Polls closing at 1 a.m.
It's now 1 a.m. Eastern, which means all polling places have closed in Alaska. And with that, polls are closed across the nation! Here are our forecasts for the races in the Last Frontier:
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 1 a.m. Eastern, which means all polling places have closed in Alaska. And with that, polls are closed across the nation! Here are our forecasts for the races in the Last Frontier:
Pennsylvania is the largest of the key swing states in this election, with 19 electoral college votes. With Georgia and North Carolina projected for Trump, Harris has no straightforward back-up for Pennsylvania's Electoral College votes — she cannot make up for them by winning Arizona and Nevada, for example.
In Pennsylvania, her current deficit is 2.8 percentage points, with more than 6.2 million votes in for major-party candidates. To be sure, in 2020, 6.8 million votes were cast for the major-party candidates, but with a relatively uniform shift across the state — sorry, commonwealth — Harris will need a sizable blue shift and some considerable breaks to catch up here in Pennsylvania.
Only two of the seven swing states have been projected at this point — Georgia and North Carolina — but both have gone Trump's way. That's important because it cuts off one of Harris' possible paths to the presidency: the Sun Belt. At this point, she basically has no choice but to win the three northern battleground states (although she could swap Arizona for Wisconsin). And she currently trails in all three: Wisconsin is 51-47% Trump, Pennsylvania is 51-48% Trump and Michigan is 52-46% Trump. She'll probably make up ground as the final ballots are counted in those states, but it's unclear if it will be enough to close the gap. (And even if it is in one state, she'll need to do it in all three.)