The final answer may or may not come on Tuesday, but news organizations that have spent months reporting on the presidential campaign between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump finally have the opportunity to report on actual results.
Broadcast, cable news networks, digital news outlets’ sites and one streaming service — Amazon — all set aside Tuesday night to deliver the news from their own operations.
Actual results will be a relief to news organizations that had weeks — and an excruciatingly long day of voting — to talk about an election campaign that polls have repeatedly shown to be remarkably tight. The first hint of what voters were thinking came shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern, when networks reported that exit polls showed voters were unhappy with the way the country was going.
It’s still not clear whether that dissatisfaction will be blamed on Harris, the current vice president, or former President Trump, who was voted out of office in 2020, CNN’s Dana Bash said.
Trying to draw meaning from anecdotal evidence
Otherwise, networks were left showing pictures of polling places on Tuesday and trying to extract wisdom from anecdotal evidence.
“Dixville Notch is a metaphor for the entire race,” CNN’s Alyssa Farah Griffin said, making efforts to draw meaning from the tiny New Hampshire community that reported its 3-3 vote for Harris and Trump in the early morning hours on Tuesday.
MSNBC assigned reporter Jacob Soboroff to talk to voters waiting in line outside a polling place near Temple University in Philadelphia, where actor Paul Rudd was handing out water bottles. Soboroff was called on by one young voter to take a picture with herself and Rudd.
On Fox News Channel, Harris surrogate Pete Buttigieg appeared for a contentious interview with “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade.
“Is this an interview or a debate?” Buttigieg said at one point. “Can I at least finish the sentence?”
Former NBC News anchor Brian Williams began a one-night appearance on Amazon to deliver results, and he already had one unexpected guest in the California studio where he was operating. Puck reporter Tara Palmeri was supposed to report from Trump headquarters in West Palm Beach, but was denied credentials to attend by the former president’s team.
Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita, in revealing the banishment, described her as a “gossip columnist” in a post on the social media site X. Palmeri told Williams that she had accurately reported some anxiety within the Trump camp about who was voting early.
Amazon said Palmeri was replaced at Trump’s Florida headquarters by New York Post reporter Lydia Moynihan.
Neither Axios or Politico would immediately confirm reports that some of their reporters were similarly banned, and the Trump campaign did not immediately return a call for comment.
New York Times strike affects an election night fixture
One notable election night media fixture — the Needle on The New York Times’ website — was endangered by a strike by technical workers at the newspaper.
The newspaper said early Tuesday that it was unclear whether it would be able to include the feature on its website during election night coverage since it relies on computer systems maintained by engineers at the company, including some who went on strike early Monday.
The Needle, as its name suggests, is a graphic that uses voting results and other calculations to point toward the likelihood of either presidential candidate winning.
The 2024 election is here. This is what to know:
News outlets globally count on the AP for accurate U.S. election results. Since 1848, the AP has been calling races up and down the ballot. Support us. Donate to the AP.
First introduced in 2016, it became nightmare-inducing for supporters of Democrat Hillary Clinton, who the Times determined had an 85% percent chance of winning the election. Readers watched as the Needle moved from forecasting a “likely” Clinton victory at the beginning of election night, to “toss-up” by 10 p.m. Eastern to “leaning Trump” at midnight. Trump won the election.
The Times said that “we will only publish a live version of the Needle if we are confident” that the computer systems it relies upon for data are stable.
Some 650 members of the Times’ Tech Guild went on strike early Monday.
Americans in 10 US states are voting on Tuesday on whether to enshrine the right to abortion into their state constitutions.
In some states, like Arizona and Florida, they have the opportunity to overturn bans that state legislatures passed after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022, doing away with the federal right to an abortion. In others, like Colorado and New York, they are voting on whether to boost protections for the procedure and make them harder to rollback in the event conservatives take power. And in one state – Nebraska – two competing measures will ask voters to choose between enshrining an existing 12-week ban or replacing it with more expansive abortion protections.
Since Roe was overturned, seven states have held abortion-related ballot referendums, and abortion rights supporters have won all of them. The results of Tuesday’s measure will not be the final word; states that vote to overturn bans will see litigation or legislation before those bans are repealed.Buttaken together, the results will indicate how potent the issue remains after two years without Roe.
Results will begin rolling in after 8pm ET, when the final polls close in Florida, Missouri and Maryland. However, it could take days for a complete tally of all of the votes.
Arizona
Abortion rights supporters in Arizona, a key battleground state in the presidential election, are vying to pass a measure that would enshrine the right to abortionuntil fetal viability, or about 24 weeks, in the state constitution. Abortion is currently banned in the state after 15 weeks.
Colorado
Colorado’s measure, which needs to garner 55% of the vote, would amend the state constitution to block the state government from denying, impeding or discriminating against individuals’ “right to abortion”. There is currently no gestational limit on the right to abortion in the state.
Florida
Florida’s measure would roll back the state’s six-week ban by adding the right to an abortionup until viability to the state’s constitution. It needs 60% of the vote to pass.
Maryland
Legislators, rather than citizens, initiated Maryland’s measure, which would amend the state constitution to confirm individuals’ “right to reproductive freedom, including but not limited to the ability to make and effectuate decisions to prevent, continue, or end the individual’s pregnancy”. There is currently no gestational limit on the right to abortion in the state.
Missouri
Voters will decide whether to overturn the state’s current, near-total abortion ban and establish a constitutional guarantee to the “fundamental right to reproductive freedom”, including abortion care until fetal viability.
Montana
Abortion in Montana is currently legal. If passed, the measure would amend the state constitution to explicitly include “a right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including the right to abortion” upuntil fetal viability, or after viability to protect a patient’s life or health.
Nebraska
Nebraska is the lone state with two competing ballot measures. If both measures pass, the measure that garners the most votes would take effect.
The first would enshrine the right to abortion upuntil viability into the state constitution.
The second would enshrine the current 12-week ban.
Nevada
Nevada’s measure would amend the state constitution to protect the right to abortionup until viability, or after viability in cases where a patient’s health or life may be threatened.
