The final outcome of the 2024 election is clear: Americans went to the polls to choose between Vice-President Kamala Harris, who would be the nation’s first female president, and Donald Trump, who successfully fought his way back to the White House after losing it four years ago and launching a coup to stay in power.
Below is a reverse chronological account of what happened as it happened, including commentary and analysis from the entire Intelligencer team.
We’re shutting down this election liveblog, but we’re starting fresh with another one collecting answers to the two questions on countless people’s minds today: What the f**k just happened? What happens now?
The New York Times features a map showing swings in the two parties’ vote shares from 2020 to 2024, and one look at it shows that Trump improved on his results from four years ago throughout the country — in some places by huge margins. The Times notes:
Mr. Trump improved on his 2020 margin in 2,367 counties. His margin decreased in only 240 counties. There were 536 counties where too few votes had been counted to be included in the analysis. Support for Mr. Trump over his three consecutive presidential runs has swayed back and forth, but early results showed that even a number of states where Vice President Kamala Harris was ahead had shifted right.
Jeff Bezos, who killed the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, wrote on X:
Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump
all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.
With control of the House of Representatives still up in the air, Democrats made some strides in New York, which was the site of several key losses in the 2022 midterms. The party was able to flip two Republican seats with eyes on a third while managing to keep Representative Pat Ryan, who was locked in a tough reelection bid. In the state’s 22nd District, Democrat John Mannion defeated Republican representative Brandon Williams. Josh Riley won the state’s 19th Congressional District, ousting incumbent Republican Marc Molinaro.
The 4th District race between Representative Anthony D’Esposito and his Democratic challenger, Laura Gillen, has yet to be called, but Gillen is currently leading with the majority of the votes counted.
While Democrats nationwide are struggling to accept Trump’s win, there’s one member of the party who has a chance to benefit from a second Trump presidency: Eric Adams. In recent weeks, the incoming president has made significant overtures to the New York mayor, who was recently hit with federal corruption charges, with Trump offering praise and comparing their legal strife. Adams has notably refused to rebuff Trump’s outreach, prompting speculation that the mayor may want to stay on good terms with the man who will soon have federal pardon and commutation powers at his disposal again. During his first term, Trump commuted the sentences of several Democratic politicians who found themselves on the wrong side of the law, including former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
Vox’s Andrew Prokop writes on X:
Current Senate Dem overperformance compared to Harris margin:
Tester +13
Osborn +13
Klobuchar +11
Gallego +7
Brown +7
Allred +5
Rosen +4
Heinrich +4
Kim +4
Kaine +3
Slotkin +2
Baldwin +2
Casey +2
Mucarsel-Powell: 0
Many people in New York City are unhappy with the results of the 2024 presidential election, but stock traders are not among them. The Dow Jones was up over 1,300 points (3.1 percent) minutes after the market opened, with the S&P up 118 points (just over 2 percent). Bitcoin is up over 7 percent and headed to an all-time high with a president-elect who has grown quite friendly to cryptocurrency. Trump, meanwhile, should be happy that the ever-volatile stock in Truth Social is up 25 points.
New York’s Andrew Rice notes that, with his win last night, Trump “overcame 34 felony convictions, accusations of insurrection, civil-lawsuit judgments totaling more than a half-billion dollars, and allegations of dictatorial intentions.” And he has promised to turn the justice system against his enemies:
Trump has hinted that, as president, he will pardon the many hundreds of his supporters who have been charged and convicted with criminal offenses related to the assault on the Capitol on January 6. Early in this campaign, Trump promised to “totally obliterate” the government institutions that he describes as the “deep state.” “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” he said at his 2023 kickoff rally in Waco, Texas, a location heavy with incendiary symbolism for the far right. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed,” he said, “I am your retribution.” He has repeatedly suggested his version of “retribution” may involve ordering investigations of his perceived legal adversaries — including Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Biden and his family. In September, Trump suggested that he would also like to see his opponent tried for unspecified offenses, saying Harris “should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions.” He and his supporters have suggested that “they” — without explicitly naming names — were somehow behind the actions of a pair of would-be assassins, one of which only narrowly missed his target when he shot at Trump from a rooftop at a Pennsylvania rally in July.
Read the full piece here.
As America groggily wakes up after a banner night for the Republican Party, Donald Trump has not just secured a win in the Electoral College but is on track to win the popular vote — something a Republican has not done in 20 years. The AP called the race for Trump at 5:34 a.m.
The GOP is also expected to flip the Senate after picking up seats in Ohio, West Virginia, Nebraska, and Montana.
Control of the House is not as clear. As of 9 a.m., the AP projects that Republicans are in the lead with 198 seats over 180 seats for the Democrats. Either party will need 218 seats for a majority. Most likely, control of the House may come down to California, where it may take weeks to count the votes due to the high number of mail-in ballots in the state. In New York, where both parties spent heavily in several battleground districts, Democrats managed to flip four Republican-held seats, giving them a better chance at House control — and avoiding another Trump trifecta.
As Democrats try to cut the margin of the GOP’s Senate majority, Representative Elissa Slotkin is winning by just under 5,000 votes with 95 percent of ballots counted in the race for Michigan’s open seat. Her own seat in Congress — a district that includes the state capital of Lansing — was flipped by a Republican.
Ryan James Girdusky notes on Twitter:
How have deep blue states moved in this election from 2020 to 2024:
New York: D+23 -> D+12
New Jersey: D+16 -> D+4
Massachussetts: D+33 -> D+26
Rhode Island: D+23 -> D+13
Connecticut: D+20 -> D+8
Vermont: D+36 -> D+32
Maryland: D+33 -> D+22
Delaware: D+19 -> D+14
Modi, Macron, Netanyahu, and Trump’s favorite strongman, Viktor Orbán, have quickly praised Trump and wished him well. So too has the world leader who may be most affected by this new course of events:
Trump did not mention Harris at all in his valedictory remarks. Nor did he mention any contrived voter fraud or imaginary non-citizen voting or indeed, any “electoral interference” by his enemies. He didn’t mention the Democratic Party and barely mentioned the Republican Party. And in his vague remarks about the administration he will lead, he didn’t repeat any of his many threats to wreak vengeance on his alleged persecutors in public office or the news media.
Speaking before a huge crowd of ecstatic supporters in Florida, Donald Trump said of his apparent victory, “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
In remarks that at times resembled one of his trademark rally speeches, he waxed eloquent about Elon Musk, demanded golfer Bryson DeChambeau take the stage, and turned over the microphone to an array of allies like his running mate, JD Vance, and UFC mogul Dana White.
Trump also gave a shoutout to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which was followed by cheers of “Bobby, Bobby” from the crowd. He said he would give Kennedy free rein to “Make America healthy again,” except on environmental issues. “Leave the oil to me,” Trump said. Kennedy has spread falsehoods about the efficacy of vaccines and recently said on Twitter he would push a Trump administration to advise against putting fluoride into drinking water.
At 3:50 a.m. ET, virtually everyone assumes Donald Trump will be the 47th president now that Pennsylvania, Harris’s last real hope, was called for the former president. Trump’s quasi-victory speech from Florida didn’t hedge a single bet.
