Election Day 2024 live results: Trump projected to win Pa., third swing state

ABC News has projected Trump will carry the state of North Carolina and its 16 Electoral College votes. Although Harris was not likely to carry that state anyway, the projections still hurts her; as you can see using our handy-dandy election simulator, when we restrict the set of possible Electoral College outcomes to ones that include a Trump win in North Carolina and Florida, Harris loses ground probabilistically because those outcomes are likelier to occur in simulations with more Republican victories than not.

Internally here at 538, we have also been running a version of this model that updates itself with a likely win in Georgia, based on how few votes are left there, as well as a tight race in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, based on the lagging Democratic turnout there. That model assigns a 6-in-100 chance of Harris winning the majority of Electoral College votes after everything is said and done.

To be clear: That 6 percent chance is not nothing. It's possible that our models are extrapolating incorrectly about outstanding urban votes in Wisconsin, for example, where about 24% of the vote is left to be counted, or inferring incorrectly the result in Nevada, where no votes have been counted yet. But those states don't have enough votes to put Harris over the top if she loses Pennsylvania, anyway. There, 84% of the vote has been counted, and Harris trails Trump by 3 percentage points.

Most of the congressional races we're watching in Michigan are still too close to call. But in the 3rd Congressional District, with 54% of the expected vote reporting, Rep. Hillary Scholten is maintaining a lead of 57% to her Republican challenger, Paul Hudson's, 41%. In the other competitive districts, the 7th and 8th, the votes are closer. Tom Barrett is running ahead of Democrat Curtis Hertel in the 7th, 54% to 43% with 57% of the expected vote reporting, while the 8th is much closer, Republican Paul Junge and Democrat Kristen McDonald Rivet are nearly tied at about 48% each with 29% of the expected vote reporting.

When we see the same trend across a broad range of places — with a shift toward the GOP presidential candidate in all kinds of places, and a small incumbency advantage in competitive Senate races —that's evidence of the nationalization Julia mentioned much earlier.

From some back-of-the-envelope math, it looks to me that if The New York Times's projections about where the presidential races wind up, the Senate races in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania--both of which feature Democratic incumbents--will be razor tight. At present, there is a 3.8 percentage point gap separating Trump and Harris in Pennsylvania, for example, but the Times projects a margin of 2.2 percentage points, meaning that the gap will close by 1.6 percentage points. What's the margin by which Republican Dave McCormick currently leads Democrat Bob Casey? 1.7 percentage points. Likewise, in Wisconsin, Eric Hovde's lead over Tammy Baldwin is 2.3 percentage points--and> the gap between Trump and Harris is projected to close by 1.2 percentage points. In Michigan, however, Democrat Elissa Slotkin's 3.6 percentage-point deficit right now is more than the 3.0 projected closing.