Reports have been flooding in of Black people across the United States receiving disturbing text messages referencing slavery and “picking cotton”, following Donald Trump’s presidential election win. These racist messages have been reported in over a dozen states, including California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia, and Alabama, as per CNN. The messages, sent anonymously, instructed recipients to report to a “plantation” or board a bus, sparking widespread alarm and prompting investigations by the FBI and other agencies.

The messages often instruct recipients to report to a specific address, sometimes mentioning the incoming presidential administration. Some even target children, with reports of middle school students receiving these hateful messages. For instance, a 16-year-old girl in California received a text directing her to report to a “plantation” in North Carolina.

A friend in San Francisco received this racist text today, and after looking on social media, it seems many Black people are receiving it too. pic.twitter.com/eDyFf3a6Ix

— John Ryan E (@RyanElward) November 7, 2024

The FBI is working with the Justice Department to address these incidents, while the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is investigating alongside federal and state law enforcement. TextNow, the platform through which some of these messages were sent, told CNN this is a “widespread, coordinated attack”. 

FBI Statement on Offensive and Racist Text Messageshttps://t.co/vpQYAO6LT7 pic.twitter.com/iDtN36WhX4

— FBI (@FBI) November 7, 2024

”TextNow is working alongside our industry partners to uncover more details and continue to monitor patterns to actively block any new accounts attempting to send these messages. We do not tolerate or condone the use of our service to send harassing or spam messages and will work with the authorities to prevent these individuals from doing so in the future,” the company said. 

Civil rights organisations, including NAACP, one of the largest Black civil rights organisations in the US, have condemned these messages. The Southern Poverty Law Center has also weighed in, calling the messages “deeply disturbing” 

”We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – there is no place for hate in a democracy. The threat — and the mention of slavery in 2024 — is not only deeply disturbing, but perpetuates a legacy of evil that dates back to before the Jim Crow era, and now seeks to prevent Black Americans from enjoying the same freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a press release. 

Whoever is sending the racist text messages is using anonymizing software to obscure their location, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told CNN on Friday. 

The entrepreneur-turned-politician said that there is a spiritual revival of American identity after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election 2024. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election will renew national self-confidence, an Indian-American politician and a close confidant of the President-elect Vivek Ramaswamy has said, expressing hope that his comeback will signify America’s comeback.

In a historic election on Tuesday (November 5, 2024), Mr. Trump defeated his Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris and was elected the 47th President of the United States, becoming only the second commander-in-chief in over a century to win two nonconsecutive presidential terms.

“America has this great tradition. We believe in our own manifest destiny…We are born to be the greatest nation that sets an example for everybody else of what’s possible for human capacity,” Vivek Ramaswamy told the Tucker Carlson Show in an interview.

“I think that that’s the kind of leader we need right now to bring that back. And that’s Donald Trump as a person. So, in some ways, Trump’s story is America’s story. Trump’s comeback is now hopefully America’s comeback,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in response to a question.

“A Trump win,” he said, “will result in the renewal of national self-confidence.”

“I think that we’re going to be more sure of ourselves as Americans. I think we already are,” the entrepreneur-turned-politician said.

“The markets reflect confidence. The revival of our self-confidence is the most important thing…Everything else, we could talk about the issues, fixing the border, restoring law and order, enforcing the law, ending rampant crime in the country, and growing the economy all of those things require a certain level of self-confidence in America, require a certain sense of spine in who we are to be able to say, an economy grows when people are willing to take risks,” he said.

He said there is a spiritual revival of American identity.

“That was the pinnacle of what we saw on Tuesday (November 5, 2024) night. There was a moment, there was a moment,” he said.

Mr. Ramaswamy revealed that he, Vice President-elect J. D. Vance and his spouse Usha Vance were classmates in Yale Law School.

“We were in the same class. Me, Usha, and J D, we’re all classmates. And my wife was in med school at the same time. So we were all friendly,” he said.

Mr. Trump, he noted, has learned a lot from that first term.

“This time around, he is laser-focused on making sure that the people he puts into those positions actually share broadly his vision for the country, broadly share an allegiance,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.

Lok Sabha Leader of the Opposition and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. File
| Photo Credit: ANI

Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, has written to outgoing U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris congratulating her on her spirited presidential campaign and said her unifying message of hope will continue to inspire many.

Democrat Kamala Harris lost to Republican Donald Trump in the hotly contested U.S. presidential polls.

“I would like to congratulate you on your spirited presidential campaign. Your unifying message of hope will continue to inspire many,” Mr. Gandhi said in his letter to Ms. Harris.

“Under the Joe Biden administration, India and the United States have deepened cooperation on issues of global importance,” the former Congress chief said.

“Our shared commitment to democratic values will continue to guide our friendship. As the Vice President, your determination to bring people together and find common ground will be remembered,” Mr. Gandhi said in his letter dated November 7, 2024.

“I wish you the very best on your future endeavours,” he added.

Washington:

Opinion polls underestimated the level of Donald Trump’s support for the third US presidential election in a row, predicting a neck-and-neck race with Kamala Harris when in the end the Republican edged the vice president across battleground states. Trump’s win involved surging support in a number of demographics and regions, but experts said pollsters failed to accurately predict races in states where the results differed significantly from the last election in 2020.

