Undecided races of the 2024 election: Live results and analysis

Late last night, the Maine secretary of state announced that no candidate for Maine's 2nd Congressional District had gotten a majority of first-place votes, so the race will be decided in an instant runoff next week. (Maine uses ranked-choice voting, whereby voters rank candidates in order of preference, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated and that candidate's votes go to whoever their voters ranked second on their ballots. This process repeats until one candidate gets a majority.)

The secretary of state also released final results for voters' first choices in the race: Democratic. Rep. Jared Golden got 196,189 first-place votes, Republican Austin Theriault got 194,030, write-in candidate Diana Merenda got 420, and 12,635 voters did not mark a first-place vote. Interestingly, that means Golden got a majority of first-place votes, but not a majority of all ballots cast — and that's enough to trigger the instant runoff (although Golden's campaign has formally lodged an objection to this). That's because, theoretically, someone could have left their first choice blank but voted for Golden or Theriault as their second choice, which might affect the final numbers. However, according to FairVote, only 6% of ballots that didn't mark a first choice in the 2022 race for this seat marked a second choice, and in 2018, it was only 9%. That suggests it's very unlikely that there are enough "hidden" second-place votes to vault Theriault ahead of Golden.

On Tuesday, voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New York and Nevada passed measures that would enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions, making abortion a winning issue in 7 of the 10 states where it was on the ballot. But voters in Missouri, Montana and Nevada also voted to send Trump, who appointed the judges who overturned Roe v. Wade, back to the White House. The presidential race has yet to be projected in Arizona, but Trump leads there, too.

An April survey by nonpartisan research firm PerryUndem found that 35% of Trump voters would at least lean toward voting for a constitutional amendment that protected the right to abortion in their state. That was especially true of Trump voters who were women, younger, described themselves as liberal or moderate, or were voters of color.

A poll from September from The New York Times/Siena College also suggested that many of these voters also don't think Trump would try to restrict abortion nationwide if elected: 49% of all likely voters and just 27% of Republicans in that poll thought he would. So many voters may simply feel that voting to protect abortion in their state is sufficient, and that Trump will not make good on Republican calls for a national ban.

“The bottom line in my view is … Abortion rights and access is more popular than Trump. It’s more popular than Harris. It’s more popular than the Democratic Party or the Republican Party,” said Tresa Undem, a cofounder of PerryUndem. “But, among Trump voters, it wasn’t the driving issue for voting for Trump.”

Some Republicans have waffled on whether they would try to ban abortion nationally. A 538 analysis of this year's GOP primaries found that in swing states and toss-up districts, Republican candidates were much less likely to mention abortion and more likely to say the issue was best left up to the states, while candidates in red states and solid Republican districts were very likely to support a national ban. The GOP left the endorsement of a national ban on abortion off their platform this year for the first time in nearly 40 years, and House Republicans in the current Congress did not pursue one either (though it was a moot issue since it wouldn't have passed in a Democratic Senate). But Trump has flip-flopped on a national abortion ban in the past, even as it remains a key goal of anti-abortion advocates nationwide. Such a ban by a newly elected Republican Senate, House and president (assuming House Republicans remain on track to hold their majority) could render the state-level initiatives that have passed since Roe was overturned useless — though it's far from certain that they would pursue or be able to pass such an unpopular policy.

The 2022 elections for the Pennsylvania General Assembly were the first with new legislative maps, and the Democrats won control of the state's lower legislative chamber that year by the thinnest of margins — a single seat. They hadn’t previously controlled the chamber since 2010.

This year, Pennsylvania’s rightward shift at the top of the ticket was very closely watched nationwide. But with conservative Democrat Frank Burns from Cambria County holding his seat, the Democrats have now managed to hold on to the General Assembly by the exact same razor-thin margin as in 2022. With the statewide vote shifting to the GOP, it's remarkable that the balance of power in the General Assembly is unchanged.

While ballots are still being counted in Pennsylvania’s 2024 Senate race, Republican Dave McCormick has a lead of half a percentage point at present — a notable shift from 2022, when Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman beat Mehmet Oz by almost 5 percentage points. Republicans did even better downballot in Pennsylvania — the GOP's attorney general candidate prevailed statewide by almost 5 percentage points, and their candidates for auditor general and state treasurer did even better.

While this surprising stasis requires more analysis, I suspect that the distribution of Republican votes was part of the story. Higher turnout in rural, GOP-leaning parts of the state might not have helped GOP House candidates even as it may have put Trump and quite possibly McCormick over the top.

ABC News reports that Republican Rep. Scott Perry has held off his challenger, Democrat Janelle Stelson, in Pennsylvania's 10th District. Perry, a former chair of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, was favored to win this central Pennsylvania district that includes the state capital of Harrisburg, though the limited polling from earlier this year showed the two locked in a very close race, with Stelson even leading in some polls. With 99% of the expected vote reporting, Perry leads 50.8% to Stelson's 49.2%.

On the other side of the country, Democratic Rep. Andrea Salinas is projected to keep her seat in Oregon's 6th District, which includes Salem and part of the Portland suburbs. This isn't a big surprise in the blue-leaning district, which was created after 2020 redistricting gave Oregon one more seat in the House. But Salinas had won election by just 2.5 points in 2022, so Republicans saw it as a potential pickup opportunity. This year, she faced the same opponent, Republican Mike Erickson, but she's currently poised to improve on her 2022 margin: With 72% of the expected vote reporting, she leads Erickson by 6 percentage points.