Election results are finally rolling in. Here’s what you need to know.

Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan may give an early sense of where the election is headed – and if one candidate has an easier path to a win or if we're in for a drawn-out process. 

|
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
A supporter arrives at an election night watch party for Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump Tuesday, Nov. 5, in West Palm Beach, Fla.

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.

Jonathan Drake/Reuters
Signs are displayed inside the gym of an elementary school, as people wait to vote in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, on Election Day in Asheville, North Carolina, Nov. 5.

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.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Follow our 2024 Election coverage

With the high interest around Tuesday’s elections in the United States, we’ve decided to take down our paywall on all Election 2024 stories, so you can freely access reliable, trustworthy coverage. The paywall remains in effect on other stories.

Give us your feedback

We want to hear, did we miss an angle we should have covered? Should we come back to this topic? Or just give us a rating for this story. We want to hear from you.

 

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Election results are finally rolling in. Here’s what you need to know.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2024/1105/2024-election-results-polls-close
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe