10:17 p.m. ET Electoral vote update (via AP)
Trump 198, Harris, 109
9:51 p.m. ET – Alsobrooks wins Maryland senate seat
Democratic senate candidate Angela Alsobrooks, a former county executive of Prince George’s County, Md., defeated Democratic candidate Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland. She’ll be the first Black senator to represent the state.
– Jared Council
9:21 p.m. ET Electoral vote update (via AP)
Trump 177, Harris, 99
9:08 p.m. ET – Early results point to strong performance for Trump
Donald Trump scored a bigger-than-expected victory in Florida, and voters in Georgia have positioned him strongly to capture that state’s 16 electoral votes.
The AP called Florida for Trump at 8:01 p.m. ET. The former president was on track to win the longtime Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County–the first Republican presidential candidate to do so since 1988.
In Georgia, Trump had a 52%-47% vote lead with more than two-thirds of the vote in.
Lakshya Jain, who co-leads the non-profit voting analysis firm Split Ticket posted on X: “Would very much say you’d rather be Trump than Harris in Georgia at the moment. I’m not seeing the margins for Harris that she really needs in Atlanta suburbs to counteract the rural redshift yet. The same goes in North Carolina, though that’s looking a bit tighter at the moment.”
– Jared Council
8:44 p.m. ET Electoral vote update (via AP)
Trump 101, Harris, 71
8:24 p.m. ET Electoral vote update (via AP)
Trump 95, Harris, 35
8:15 p.m. ET – Some Virginia Dems in high spirits as results pour in
At the Landing Hotel in downtown Hampton, seven people were watching the returns on the jumbo TV screen. It’s 7:15 p.m.
“Kamala’s going to win,” said Cynthis Chillos of Suffolk, Virginia. “It’s a woman’s time.”
“Hope, for Harris,” said Pam Stanberry of Smithfield, Virginia. “Because of women’s rights.”
“It’s not going to be as close as they [pundits and pollsters] say,” said Mark Cooper of Hampton, Virginia. “It’s going to be a blowout, for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.”
There are about 100 people in the room at 7:50 p.m.
They are eating snacks and drinking cocktails or soft drinks.
A five piece jazz fusion band is playing at this Democrats watch party.
– Wayne Dawkins
8:02 p.m. ET – Polls close in key battlegrounds; GOP flips Senate seat
Poll recently closed in Georgia and North Carolina, two key states where the outcomes have significant implications for the paths to electoral college victories for the two presidential candidates.
While these races were still too early to call, exit polls in Georgia showed independents voting for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by a margin of 54% to 43%, according to CNN. Joe Biden won this group in 2020. Harris is winning Black voters 86% to 12% in Georgia, slightly below Biden’s 2020 levels.
Trump secured electoral map victories in the Midwest states, with races called in his favor in Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia. New Hampshire was called for Harris.
In West Virginia, Republican Senate candidate Jim Justice won the senate seat opened by retiring Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, easing the path for Republicans to gain control of the upper Chamber.
– Jared Council
Earlier
Millions of Americans headed to the polls Tuesday to vote in elections up and down the ticket–including in a presidential race that is one of the closest in modern U.S. history by final polling and one that will make history no matter who wins.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, and former President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, for weeks have been effectively tied in polling averages in seven battleground states–Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
More than 80 million Americans have voted early, and neither candidate appeared to enter Election Day with a meaningful edge.
If Harris wins, she will become the first woman president, the first president of Black and South Asian descent and the first president that’s a member of one of the “Divine 9” fraternity or sorority organizations. For Trump, who’s been the GOP nominee for three straight presidential election cycles, a victory will mark the first time that America votes to make a convicted felon its commander-in-chief.
Also on the ballot for Americans: choosing which party will control the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
The 2024 presidential contest has already differentiated itself from most others in the history books. For Trump, the year brought two assassination attempts and four criminal indictments, including a New York state case that resulted in 34 felony convictions. His standing in the Republican party never faltered. Harris, who previously had mostly been a low-profile sidekick to President Joe Biden, entered the race after Biden dropped out in July and quickly consolidated support on her way to becoming the Democratic nominee.
As of Tuesday evening, federal and local officials said Russia was behind non-credible bomb threats that briefly closed some polling locations, including at least six threats in Democratic leaning locations in Georgia, the Washington Post reported.
Trump cast his vote in-person in Florida Tuesday, while Harris cast a mail-in ballot to her home state of California on Sunday. Trump is slated to watch the election results at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, while Harris plans to set up shop in Washington D.C. at Howard University, her alma mater.
Among the battlegrounds, the simplest paths to victory for both candidates involve Pennsylvania. If Trump wins there and in North Carolina and Georgia, he’ll be president again. If Harris keeps Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, as Biden did in 2020, she’ll win.
The votes in Georgia and North Carolina are expected to be counted on election night. The vote counts in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are unlikely to be tallied before the night ends. If Harris wins either Georgia or North Carolina, it will complicate Trump’s path to victory. The same is true if Trump wins one of the three northern “Blue Wall” battleground states.
The gender divide is expected to be a driving force in the election, with men favoring Trump and women favoring Harris in a gender gap that has exceed recent presidential races. On each side, the candidates are looking to run up the votes with their respective genders to offset potential shortcomings from the voting bloc of the opposite sex.
The Black vote is expected to be closely watched, especially in the battleground states. Trump got 8 percent of the Black vote in 2016 and 12 percent of the Black vote in 2020, and he continued to court Black voters this cycle. He notched 15% of the Black vote in an October poll by the New York Times/Siena College, a figure that, if it held, would be the highest among any Republican presidential candidate since 1980.
But Trump’s support among Black voters has shown some signs of slipping in the closing stretch. A recent NAACP poll found that Black support dropped to 11% from 13% a month earlier, while Harris grew her support to 73% from 63% over that span.
The most important issues for Black voters are inflation, healthcare, jobs and civil rights–in that order–according to a survey of 1,013 Black voters last week by the Black Voter Project. In other polls, voters have preferred Harris on healthcare issues, including abortion rights, while preferring Trump on the economy and immigration. Immigration was only the most important issue for 3% of respondents in the Black Voter Project.
Black men have been a focus of the campaign, as Harris has struggled to reach the levels of support that President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Biden drew from this bloc while Black women’s support of Democratic candidates have hardly budged. (Obama made remarks in October that seemed to chide Black men for their hesitance to support Harris.)
Some Black political commentators saw the focus on Black men as laying the groundwork for them to be blamed if Harris loses, and pointed out that the votes of white women are far more likely than those of Black men to determine the winner.
On election night, the campaigns and election analysts are expected to see if Harris can maintain the winning coalition that Biden formed in 2020, with strong margins–winning 80% of the vote or more–in urban areas and decent ones in the suburbs. The Democratic party has made deep inroads among white college-educated voters over the past few election cycles, especially in the suburbs. Trump, meanwhile, has increased his support among non-white working class voters, including in urban areas.
