AS is so often the case when gauging the political mood of America, it was Barack Obama that nailed it. Speaking during the election campaign last month he warned American voters “it’s going to be close ... and it could come down to a handful of voters just like you”.

But not even Obama, with his unerring political nous and instinct, could have envisaged just how close this battle for the soul of America would be. Not that this election is anywhere near over as I write, with both President Donald Trump and Democrat rival Joe Biden still with everything to play for in this nail biter of a contest to become the next leader of the United States.

If uncertainty as to the final outcome remains, other aspects of this election are beyond doubt. The first is that the pollsters got it colossally wrong. On the eve of the election some poll trackers were giving Biden as much as 8.6 –point national lead, but how things have played out has proved to be something else entirely.

The National:

Those Democrats hoping for a Biden landslide and repudiation of Trump instead face a down-to-the-wire contest in which the mercurial political “beast,” as one Republican commentator referred to the president this morning, could still find himself in the White House.

Exit polls already suggest that this has been a political contest that has deeply divided voters and boiled down to what mattered most, containing the coronavirus pandemic or concerns over the economy. In many of the key states Biden led in early vote totals, this being most likely down to his campaign’s push for Democrats to vote early. On election day itself however it seems that voters came out for Trump and in some places by wide margins, according to early exit polls.

Whatever the final outcome of this election another certainty is that the Democratic Party will have serious questions to address in its aftermath as to how its campaign machine could have been so off beam. Speaking early this morning Biden was still insisting he would prevail and that may yet prove to be the case, but not before Trump has taken his share of the political scalps that the US states have presented him with.

READ MORE: US election: 'We believe we're on track to win this,' Joe Biden says

By early this morning Trump had already won a series of key battleground states the most significant of which was Florida. It was only five days ago that Biden stood at a campaign rally in the "Sunshine State" and said that “If Florida goes blue, it’s over,” for Trump.

As of this morning Florida remains Republican red, as do other states like Ohio, Iowa and Texas. While Biden does not need to win Florida to take the White House, he was hoping that he could win back the state after Trump’s victory there in four years ago. But that Florida loss now puts more pressure on Biden to win Pennsylvania, another crucial battleground and the place where he was born.

Despite the loss of Florida, Biden was at pains to insist, "it ain’t over ‘til every vote is counted" and that the Democrats were still "on track" to win the contest. For his part Trump at around the same time as Biden spoke, resorted to his favoured means of messaging using the social media platform Twitter to misleadingly say “we are up BIG” and baselessly accused Democrats of “trying to STEAL the election.” Twitter immediately placed a “disputed” label on the Tweet. Such accusations remain a source of concern for many Americans who see their country still sitting on a knife-edge election with tensions running high on the streets in some parts of the country.

The National:

As the results initially came in they appeared to go as expected but it quickly became apparent that the margin of lead attributed to Biden by many pollsters was breaking down to a much closer contest. While Biden’s camp will now be nervous indeed the most encouraging sign on the electoral map for the Democrats at time of writing was in Arizona where he was leading in a state Trump won in 2016. Biden will have been heartened also by carrying New Hampshire and Minnesota, two states that Hillary Clinton had only narrowly carried during that last election and the Trump has hoped to overturn in 2020.

For the Democrat challenger though, the clearest path to clinching a majority of electoral college votes remains in sight and boils down to a trio of Rust Belt States on which both campaigns concentrated their election machinery.

With Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin slow to report returns, both were prepared for legal challenges over ballots, meaning the result may not be clear until later today or even later this week.

As any notion of an Electoral College landslide evaporates for Biden, this has turned into a state-by-state war of political attrition that could drag on for some time yet. Democrats will be smarting this morning and Republican tails up, but this is not over yet. What has a been messy election so far could be about to get even messier.