But right now, Trump has 266 electoral votes according to the AP and other major media outlets. A slow count in Arizona and the likelihood that remaining ballots in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada favor Harris, mean those battleground states may not be called for a while. It’s more likely that Trump will be put over the top by Alaska, where he leads by 15 points with 62 percent of the vote counted, in combination with the second congressional district of Maine, where he leads by eight points with 72 percent of the vote counted.
Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin suggests that Trump successfully rode the anti-incumbent wave:
The overall story, so far: Nothing here looks like a story of various campaign decisions or a VP choice or big set piece speeches. It’s an electorate mad at the incumbent WH’s record and expressing it pretty uniformly everywhere, blue and red states alike.
Pollster Natalie Jackson nods:
Anti-incumbency has been a global phenomenon. It seemed like we might overcome it, but clearly no. It’s not over until every vote is counted — but the anti-incumbency trend is already clear.
The Des Moines Register reports:
Renowned Pollster J. Ann Selzer said Tuesday she would be reviewing her data to determine why a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll released just days before the election produced results so far out of line with former President Donald Trump’s resounding victory.
Trump handily won Iowa for a third time, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points with more than 90% of the vote counted ― a sharp contrast to Saturday’s Iowa Poll that had Harris leading by 3 points.
“Tonight, I’m of course thinking about how we got where we are,” Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which conducts the Iowa Poll, said in a statement. “The poll findings we produced for The Des Moines Register and Mediacom did not match what the Iowa electorate ultimately decided in the voting booth today. I’ll be reviewing data from multiple sources with hopes of learning why that happened. And, I welcome what that process might teach me.”
NBC, CNN, and CBS are all now projecting a Trump victory in the state.
The network has called Pennsylvania and now Wisconsin for Trump, which would give him an Electoral College victory.
No other networks have called either of those states for Trump yet, but at this point, analysts have all but said there’s no room for Harris to overcome his leads.
The Associated Press takes a first swing at explaining what just happened:
Voters under age 30 represent a fraction of the total electorate, but about half of them supported Harris. That’s compared to the roughly 6 in 10 who backed Biden in 2020.
Slightly more than 4 in 10 young voters went for Trump, up from about one-third in 2020. Another shift that emerged was among Black and Latino voters, who appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than they were to back Biden four years ago, according to AP VoteCast.
About 8 in 10 Black voters backed Harris, down from the roughly 9 in 10 who backed Biden. More than half of Hispanic voters supported Harris, but that was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 who backed Biden in 2020. Trump’s support among those groups appeared to rise slightly compared to 2020 …
It may turn out that the Trump era is not a permanent realignment of the major party coalitions. But it’s clear that old coalitions and longstanding understandings of how to win the White House simply do not apply with Trump in the mix.
The room in Florida erupted into a single loud roar as Fox News called Pennsylvania for Trump. Fists were raised and people embraced as it became inevitable that he would return to the White House. As the loud cheering crowd pressed further toward the stage celebrating, Nigel Farage, accompanied by an entourage, joined in.
The AP has called the race for New York’s 19th Congressional District. Democrat Josh Riley has defeated Republican incumbent Marcus Molinaro. It’s the first toss-up House race, as rated by the Cook Political Report, that Democrats have won tonight.
The polls have closed in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, marking the official end to voting in the 2024 U.S. election. Now the only thing left is the counting — and the consequences.
Republicans are giddy ahead of Trump’s expected self-declared victory speech in Florida. Noah Pollak, a political consultant, was munching on olives and cheese, taking a victory lap. “I’d like to quote Jeffrey Lebowski: ‘The bums lost. The bums will always lose,’” he said as Georgia was called for Trump in the background. “This is not the party of Romney and McCain,” he continued. “It is a based GOP that is going to want to show up in Washington and do serious damage to the left.” Matt Rand was sitting in the back of the room sipping on a cup of Red Bull, wearing a red MAGA hat, and described his mood as simply “electric, baby, electric.”
NBC and CNN have both called the Peach State for Trump. With North Carolina also called for the former president, Kamala Harris’s path to victory rests with the three Blue Wall midwest states — but things aren’t looking good in any of them, either.
Republican representative Brandon Williams has been defeated by his Democratic challenger, John Mannion, in New York’s 22nd Congressional District, flipping a top House target of the Democratic Party.
Brian Armstrong, the CEO of crypto exchange Coinbase, is turning out to be one of the more powerful players in reshaping Washington. Armstrong was one of the central funders for Fairshake, which backed pro-crypto lawmakers. He’s now claiming there will be 219 members of Congress he considers supportive of the industry.
This isn’t an outright majority in either chamber. Still, with one of Washington’s most stalwart crypto skeptics, Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, voted out of power, this is a huge turnaround for an industry that was a pariah not too long ago.
It’s official: Per the Associated Press, Republicans have taken control of the U.S. Senate for the first time since 2018. They flipped Democratic seats in West Virginia (a non-contest after Joe Manchin retired) and Ohio (where Bernie Moreno overwhelmed Sherrod Brown with money and party-line Republican votes). They also avoided upsets in Nebraska (where Deb Fischer narrowly defeated independent Dan Osborn), Florida, and Texas, where Democrats had some hope of beating Rick Scott and Ted Cruz but failed.
The GOP Senate margin could yet expand when close races in Montana, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are resolved, which would save the GOP majority (or Donald Trump) from relying too heavily on the independent-minded Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins.
If you adjudge elections by media “calls” of battleground states, this presidential election is a cliff-hanger of the highest order. Only one of the seven battlegrounds, North Carolina, has been called by the Associated Press, the official arbiter of official results. In theory, Harris could win the other six battlegrounds and take 303 electoral votes and the presidency.
But media calls are an all-or-nothing thing; they don’t happen without considerable certainty because no one wants to be like the networks in 2000 that called and uncalled and recalled and uncalled Florida and the entire presidential election. That’s why so much attention is being paid to the New York Times’s probabilistic forecasts of where the vote will wind up, which don’t imply total certainty but do reflect a lot of conviction.
At this point, the Times gives Trump win probabilities ranging from 63 percent in Nevada to more than 95 percent in Georgia. Could they be completely wrong in all or even most of these states? Yes, it’s possible, but it’s more likely the Times is a bit ahead of the networks that are waiting to remove all doubt.
Missouri voters have passed a measure to enshrine a right to abortion in the state constitution. It’s the first time a state has voted to overturn an abortion ban by ballot initiative, an important milestone on a Tuesday night that’s becoming grim for liberals. Voters in the state have also reelected the anti-abortion senator Josh Hawley by a wide margin.
The Trump campaign party in Florida erupted in cheers as CNN officially called North Carolina, with the crowd cheering “USA! USA!” as anchor Kaitlan Collins announced the news. The room filled more and more with well-dressed attendees as the crowd started to resemble a Mar-a-Lago gala more than a Trump rally. Outside, Trump’s longtime stalwart Roger Stone held court around a circle of reporters who were ready to listen to him should his old friend secure a second term.