New York
New York state legislators added a measure to the ballot to broaden the state’s anti-discrimination laws by adding, among other things, protections against discrimination on the basis of “sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health”. It does not explicitly reference abortion, but advocates say its pregnancy-related language encompasses abortion protections. Abortion is protected in New York until fetal viability.
South Dakota
South Dakota’s measure is less sweeping than other abortion rights measures, because it would only protect the right to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy. Although this measure will appear on the ballot, there will be a trial over the validity of the signatures that were collected for it. Depending out the outcome of the trial, the measure – and any votes cast for it – could be invalidated.
Tens of millions of voters went to the polls in the United States on Tuesday, see-sawing between anxiety and hope, to send one of the closest and most consequential presidential elections hurtling towards an uncertain finish.
The Democrat Kamala Harris and her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, appeared locked in a knife-edge contest with hardly any daylight between the pair in national opinion polls that have barely budged in weeks.
As the first polls closed in Kentucky and Indiana on Tuesday evening, exit polls suggested concerns over the state of the economy and the future of US democracy weighed heavily on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots.
According to the AP Votecast survey, four in 10 voters named the economy and jobs as the most important problem facing the country, a potentially hopeful sign for Trump given that Republicans generally receive higher marks on their handling of the economy. But roughly half of voters cited the fate of democracy, which has become a focal point of Harris’ campaign, as their largest concern this year.
But election experts often warn against overanalyzing the findings of the earliest exit polls. Voters will get their first clearer sense of the outcome at 7pm ET, when Florida and Georgia start reporting results.
From coast to coast, in sprawling cities and small towns, in churches and school gyms, people waited patiently in line to play their part in the world’s most powerful democracy and choose between two sharply different visions for America. They mostly encountered a smooth process, with isolated reports of hiccups including long queues, technical issues and ballot printing errors.
Harris, 60, was among more than 82 million people who voted early, having mailed her ballot to California. From her vice-presidential residence in Washington DC, now secured by 8ft-high metal fences, she conducted phone interviews with radio stations in battleground states. Harris then took part in a phone bank event at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
People queue outside a polling station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. Photograph: David Muse/EPA
Trump, 78, voted on Tuesday near his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, and said he was feeling “very confident”. Wearing a red “Make America great again” cap, he told reporters: “It looks like Republicans have shown up in force.” The former president said he had not prepared a speech about the outcome, adding: “I’m not a Democrat. I’m able to make a speech on very short notice.”
Trump has been told by some advisers that he should prematurely declare victory on election night if he is sufficiently ahead ofHarrisin battleground states such as Pennsylvania, according to people close to him. Meanwhile the New York Times reported that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who has spent at least $119m in support of Trump, would watch the results with him at Mar-a-Lago.
After billions of dollars in spending and months of frenetic campaigning in seven crucial swing states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina – the candidates appeared deadlocked. Recent polling has been unable to discern a clear pattern or advantage for either Harris or Trump in this electoral battleground, though most experts agree that whoever wins the Rust belt state of Pennsylvania is likely to have a clear advantage.
Robert Brady, the Democratic party chair in Philadelphia, the biggest city in Pennsylvania, said turnout at polling stations was “extremely high” and that “is great for us”. But elsewhere in the state Tiana Peters, a 39-year-old Democrat from Allentown, voted for Trump. “The last four years, nothing really good happened,” she said. “Giving away free money to the people that can’t afford houses, financially that doesn’t work, you know.”
Kamala Harris greets volunteers as she prepares to phone bank at the DNC headquarters on election day. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP
It is the swing states that will decide the election because, under the complex American political system, the result is decided not by the national popular vote but an electoral college in which each state’s number of electors is weighed roughly by the size of its population.
Each candidate needs 270 votes in the electoral college to clinch victory, and the battleground is formed of those states where polls indicate a state could go either way. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections but lost out to George W Bush and Trump in the electoral college.
The result may not be quickly known. With polling so tight, full results in the crucial swing states are unlikely to be available on Tuesday night and may not even emerge on Wednesday, leaving the US on tenterhooks as to who may emerge as America’s next president.
That will only fuel jitters in foreign capitals where the election is being watched closely. Harris would probably follow Joe Biden’s foreign policy playbook, focusing on alliances and maintaining the defence of Ukraine, where victory for Trump’s “America first” ethos would boost rightwing populists in Europe and elsewhere.
Tuesday’s election brought the curtain down on a remarkable and historic election campaign that deeply divided American society and upped the stress levels of many of its citizens amid warnings of civil unrest, especially in a scenario where Harris wins and Trump contests the result.
Harris put together a whirlwind campaign in just over 100 days after 81-year-old Biden stepped aside. She is bidding to become the first woman, first Black woman and first woman of south Asian descent to be elected president but, unlike Hillary Clinton in 2008, she downplayed the historic nature of her candidacy.
She centred her campaign on the autocratic threat that Trump represents. In her final big signature event, Harris staged a rally of 75,000 supporters on the Ellipse in Washington – the spot where Trump helped encourage his supporters to attack the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
“On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list full of priorities on what I will get done for the American people,” Harris told the crowd.
Harris’s campaign has tried to represent a page turning on the Trump era and threat of his return to the White House. She has acknowledged that calling Trump a fascist was a fair reflection of his political beliefs and the intentions of his movement, while insisting that she represents a choice that will serve all sides of America’s deeply fractured political landscape.
Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump depart after casting their votes in Palm Beach, Florida. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The vice-president has also emphasised reproductive freedom in the first presidential election since the supreme court, with three Trump appointees, ended the constitutional right to abortion. Opinion polls suggest a record gender gap, with men backing Trump and women supporting Harris.
Trump, meanwhile, would be the oldest president ever elected. He would also be the first defeated president in 132 years to win another term in the White House, and the first person convicted of a crime to take over the Oval Office.
He ran a campaign fuelled by a deep sense of grievance, both personal, at his legal travails, and the perception among many of his supporters of an ailing America that is under threat from the Democrats.
