Undecided races of the 2024 election: Live results and analysis

Every county in Iowa has now certified the results of the election, opening the door for candidates whose races are within 1 percentage point to request recounts. There are a surprising number of close races in the state: a number of legislative seats are within the recount threshold, and so is the 1st Congressional District.

In that race, Democrat Christina Bohannan has already requested a recount of her 802-vote loss to incumbent Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks. This will be the second time that Miller-Meeks's election was subjected to a recount; in her first bid for Congress in 2020, she won over Democrat Rita Hart by just 6 votes. Under Iowa state law, each county in the district has 18 days from the original certification date to complete the recount, so we should have final results in the race by Dec. 1.

In addition to the 1st Congressional District, there are two state Senate seats whose winners were decided by less than 50 votes, both located just outside of Des Moines. In District 20, incumbent Democrat Nate Boulton trails Republican Mike Pike by 44 votes, and has already signaled that he intends to request a recount. In District 14, incumbent Democrat Sarah Trone Garriott is leading by just 24 votes, though the Republican challenger Mark Hanson has not made clear whether he will request a recount in that race. There are at least two other state Senate seats within the recount range, though the margins are higher in those seats, and a recount would be much less likely to impact the outcome.

There are also three state House races that are within the recount range in Iowa, though it's not known yet whether candidates in those races will request a recount. The outcome might not matter that much: Iowa Republicans already earned a supermajority in the state legislature, regardless of the outcomes in the potentially contested seats. And, of course, it's worth noting that recounts rarely change the results of an election.

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.