New York was quickly called for Harris to no surprise from election watchers. But a closer look at the numbers show that Trump has made significant inroads into the deep-blue state. As of 11:47 p.m., the New York State Board of Elections has Harris at 54.82 percent to Trump’s 43.12 percent. Biden won the state by 60.9 percent in 2020.
Fox News has called the Ohio Senate race for Colombian-born businessman Bernie Moreno, an upset for Sherrod Brown, who has held the seat since 2007.
This brings Republicans closer to getting a majority in the Senate. Brown is one of the last few Democrats, along with Elizabeth Warren, who had reshaped the finance industry after the 2008 financial crisis. Since 2021, he has been chair of the Senate Banking Committee and has been one of Congress’s most stalwart skeptics of the crypto industry.
The Moreno-Brown race was reportedly the most expensive congressional contest, with about $500 million pouring into the state, much of that from crypto executives and lobbying groups. Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, spent at least $75 million to elect pro-crypto candidates, according to CNBC. Brown would be the most prominent scalp for the industry, which funded the ouster of Representative Katie Porter two years ago. The digital-asset industry is on the verge of winning over Washington — should Trump win — hardly two years after FTX collapsed in the largest financial fraud in American history.
If you are looking for reasons Donald Trump is doing as well as he is tonight, there’s a dog that isn’t barking. The flood of pro-choice votes for Harris isn’t quite a flood, or so the national exit polls suggest. Two-thirds of voters say they want abortion to be legal, while 31 percent say they want abortion to be illegal. Harris led Trump in the former category but by 69 percent to 28 percent. In the latter category, Trump won by 90 percent to 9 percent. A more nuanced question as to whether voters wanted “all” or “most” abortions to be legal or illegal showed Trump’s big breakthrough: He won 47 percent of voters who wanted “most” abortions to be legal.
Clearly, Trump’s lies and and flip-flops about abortion fuzzed up the issue enough to take it off the table among voters who were pro-choice but not adamantly so. If he wins, his anti-abortion allies will forgive him for his temporary heresies.
The first swing-state decision is a Trump victory. At 11:18 p.m, the Associated Press called North Carolina for Trump, taking a top target of the Harris campaign officially off the board.
Here’s what Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon just emailed to her campaign staff as the VP’s path to 270 looks increasingly difficult:
Subject: What We’re Seeing So Far
Team, As polls close across the country, I wanted to give everyone an update on what we’re seeing. As we have known all along, this is a razor thin race. Thanks to this amazing team, we have seen incredible turnout across the Battleground States, and the closeness of the race is exactly what we prepared for. While we continue to see data trickle in from the Sun Belt states, we have known all along that our clearest path to 270 electoral votes lies through the Blue Wall states. And we feel good about what we’re seeing.
• In Pennsylvania, we overperformed turnout expectations in Philadelphia, and overperformed in our early vote expectations in Bucks County. We don’t have Election Day results from Philadelphia, but we do know that we overperformed turnout expectations there, and have seen especially high turnout in places with large non-white and student populations. We expect to see higher turnout in Philadelphia than in 2020. Outside of Philadelphia, we have limited data on turnout and support right now, but what we do have is tracking with our expectations. We are awaiting more results (like everyone else!), and hope to get a closer read in the coming hours.
• In Michigan, we are awaiting a significant amount of votes to come in. The City of Detroit won’t be reported out until roughly midnight, but we have seen strong turnout throughout early vote and Election Day there. Other results in Michigan are harder to parse, since results are coming in more piece-meal than elsewhere.
• In Wisconsin, we know there is a significant amount of vote remaining in Dane and Milwaukee counties, and we are seeing signs of strong performance in the WOW counties, where we have partial data. We don’t expect complete results from Wisconsin until tomorrow morning between 3 am - 5 am.
Polls just closed in Nevada and Arizona so, as expected, it will be a while before we have more information from both states.
We’ve been saying for weeks that this race might not be called tonight. Those of you who were around in 2020 know this well: It takes time for all the votes to be counted – and all the votes will be counted. That’s how our system works. What we do know is this race is not going to come into focus until the early morning hours. We’ll continue to keep you all updated as we get more information. This is what we’ve been built for, so let’s finish up what we have in front of us tonight, get some sleep, and get ready to close out strong tomorrow. — JOD
In an update on the New York Times election liveblog, Nate Cohn writes:
For the first time tonight, we consider Trump likely to win the presidency. He has an advantage in each of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. To win, Harris would need to sweep all three. There is still a lot of vote left, but in the voting so far, Trump is narrowly but discernibly ahead.
The Associated Press has called New York’s 18th Congressional District for Pat Ryan, the Democratic incumbent fending off a challenge from his Republican challenger, Alison Esposito.
Decision Desk HQ is also projecting a victory for Republican congressman Nick LaLota over his Democratic opponent, John Avlon, in New York’s First Congressional District.
As most of the country stared at websites or TV screens as key battleground states (or at least North Carolina and the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) hung in the balance, that 2016 harbinger of Democratic electoral doom, the New York Times “Needle,” is suddenly pointing to a sizable Trump victory. As of 10:30 p.m. ET, the Times is showing Trump favored in all seven battleground states with a win probability of 61 percent in Nevada, 64 percent in Pennsylvania, 66 percent in Wisconsin, 67 percent in Michigan, 77 percent in Arizona, and over 95 percent in both Georgia and North Carolina. The Times also estimates that for the first time Trump will carry the national popular vote, by 0.8 percent.
How could this have happened? Well, analysts all along (notably Nate Silver) pointed out that all seven battleground states were close enough that a mild breeze (or polling error) in one direction or the other could sweep all of them into one candidate’s column. That could be what’s happening, or perhaps the Needle is off and will swing back before all these states are called. But at the moment, a lot of Democrats are feeling déja vù from 2016.
As of 10:18 p.m., the New York Times has Trump up slightly in its popular-vote projection, leading Harris by +0.6. Nate Cohn, the outlet’s chief election analyst, says:
The race for the national popular vote is a true tossup. Trump has run well all over the country. If that trend continues in California and New York, where the vote count is still early, there’s a distinct chance he could win it.
Earlier today, Wall Street was hedging its bets against a Trump win. No longer.
Bitcoin has surged above $74,000 to all-time highs. In after-hours trading, Trump Media & Technology Group rose as much as 10 percent despite its disastrous quarterly earnings. Take a look at the U.S. Treasury markets and you will see a huge sell-off, a clear sign that Trump is expected to win. The yield on the ten-year Treasury bond is about 4.45 percent, the highest since July.
All these markets have surged as betting-market odds have heavily shifted toward Trump. His odds of winning on Polymarket are just shy of 87 percent.
Fox News and NBC both currently project that Ted Cruz will win reelection over long-shot Democratic candidate Colin Allred.
The Democratic Party’s path to retaking the Senate now becomes even narrower. The party will have to retain all of its seats that are up for grabs in addition to having some other races go against the Republican Party, including Nebraska’s U.S. Senate race in which incumbent Deb Fischer is facing a challenge by independent Dan Osborn (who has said he won’t caucus with either party if he wins).
