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.
ABC News has projected that Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer will win his reelection battle. Further down the ballot, Rep. Kelly Armstrong, a Republican, also won the gubernatorial race against Democrat Merrill Piepkorn. North Dakota is a solidly red state, so these results shouldn’t be too shocking. In 2020, Trump defeated Biden 65% to 32%.
ABC News is projecting that Trump will carry Louisiana. Nothing surprising here as the state has been firmly in the GOP column in presidential races since it moved away from Democrats in the 2000 election.
We have about 22% of the expected vote reporting from Pennsylvania, and Harris leads Trump by about 17 points, 58% to 41%. However, her ability to hold onto the lead in Pennsylvania with so many votes left is definitely open to question. Many of the big blue counties in the state (Philadelphia, Allegheny, Montgomery and Delaware) haven't reported that many votes yet, but the ones they have are, in many cases, mail ballots or other more Democratic-leaning tranches that have Harris doing much better than Biden. Once we get more Election Day votes in the tally, however, the state will be much tighter.
It's past 9 p.m. Eastern, and it still feels like we don't know much about who will win the presidential race. Neither Harris nor Trump is doing notably better than expected, so here in the 538 office, it feels like we're settling in to watch states like Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania come down to the wire. It reminds me of 2020, when the race also didn't have a clear leader until a day or two after Election Day.
So overall, it's looking like the polls were right and the race is going to be close. That means we may not know the winner for a couple days.