That sense of victimhood has been fueled by lies and conspiracy theories that have baselessly painted Biden and Harris as far-left figures who have wrecked the American economy with high inflation and an obsession with identity politics.
The former president told supporters “I am your retribution” and threatened to prosecute political foes, journalists and others. He also suggested turning the US military against what he calls “the enemy from within”.
Trump put immigration and border security at the heart of his campaign pitch, painting a picture of America as overrun with crime caused by illegal immigration with language that has often veered into outright racism and fearmongering. He has referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals” with “bad genes” who are “poisoning the blood of our country”.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
During the campaign, Trump vowed to replace thousands of federal workers with loyalists, impose sweeping tariffs on allies and foes alike and stage the biggest deportation operation in US history.
The huge divisions between the two campaigns and the language used by candidates – especially Trump and his allies – have led to widespread fears of violence or unrest as voting day plays out and especially as the count goes on. In the run-up to election day, ballot drop boxes used for early voting were destroyed in several US states.
Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state,told the Washington Post newspaper: “There is the potential for small flare-ups throughout our state and other states – little fires everywhere. Collectively they could become a massive firestorm that is more difficult to contain because the embers have been burning throughout the nation.”
At the same time, however, it was Trump himself who was the subject of two assassination attempts during the campaign. At a rally in Pennsylvania, an assassin’s bullet grazed his ear and at a golf course in Florida, a gunman lay in wait for an ambush, only to be foiled by an eagle-eyed Secret Service agent before he could open fire. Neither shooter seemed coherently politically motivated or definitively aligned with one side or another.
Tuesday would not decide the presidency alone. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives were up for grabs, along with 34 of the 100 seats in the Senate. Thirteen state and territorial governorships and numerous other state and local elections were also taking place. Ten states including Arizona, Colorado and Florida had abortion-related measures on the ballot.
Additional reporting by Sam Levine in Allentown, Pennsylvania and Hugo Lowell in West Palm Beach, Florida
Voting finishes in parts of Kentucky, Indiana as first US polls close
The first polls have closed in the United States, with voting wrapping up in most Indiana counties and in Kentucky’s eastern half.
Voting will finish in the rest of the two red states at 7pm, at which point it will also conclude in a handful of other states – including swing state Georgia.
Key events
First polls soon to close in US election
We’re minutes away from the first polls closing anywhere in the United States.
Most counties in Indiana and several in eastern Kentucky will wrap up voting at 6pm ET. Both generally vote Republican and not considered swing states this year. Voting in the remaining counties will finish at 7pm.
Alice Herman
Reporting from Milwaukee, Wisconsin:
Serina Jones, 30, pulled over her minivan in West Milwaukee and flagged down a canvasser walking down the street in a reflective jacket.
“Are you all doing voter stuff?” she asked.
Jones, who is a mother of three, had not registered to vote yet but was determined to cast a ballot – and had plans to get her husband to the polls, too.
After plugging in her address and making a plan to vote, she told me she has “mixed feelings” about the election.
“I’m fired up,” said Jones, who is voting for Kamala Harris and said she worried about the consequences of a second Donald Trump presidency for her three children’s education and livelihood.
“But I have a lot riding on this,” she said. “I’m trying to make sure we got a future for our babies.”
Republican Philadelphia official says ‘no truth’ to Trump’s claim of election fraud
Seth Bluestein, a Republican Philadelphia city commissioner, called Donald Trump’s claim of “cheating” in the city “disinformation”, and said the vote so far has been “safe and secure”.
Bluestein is one of three officials on the board tasked with overseeing voting in Philadelphia. Here’s what he had to say:
There is absolutely no truth to this allegation. It is yet another example of disinformation. Voting in Philadelphia has been safe and secure. pic.twitter.com/wMiPnAgO17
We have been in regular contact with the RNC. We have been responsive to every report of irregularities at the polls to ensure Philadelphians can vote safely and securely.
Harris campaign sees high Puerto Rican turnout in Pennsylvania
Philadelphia neighborhoods where many Puerto Ricans live have seen high voter turnout, the Harris campaign says, after a speaker at a Donald Trump rally last month referred to the US territory as “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean”.
It could be a positive sign for the vice-president’s chances of winning Pennsylvania, perhaps the most vital of the three “Blue Wall” swing states along the Great Lakes. Victories in the Keystone state along with Michigan and Wisconsin would probably provide enough electoral votes to make Harris the next president.
The campaign also sees high turnout by students at universities nationwide, including in Pennsylvania. In battleground state North Carolina, fewer rural Republicans appear to have voted, but many people have cast ballots in the Democratic-leaning city of Durham.
Joan E Greve
Democrats are counting on young voters to turn out at the polls today to help deliver wins for not just Kamala Harris but congressional candidates and ballot measures across the country.
“Young people will decide this election. From local ballot initiatives to federal races, we know this critical bloc is showing up for their futures and making their voices heard,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of the youth voting group NextGen America.
According to NextGen’s data, the group registered more than 130,000 young voters this election cycle, while more than 171,000 young voters signed pledges to vote.
“We are proud of our work this cycle on-the-ground and online to educate, mobilize, and empower young voters, contributing to a culture of civic engagement that will extend beyond this election,” Ramirez said.
“Young people are showing up, turning out, and using their collective power to elect leaders that represent our values – today and into the future.”
Fears for democracy and state of economy top issues for voters, exit polls suggest
The state of American democracy and the economy were the top issues on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots in the 2024 presidential election, according to an NBC News exit poll.
The poll’s preliminary results show 35% of voters said democracy mattered most to their vote, while 31% said the economy.
Abortion (14%) and immigration (11%) ranked as the next-most important issues, while just 4% named foreign policy.
ABC News’ preliminary exit poll also shows that the state of democracy prevailed as the most important issue to voters. More voters said they see American democracy as threatened than secure – 73% to 25%, the poll shows.
Voters described the economy as being in “bad shape” by 67%-32%, with 45% of respondents saying that their own financial situation is worse now than four years ago.
