his tally crossed 270 electoral votes in the 538-member Electoral College based on the results from states at that point.
In this kind of Electoral College system, a president is elected not by the number of popular votes but by the seats won in the body.
As the other states were nearly evenly divided firmly in the camp of either party, swing states or, in this terminology, battleground states exercised an inordinate influence in deciding the winner, and Harris and Trump spent most of their energies campaigning there.
This result was at sharp variance from the RealClear Polling aggregation showing Trump ahead just by a 2.8% margin of votes, while an AP tally placed him head over heels at a 6.1% margin lead.
In one of the roughest days pollsters might recall, he outperformed the predictions for all of the seven elections, carried Wisconsin and Michigan, whereas an aggregation had been showing the way towards Harris.
Unlike in 2016 when Trump did not win the majority in popular votes but still came up victorious with Electoral College votes, this time he is forward even in popular votes too.
Arizona is a border state where Latinos comprise 30.1 percent of the population.
President Joe Biden had won the state in 2020 by about 10,000 votes, less than 0.5 percent.
The Harris campaign had been hopeful that some of these acts by Donald Trump, including promises to take firm actions against illegal migrants, the majority of whom come from Latin American countries and some racist remarks by his supporters against the community, would galvanize them to go out to vote for her.
But that did not materialise and nationally Trump has weaned away Latino voters from the Democratic Party, increasing the proportion of votes from them to 46 percent compared with 35 percent in the last election, still leaving the Democrats with a narrow lead, according to AP polling.
The Latino voters are legal immigrants or were born in the US and the immigration issue did not resonate with them as a communal issue that Democrats made it to be.
Common issues of price rise and the economic and social fallout from high illegal migration swung the Latinos.
By tradition, in the absence of a national election body, the AP first declares the result based on the counting trend and the historical data, and the official declaration comes days or even weeks later after military and postal votes are cleared.
Regarding methodology, the AP reports it "only declares a winner once it can determine that a trailing candidate can't close the gap and overtake the vote leader."
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