Election results are finally rolling in. Here’s what you need to know.
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Cameron Joseph Staff writer
| Washington
Editor’s note: This story was most recently updated at 9 p.m. EST and will be updated throughout the night as results come in.
After a contentious and chaotic sprint of an election season, polls have closed in a number of key states. Early results are beginning to roll in, as America waits to find out who will be the 47th president of the United States.
As of 9 p.m. EST, 41 states have concluded voting and are now tabulating their results – with Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan joining the key swing states of Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Polls had long predicted a coin-flip race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Early results indicate a relatively close race – though so much of the vote is still out in key counties and states that it’s hard to predict where things are going.
While we await the big prize, a handful of other key races have been called. Democrat Josh Stein has been projected to be the next governor of North Carolina, and Republican Jim Justice won a mostly uncontested West Virginia Senate race, giving Republicans their first Senate pickup of the night. They need to net one more seat for control. And Florida, a swing state as recently as 2020, was called quickly for Mr. Trump and appears to be going comfortably for the former president.
Early results indicate that rural counties are moving a bit further to the right overall, a continuing trend in the Trump era. The very early results in suburban-heavy counties, where Democrats had been making big gains in recent years, are more of a mixed picture.
Three big swing states may give an early sense of where the election is headed: Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan. All three are expected to count their ballots fairly quickly, while other key states are likely to take longer.
Georgia in particular is counting fast. Two-thirds of the state’s votes had been tallied as of 9 p.m. EST. Mr. Trump held five-point a lead there.
If former President Donald Trump sweeps Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan, he’s all but guaranteed to be heading back to the White House.
If Vice President Kamala Harris carries two of those three states, she’ll have a much easier path to an election win at that point than Mr. Trump.
But if Ms. Harris is winning one of the three, while losing the other two, we’re likely looking at a drawn-out process where it could take days for the remaining states to count their results.
Depending on how close it is, Wisconsin’s result might be clear by the morning, once Milwaukee reports its vote. Pennsylvania will likely take a bit longer. Arizona and Nevada, the remaining swing states, will likely take days to get their results counted because of their heavy use of mail voting.