Carter Sherman
Reporting from Phoenix, Arizona:
Alison Folsom has cast her ballot at the same library in downtown Phoenix for years. This is the first year, Folsom said, that she had to wait in line – for 40 minutes.
But Folsom was delighted, especially because so many of the other people in line seemed to be between the ages of 18 and 25.
“We know that they’re one of the most important, consequential voting blocks, but seeing them come out and vote on election day that was special,” said Folsom, who wore a purple shirt that read “ABORTION RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS” and works for the Movement Voter Project, which helps Democratic and progressive donors give to grassroots campaigns.
Arizona State University students Joy Leon, a 19-year-old Arizona voter, and Kaya Clark, a 18-year-old Idaho voter, said that they had both voted for Kamala Harris in large part because of their support for abortion rights.
“I like having the choice. It’s kind of strange that stuff about human rights and the choice of your body is considered controversial,” said Clark, who carried a handmade flag that read “VOTING IS BRAT” in green and black.
She added: “I don’t really want to vote for a convicted felon. I’m for the girlies.”
New York City mayor Eric Adams has named Kamala Harris as his candidate of choice in the presidential election, in what the New York Times said is the first time in recent memory.
For the first time in recent memory, Mayor Eric Adams explicitly named Kamala Harris as his candidate of choice in the presidential election, before voting at a Brooklyn public school. pic.twitter.com/8e2BTdFwVJ
Wall Street rose on a quiet last day of trading before polls close. The benchmark S&P 500 finished up 1.2% on Tuesday.
While trading was broadly muted, there was a notable exception: it was another volatile day for Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), owner of the former president’s tiny Truth Social media empire.
Trading in TMTG was repeatedly halted. The stock – which has been on a wild ride in recent weeks – surged by nearly 18% during early trading, before falling into the red. It finished the day down 1.2%.
The economy has taken center stage in this campaign. While the last few months have been filled with great news, according to economists, many Americans still think the economy stinks, as Lauren Aratani reported.
It’s a disconnect that could ultimately decide who takes the White House.
First election result in tiny New Hampshire village sees a Trump-Harris tie
Lorenzo Tondo
The traditional first tally of the 2024 US presidential elections in the tiny village of Dixville Notch, in New Hampshire’s northern tip, ended in a deadlock: three votes to Kamala Harris and three for Donald Trump.
It took approximately 12 minutes to count and certify the votes of the six residents of this tiny community near the Canadian border, which has been casting its ballots at midnight on election day for decades.
The result marks a significant shift from four years ago, when all five votes went to Joe Biden – even though this year four of the registered voters are Republicans and the other two are independents, according to the Washington Post.
Tiny New Hampshire town delivers first US election result – video
Dixville Notch, in the White Mountains, started its early voting in 1960. The tradition originated in the nearby town of Hart’s Location, to accommodate rail workers who had to be at work before normal voting hours.
Although the town’s result doesn’t always predict the eventual winner – in 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump here by four votes to two – this time the result chimes with what most polls say is an extremely close election and evenly divided electorate.
Maanvi Singh
Nevada is one of 10 states with abortion is on the ballot – and reproductive rights could be a deciding issue in this key swing state.
Outside the library voting site on the University of Nevada Las Vegas campus, both Alexis Rivera-Valenzuela, 18, and his partner Jasmine Mata, 19 said abortion rights were at top of mind as they cast their ballots.
Both voted for Nevada’s abortion ballot measure, and for Kamala Harris – because she had promised to protect access.
Donald Trump, who appointed three of the US supreme court justices who overturned Roe v Wade and has branded himself as “the most pro-life president”, could further restrict abortions or enact a de-facto national abortion ban by prohibiting the mailing of abortion medication and materials.
Rivera-Valenzuela said he wasn’t too worried, as a Nevada resident. “If Trump wins, he might change things at the federal level, but I think if we get the protections passed here, it won’t matter as much what he does,” Rivera-Valenzuela said.
Sairy Cruz, 21, who was about to cast her first vote, said she hoped Harris would pull through in this deadlocked swing state.
“I feel like a woman deserves to have the right to her own bodily autonomy, and no man should have a say in that. That’s the bare minimum,” said Cruz. “I feel like as a person of color and also a woman, I’d like to see another woman of color in the office.”
Clark County, Nevada is a bellwether in this election – with polls showing Harris and Donald Trump virtually tied. About 50% of Nevada’s electorate lives here, and they could determine the outcome in this key swing state.
Though several students said they weren’t particularly worried. “To be honest I’m so focused on finals, so we don’t have much time to really think about,” Cruz said. She had, however, avoided looking at the polls.
Maanvi Singh
Reporting from Las Vegas, Nevada:
The line of students waiting to vote snaked all around the third floor of the University of Nevada Lied library.
School staff were on hand to hand out candy, chips and drinks to have while they waited. The wait time was upwards of an hour, and students occasionally dipped out of line to sprint to class – with the intention of perhaps returning later.
Alexis Rivera-Valenzuela, 18, said it was quite a thrill when he finally cast his ballot. “Everyone cheered because I was a first time voter,” he said. “I’m feeling pretty good right now.”
Meanwhile Darcy Morales, 18, was bracing herself for the wait. “I’m nervous and I’m excited,” she said. “It’s my first time, so I’m just like, ‘Oh am I making the right choices?’”
She’s planning on voting for Kamala Harris, as well – because she believes the vice president has better policies to address rising costs. “And the fact that she’s a woman – that’s also really exciting. It’d be a really big change if she does end up winning the election.”
Here some of the key images sent from the newswires on Election Day:
Election workers are sworn-in ahead of processing ballots for the 2024 presidential election at an election’s warehouse in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPADonald Trump and Melania Trump after voting at the Morton and Barbara Mandel Recreation Center, in Palm Beach, Fla. Photograph: Evan Vucci/APKamala Harris drops by a phone bank event at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on Election Day in Washington, DC. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesDustin Ritchie, 34, votes with his daughter at the Douglas County Central Assembly of God polling location in Superior, Wisconsin. Photograph: Erica Dischino/ReutersSupporters of Kamala Harris in The Villages, Florida. Photograph: Miguel J Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP/Getty ImagesRudy Giuliani, former lawyer to former US President Donald Trump, center, speaks to members of the media outside a polling location for the 2024 Presidential election at the Mandel Community Center in Palm Beach, Florida. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
When do the polls close tonight?