One of the most apparently meaningful data points to emerge in the days before the election was the Iowa Selzer poll, which has an extremely strong track record and which showed Harris leading by three points in a state Donald Trump won by seven four years ago. Seltzer’s poll looks like a gigantic miss. Harris is on track to lose the state by at least as much as Biden did.
I had one moment of doubt about Selzer not long ago. Tim Miller interviewed her on his Bulwark podcast, and asked how she handled the possibility of differential response bias, i.e., the risk that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to reply to a poll. All pollsters have grappled with this risk, some more successfully than others. Seltzer didn’t have any answer.
I raised an eyebrow when I heard that. I wasn’t ready to publicly question a pollster who has compiled a long and impressive record, including during the Trump era. But in retrospect, I’d guess this did her in.
U.S. historian Allan Lichtman has successfully predicted nine of the past ten elections with his “key”-based system — essentially, a vibe-based assessment of 13 true-or-false criteria that he says can determine who will become the president. (They range from “social unrest” to “incumbent charisma” to the state of the economy and “scandal.”) This time around, he projected a Harris win, setting off a battle with more data-based prognosticators like Nate Silver.
Right now, he’s not feeling too good:
Tweets 538’s Nathaniel Rakich:
Blue Wall check-in:
• PA: Harris 52–48% with 35% in
• MI: Harris 53–45% with 13% in
• WI: Harris 51–47% with 29% in
All three are setting up for a photo finish right now. Nobody knows anything yet.
A quick look at the national exit polls shows a lot of consistency between the 2020 and 2024 results. The much-discussed Trump surge among Black voters doesn’t appear nationally. Harris slightly improved on Biden’s margins among college-educated voters and did better overall among white voters generally.
The much-discussed gender gap wasn’t dramatically different either. Trump won men by 9 percent in 2020 and by 11 percent this year; the Democratic margin among women actually dropped from 15 percent to 10 percent, the exits report. Where Trump has made notable gains is among Latinos, his percentage rising from 32 percent in 2020 to 45 percent. He also improved his percentage of under-30 voters (which we should remember change a lot every four years) from 36 percent in 2020 to 42 percent this year.
You may be reading commentary suggesting Harris’s only path to victory at this point is the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Definitely possible, but the Harris camp is eager to insist that North Carolina and Georgia aren’t gone yet. They’re pointing out that there were still long lines at UNC-Charlotte and UNC-Wilmington as polls closed — favorable locations for them. And they’re saying that they’re seeing better-than-expected numbers for Harris in suburban areas of Georgia, while they’re not seeing as much of a rural boom as Republicans had hoped. The night is young (and the coffee is still flowing at the Chik-fil-A a few feet from the press filing center at Howard).
The French 75s are flowing at New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s reelection party at the Hotel Chelsea. One of the hosts is Rachelle MacPherson — her husband owns the hotel — whose fashion brand, Lingua Franca, sells $380 cashmere sweaters with #Resistance slogans on them, such as “I voted for her” and “childless cat lady.” Everyone’s smiling. No one’s checking their phone. Captain & Tennille is playing. “This is a great party because Governor Hochul is coming,” says a Chuck Schumer staffer (the senator is “number crunching” in D.C. What time will he go to bed tonight, by the way? “One or two.”)
“I have a news flash for all of you: Tonight, the women have won,” says Hochul when she takes the stage. There’s upbeat talk of “badass women” and taking the House and slightly less peppy affirmations about “holding” the Senate and “fighting against the politics of hate and division in this country.” “I love you. I cherish your friendship,” Hochul calls out. “I love YOU,” Gillibrand screams back. They walk off to “Empire State of Mind.”
Did you know the senator’s nickname is Tina?
Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks has defeated Republican former governor Larry Hogan, holding a key Senate seat for Democrats. Alsobrooks will be the first Black senator to represent Maryland in the chamber. With Lisa Blunt Rochester’s projected win in Delaware, January will mark the first time in history that two Black women have served together in the U.S. Senate.
In Delaware, state senator Sarah McBride has won her race and will enter Congress next January. The 34 year-old McBride was expected to win and has been a fixture of Democratic politics for years; President Joe Biden even wrote the foreword to her memoir.
“That ticket is not an ultimate destination, but it is a reflection of how far we’ve come, that no matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, or the gender with which you identify, that you can live your truth and dream big dreams all at the same time,” McBride said as she voted on Tuesday. “It’s not the end, but it’s the beginning.”
Polls are now closed in Michigan and Wisconsin, and both the anecdotal buzz and the exit polls show these two bricks in the so-called Blue Wall of essential Democratic states looking pretty close. The exit polls in Michigan suggest a very narrow Harris win, but fears about Black turnout and youth voting appear to have some foundation. The Black percentage of the electorate seems to have dropped slightly from 2020, and the Democratic percentage has dropped a hair. Meanwhile, Trump is leading among under-30 Michigan voters.
Wisconsin may lean a hair toward Harris as well (she leads by four points among independents and is doing better among Republicans than Trump is among Democrats), but there are some funky numbers in the exits: They show Trump winning 20 percent of the Black vote, significantly more than in any state we’ve seen. The way things are shaking out elsewhere, Harris will need both Michigan and Wisconsin to win.
At the Trump campaign’s watch party in Florida, attendees are swapping jubilant anecdotes and lining up at the cash bar for celebratory drinks as the results so far show Trump has multiple paths open to regaining the White House. Partygoers cheered as safe Republican states were called. The mood is reflected in conversations I’m having with Republicans who are feeling increasingly confident based on the numbers they are seeing. In the meantime, and for the first time tonight, the TV screens in the room are playing CNN — a network that would not likely be shown if it was a bad night for Trump.
Harris’s chances seem to now hinge on sweeping Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Right now those states are very early and very close. But the Times “Needle” has Trump favored slightly in Pennsylvania (with a 53 percent chance to win). The other two states are pure toss-ups. The Blue Wall has to break Harris’s way or Trump will probably win.
Although a majority of Florida voters backed a measure that would have enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution, they weren’t numerous enough to surpass a 60 percent threshold. Polling suggested the result would be close, but there was some reason for optimism. Stories like that of Deborah Dorbert, a Florida woman forced to carry her pregnancy to term despite her son’s fatal abnormalities, had captured national attention, and campaigners had carried out a formidable ground game.
They had expressed confidence ahead of Tuesday’s result. “I think this is ours to win. I think it’s been ours to win from the get-go,” Anna Hochkammer, executive director of the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition and a key leader in the fight for Amendment 4, told The 19th News in October. “Floridians in general are suspicious of abortion bans. They don’t like them. There tends to be a fairly libertarian bent to the Florida voter consciousness, and I think the abortion bans violate them quite profoundly.” Hochkammer wasn’t entirely wrong — most voters did support the amendment — but the threshold, which was the product of Republican efforts to stymie the campaign, was too much to overcome. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, also spent public funds to try to defeat the amendment, and the head of the state’s health department had threatened TV stations for airing commercials in support of the measure.
The state’s six-week ban remains in place for now, forcing many Florida women to travel extreme distances for abortion care. Amendment 4 is one of ten pro-abortion-rights measures on the ballot around the country this year. Because of the 60 percent threshold, its failure may mean it’s not a useful bellwether for other campaigns like it.