“They did fine in battlegrounds, but… they failed to provide the essential information that Trump was surging across the board,” said Michael Bailey, a professor of political science at Georgetown University.

More than 90 percent of US counties voted in higher numbers for the Republican billionaire than they did in 2020, according to The New York Times.

Overall, the polls had predicted razor thin margins in races in the seven battleground states that decide close US elections. As of Wednesday, Trump was projected to win five of those states by between one and three percentage points. 

The former president was well on his way to sweeping all seven states, according to those projections.

“Trump may have been mildly underestimated but I think the polls ended up doing pretty well, collectively — this was not a huge miss,” said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia. 

“The polls suggested Trump had a decent chance to win, and he won.” 

The pollsters’ performance was under the microscope this year, after two big misses in succession: they had failed to anticipate Trump’s victory in 2016, and had overestimated the margin by which President Joe Biden won against him in 2020.

“Trump was underestimated by about two points this time around” in key states, said Pedro Azevedo, Head of US polling at AtlasIntel.

In Pennsylvania, the latest polling average from RealClearPolitics put the Republican in the lead by 0.4 percentage points. As of Wednesday, he was ahead by two points.

In North Carolina, polls predicted a 1.2-point margin for Trump, and he won by three points over Harris. 

In Wisconsin, the vice president was given a 0.4-point lead, but the projected results showed Trump leading the count by 0.9 points.

The main problem has not changed since Trump’s arrival on the US political scene about a decade ago: a fringe of his electorate refuses to take part in opinion polls, and firms have failed to be able to accurately gauge their impact.

In the most recent polls conducted by The New York Times with Siena College, “white Democrats were 16 percent likelier to respond than white Republicans,” NYT data analyst and polling guru Nate Cohn wrote two days before the election. 

That disparity had grown over the course of the 2024 campaign, he added.

Although pollsters like The New York Times/Siena tried to compensate for these flaws with statistical adjustments, it was clearly not enough.

“It is apparent that polls significantly underestimated Trump’s growth among Hispanic voters,” said Azevedo, pointing to Trump’s larger-than-expected victories in Nevada and Florida.

“This is also the case among white voters,” he said, adding that while most polls expected Harris to “improve her margins” in this demographic, Trump outperformed the polling and ran up his numbers in rural areas.

Iowa was a prime example of this, with a poll three days before Election Day giving Harris a three-point victory in the solidly Republican state. In the end, Trump won it comfortably by 13 points, Azevedo said. 

J. Ann Selzer, the author of that inaccurate Iowa poll, said the difference could have been made by late-deciding voters.

“The late deciders could have opted for Trump in the final days of the campaign after interviewing was complete,” she told the Des Moines Register newspaper.

“The people who had already voted but opted not to tell our interviewers for whom they voted could have given Trump an edge.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Supporters of Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump react as they watch early election results in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 6, 2024
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Former U.S. President Donald Trump won the swing state of Georgia on Wednesday (November 6, 2024), returning its 16 electoral votes to the Republican column.

Joe Biden narrowly carried Georgia in 2020, but Republicans have won every other Georgia presidential vote since 1996. Mr. Trump tried to overturn his 2020 loss in Georgia, setting off a political and legal struggle that led to his indictment in the state.

ALSO READ:U.S. Elections 2024 results LIVE

While the State has two Democratic U.S. senators, Mr. Trump’s victory proves Georgia still has a Republican bent.

Six candidates appeared on Georgia ballots, but votes for Claudia De la Cruz and Cornel West weren’t counted.

The Associated Press declared Trump the winner at 12:58 a.m. EST.

Millions of Americans on Tuesday voted in the US presidential election to decide whether Democrat nominee Kamala Harris will win the race to the White House or the Republican candidate Donald Trump will retain the top post for a second time.

According to the latest projections, Trump, 78, won several strongholds, including Florida, while Harris took a number of eastern states. US networks have projected that Trump is winning 10 states and Harris five. As for electoral college numbers, which will determine the winner in this election, the former President is ahead with 101 votes and Harris trails with 71. Each candidate is aiming for the magic figure of 270 electoral college votes.

Earlier, exit polls showed that most of the voters favoured Harris, 59, over her Republican rival. According to an exit poll by NBC News, 48 per cent of voters nationwide expressed a favourable view of Harris, while 44 per cent supported Trump.

The voters were also asked to choose between five issues – democracy, economy, abortion, immigration and foreign policy.

While 34% of voters said democracy mattered most to their vote, 31% said the economy. Abortion (14%) and immigration (11%) ranked as the next-most important issues and 4% of voters named foreign policy.

An exit poll by CNN said roughly three-quarters of the electorate holds a negative view of the way things are going in the US today. According to the poll, only about one-quarter call themselves enthusiastic or satisfied with the state of the nation, with more than four in 10 dissatisfied and roughly three in 10 saying they are angry.

Exit polls, however, are not always accurate and the preliminary results are subject to change as more voters are surveyed.

The 2024 US Presidential elections are historic because if Harris, the Indian-American who is the first female vice president, wins, she would become the first woman, Black woman and South Asian American to win the presidency.

On the other hand, if the US voters choose Trump, the only president to be impeached twice and the first former president to be criminally convicted, he would become the first president to win non-consecutive terms in more than a century.