Undecided races of the 2024 election: Live results and analysis

Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Department of State announced that the state's election for U.S. Senate will go to a recount. Based on ABC News's reports, Republican Dave McCormick leads Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. by 0.4 percentage points, 48.9% to 48.5%. That puts the margin inside of the 0.5-point threshold that mandates a recount under Pennsylvania law. This has also played out because, as Carter Walker at VoteBeat reported, Casey did not waive his right to a recount.

Overall, McCormick's raw vote lead is a bit less than 30,000 votes, although that could narrow further — the state reported that there were about 80,000 ballots whose validity is still be adjudicated (about 60,000 provisional ballots and 20,000 absentee and mail-in ballots). Still, Casey will have to gain a lot from those ballots to have much chance of winning in a recount. A FairVote analysis of statewide recounts from 2000 to 2023 found that just 36 recounts occurred out of nearly 7,000 statewide elections in that time. Of those, recounts reversed the outcome in just three races, all of which had margins of 0.06 points or fewer — roughly six times smaller than McCormick's current edge.

We now know that Republicans won the House of Representatives (as well as the Senate and the White House), but there are still several races that are unprojected, and we at 538 are still tracking them! The U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania is still unresolved, as are nine House races — and the exact size of the GOP majorities will be quite important for their prospects of passing legislation and holding both chambers in 2026.

(By the way, on the topic of the size of Republicans' majorities: Yesterday, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, Trump's nominee for attorney general, announced he would resign from the House, which will temporarily cost Republicans one seat in the House once the resignation takes effect. Theoretically, if Democrats win all nine unprojected House races, that would temporarily leave the House tied 217-217, but this is extraordinarily unlikely. However, the resignation of Gaetz — and potentially Reps. Elise Stefanik and Michael Waltz, two other Trump appointees — could leave the House with its narrowest margin since the 1930s.)

Late last night, Alaska reported updated tallies of its vote count, and the news was good for Republicans — at least when it came to the race for the state's lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. With 90% of the expected vote reporting, Republican Nick Begich III leads Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola by a little more than 3 percentage points, 49.1% to 45.8%. Although this represents a slight improvement for Peltola relative to where she stood right after Election Day (about a 4-point deficit), there simply aren't many votes left to be counted.

Now, Alaska uses ranked-choice voting if no candidate has a majority of first-choice votes, so it's worth mentioning the third- and fourth-place contenders: In third with 3.9% is John Wayne Howe of the secessionist and conservative Alaskan Independence Party, and in fourth with 1.0% is Democrat Eric Hafner, a perennial candidate.

At this point, Begich is so close to the magic 50%-plus-1-vote mark that it's difficult to imagine him losing. In fact, a 538 analysis of Alaska's Cast Vote Record suggests Begich's edge could expand once ranked-choice voting is taken into account. The CVR contains the votes and ranking of all scanned ballots, and while the state still needs to tally some votes, the math of incomplete CVR data is as follows: Once the secondary choices of voters who initially picked Hafner or Howe are added to the first-choice votes for Begich and Peltola, Begich leads about 52% to 48%. Assuming it works out this way, Peltola's defeat would mark the fourth for a Democratic House incumbent this cycle, and would put the GOP on course to likely win at least 221 seats (the party's total entering the election) based on where the other undecided races stand.

ABC News reports that Republicans are projected to have at least 218 seats in the next U.S. House of Representatives. Projections for GOP victories in Arizona's 6th District and California's 41st District have ensured that Republicans will have an edge — at least before Trump's initial Cabinet selections create openings in the House that will have to be filled by special elections in 2025. Overall, we have projections in 426 of 435 seats, with Republicans holding a 218-to-208 edge. As things stand, Democrats lead in five of the remaining nine unprojected contests, so it's possible that a 222-to-213 Republican majority — the same one they won in the 2022 midterms — is the most likely outcome at this point.