The Cut is tracking how all of Tuesday’s abortion-rights ballot questions have fared nationwide here.
Good evening from the New York Young Republican Club’s election watch party at a packed East Village bar that has been rented out for the festivities.
A sea of MAGA hats and “Never Surrender” shirts are snacking on mozzarella sticks and drinking themed cocktails; a “Maga-rita” is on the menu, as is “Unburdened By What Has Gin.” Almost every TV is playing Fox News, and while the crowd was enjoying Crazy Train and YMCA, by a quarter to nine, the music was off and Bill Hemmer’s analysis was blasting over the speakers. The mood is optimistic and a bit anxious.
“I’m a little nervous, dude,” I hear one guy tell his friend, who notes that they just have to “focus on the good news.”
“It’s a coin flip,” one middle-aged male attendee, a member since 2020, tells me when I ask how he’s feeling about the night. “I predict if he wins Georgia, he wins the election.”
A photo of Harris comes on the TV and the crowd boos. Then Arizona is projected for Trump and the crowd breaks out into a “U-S-A” chant.
Former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson tweets:
Thoughts at the moment:
• FL was a bloodbath for Ds
• Trump is slightly favored in GA
• Harris will win VA comfortably, though it’ll shift right by several points from 2020
• Not looking good early for Brown in OH in terms of separation with Harris Blue Walls looms large
Outside of the Blue Wall, NC is looking tight and polls are still open in AZ/NV. Not the way you’d prefer to start the night if you’re Harris, but a lot of game left to play.
Representative Andy Kim will be heading to the U.S. Senate. He has officially won the seat left open by Senator Robert Menendez, who resigned following his conviction on federal corruption charges earlier this year. Kim will be the first Korean American in the chamber and its third-youngest member.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein reports:
With half the precincts in Georgia reporting, the race is tightening as more votes are tallied in densely populated parts of the state. Millions of votes still outstanding in heavily Democratic metro Atlanta — and rural and exurban areas where Trump will dominate.
Despite a New York Times tech strike, Nate Cohn’s alternately loved and loathed election-prediction tool is back. And right now, it’s showing an exceedingly close race, as predicted by many preelection polls — with just a slight tilt for Trump, who appears to be faring relatively well in Georgia and North Carolina so far.
In the extremely close, just-downballot race to take control of the Senate, Republicans picked up a key seat in West Virginia, where governor Jim Justice won the race over a Democratic mayor. Though the GOP was expected to pick up the seat held by retiring Democrat Joe Manchin, it will be an essential part of their push to flip the Senate. When Justice heads to D.C. in January, he may bend some etiquette rules in the Capitol building: He brings his English bulldog (Baby Dog) everywhere he goes.
Polls closed in the Keystone State at 8 p.m., and it is the state most often pointed to as the tipping point, in part because of its 19 electoral votes. It’s far too early for a call (Pennsylvania didn’t start even processing early votes until this morning), but the exit polls (per CNN) suggest a dead-even contest. Harris is doing slightly but significantly better than Trump with her fellow partisans (she’s winning 9 percent of Republicans), but Trump leads modestly among self-identified independents.
Interestingly, the exits show Trump greatly improving his performance among Pennsylvania Latinos from 27 percent in 2020 to 42 percent in 2024. But it’s unclear whether the Latino sample adequately reflects the views of the Puerto Ricans offended by the racist humor of Trump’s New York City rally down the homestretch.
A data point to remember: If Trump wins Georgia and North Carolina, Pennsylvania literally becomes a must-win for Harris.
The Associated Press officially called Delaware’s U.S. Senate race for Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester. The outgoing Democratic congresswoman will succeed Senator Tom Carper, who decided against seeking reelection earlier this year. With her victory, Rochester will become the state’s first Black senator and first woman senator. She’ll also be only the fourth Black woman ever to serve in the U.S. Senate.
Election betting markets make up an inherently volatile space that tends to swing big based on any political developments. But after 7 p.m. — when several expected states were called for Donald Trump — the markets swung big in Republicans’ favor, notching a record 70–30 margin:
Keep in mind that the market could shift back if Harris closes the gap in key states like Pennsylvania and Georgia. Meanwhile, some crypto fans are feeling good, with TrumpCoin surging. Tesla stock has also jumped after market close, with similar-minded investors seeing an opportunity in the company owned by Trump’s close ally Elon Musk.
News outlets are projecting that Trump will win Florida and that incumbent Senator Rick Scott has defeated his Democratic opponent, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. In the House, Representatives Anna Paulina Luna and Maria Elvira Salazar have also won their reelection bids, a reflection of the deep reddening of the state evident in its early results.
While keeping in mind that exit polls (a) may be inaccurate and (b) are often adjusted as results come in, it’s worth taking a look at the evidence so far about one of the big themes in preelection analysis: the alleged major Trump gains among Black and Latino voters.
In the big southern battleground states of Georgia and North Carolina, the evidence is mixed. In Georgia, Black voters are breaking exactly as they did in 2020 with Harris winning 86 percent and Trump 12 percent; Black voters also represent the same 30 percent of the electorate. In North Carolina, the numbers are the same, but that’s a shift in Trump’s direction from the 7 percent the exits said he won in 2020.
There is evidence of Trump gains among Latinos in both states. The 2020 exits showed Trump’s share of North Carolina Latinos rising from 42 percent in 2020 to 49 percent this year. In Georgia, he went from 37 percent among Latinos in 2020 to 42 percent this year.
Earlier, Trump alleged there was “massive CHEATING” in Philadelphia and has now turned his eyes to Detroit, writing on Truth Social that “Heavy Law Enforcement is there!!!”
But officials in the city say they have no idea what Trump is talking about. “We are unaware of any police presence in the city for elections beyond what was outlined in a press conference last Thursday and widely reported nationally,” a Detroit elections-department spokesman told CNN.
Maybe it’s better to hide out in the privacy of your own home should the picture start looking bleak. A quick survey of New Yorkers revealed a preference for “gatherings” over “parties.” (That’s what Sarah Jessica Parker is doing, according to one invitee to her townhouse.) When asked yesterday if she had been invited anywhere good this year, one New York socialite and Kamala fundraiser responded, “Not yet, but there’s talk of Xanax drips.”
Maybe it’s 2016 PTSD. Said one reporter, “Everyone got burned at 2016 election parties. I’m taking an Ambien at 9 p.m. no matter what.” And a former Senate speechwriter: “We Democrats learned from 2016 not to have Champagne chilling.” Carole Radziwill, the former Real Housewife who allowed producers to film her Election Night party in 2016, responded, “I’m hiding.”
With additional reporting by Charlotte Klein.
CNN projects that North Carolina state attorney general Josh Stein has beaten Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson in a race that Republicans totally blew by nominating Robinson, whose past positive comments on Hitler, extreme comments on reproductive health and LGBTQ+ rights, and reported love of pornography made an otherwise purple governor’s race a sure thing for Democrats. It’s too early to get a clear picture on how the presidential race will ultimately look in North Carolina, where it is expected to be close.