The first polls tonight will close at 6 pm ET and are in the eastern counties of Indiana and Kentucky.
At 7pm ET, polls will close in Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, parts of Florida, and the rest of Indiana and Kentucky.
Thirty minutes later, at 7:30pm ET, polls in North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia will close.
At 8pm, polls will close in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Missouri, parts of Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota and Texas, and the whole of Florida.
By 9pm ET, polls will close in Arkansas, as well as Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Wisconsin, Wyoming, the whole of Texas, Michigan, South Dakota and North Dakota.
At 10pm ET, polls in Montana, Nevada and Utah will close. At 11pm ET, polls in California will close, as well as Idaho, Oregon and Washington.
At midnight ET, polls in Hawaii will close and finally, at 1am ET, polls will close in Alaska.
Voting enters final hours as Harris and Trump hope to win presidency
Hello US politics readers and welcome to our live coverage of the 2024 election, where the first polls will close in about an hour on the east coast.
In the meantime, here’s a recap of the main developments so far:
Before the polls opened on Tuesday morning, more than 80 million Americans had already voted and cast early ballots, with just under 45 million voting early in person and about 38 million voting early by mail.
Harris, who voted by mail ahead of election day,made a surprise visit to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC on Tuesday afternoon. Earlier she told a radio interview that her first order of business if elected would be “bringing down the cost of living for folks”.
Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, said the election was “razor close” but said he was feeling “good about this.” America has “the fairest, the freest, the safest elections,” Walz said as he visited a diner in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania earlier on Tuesday.
Trump and his wife, Melania, cast their ballots in Florida, earlier on Tuesday. Asked if he would call on his supporters not to engage in violence, Trump said: “I don’t have to tell them that there will be no violence,” adding his supporters “are not violent people”. He added that he felt “very confident”.
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, cast his ballot in Cincinnati, Ohio, earlier on Tuesday. Vance said his attitude “is the best way to heal the rift in the country is to try to govern the country as well as we can”.
The FBI said they are aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which, they said, appear to “originate from Russian email domains”. The bureau said none of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.
A man was arrested by US Capitol police officers during a screening process at the Capitol visitor center in Washington DC, police said. The man “smelled like fuel” and had “a torch” and “a flare gun”, police said.
Trump has been told by some advisers that he should prematurely declare victory on election night if he’s sufficiently ahead of Harrisin key battleground states like Pennsylvania, according to people close to him, though whether he will heed that advice remains unclear.
As the sun rose on Tuesday, there was something reassuringly familiar about the rituals that election day in America would bring: long queues of voters, candidates casting their own ballots, TV experts tapping their electoral map touchscreens and a steady flow of results from safe blue states and red states.
But something is different this time.
The 2024 US presidential election has witnessed a late candidate switch, two lopsided debates, two assassination attempts, an intervention by the world’s richest man, euphoria reminiscent of Barack Obama and rhetoric evocative of Adolf Hitler. It is a campaign marked by both violence and joy.
Its outcome – effectively a coin flip that might or might not be known on Wednesday – will be equally groundbreaking. America might be about to elect Kamala Harris, the first female president in its 248-year history. Or it could hand the White House back to 78-year-old Donald Trump, the first former president with a criminal record as well as two impeachments.
Both sides are utterly convinced that their side must win, that defeat would represent the end of democracy, freedom and the American way of life. They are like two trains gathering speed as they hurtle towards each other and an inevitable crash. For nearly half the country the result will be devastating. They will have lost what veteran journalist Carl Bernstein once called a cold civil war.
That is in part because Trump has spent a decade sowing divisions of class and race. But this election has exposed a gender gulf two years after the supreme court ended the constitutional right to abortion. Democrats nominated a woman while Trump has embraced crude machismo and “bro” culture in a quest to find new voters.
Maureen Dowd, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote: “It is the ultimate battle of the sexes in the most visceral of elections. Who will prevail? The women, especially young women, who are appalled at the cartoonish macho posturing and benighted stances of Donald Trump and his entourage? Or the men, including many young men, union men, Latino and Black men, who are drawn to Trump’s swaggering, bullying and insulting, seeing him as the reeling-backward antidote to shrinking male primacy.”
Consider this part three in the Trump trilogy. In 2016, he was a brazen newcomer thumbing his nose at the political and media establishment to the glee of supporters who felt the American dream had eluded them. In 2020, he was rebuked by an electorate weary of his chaos, narcissism and incompetent handling of a global pandemic.
When the history of the 2024 election is written, a single week in July will be at the heart of the narrative. On 13 July, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks took aim with a rifle and opened fire, injuring Trump’s ear and killing an attendee. A photo of Trump standing with blood streaked across his face as he raised his fist and shouted “Fight!” became the indelible image of his campaign.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
Two days later, the Republican national convention got under way with some attendees wearing ear bandages in solidarity. Speaker after speaker insisted that Trump had been spared by God, a sure sign that his work on this earth was not yet done. The nominee recounted the episode in a sombre opening to his convention address – but then blew it by recycling old grievances for more than an hour.
Democrats needed to reclaim the narrative. At the end of that week, on 21 July, they did. Joe Biden, 81, trailing in polls and reeling from a feeble debate performance, bowed to pressure from his party and announced that he was dropping out of the race. It was, said 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, one of the most selfless acts of patriotism that she had ever seen.
Biden quickly endorsed Harris; the Clintons, the Obamas and the rest of the party followed suit. The vice-president parlayed “the politics of joy” and named a running mate, Governor Tim Walz, who branded their opponents “weird”. Now the Democratic national convention in Chicago felt like the happiest place on earth, brimming with relief, hope and fun; even the state-by-state roll call became a dance party.
