APPLENEWS - STORY ADD
Election Day 2024 live results: Trump projected to win North Carolina, a key swing state
We're tracking races for president, Senate, House and more across the country.
Polls have closed in some states and the first results are coming in in the high-stakes presidential match-up between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. According to 538's forecast, both candidates have a roughly equal chance to win.
Voters are still at polling places around the country, casting ballots to decide who controls not only the White House, but also Congress, state and local governments.
Reporters from 538 and ABC News will be following along every step of the way with live updates, analysis and commentary on the results. Keep up to date with our full live blog below!
Key Headlines
Republicans hold top Utah seats
Both incumbent Republican Gov. Spencer Cox and Senate candidate John Curtis have been projected to win their races in Utah by ABC News. While some early polls suggested that Republican write-in candidate Phil Lyman might cut into Cox’s lead in the gubernatorial race, ultimately Lyman is only taking 8 percent of the vote with 35 percent of the expected vote reporting.
Harris projected to win New Mexico
ABC News is projecting that Harris will win New Mexico's five electoral votes. ABC News is also projecting the state's U.S. Senate race for the Democratic incumbent, Martin Heinrich.
Why Senate seats are worth so much
Blue Wall Democratic Senate seats seem to be on the knife's edge. Here's why they are so key: Senate seats are held for six years, and there are only 100 of them, versus 435 House seats held for two years. So that makes each Senate seat worth roughly 13 House seats. And the Senate looks very different with, say, 55 Republican Senators than with 52 Republican Senators. With 52 Republican Senators, moderates like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are key. But with 55 Republican Senators, more expansive GOP policy goals are well within reach.
With North Carolina called, Democrats' path to victory dwindles significantly
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.