Election 2024 updates: With Arizona, Trump sweeps all 7 swing states

In this year's GOP primaries, Texas Governor Greg Abbott went on a full-blown crusade, endorsing against fellow Republicans in the state House who refused to back a controversial school voucher plan that would siphon taxpayer funds from public schools and send them to private ones.

In the March primaries and May runoffs combined, the governor's efforts were largely successful: Between Abbott's endorsement power and fundraising prowess, he helped depose nine of the 16 anti-voucher Republicans who ran for reelection. Plus, other legislators he targeted retired so, in total, Abbott netted 13 more pro-voucher votes ahead of next year's legislative session.

Given that the Texas legislature's solidly Republican makeup is unlikely to change, coupled with the fact that the majority of anti-voucher Republicans are gone, Abbott should, theoretically, have the votes to pass the program next year. The only thing that could get in his way is if some of his primary-endorsed candidates (many of whom represent the far-right) are knocked down by Democrats tonight.

Here's the math: Pro-voucher Republicans are currently positioned to hold a tentative majority in the 150-member House. But the chamber's Democrats, who are largely opposed to the program, can stop this if they pick up a handful of seats in today's elections. For their part, Texas Democrats are hoping to flip at least seven seats that were redrawn during the 2021 redistricting process to make them more favorable to the party. Of course, the party has a reputation for being dysfunctional, but if they can manage to wrangle just three new seats in the state House (while not losing races elsewhere) and the remaining anti-voucher Republicans hold their votes, then the two blocs would have enough manpower to stop a voucher bill from passing.

Ahead of tonight, Abbott has put his full weight behind helping his cherry-picked Republican candidates win. And he's likely to not give up on his push for a voucher program, especially since top Republican donors have expressed a want for it despite evidence the vouchers don't always produce good educational outcomes. But voters are more torn on the issue. According to an April survey from the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation, 57% of Texas's likely voters said they opposed using tax dollars to provide school vouchers to parents. Legislators from rural areas, too, have long been opposed to vouchers because they represent areas where private alternatives to public schools are few or nonexistent.

By now, you're probably well familiar with the handful of swing states that are all-but-certain to decide who wins the race for control of Congress and the White House this November. But, as I detailed last week, many of those states are also hosting highly competitive elections for their state legislatures too.

Democrats currently control 41 state legislative chambers, while Republicans hold majorities in 56. These races may be lower-profile, but don't mistake their importance; across a myriad of social and economic issues, state legislatures could end up having an even bigger impact on public policy across the country over the next two years than Congress.

Democrats have a shot at flipping state legislative chambers in Arizona (both chambers), Wisconsin (state House) and New Hampshire (both chambers), while Republicans are hoping to regain control of the Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania state Houses, as well as an outside shot at flipping the Minnesota state Senate in a special election. Power is also likely to shift in Alaska's state House, though bipartisan coalitions in both chambers make control of the state legislature particularly difficult to predict.

In New Hampshire and Arizona, if Democrats flip both chambers (and win the governor's race in New Hampshire), they would win a state government trifecta in those states, giving them full control over the legislative process.

The elections analytics site CNalysis rates most of these chambers as toss-ups, though Democrats have a small edge in the New Hampshire state House and slightly larger edge in Minnesota's, while Republicans are slightly favored to keep control of the Wisconsin state Assembly.

Yesterday, 538 unveiled our county benchmarks for the 2024 election. The benchmarks are one of the tools our reporters have used on election nights internally to spot early trends in results and see who's on track for victory. Another is our hypothetical election simulator, which enables users to pick winners in each state and see how your calls update our pre-election presidential election forecast.

For example, while our model starts off giving Kamala Harris a 50-in-100 chance of winning the election, if you call Pennsylvania for her, her chance of winning the majority of Electoral College votes rises to 87 in 100. Add Wisconsin and she's a 94-in-100 favorite. Trump, meanwhile, has a solid Pennsylvania-plus-Sun Belt path to victory. If we assign Michigan and Wisconsin to Harris, but give Pennsylvania and Georgia to Trump, the former President wins 62% of the time.

I will personally be running a version of our what-if simulator throughout election night and reporting the results for you here on this live-blog. That version is a little closer to what you'd get in a full live election night model — it updates our pre-election model not with binary calls about who will win or lose, but with projections in each state from various other sources and models — but we're keeping it on my laptop as a test for future elections.

Our "what-if?" simulator is pretty much an empirical replica of what you'll see anchors and reporters doing on television all night, though. If you take X away from Y, what happens in Z? If Trump is beating his polls in three fast-counting east coast states, is he on track out west, too? Plug your guesses into our interactive as the night goes on and you can figure it out!

Polling in Arizona could hardly be closer. Trump leads Harris by a little over 2 percentage points in 538's final polling average of the state. That puts Arizona's polling about 3 points more Republican than the rest of the country.

Indeed, Arizona was a solidly Republican state until 2020, when it very narrowly gave its 11 electoral votes to Biden, who defeated Trump by just about 11,000 votes — a result that prompted attempts to challenge the outcome of the election. Since then, Arizona has become a hotbed for election denial, including by its 2024 Republican Senate candidate, Kari Lake, who made her name as a stalwart of the pro-Trump MAGA movement.

When it comes to demographics, nearly one in four voters in Arizona are Latino. According to a September Suffolk University/USA Today poll, nearly half of that group, 49%, are registered as Democrats, while around a quarter are registered as Republicans. Overall, Hispanic voters planned to vote for Harris over Trump 57% to 38%, even as the overall electorate in Arizona split the other way, with 43% favoring Harris and 52% favoring Trump. Another smaller but notable group in Arizona is Mormons, who make up 5% of the state's population. While they have historically voted Republican, many have moved away from Trump's rebrand of the party.

Like most of the country, Arizonans name inflation and the economy, immigration, and abortion as their top issues. Abortion and immigration may have special salience for voters this year, as they'll be deciding on ballot measures to tackle each of those issues.