Harris and Trump each need at least 270 electoral votes to win the race for White House.
Polls are closed across many East Coast battleground states, and votes are being tabulated. An early picture of the presidential race has emerged. While Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump is sweeping reliable states, Democratic Kamala Harris is picking up blue strongholds.
However, the clear picture is far from visible as the US is bracing for a nail-biter result day. Harris and Trump each need at least 270 electoral votes to win the race for the White House.
Meanwhile, it is too early to conclude anything about the battleground (swing) states of Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada, which are seen as pivotal to the candidates’ path to victory.
The union-heavy states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin used to be more reliably Democratic but have shifted in recent years as their populations have changed and as former President Donald Trump has appealed to White voters without a college degree.
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States with growing populations such as Arizona and Nevada in the West and North Carolina and Georgia in the East comprise the four Sun Belt battlegrounds. Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina used to be more reliably Republican. Trump won North Carolina twice, but the margins were close in 2020. The last Democrat to win there was Barack Obama in 2008. Biden was the first Democrat to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992 and Arizona since Clinton in 1996.
According to a report on BBC that quoted the latest exit poll data, a majority of women are backing Kamala Harris, while men are giving their support to Donald Trump.
However, what is a bit surprising, at least according to these findings, is that the 54% of women voting for Harris doesn’t match the 57% that backed Joe Biden in 2020. All that talk of a historic political divide between the two genders may have been premature.
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In Georgia and North Carolina—two states that Donald Trump essentially must win—the former president is performing even better in rural areas than he did in 2020. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is holding steady with Joe Biden’s performance in urban and suburban counties, though she has not yet shown significant gains.
While these vote margins could still change, a narrow Trump victory in both Georgia and North Carolina would shift focus back to the Democratic “Blue Wall” states in the Great Lakes region. In such a scenario, Harris delivering a decisive victory on Election Night would not come to pass.
At that point, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania would become her most viable—and perhaps only—route to the White House. In Pennsylvania, however, the final outcome might take days to determine.
One thing is certain, though: voter turnout in this election is nearing the highest levels in modern US history and may even surpass the 65.9% turnout seen in 2020.
