US election: Trump wins first two battleground states

Harris won the New England state of New Hampshire, continuing the state’s two-decade-long streak of awarding its four electoral votes to Democrats.

New Hampshire has backed Democrats in seven of the last eight presidential elections.

As voting has now closed in Alaska, all polling places across the United States are closed.

With vote counting continuing, key states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada remain too close to call.

The state of Delaware has seen a historic win on Tuesday night. Democrat Sarah McBride, who won Delaware’s only seat in the House of Representatives, will be the first openly transgender person in the US Congress.

McBride is currently a Delaware state senator and took almost 58% of the vote Tuesday night.

“Thank you, Delaware! Because of your votes and your values, I am proud to be your next member of Congress,” McBride wrote in a post on social media platform X.

She won in an election cycle that has seen a number of anti-transgender ads, with Trump’s campaign attacking Harris over supporting transgender rights.

“This historic victory reflects not only increasing acceptance of transgender people in our society, ushered in by the courage of visible leaders like Sarah, but also her dogged work in demonstrating that she is an effective lawmaker who will deliver real results,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in the US.

Following North Carolina, a second battleground state has gone to Trump.

Georgia had been solidly Republican for two decades before unexpectedly going to President Joe Biden in 2020.

Early figures show that the victory was a close one, with Harris at about 48.4% and Trump at 50.7%.

The win puts Trump 23 electoral votes away from victory in the presidential election.

The victory left Harris heavily dependent on the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to have a credible path to the White House.

An exit poll conducted by US broadcaster NBC has found that Trump is more popular with young voters than any Republican nominee since John McCain ran against Barack Obama in 2008.

Although Harris still wins that demographic with 55% to 42%, Trump’s numbers are up from 36% in the last two elections.

While young women largely prefer Democratics, young men are more split. According to the poll, 49% of young men preferred Harris and 47% preferred Trump.

Harris campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond has announced that Harris will not speak tonight, saying the campaign was waiting for all the votes to be counted.

Some 75 million Americans cast their votes early this year. In 2020, counting the early and absentee ballots took weeks.

The US Senate will have a Republican majority as of next year as the West Virginia and Ohio races go to the GOP.

Republican Jim Justice was able to take over the West Virginia seat formally held by Democrat-turned-independent Joe Manchin.

Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown lost his reelection to Republican Bernie Moreno, a wealthy Trump-era newcomer.

The House of Representatives remains up for grabs as vote counting continues in the western US.

Voting has now officially closed in Hawaii, and the state’s four electoral votes will go to Harris.

It’s the 10th straight presidential election in which Hawaii has selected the Democratic Party candidate.

Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono has also won reelection in the state.

The state of Nevada is facing a problem with a large number of mail-in ballots. More than 13,000 voters across Nevada need to verify their signatures or their votes will not be counted. A large part of the problem is young voters, who don’t have a long history of voting and only have the signature on their voter registration form or the one on their driver’s license on file. And there have been issues with their signatures in the first place.

“It’s mostly the fact that young people don’t have signatures these days,” Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar told .

Many schools in the US stopped teaching cursive over the past two decades, raising a generation unfamiliar with handwriting. Now the thousands of mail-in ballots that need confirmation from voters slow down the vote counting process. People whose signatures are in doubt need to have a phone number or email address on file in order to be notified by Nevada’s county election departments. The ballots of those who cannot be reached will be tossed out.

Nearly 15,000 voters have already successfully confirmed their signatures. In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won the state with 50.06% of the vote to Donald Trump’s 47.67%.

Kamala Harris has won the state of Virginia.

Although it used to be considered a swing state, Virginia has reliably gone for Democrats in recent cycles.

Democratic strongholds in the state include DC suburban areas such as Fairfax County and cities such as Norfolk, Richmond and Charlottesville.

Republican challenger Bernie Moreno has defeated incumbent Senate Democrat Sherrod Brown.

Brown, who is known for his pro-labor stances, has been in office since 2007.

With Moreno’s victory, the Republicans are very likely to take control of the US Senate from the Democrats.

As more and more states are called or projected for Donald Trump, people at Howard University are slowly starting to realize that Kamala Harris might lose. There are tears, nobody here expected this.

They just can’t believe that a man who is so openly racist and misogynistic might win the election. Many people are already leaving this election night party, even though it’s far too early to call the election.

CNN just quoted from a memo by Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon in which she said that there’s still a path to victory for the vice president, and it involves the “Blue Wall,” so the states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan going to the Democrats.

O’Malley Dillon told staffers to finish out the night, following that with: “I’ll see you tomorrow.” So the Harris campaign does not believe a result will be announced tonight.

But important counties in Georgia went to Donald Trump.

And at least for the moment, it even looks like he’s ahead in the popular vote. That’s something that many Democrats, many people in Washington DC, and especially many students here at Howard University just didn’t want to believe. Now reality is kind of brutally coming into their lives.

Donald Trump has won the major battleground state of North Carolina.

The state has 16 electoral votes. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes in total to win the presidency.

Harris also won Oregon, a West Coast state that typically goes for Democrats in presidential elections. She also won New Mexico.

Early vote returns in US battleground states may not be a good indicator of the eventual winner in some battlegrounds thanks to vote counting rules and anomalies in certain key states.

In 2020, some states showed a “red mirage” that saw Donald Trump out in front initially on election night, red being the color of the former president’s Republican Party.

That was before a “blue shift” saw Democrat Joe Biden overtake him as mail-in ballots — more popular with Democratic voters at the time of the coronavirus pandemic — were counted.

Ahead of the 2024 election, experts had said this could happen again — especially in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

One factor that can also lead to red mirage is that Democrats tend to live in more populous urban areas, where counting can take longer.

However, the opposite can also happen, with a “blue mirage” apparently showing a strong result for the Democrats, only for a “red shift” to reverse the trend