US election 2024 live: polls close in battleground states Georgia and North Carolina as Trump and Harris pick up early wins | US elections 2024

Republican attorney general Patrick Morrisey will be West Virginia’s next governor, the Associated Press reports.

The victories are a sweep by the GOP of a state that was for decades a Democratic stronghold, but has recently become one of the most Republican in the nation and in the past two presidential elections gave Donald Trump some of his biggest margins of victory.

Donald Trump has won West Virginia, the Associated Press reports, while Republican governor Jim Justice has won its Senate seat.

Justice will replace Joe Manchin, an independent who recently left the Democratic party after acting as a spoiler to many of Joe Biden’s economic proposals.

Manchin continues to caucus with the Democrats, and the loss of his seat brings Democrats closer to losing their control of Congress’s upper chamber. Their hopes now hinge on victories by their candidates in Ohio, Montana and potentially Texas and Florida – all red states.

Voting has finished in another three states, one of which is a swing state.

At 7.30pm, polls closed in North Carolina, which has not backed a Democratic candidate since 2008, but which Kamala Harris’s team believes she may have a chance of winning this year.

Balloting also wrapped up in deep-red West Virginia, where Democrats are expected to lose a Senate seat. But they are hopeful about Ohio, where Democratic senator Sherrod Brown is standing for re-election in a state that has grown increasingly Republican in recent years. Voting just finished there, too.

The Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking legal action to have voting extended past 8pm in precincts where students have been waiting hours to cast a vote.

That includes in Bethlehem, where students have been waiting as many as six-and-a-half hours to cast a ballot.

“The counties know from history that students come out for presidential elections, and they should have been better prepared,” said Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

“Still, it’s a good problem to have. Students are participating in this election, and we’ll take court action necessary to ensure that they get to cast their ballots.”

Here’s a post on X from earlier with a clip of a voting line near the university.

A CNN exit poll in Georgia had a potentially concerning finding for Kamala Harris: independents who backed Joe Biden in 2020 now have swung to Donald Trump, albeit by a small margin.

However, the vice-president continues to be strong among Black voters, as well as young people. Here’s more, from CNN:

Roughly 86% of Black Georgia voters say they cast their ballot for Harris, as do about 6 in 10 voters younger than 30 — in both cases, generally similar to Biden’s numbers in 2020.

As was the case in 2020, suburban voters are closely split. But where Biden won slightly over half of political independents in 2020, now a slim majority say they’re backing Trump.

White voters without a college degree, who went overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020, are still predominantly in his camp, with roughly 8 in 10 picking him over Harris.

Lara Trump, the GOP nominee’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, has raised alarms about slow counting in Milwaukee, saying it was “an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration in a key swing state”.

As we reported earlier, a human error during Milwaukee’s absentee vote could lead to a late night for election workers in the city. An election observer noticed panels open on multiple tabulators, which should have been locked and closed, according to Vote Beat. The open panels revealed machines’ on/off switches, and although officials said it appeared the machines had not been tampered, they moved to recount 30,000 votes that had already been processed.

Lara Trump’s statement said:

We are unambiguously calling on Milwaukee’s officials to do their jobs and count ballots quickly and effectively. Anything less undermines voter confidence.

We also have a few race calls for House seats, with no surprises.

In Florida, the Associated Press says Republican Gus Bilirakis has been re-elected, as have Democrats Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Frederica Wilson.

In Kentucky, Republicans Hal Rogers and Thomas Massie have won themselves another term. Republican Mark Messmer has won election to a district in Indiana.

All were running in safe districts, and expected to win.

Independent Bernie Sanders, an icon among progressives, has won a fourth term representing Vermont in the US Senate, the Associated Press reports.

Republican congressman Jim Banks will be Indiana’s next senator, replacing Mike Braun, who the AP says was just elected as the state’s governor.

Here’s what Sanders posted on X on Sunday.

The Associated Press has called its first states, and there are thus far no surprises.

Kamala Harris became the latest Democrat to win Vermont, a party stronghold. Donald Trump has won Indiana and Kentucky, both red states.

The AP has not yet called swing state Georgia, or Virginia and South Carolina.

Voting just wrapped up in six states, including Georgia, one of the swing states expected to determine the winner of the presidential election.

In addition to the Peach State, polls closed at 7pm in red state South Carolina, blue state Vermont and Virginia, which is expected to vote Democratic but where there are several contested races for seats in the House of Representatives.

Polls that had remained open in Kentucky and Indiana, both red states, have also closed.

Georgia tends to count ballots quickly, so we may know the winner there before the night is through. Joe Biden won the state in 2020 and Democrats won both of its Senate seats, despite the state’s historically Republican tilt.

Sam Levine

Ana Mendoza, a 19-year-old political science major at Lehigh University, got in line to vote around 11am at her polling place. She didn’t cast her vote until six-and-a-half hours later.

She was one of many students who waited hours in line at a polling precinct that only had two working voting machines this morning, and two volunteers checking people in, according to school newspaper the Brown and White. The county has sent three additional voting machines to the site, according to the Allentown Morning Call.

“I’m in Pennsylvania and it’s a swing state so I know that every single vote matters,” she said.

Mendoza, who was voting in her first presidential election and cast her ballot for Kamala Harris, said she and those who were waiting were pretty tired by the end, but there were groups giving food and water out.

Philadelphia’s Democratic district attorney Larry Krasner had this to say about Donald Trump’s claim that “cheating” was happening in elections held in the city:

A human error during Milwaukee’s absentee vote count could lead to a late night for election workers in the largest city in the state, and delayed results.

According to Vote Beat, an election observer noticed panels open on multiple tabulators which should have been closed and locked – revealing the machines’ on/off switches. Although election officials said it did not appear that anyone had touched the panels or tampered with the machines, the commission has moved to recount the 30,000 votes that those tabulators already processed.

The recount could mean a long night for Milwaukee election officials and lead to a possible late night boost for Kamala Harris, who will probably command a majority of the Milwaukee vote, which tends to be a Democratic party stronghold.

In 2020, Trump and his allies seized on late-night absentee votes as evidence of wrongdoing – a patently false claim that nonetheless contributed to a wave of misinformation.

MJ, an 18-year-old from Milwaukee, voted for the first time today – splitting her ballot between Donald Trump, at the top of the ticket, and Democratic candidates all the way down.

“I’m mainly worried about economics,” said MJ, who cited immigration as her second top concern. She said she’s frustrated about the possibility of non-US citizens voting in this election – a claim that Trump and his allies have been promoting for months, despite the fact that empirical evidence suggests non-citizens, who face steep penalties for voting illegally, including felony charges and possible deportation, rarely cast a ballot in federal elections.

Evidently, those claims have stuck – including influencing MJ’s decision to vote Trump, despite preferring Democratic party candidates in general.

“I’m gonna vote all Democrat [otherwise],” said MJ. She said abortion rights are a major concern for her, and said she was “on the fence” about Trump for that reason.

Rachel Leingang

According to CNN, Philadelphia police don’t know what Trump is talking about in his post alleging “cheating” in the city, and are not aware of any issues that would call for their response.

There was a semi-viral video spreading on the rightwing internet today. James O’Keefe, the guy who makes undercover videos that are often misleading or outright false, posted a video on X claiming that an election worker in Philadelphia told voters they could cast a ballot if they were not citizens. Accounts like Libs of TikTok spread the video to their followers.