The final electoral college count is Trump: 312, Harris: 226.
Just days after former President Donald Trump was projected to have won the presidency, Trump's transition team operation has begun, with transition co-chairs confirming that he will be selecting personnel to serve under his leadership in the coming days.
Trump is also the projected winner in Arizona, a state the former president flipped after losing it to Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump's projected win in the vital swing state marks a sweep of the battleground states.
It's now 9 p.m. Eastern. The last polling places have closed in another big batch of states: Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Here are our forecasts for the races in those states:
Election observers are closely watching Loudoun County, a suburban and exurban county outside Washington, D.C. In 2020, Biden won 62% of its votes, but with more than 95% of the expected votes in, Harris has just 57%. That's probably not enough of a deficit to cost Harris Virginia, but what might it say about Pennsylvania's southeastern suburbs, where Harris will need to run up the score to win this keystone state in her Electoral College strategy? Looking at elections since 2000, I calculated how Loudoun's performance correlates with the so-called "collar counties" — the suburban counties that surround Philadelphia. It turns out that Loudoun has correlated very highly with the swings in Delaware County, which is just to the west of Philadelphia.
With Florida's Senate race off the table for Democrats, the outcome of Ohio's Senate race is now even likelier to determine control of the Senate. As of 8:40 p.m. Eastern, with 44% of the expected vote reporting, Democrat Sherrod Brown leads Republican Bernie Moreno by about 50,000 votes or 2% of the current vote count. Right now, there's a lot of outstanding ballots left in the big cities -- Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati especially. But there's a lot of rural votes in Ohio, potentially enough to flip Brown's current tenuous lead.
With 21% of the expected vote reporting in New Hampshire, Harris is at 54% and Trump at 45%. However, in the competitive governors' race, Republican Kelly Ayotte is at 51% and Democrat Joyce Craig is at 48%. Craig was probably hoping that Harris' likely win in New Hampshire would pull her over the finish line, but it looks like Granite Staters are differentiating between the two Republicans at the top of the ticket.