The Trump campaign appeared wrongfooted, unable to frame Harris or find a disparaging nickname. Trump was going off the rails with a bizarre, false story that immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Harris, a former courtroom prosecutor, pulverised him in their one and only debate in Philadelphia. With momentum on her side, she seemed to have found the long elusive antidote to Trumpism.
But there was a final twist and it was the most unexpected of all: the last two months of the campaign were oddly undramatic, even anticlimactic, as if the cosmic scriptwriters had peaked too soon. There were no more game changers as polls stabilised and equilibrium was restored. Harris was so disciplined that she avoided the kind of gaffe that animated past elections, although her struggles to distance herself from Biden gave Republicans some fodder.
Trump was so ill-disciplined that many Americans felt numb with indifference. There was no repeat of the 2016 Access Hollywood tape, in which he could be heard boasting about grabbing women’s genitalia, that led some Republicans to call for him to drop out. When he mused on film character Hannibal Lecter or the size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia, or a comedian at his New York rally insulted Puerto Rico, Republicans shrugged and moved on.
If there was an October surprise, perhaps it was tech entrepreneur Elon Musk giving away millions of dollars in a bid to help Trump in swing states, or the return of Hitler to the political stage. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, told how the president expressed admiration for the Nazi’s generals. Gen Mark Milley, formerly at the top of the military top brass, characterised Trump as “fascist to the core”.
Harris, tempering the joy, endorsed this definition about a man who asserts that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and threatens to turn the US military against “the enemy from within”. It was time, she insisted, to “turn the page” on Trump’s chaos and division.
Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, says: “It’s a very stark choice in this election. It’s a choice between in many ways whether we abide by the constitution and the rule of law, whether we abide by a process of free and fair elections, whether we abide by the truth or whether we again make a choice to basically choose chaos over order.
“Trump will produce chaos. There’s not much doubt about it because that’s the way he operates. He operates by chaos because that’s how bullies get attention and he’s a bully. The question then becomes is the country, are other leaders going to allow him to do what violates the basic principles of our democracy? I just don’t think ultimately a bully like Trump will prevail.”
“Did the fascist win?” was not a question asked about any of the 59 presidential elections before this one. But as millions of people go to the polls on Tuesday, following millions more who have already voted, it is the question haunting America and the world.
Moe Vela, a former senior adviser to Joe Biden when he was vice-president, says: “Every democracy in the world has to be on pins and needles and biting their nails. Not that the US was better than anybody else but the world has kind of always looked at the US as the gold standard of democracies. That it is this close to collapse and this close to being taken away from us, there can’t be any any democracy in the world right now that isn’t concerned.”
If that fate is avoided and Harris becomes the 47th president, the world will express relief that the populist tide has again been beaten back. Trump will be seen as the aberration, not the norm. But within the US, deep wounds will remain. The defining hallmark of the Trump era has been division and divisiveness: female versus male, Black versus white, urban versus rural, Hollywood versus heartland, liberal versus conservative. This has been exacerbated by the echo chambers of social media.
The Pew Research Center found that Democrats and Republicans are becoming more likely to view members of the other party as unintelligent, lazy, immoral or dishonest. A survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that 84% of workers agree that the current political climate causes US citizens to see each other as enemies, and 78% said they had seen people treated poorly because of their perceived political affiliation.
Johnny Taylor, president and chief executive of the SHRM, says of the election: “We believe, at least if the polling data is right, that it’s going to be close so it is quite feasible that 49.9% of the population wakes up the next day pissed off that their candidate didn’t win and 50.1 are happy. It’s one thing if my sports team loses to the other team in the Super Bowl. This is so personal to people because of the topics. If it’s abortion, you think this is the end of the world if you lose.”
Harris has promised to work across the aisle and put a Republican in her cabinet. But there are many on the far right who will seethe with resentment at the prospect of a Black female president, just as they did when Barack Obama took the White House. Fox News and other conservative media will thrive on fuelling the hate. A fascism-curious society in which Donald Trump came so close to regaining power will need more than one election to heal itself.
Americans went to the polls on Tuesday against a backdrop of misinformation – much of it suspected of originating in Russia – as the FBI warned of fake videos and non-credible threats of terrorism aimed at disrupting the US presidential election and discouraging voting.
These tensions were stoked by Donald Trump supporters, and the former US president himself. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s most vocal surrogate, tweeted a video of support that appeared to reference the far-right QAnon ideology.
The video, showing footage of the January 6 insurrection and featuring Van Halen’s song Jump as a soundtrack, came after an earlier social media post from the entrepreneur that repeated elements of the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy from the 2016 presidential election.
“The hammer of justice is coming,” read that earlier post.
The flood of untruths was fed by Trump on Tuesday as he falsely claimed he had a “big lead” in opinion polls while casting doubt on the reliability of voting machines. Having already baselessly claimed that there was Democratic “cheating” in Pennsylvania, the Republican nominee said it was “an outrage” that it took so long to count votes in swing states.
The former president also took liberties with the truth in an early election day video on his Truth Social platform. In an apparent reference to transgender boxers, the video featured Trump complaining that “men could beat up women and win medals” – a supposed example of how American values had collapsed under Joe Biden’s presidency, which the Republican has tied to his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.
The disinformation and false statements from the Trump campaign came as voting in one key battleground state, Georgia, already faced disruption following what appeared to fake bomb threats against at least two polling stations.
The threats were made against polling stations at Etris Community Center and Gullatt elementary school in Union City, on the outskirts of Atlanta, according to Fulton county police. Union City’s population is nearly 90% Black, according to the US Census Bureau, fuelling suspicions that the threats were aimed at disrupting a cohort expected to mainly vote for Harris.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, told journalists that the “non-credible” threats came from Russia.
“We identified the source, and it was from Russia,” he said, saying he believed that the source had been a Russian troll farm.
