Election Day 2024 live results: Trump projected to win North Carolina, a swing state

Here at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, turnout at the on-campus precincts is way up from 2020, and I know of at least a few students who skipped class to wait on the hour-long lines. But it's worth be cautious about how you interpret those results.

For one thing, the COVID-19 pandemic meant that there were far fewer students on campus four years ago, so it's hard to make direct comparisons. And we can't necessarily read these results as representative of the college-aged demographic: Fewer than half of 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled in colleges, and some of those students live at home or off campus. So reports from campuses are important, but they don't tell us how young voters are reacting in general.

According to a recent analysis by Pew Research Center, there are 17 states that have never had a female Senator. After today's races are called, women could be elected to the Senate for the first time in Delaware, Indiana, Utah, New Mexico and Rhode Island. Of these women, Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Democrat in Delaware, is most favored, winning 98 in 100 simulations in our forecast. The other women running to be their state’s first senator are all longshots in their respective races, but include Democrats Valerie McCray in Indiana and Caroline Gleich in Utah, and two Republicans: Nella Domenici in New Mexico and Patricia Morgan in Rhode Island.

The US Senate currently stands at just 25% female representation.

Here's a good example of overreacting to a small sample of results from another Indiana election ...

Results are starting to trickle in from the first few counties in Indiana and Kentucky! However, they're incomplete, and it's far too early to draw any conclusions from them. My general rule of thumb is to wait until at least 10% of the expected vote is reporting before taking those numbers seriously.