CNN checked in with a young man who had waited hours in line to vote and who made a lot of jokes about eating chips and his girlfriend breaking up with him if he didn’t get to the polling site:
About 50 minutes after he released a video urging voters to “stay on line” — like a true New Yorker — he has released another video that begins, “Hey, Republicans, we’re doing really well. If you’re in line, stay in line.” Weirdly, in the last video, Trump was wearing a MAGA hat and no tie, and now he’s sporting a more formal look. Did he change or was this prerecorded?
Elon Musk says his America PAC is not going anywhere and will play a role in future elections down the line. “America PAC is going to keep going after this election — preparing for the midterms and any intermediate elections as well as looking at elections at the district attorney and sort of judicial levels. Something has to be done to counter the damage that Soros has done to the American system,” he said, per Puck.
It remains to be seen if the Tesla CEO will continue to dabble in canvassing efforts following recent reporting that raised questions about the integrity of his PAC’s operations. Wired reported Tuesday that Arizona canvassers paid by the PAC had trouble with compensation for their work and frequently had to knock on doors while ill.
Polls just closed in a second presidential battleground state, North Carolina. This is a state Trump carried in 2020 even as Joe Biden carried its southern counterpart, Georgia (both have 16 electoral votes this year). But exit polls suggest the Tar Heel State may be a better prospect for Kamala Harris, though it’s crazy close. According to CNN’s version of the exit polls, Trump is winning self-identified independents in Georgia handily. But in North Carolina, the exits show Trump and Harris dead even among the one-third of voters who call themselves indies. As it happens, the electorate in this state neatly divides itself between Democrats, Republicans, and independents, and Harris and Trump lead among their own partisans by an identical 96 to 3 percent.
Axios’s Stef Kight reports:
One GOP source says Trumpworld is “fairly confident” but also “a little worried about everything.”
You probably need no reminder that Pennsylvania is the biggest prize on the map tonight, so both campaigns are watching it extremely closely. There has already been plenty of talk about an apparently huge turnout in Philadelphia — possibly a very good sign for Dems — but the Harris camp is also feeling positive about long lines that persist on college campuses around the state, including in Philly (Temple) and elsewhere (Lehigh, Lafayette). They’ve also been having celebrity surrogates FaceTime into these campuses to urge students to stay in line — Jennifer Garner at Villanova and Josh Gad at Lehigh, for example.
The polls closed at 7 p.m. ET in Georgia, the first of the 2024 battleground states to begin reporting votes. While it’s far too early (and close) for a call on this state, CNN’s version of the exit polls shows one potentially key indicator: Trump is leading Harris by a 54–43 percent margin among self-identified independents. Joe Biden carried Georgia indies in 2020 by about the same margin. The percentage of the electorate this category represents has risen from 28 percent to 31 percent. That’s a very big positive sign for Trump in this important state with 16 electoral votes.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a statement shortly before polls closed at 7 p.m. that there will be around 5.2 million total votes this year, with 1.2 million coming on Election Day. That’s a few hundred thousand more votes than the previous high last cycle.
One working hypothesis I have is that northern white voters are more likely to be pulled to the Democrats over abortion, while Southern whites may not be. There may be some fragmentary evidence of this shift in the very early returns: Boone County of Indianapolis is showing Trump winning by just over 10 points, barely half his 2020 margin. Meanwhile, two counties in Kentucky show Trump edging up a couple of points from 2020.
This is extrapolation from very fragmentary data, but keep an eye out for this dynamic as one potential outcome.
Howdy from the campus of Howard University, Kamala Harris’s alma mater, where I’m inside the press filing center high above the Democrats’ Election Night party/event/extravaganza. There’s a massive setup on the campus’s main yard lined with approximately half the cameras in the country, but it’s not quite clear when the actual substantive programming may get started. Huge lines have been snaking around the campus for hours as supporters line up to get in. Lucky for them, it’s a beautiful night in D.C.
As for the feeling in Harris World? Most of the campaign operatives I’ve spoken with today insist they’re feeling positive based largely on reports of large turnout in Philadelphia and on campuses and because of signs that they’ll benefit from a historic gender gap across the battlegrounds. Meanwhile, Democrats seem to be more positive about Nevada than in recent days after strong numbers have been coming in from Clark County (Vegas), and they seem optimistic about suburban women voters in North Carolina.
But they’re also gearing up for what could be a long night. Harris herself is at home at the VP residence, the Naval Observatory, after a day of GOTV-focused radio interviews and phone banking. And her top aides are bunkered in a war room in town monitoring the results.
Trump, still a New Yorker despite living in Florida, urged voters in a video on X to stay “on line,” using the city’s preferred way of describing waiting in line. “We’re doing really well,” he said. “Stay on line, don’t get off line … make sure you get through and vote. We’re gonna have a big victory tonight.” Trump campaign sources have also told CNN their candidate is calling local radio stations in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, encouraging voters to get on line before polls close in both states at 8 p.m.
Anecdotal evidence throughout the day has suggested a potential for high voter turnout in Philadelphia and Mayor Cherelle Parker, who is backing Harris, is projecting confidence for her preferred candidate. Parker is predicting that the city could return between 650,000 and 700,000 votes for Harris, a figure that would bode well for the vice-president’s chances in Pennsylvania overall if accurate.
Reuters reporter Alexandra Ulmer tweets that Trump’s team was having trouble keeping his attention:
Trump was in a meeting today about turnout but appeared bored by the data talk, according to a source briefed on the meeting. All Trump wanted to know, the source said, was: “Am I going to win?”
The New York Times “Needle” is the absolute best way to follow election returns. It is a mathematically precise version of the eyeball-style predictions TV-news analysts perform when they look at various counties and guess how many votes each candidate will get from what remains. In 2020, the Needle was the first source to detect that Joe Biden was on course to win Georgia (this came after earlier returns in states like Florida suggested he was underperforming the polls and at risk of losing).
The New York Times tech staff is on strike, and the Needle will be lacking the support it normally gets from staffers. It may work well, it may not work at all, or we may see something in between. That, to me, is the most important tool for following the returns.
Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney, quickly pushed back on Trump’s unsourced accusation of “massive CHEATING” in the city, saying in a statement that there’s “no factual basis” for his claim. “We have invited complaints and allegations of improprieties all day. If Donald J. Trump has any facts to support his wild allegations, we want them now. Right now. We are not holding our breath,” Krasner said.
Our New York colleagues are collecting diversions, amusements, and absolutely nothing about the election at the No-Election Liveblog.
There will be scattered early results from Indiana and Kentucky, where polls closed at 6 p.m., but the first truly meaningful presidential results will come from my home state of Georgia at 7 p.m. ET. Georgia was for eons the least competitive of states: It didn’t go Republican until 1964, then after Jimmy Carter came and went, Georgia became very predictably Republican. It has been a battleground state exactly twice — in 1992, when it was the first state called for Bill Clinton (his lead nearly unraveled in the final results), and in 2020, when it was the last state called for Joe Biden. Election officials are predicting a quick count this time around, but if it’s again crazy close, we could be waiting awhile.