“They’re up to mischief, it seems, and they don’t want us to have a smooth, fair and accurate election,” he added. “Anything that can get us to fight amongst ourselves – they can count that as a victory.”
The bomb threats followed a warning from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] on Monday that Russia, Iran and China were involved in efforts at election disruption but that Russia was “the most active threat”.
“Influence actors linked to Russia in particular are manufacturing videos and creating fake articles to undermine the legitimacy of the election, instill fear in voters regarding the election process, and suggest Americans are using violence against each other due to political preferences, judging from information available to the IC [intelligence community],” an ODNI statement said.
“These efforts risk inciting violence, including against election officials. We anticipate Russian actors will release additional manufactured content with these themes through election day and in the days and weeks after polls close.”
In line with that statement, the FBI on Tuesday dismissed a video – made to look like a news clip and purporting to emanate from the bureau – advising Americans to “vote remotely” due to a “high terror threat” at poling stations.
“This video is not authentic and does not accurately represent the current threat posture or polling location safety,” the bureau said.
It also disavowed a separate video falsely depicting a political rigging voting among prison inmates.
In a statement, the FBI said there were “two instances of its name and insignia being misused in promoting false narratives surrounding the election,” USA Today reported.
The second video features a fake FBI press release alleging that officials at five prisons in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona rigged voting among inmates and conspired with a political party. “This video is also not authentic, and its contents are false,” the FBI said.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
Just hours after the polls closed in the 2020 United States presidential election, as millions of votes were still being counted, Donald Trump delivered an extraordinary address.
“We were getting ready to win this election – frankly, we did win this election,” the then-president told reporters in the early morning hours after Election Day, alleging that “a major fraud” was being committed.
“We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list,” he said.
Trump’s premature — and false — claim of victory over his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who ultimately won the 2020 election, capped weeks of untrue voter fraud allegations made by the Republican incumbent.
Four years later, as the 2024 race between Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris remains too close to call, experts again are stressing that it could take days to count the votes — and that is not a sign of malfeasance.
“Just like in 2020, it’s entirely normal for vote counting to take several days,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the voting rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
That’s especially true “in closely contested states where things are going to be scrutinised and you’re going to have to count a lot of votes before you’re going to have a sense of who’s going to win those states”.
“It’s going to take time, and that’s due to built-in verification steps in the counting process to ensure accuracy,” she told Al Jazeera.
Different procedures
Vote counting takes time in the US for a variety of reasons, including how elections are administered and how ballots are processed.
Each US state runs elections its own way, and as a result, each state’s vote count takes a different amount of time, explained Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a professor of law at Stetson University College of Law in Florida.
For example, the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin do not allow mail-in ballots to be processed before Election Day, meaning their respective counts will likely take longer.
“Others get a head start by starting the counting process earlier during the early voting period,” Torres-Spelliscy told Al Jazeera in an email.
“And states have vastly different population sizes. Wyoming has a tiny population while California has more people living in it than Canada. The bigger the population of voters, the longer it takes to count their ballots, which can number in the millions.”
Meanwhile, states also must sort through what are known as provisional ballots. These are ballots cast by people whose voter registration status must first be verified before their vote is counted, thereby taking a little bit longer.
Ultimately, that it can take hours — or even days — after Election Day to count votes is not a sign of any illegal act, Torres-Spelliscy said. “Just because it takes a populous state a few days to count millions of votes is not evidence of fraud.”
Misperceptions, misinformation
Still, misinformation can quickly spread in the time it takes to tabulate the votes — and between when the polls close and when a projected winner is announced.
While states can take weeks to release their official vote tallies, US media organisations make projections based on their own methodologies as well as preliminary results.
This “election call” — a news outlet announcing a projected presidential winner — can happen on election night. But in closer contests, such as the 2020 race between Trump and Biden, it can take a few days.
Most polling leading up to Election Day this year showed Harris and Trump locked in a race that is too close to call and will likely come down to how the candidates fare in seven critical battleground states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada.
The potential for misinformation in this period is especially high in a polarised nation where Trump has now spent years claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him and the electoral system overall is rife with fraud.
Those beliefs are held by many Americans: According to a September 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 66 percent of Republican voters said they believed the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
A phenomenon known as the “Blue Shift” can also add to false perceptions that something nefarious is going on, as it did in 2020.
The term refers to a moment in US elections when the results begin to shift in favour of Democrats as more mail-in ballots get counted throughout the day. Generally, more Democratic voters have voted by mail than Republicans, but it remains to be seen if that will again be the case this year.
In 2020, Trump “used that change in the numbers over the course of the day … to create this idea that something was wrong”, Lakin at the ACLU said.
“But it was the normal processing of ballots; it was just a feature of the way people were opting to vote in that particular year.”
On the campaign trail, the former president repeatedly warned of voter fraud, including the prospect that noncitizens were voting as part of a Democratic plot to skew the results in Harris’s favour — a claim experts have slammed as untrue.
His team has filed a number of lawsuits related to alleged irregularities on voter rolls, the lists of people who are eligible to cast ballots.
And Trump also embraced the slogan “too big to rig” to urge his supporters to vote in numbers large enough to “guarantee we win by more than the margin of fraud”.
“He’s already sort of announced that he’s the winner before the ballots have even been counted. This is the same claim that he made in 2020: If he’s not the winner of the official count, it can only be because of fraud,” said James Gardner, a professor at the University of Buffalo School of Law in New York state.
“He has already laid the groundwork for yelling fraud and irregularity just because he might not win. If that’s your starting point, the fact that it takes a while to count the ballots is only one of a million different things that you can say.”
According to Gardner, “the root of the problem is that the Republican Party under Trump is not willing to play by the rules of democracy.
“It believes that it deserves to be in power regardless of electoral outcomes. So as a result, it does not adhere to any of the ethics of democratic fair play. Democracy is based on fair rules of fair competition, and the Trump Republican Party is not committed to those.”
Potential for violence
Torres-Spelliscy noted that even if Trump does say he won before all the votes are counted, that type of pronouncement “makes no difference legally”.
