The presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris has been decided, but there are still several downballot races where the winner isn't yet apparent. Control of the House of Representatives is still up in the air, and while ABC News has projected that Republicans will win the Senate, the size of their majority is still TBD. Needless to say, both of these things will have major implications for how easy it will be for Trump to enact his second-term agenda.
However, it could be a while before we know who won these races. Many of them are in states like California, Arizona and Nevada that take days to count all their ballots. So we at 538 are settling in for the long haul with this live blog dedicated to all the outstanding races of the 2024 election. Join us for live updates, analysis and commentary until the last major race is decided.
Working off our expected vote estimates can be a tricky business sometimes. We said earlier that there could be more than 100,000 votes left in Philadelphia. However, looking at data from the Philadelphia City Commissioners, the number of outstanding votes appears likely to be much smaller because only 16 remaining election divisions still have to report out 1,703. Obviously, if there aren't that many votes left in Philadelphia, then Republican Dave McCormick is well-positioned to maintain his lead and win Pennsylvania's Senate race over Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr.
Votes are still being counted in the presidential and Senate races in Nevada, and the odds of still being able to pull out a win are shaping up very differently for Harris and Sen. Jacky Rosen.
Harris is currently behind Trump in the statewide tally by 47% to 52%, with 93% of the expected vote reporting. That means that to win the state, Harris would need to win about 83% of the estimated 7% of votes left to be counted.
How can Harris win Nevada?
Amina Brown and Katie Marriner for 538
That's a tall order. That's especially true when you look at where the votes are coming from. Clark County, which comprises the Las Vegas metropolitan area, is the state's Democratic stronghold and where a majority of the state's voters live. Harris needed to win 69% of the vote there to match Biden's 2020 margin, and needed to win the county by 6.9% to win the state, according to our benchmarks. But with 95% of the expected vote reporting, her lead there is only 1 point, 50% to Trump's 49%. Most of the state's remaining votes are coming from nearby Nye County, which is only reporting 36% of the expected vote so far. Trump leads there 83% to 16%, and was always likely to win there. It makes up a smaller percentage of the state's overall population, but Trump is outperforming his benchmark margins there.
In the race between incumbent Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen and the Republican challenger, Sam Brown, about 12% of the expected vote is left to be reported. Rosen would need to win a little more than half, about 52%, of that vote to pull ahead of Brown's current half-point lead. In Clark County, Rosen's stronghold, 94% of the expected vote is reporting, but she is performing better than Harris.
How can Democrat Jacky Rosen win Nevada's U.S. Senate race?
How can Democrat Jacky Rosen win Nevada's U.S. Senate race?
But the Senate race is still close, and has yet to be projected.
Iowa’s 1st District looks to be headed for a recount ... again
In Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, in a rerun of the 2022 race in the seat, incumbent Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks currently leads Democratic former state Rep. Christina Bohannan by just 799 out of 413,502 votes cast, with all precincts reporting. That's a margin of just 0.2 percentage points, according to the Iowa Secretary of State. In Iowa, candidates involved in any race within 1 percentage point can request a recount that will be funded by the state.
We don’t know yet exactly how many provisional ballots or additional absentee ballots there are to be considered for this seat, but it’s fairly unlikely that there would be enough to move either candidate out of recount range (they’d need more than a 4,000 vote margin among any remaining ballots for that to happen).
This will be the second time in the last three cycles that Iowa’s 1st District ends up in recount territory. In the 2020 election for the seat, Miller-Meeks’s first race for Congress came down to just six votes. In 2022, Bohannan felt short by almost 7 percentage points.
Bob Casey still has a path in Pennsylvania. A rather narrow one.
Looking at Pennsylvania's Senate race, Republican Dave McCormick leads Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. by about 0.5 points, 48.95% to 48.44%, with 97% of the expected vote reporting. ABC News estimates that perhaps as many as 300,000 votes are left to be counted, however, and nearly 130,000 of those are in deep-blue Philadelphia. Some back-of-the-envelope math: If we assign the outstanding votes based on the current margins in those counties, Casey would end up leading by around 16,000 votes once all votes are reported. Now, we don't know just how those outstanding votes will actually break, and whether the real total left will be around 300,000 or a bit less or more — all critical aspects to this. But this does suggest that Casey might just be able to survive even as Harris lost to Trump in the presidential race.
