Election Day 2024 live results: The 7 swing states have yet to be projected

Georgia is a new battleground in the post-2000 "red state, blue state" era. While statewide races had not really been highly contested before then, it has since trended left compared to the country as a whole. In 2016, Trump carried the state by 5 percentage points, which was the state's closest margin in a presidential race over the past two decades until Biden won it by just 0.2 points — becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win there since Bill Clinton in 1992.

Trump really needs to capture Georgia's 16 electoral votes to give himself a good shot at hitting the magic majority number of 270 nationally. Without knowing how other states will vote, 538's forecast suggests that Trump would have about a 4-in-5 shot at winning the presidency if he ends up carrying Georgia. But if Harris claims it, she would have about a 9-in-10 chance of becoming the next president.

And polls once again show an extremely close race in Georgia. Trump leads slightly less than 1 point in 538's polling average of the state. Although Trump holds a slight edge, his standing against Harris is significantly closer than it was against Biden, who trailed Trump by about 6 points when he stepped aside in late July.

Like Biden, Harris will need overwhelming support from Black voters in Georgia. At nearly one-third of the population, the Peach State has the largest population and proportion of Black Americans of any of the seven main swing states. In 2020, about 30% of Georgia voters identified as Black, according to exit polls, and nearly 90% backed Biden. Yet recent polls suggest that Harris may be running shy of Biden's 2020 support level, while Trump is running a bit ahead of his roughly 10% haul in 2020. Taken together, these potential shifts would notably improve Trump's chances of winning the state in 2024.

Trump can once again expect to win a sizable majority of white voters in the South, which has a higher degree of racially polarized voting than any other part of the country. Still, it's possible he might lose a little ground in Georgia, specifically: In 2020, Trump won about 70% of Georgia's white voters, but he's garnering a little less than that in recent polls, while Harris is polling right around the 30% that Biden carried.

Now, Georgia saw a sizable education split among its white voters last time around, with white voters without a four-year college degree going overwhelmingly for Trump (80% to 20%) but those with a degree only preferring him slightly (55% to 44%). How much Harris can recreate Biden's coalition among college-educated voters in particular will be pivotal to the Georgia outcome. Recent polls in the state that have data for college-educated voters have found Harris running a little behind Biden's 57% among the group as a whole (including voters of color).

Harris will be at Howard University, her alma mater, for a watch party. If elected, she would be the first president in history to be a graduate of a historically Black college.

Before the party, Harris said she will have dinner with her family, many of whom are staying with her in Washington.

Trump's watch party is taking place at the Palm Beach Convention Center in Florida. Earlier Tuesday, after casting his ballot, Trump visited his campaign headquarters to thank staffers.

As with any presidential cycle, there have been a staggering number of polls published in the last 6 months: We've had 1695 polls of the presidential race this year, including 1315 state polls and 380 national polls. But even those astonishing numbers are less than we've seen in some previous cycles.

According to a 538 analysis in late October, while we have somewhat fewer polls than in previous cycles, the polls we do have may be of slightly higher quality. For one thing, more 2024 polls come from pollsters with a pollster rating, meaning that we know how much we should trust them based on their past performance. Plus, for polls that do have a pollster rating, the average pollster rating is higher than in previous cycles, meaning higher quality pollsters are conducting a large share of surveys.

In addition, we're seeing a higher proportion of polls come from nonpartisan organizations, like media outlets and universities, than we have in past cycles. Media organizations and universities are usually more rigorous, transparent and nonpartisan than other kinds of pollsters and sponsors. Just take a look at our pollster ratings — eight of the top 10 ranked pollsters are news organizations or universities. The fact that these groups are making up a large share of the polling this year is a good sign.

We also have a lower percentage of congressional polls coming from partisan sources, which means our read of the House and Senate may be more neutral than in past years. And while the percentage of presidential polls coming from partisan sources is higher than it was in 2016 or 2012, it's also decreased since 2020.

According to 538's final presidential forecast, Harris has a 50-in-100 chance of winning the majority of Electoral College votes after all votes are counted today (or, in the case of a particularly tight race, over the next few days). We give Trump a 49-in-100 chance to win. Practically speaking those odds are roughly indistinguishable: You would have to flip a coin thousands of times to determine if it was slightly unfair, given a 49-in-100 chance of coming up heads or tails.

Statistically, too, a 50-in-100 chance and a 49-in-100 chance are practically indistinguishable when it comes to elections and polling. Due to the randomness in polling and changes in demographics and turnout from cycle to cycle, small changes in the settings of our model could easily change a 50-in-100 edge to 52-in-100, or even 55-in-100. These probabilities come from our subjective statistical assumptions about elections and polling that are correct on average over the long term, but can change in important ways in the short term.

That's all to say that our overall characterization of the race is more important than the precise probability of its outcome. And, by and large, we have characterized the race as a toss-up since launching our forecast for the Harris versus Trump race in August.

Our forecast today is so close because the polls are close. According to our final polling averages, the margin between Trump and Harris is 2 percentage points or less in all seven swing states. But it is worth stressing that the polls will not be exactly correct. Polls overestimated Democrats by more than 2 points in both 2016 and 2020, for example, and our election model thinks the expected bias in polls this year is 3.8 percentage points on average, and could be more or less, favoring either party equally. When we did the math we found that polling error should be larger than 2 points favoring either candidate about 60% of the time.

You should not expect polls in presidential races to be perfectly accurate, in other words. You should expect them to be as imperfect as they have been historically. And in a race with very tenuous advantages for either party in each key state, that means there's a wide range of potential outcomes in the election. And that's why we've been saying the race isn't necessarily going to be close just because the polls are. Trump and Harris, our model says, are both a normal polling error away from an Electoral College blowout. If we shift the polls by 4 points toward Harris, she would win the election with 319 Electoral College votes. Meanwhile, Trump could win with 312 electoral votes if the polls underestimate him by 4 points instead.

Hopefully, this illustrates just how uncertain a 50-in-100 chance of winning the election really is. When we say the race for the White House is a toss-up and could go either way, we mean it.