The MAGA faithful have already started to gather in the Palm Beach County Convention Center, while Trump himself is ensconced at nearby Mar-a-Lago. The room is filled with loyalists to the former president dressed in red hats who have been mixing and mingling impatiently. Starting at 6 p.m. when the first polls closed, the sound went from a classic-rock playlist to Fox News, which was being shown on big screens. Cash bars scattered throughout the room are selling beer and wine. Snacks placed on the tables were waiting until 7 p.m. to be opened up for attendees. In the meantime, Republicans privately feel confident about the election results, and some attendees sneered when the Fox News reporter talked about the well-stocked coffee bar here, which she said was good preparation for a late night. “It’s not going to be a late night,” one said.
Several polling places were hit by fake bomb threats on Tuesday with state and federal officials confirming many of the hoaxes originated outside the country. The Washington Post reports that Georgia was hit by at least six threats, forcing closures at sites in Gwinnett and Fulton counties. Polling locations in Michigan and Arizona were also reportedly targeted by the hoaxes. NBC reported that some Georgia polling stations were still receiving threats with hours to go before the polls close. In a statement, the FBI confirmed it was aware of the hoaxes and said they appeared to “originate from Russian email domains” and have not been deemed credible.
Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, has never been a big moneymaker, but it announced on Tuesday that it hasn’t even been able to make a profit during one of the most heated periods of the election. The historically fraud-ridden company, which trades as DJT, announced that it lost $19 million from July to September. During the same period, it made about $1 million — with an m — in sales. During the first nine months of the year, DJT has lost $363 million.
The $1 million in ad sales is lower than during the same period last year when the company wasn’t even publicly traded and, of course, when there wasn’t an election. It also coincided with the height of Trump’s popularity this summer: the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and the period before Biden dropped out. This doesn’t mean DJT is on its last legs. The company is worth nearly $7 billion since traders treat it like a meme stock — kind of a GameStop for politics — and its stock price has basically been interpreted as a proxy for Trump’s election odds. (On the flip side, if Trump loses, investors think the company reported having $372 million in cash, which is more than it had during the end of the second quarter.)
While the Harris campaign is putting out word that turnout is looking strong for them, a Trump campaign official told CBS News the turnout is “robust” in rural areas, where they will need to run up the votes to win the pivotal swing state.
The first presidential election I can remember was way back in 1960, when the morning after the polls closed, my elementary-school teacher rolled a TV set into the classroom and let us watch the endgame of that contest, featuring Richard Nixon’s concession to John F. Kennedy around the same time that the Associated Press and NBC News called the very close contest for JFK. For a long time after that, the AP and other media outlets competed to call elections earlier and earlier, usually on Election Night — until the national fiasco of 2000 when nobody could really say who had won until the U.S. Supreme Court shut down vote counting in Florida in December and let the certification of George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore by Republican state election officials take effect, which was followed almost instantly by a gracious Gore concession.
Since then, the media outlets have remained highly competitive about being the first to tell everybody what they will eventually know, but with a little extra care. The close election of 2004 wasn’t resolved until the next morning, but in 2008 and 2012, the winner was named (followed quickly by a concession) before midnight on Election Night. Even in 2016, Donald Trump’s shocking and quite narrow victory over Hillary Clinton was called at 2:29 ET on Election Night and Clinton conceded five minutes later.
I’ve put together a look at when tonight’s races might get called here.
Trump’s surrogates know he’s in trouble with women — so they’re calling on men to vote. On X, Elon Musk referred to men as the “cavalry” who are voting in “record numbers.” Later, former Trump official Stephen Miller wrote, “If you know any men who haven’t voted, get them to the polls.”
There’s no evidence that men are voting in unusual numbers yet, but Trump certainly needs them to do so. He and his campaign bet heavily on masculinity this year, with some payoff: Trump won a late endorsement from Joe Rogan and has given interviews to podcaster Theo Von and the Nelk Boys, social-media superstars who are popular with young men. He has also slut-shamed Vice-President Kamala Harris repeatedly while denigrating her intelligence and professional accomplishments. Perhaps that’s partially why women voters have favored Harris by significant margins in most polls conducted prior to Election Night. This gender gap could help decide the election and not necessarily in Trump’s favor. Women tend to vote at higher rates than men, and this year, they’re motivated by draconian post-Roe abortion bans in much of the country. The posts from Musk and Miller betray some anxiety on the part of Trump’s most dogged allies. If men do stay home, it’s bad news for the former president and a sign that his attacks on Roe and on Harris’s gender have backfired in a major way.
Our esteemed colleagues are liveblogging every single thing Steve Kornacki does tonight. It’s a nice niche.
Soon TV networks and social media will be sharing non–candidate-preference results (i.e., answers to issue questions and demographic info) from the exit polls that Edison Research quadrennially conducts for a consortium of media outlets (CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC). Political junkies will try to figure out what that means in terms of who is winning or losing; the candidate numbers will be released in part or in full once the initial polls have closed. The exit polls are taken in three waves during the course of Election Day.
You should read both partial and total exit-poll data with a grain of salt. For one thing, the advent of significant voting by mail means a lot of voters can’t be interviewed leaving the polls; Edison supplements the exit data (which now does include early in-person voting) with regular old polls of everyone else. But it’s also true that exits occasionally get key details wrong. Don’t take the demographic breakdowns as gospel. And occasionally, as in 2002 (when the system broke down entirely) and in 2004 (when the exit-poll sample skewed very Democratic), they can get it all wrong. Buyer beware.
For years now, some Americans have thought the Melania Trump we see only on rare campaign occasions isn’t actually Melania. The conspiracy goes that whoever is with the former president in these public visits is not his wife but a stand-in amid their reported marital strife. Because Melania wore sunglasses throughout the day today, some X users revived the conspiracy theory — which remains a totally bogus conspiracy theory:
In this very uncertain and turbulent presidential election, one of the iron certainties has been that Donald Trump will again claim victory at some point (probably on Election Night) whether he’s winning, losing, or (as in 2020) winning temporarily.
He has, after all, claimed the election has already been “rigged,” citing a host of developments that he interprets as ”election interference,” ranging from the investigations and indictments arising from January 6 to an undocumented but repeatedly asserted outburst of noncitizen voting.
Earlier on Election Day, Trump expressed satisfaction with the fairness of the election “so far.” While voting in Palm Beach, he told reporters, “I think they’re crazy,” referring to fears that he might not concede. “If I lose an election, if it’s a fair election, I’d be the first one to acknowledge it. So far, I think it’s been fair.”
For a little while at least, we all wondered if this meant the former president was dismissing all the complaints issued earlier about a rigged or stolen election and might actually concede defeat if he loses. But then, at 4:39 p.m. ET, he posted on Truth Social, “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” So you may return to your previously scheduled assumptions about election denial.
The Washington Post reports that the Harris campaign is seeing some positive signs in key states where polls have yet to close, including a high Puerto Rican turnout in Philadelphia, high turnout in college towns in Pennsylvania, and high turnout in the research triangle of North Carolina. They also note high turnout among Republicans in Florida and relatively low turnout among rural areas of North Carolina.
Wrote the former president on Truth Social at 4:39 p.m.:
A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!
