Go to Bed
You didn’t really think we’d know on Election Night who will be the next president of the United States, did you? In an unsurprising but nevertheless nerve-racking turn of events, the race between Vice-President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump remains too close to call. After all, polling has consistently shown that the presidential contest would be decided by razor-thin margins in just a few states.
As of publishing time, polls have closed and Trump holds 230 Electoral College votes to Harris’s 209. Just one of the seven battleground states had been called before midnight: North Carolina, which granted Trump 16 electoral votes. There have been no surprising flips in states that either Trump or President Joe Biden won in 2020. In a memo to staff, Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said the vice-president’s most likely path to victory would be through the so-called Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Results from those states likely will not come in until the early hours of Wednesday at the soonest; it’s possible some may take days to finish counting votes.
Voters faced some challenges on Election Day, including long lines in some key states and bomb threats that led to evacuations and delayed the process at polling places in Georgia, Maine, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio. (The FBI has said the threats were not credible and seemed to have originated from “Russian email domains.”)
In addition to not knowing who will sit in the Oval Office come January, control of the U.S. House and Senate has yet to be determined, though Republicans had a narrow lead on both fronts at publication time. But there have been some bright spots in the results so far: For the first time in U.S. history, there will be two Black women in the Senate; Congress will have its first transgender representative; and abortion rights have won on most state ballot measures so far.
What’s clear is that the election is so far from over. So maybe go to sleep? The results will (perhaps) be trickling in by the time you wake up.