“What matters is who states and DC certify and which candidate wins 270 Electoral College votes,” she explained.
Still, if Trump prematurely declares victory over Harris and is ultimately found to have lost after the votes are counted, that would add to the distrust, anger and feelings of injustice that already permeate among many of the former president’s supporters.
“What’s going to happen this time — what’s already happening — is that there’s going to be all kinds of outlandish claims made through the media, and that will at the very least inflame Trump’s supporters,” Gardner said. “And who knows what they’ll do.”
Amid Trump’s false fraud claims after the 2020 vote, a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in Washington, DC, to try to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory.
The January 6, 2021, insurrection continues to reverberate across the country, Lakin said, as the false claims of a stolen election “created this huge divide in this country and ultimately led to violence”.
“That would be unfortunate if that were to happen again,” she said. “It would be a travesty for democracy if we can’t figure out how to return to a peaceful transfer of power.”
“538 is excited to unveil our forecast for Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Our forecast starts out with a slight lead for Harris, reflecting her current edge in polls but uncertainty about how the rest of the election could impact the state of the race. With 75 days to go, we think anything from a clear Trump victory to a clear Harris win is possible (while a close win either way is most likely).”
In the image below, the Toss-up tan color is used where neither candidate currently has a 60% or higher chance of winning. The colored gradients are used to show higher probabilities for Harris or Trump, deepening as the likelihood of winning increases: Light (60%+), Medium (75%+), Dark (95%+).
Democratic presidential candidateKamala Harris has made her last appeal to voters, holding a series of rallies in battleground Pennsylvania, with a final, glitzy event in the city of Philadelphia, where producer-actress Oprah Winfrey introduced her.
In her fifth and final event late on Monday night, Harris told a large crowd she was ready to represent the next generation of leadership in the United States.
“But this race is not over, and we must finish strong,” she said.
“And this could be one of the closest races in history. Every single vote matters.”
Winfrey appeared on stage at the event at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with 10 young people who were all first-time voters.
“[If] you’re feeling burned out and bruised and maybe inconsequential, nothing could be further from the truth. Every single vote, everyone is going to matter,” said Winfrey. “That’s why I’ve come to Philadelphia tonight.”
As she closed her address, Harris said voters had a chance in this election to finally “turn the page on a decade of politics that has been driven by fear and division”.
“We are done with that. We’re done [and] we’re exhausted with it,” she said.
“America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow Americans not as an enemy.”
‘You’re going to make the difference’
Throughout the day, Harris’s message had been consistent – every vote was crucial in the state that holds 19 Electoral College votes, the most of all the seven swing states that will likely determine the outcome.
“We need everyone in Pennsylvania to vote,” she said to an exuberant afternoon crowd in Allentown. “You are going to make the difference in this election.”
The polls have Harris essentially tied in Pennsylvania with her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, who held one of his final rallies in Reading, Pennsylvania, only a few kilometres away from Harris.
Over the last few days, Harris has sought to further differentiate her campaign from Trump’s by not mentioning his name, and emphasising optimism and community.
“Momentum is on our side, momentum is on our side, can you feel it? We have momentum, right?” she said to cheers.
“Because our campaign has tapped into the ambitions and aspirations and the dreams of the American people, we are optimistic and excited about what we will do together.”
Harris, 60, could make US history as the first woman, the first Black woman and the first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office. Four years ago, she broke the same barriers in national office by becoming President Joe Biden’s second-in-command.
Harris’s last day was all about encouraging supporters to vote and think about the future.
“It’s time for a new generation of leadership in America, and I am ready to offer that leadership as the next president of the United States of America,” she said.
‘No joke’
Harris’s Allentown rally was introduced by Grammy Award-winning musician Fat Joe, who was raised by parents of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent. He wasted no time in taking aim at the racist remarks that featured at the recent Republican rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden.
“That was no joke ladies and gentlemen. That was no joke, filled with so much hate,” he said.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who was part of Trump’s warm-up act at the New York rally, created a firestorm of protests when he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”.
Southeast Pennsylvania is home to thousands of Latinos, including a sizeable Puerto Rican population. Harris and her allies have repeatedly hit at Trump for those comments.
Fat Joe reminded the Allentown rally that people can make their feelings clear when they vote.
“My Latinos, where is your pride,” he asked.
“If I am speaking to undecided Puerto Ricans, especially in Pennsylvania, what more do they gotta do to show you who they are? If I tell you that Kamala Harris is with us, she’s with us.”
On Monday, Harris told supporters: “I stand here proud of my longstanding commitment to Puerto Rico and her people and I will be a president for all Americans.”
Harris also swung by Scranton – the birthplace of Biden.
“Are you ready to do this?” she yelled to supporters there, with a large handmade “Vote For Freedom” sign behind her and a similar “VOTE” banner to her side.
‘We are not going back’
Throughout the whirlwind last day, Harris repeated one of the slogans of her campaign – “We Are Not Going Back”. It is designed, in part, to contrast her with Republicans who supported the US Supreme Court decision that overturned a national right to an abortion.
She repeated her promise to protect women’s reproductive rights.
“We are not going back because ours is the fight for the future, for freedom, like the fundamental freedom for a woman to make decisions over her own body and not have the government tell her what to do,” Harris said.
US journalists spotlight issues in the 2024 election in the battleground states which could swing the vote.
In the US election, seven battleground states could swing the contest towards Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Kamala Harris. Voters in these states have faced a barrage of outreach and campaign visits. We hear from a panel of local journalists taking the pulse of their communities, on the calculus of voters they’ve been talking to and the issues that matter most.
George Chidi (@neonflag), politics and democracy reporter, The Guardian
Sophia Lo (@sophiamaylo), producer, City Cast Pittsburgh
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Chloe K Li, Sonia Bhagat, Ashish Malhotra, Khaled Soltan and Sarí el-Khalili with Phillip Lanos, Spencer Cline, Cole Van Miltenburg, Duha Mosaad, Hagir Saleh and our host, Malika Bilal.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editor is Hisham Abu Salah. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio.