Swing-state celeb sighting (and yes, he is a national treasure):
Nevada election analyst Jon Ralston, who on Monday predicted the narrowest of wins for Harris in the state, tweets:
The indie turnout in urban Nevada is insane. It is far outdistancing the R and D turnout in both Clark and Washoe, may end up being close to a third of the vote. All about the indies in Nevada.I estimated 400,000 of them; already at 359,000.
I’ve written quite a bit during this cycle about how financialized this election has become, with all kinds of assets becoming Wall Street proxies for it. One of them is obvious: Trump Media & Technology Group, which is nominally the ex-president’s social-media and streaming company but is really just a meme stock. That means its price bounces all over the place since people buy it not because it’s a good company but because they think Trump will win. (It will probably be worthless if he loses.) Another, less obvious, proxy is the market for U.S. Treasuries, which is more than $27 trillion. It is hard to get less meme-y than Treasuries.
Trump Media, which trades as DJT, started the day more than 17 percent higher, but by the early afternoon, trading had to be halted after a massive sell-off. It ended the day losing more than 18 percent from its peak, making for one of its worst-ever sell-offs. At around the same time that it fell, the price of bitcoin (which Trump supports) also sank but not by as much.
All that volatility is to be expected for a meme stock. More interesting was the massive buying of Treasury bonds at around the same time DJT was collapsing. Wall Street associates a second Trump term with higher inflation, which makes bonds less valuable. (By contrast, Kamala Harris is expected to have a deadlocked Congress and faces a debt-limit standoff at the start of the year, which could rein in spending.) Ten-year-bond yields fell from 4.36 percent to 4.27 percent, a massive move in less than four hours. (Yields fall when prices rise.)
Remember, these bond markets are massive. These relatively small changes, in the absence of other real economic news, show that bond traders were losing confidence in a Trump victory and the inflationary agenda he would bring with him.
Google Search traffic is spiking in the U.S. for the question “Did Joe Biden drop out?”
This was my favorite piece of advice that I saw while liveblogging the last night of campaigning, so I’m reposting it tonight. From RealClearPolitics election analyst Sean Trende:
I don’t know what else we can tell you. The modelers are effectively 50-50. Our tipping point state average has Trump up 0.3%, which is effectively 50-50. Everything beyond that is a vibe or, arguably worse, anecdata. No one should have any confidence. Sorry.
There has been an unusually intense focus on turnout data in this presidential election for several reasons. For one thing, the early voting that spiked so significantly in 2020 has drawn a lot of attention to pre–Election Day data as a potential leading indicator of who will win. For another, the decision by Republicans (only partly undercut by their presidential candidate) to encourage early voting this time around has led some observers to see big GOP numbers and assume that means a victory march for Trump (as Trump himself has encouraged us to believe). And for still another thing, the perception that this is a “base mobilization” election in which swing voters are rare naturally makes it important to weigh the effectiveness of each party’s get-out-the-vote initiatives. That’s particularly true this year because Team Trump has made two very unconventional decisions: to outsource its voter-mobilization efforts (mostly to super-PACS founded by Elon Musk and Turning Point Action) and to focus on low-propensity voters.
Now that Election Day is here, there’s an equally intense, if temporary, focus on discerning the overall direction of the results via levels of turnout. Traditionally high turnout has been good for Democrats, who have in recent elections relied on young and Latino voters, who tend to turn out at much lower rates than the electorate as a whole. But the picture is clouded by the abovementioned efforts of the Trump campaign to both identify and get to the polls people from demographics that tend to support the former president but haven’t voted recently. So Trump is telling the world that robust turnout numbers are great for him, and maybe they are — but maybe they aren’t. The smart thing is not to jump too far down the turnout rabbit hole. We’ll have real voting results soon enough.
Our own Charlotte Klein reports:
Politico had three reporters and a photographer credentialed for the campaign’s watch party in Palm Beach, Florida. But on Tuesday, according to a source, Politico learned they’d been barred from the event over a story Politico Magazine had published a day earlier, by a freelancer, about a white nationalist who had worked on the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania GOP fired the staffer after learning about the views he had expressed under an online alias.
Read the rest here.
“Michiganders are already voting in record numbers. It’s a great thing for voters and for democracy,” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Tuesday morning.
The Michigan Advance’s Jon King passes along the 3 p.m. update.
3,379,252 total returned ballots, including absentee and early voting, which represents 46.3% of the active registered voters. The state has received 2,164,803 absentee ballots, with 92% of requested AV ballots returned so far.
In my Election Night preview, I outlined three factors that could make a difference, including Harris’s baggage versus Trump fatigue:
Kamala Harris is in a situation that would usually spell defeat for the candidate of the party controlling the White House. Solid majorities of the voting public are very sour about conditions in the country. Legitimately or not, they think the economy is terrible; that the southern border is out of control; that violent crime and disorder are threatening our major cities. Joe Biden’s job-approval numbers (38.7 percent approve, 56.2 percent disapprove, per FiveThirtyEight) are significantly lower than the minimum associated with presidential reelections (or even presidential successions by a different candidate of the same party). Yes, Harris is a very different person from Biden in multiple ways, the most important being her age and debating skills. She has worked very hard to cast herself as a “change” candidate. But in the end, she’s the sitting vice-president of the United States, whose own job-approval rating is underwater even though it’s superior to Biden’s. Internationally as well as historically, all the signs indicate this isn’t a good position for Harris.
While the 46th president and their shared administration represent Harris’s most important “baggage,” there are also doubts and concerns among swing voters about her positions on the issues — which the Trump campaign has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to depicting as extreme. In particular, she’s coping with the unpopularity of the progressive positions on immigration, crime, and transgender rights she adopted as a California politician running for president in 2020. These positions have been isolated and magnified to an insane degree by Team Trump, to the point that you might think Harris’s purpose on earth is to ruin women’s sports teams and bankrupt the country with subsidies to illegal immigrants and transgender prisoners. This is a lot of flak for a relatively little-known public official to fly through without abandoning her own message. And of course, Harris is dealing with the hard-to-measure but unquestionably resilient sexist and racist impulses inhibiting some voters from embracing a Black and Asian woman as president.
It’s pretty clear that almost any Republican other than Trump would be winning this election comfortably. But Harris’s most important lifeline is that Trump’s dominant position in the politics of this country dating back at least to 2015 makes him as much a figure of the hated status quo as anyone, and someone a lot more central than Harris. The pull he has with swing voters is that he represents an administration that is (mis)remembered as producing peace and prosperity and a party that lost its exclusive responsibility for national policy way back in 2018. That’s why it has been so important for Harris to remind voters of the downside of the Trump Experience, whether it’s framed as a threat to democracy or simply a return to exhausting daily chaos. Fortunately for her, Trump has worked very hard to reinforce these reminders by doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on the personal traits that even Republicans find problematic. Perhaps Trump can overcome the damage he suffered among Latinos for the racist “jokes” performed in his name at his recent (and totally unnecessary) Madison Square Garden rally. But its echoes have served more broadly as a reminder of the 45th president’s nasty character and the nasty characters who surround him.
Read the rest here.
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