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TRUMP TAKES PA NEARING VICTORYAS GOP CLIAIMS SENATE
TRUMP : 267 HARRIS : 224
Trump Declares Victory as He Wins Pennsylvania
FOR HARRIS SUPPORTS MOOD SHIFTS FROM UPBEAT TO SOMBER
2024 US Election Results Live Updates: PM Modi, Netanyahu, Zelenskyy, other world leaders congratulate Trump on big election win.
Where Things Stand
- Former President Donald J. Trump is closing in on the presidency. He claimed the crucial battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, leaving Vice President Kamala Harris only the narrowest of paths to the White House.
- Mr. Trump addressed his supporters in Florida. “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” he said.
- Republicans secured control of the Senate with crucial wins: Bernie Moreno in Ohio, Jim Justice in West Virginia and Deb Fischer, who held on to her seat in Nebraska.
Our veteran political correspondent Jonathan Weisman sums up this historic night:
Battleground victories are powering Trump.
Donald J. Trump has captured Pennsylvania, the biggest prize of the seven battleground states in one of the most consequential presidential elections in modern American history. It all but seals his return to the White House four years after voters turned him out.
Georgia, a state that Mr. Trump narrowly lost in 2020, and North Carolina, a state he narrowly won, had already moved into the win column for the former president. With Pennsylvania gone, Vice President Kamala Harris’s “blue wall” along the Great Lakes has cracked, and her path to becoming the first woman in the Oval Office has nearly disappeared.
Republicans also flipped control of the Senate with a string of key victories. In Ohio, Bernie Moreno defeated Senator Sherrod Brown, a resilient red-state Democrat. The retiring Senator Joseph Manchin, an independent, will be replaced by . And Senator Deb Fischer held off a dark-horse challenge in Nebraska from a blue-collar independent, Dan Osborn, eliminating any path Democrats had toward retaining control of the chamber.
Speaking to supporters in Palm Beach, Fla., in the early hours of the morning, Mr. Trump declared, “This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country.”
Two hours before, the crowd at Ms. Harris’s election watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C., had already thinned by midnight, and the mood was glum when Cedric Richmond, a co-chairman of the Harris campaign, told those who were left that the vice president would not be coming to campus. Her supporters streamed for the exits.
Mr. Trump showed his strength early, winning states like Texas and Florida easily and defying recent polls, such as one in Iowa, that seemed to show a surge of support for Ms Harris.
Republican-held Senate seats that Democrats had hoped to at least make competitive — such as Ted Cruz’s in Texas and Rick Scott’s in Florida — were not even close. And Republican leaders in Florida were also able to defeat ballot initiatives legalizing abortion and marijuana, both of which failed to reach the 60 percent they needed.
A largely peaceful Election Day was marred by bomb threats that roiled polling places in Democratic regions of Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. Officials said but at least in Georgia and Arizona, some polling places stayed open later as a result. Election officials in those states attributed at least some of the threats to Russian actors.
Democrats did score some landmark wins. For the first time in history, the Senate will have two Black women, both Democrats, serving simultaneously: Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester won her Senate contest in Delaware, while in Maryland. Sarah McBride, a Delaware Democrat, will also be the first transgender member of the House.
In the battle for the House, Republicans were holding their own in key races, leaving control up for grabs.
Tom Barrett, a G.O.P. former state senator, has defeated Curtis Hertel, a Democratic former state senator, according to The Associated Press, flipping an open Michigan seat and handing House Republicans a crucial victory in their drive to keep their majority.
Mr. Barrett had run for the Lansing-based seat in 2022 and come up short, losing to Representative Elissa Slotkin, the Democratic former defense official who was widely considered one of the party’s strongest campaigners.
This year, the political winds were blowing in Mr. Barrett’s favor. Ms. Slotkin vacated the seat to run for Senate, depriving Democrats of the advantage of incumbency. And this time, unlike last cycle, there was no referendum on abortion rights on the ballot. In 2022, a ballot question asking whether Michigan should codify a right to an abortion in the state’s Constitution drove up turnout among women and young voters, bolstering Democrats.
Mr. Hertel, who served as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s chief lobbyist for six months before running for Congress, had hoped to appeal to voters in the district by campaigning on reproductive rights, as well as a centrist pitch focused on reaching across the aisle. He attacked Mr. Barrett for stating on his campaign website last cycle that he was .
Mr. Hertel’s campaign was also banking on energized by Vice President Kamala Harris’s late ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket after President Biden stepped aside amid concerns about his age.
But Mr. Hertel was never able to shrug off the connotation of his lobbying work for Ms. Whitmer, even as he outspent Mr. Barrett’s campaign.
Mr. Barrett leaned on his credentials as a former Army helicopter pilot who served in Iraq to make the case that he would be a more moderate voice in the House Republican conference.
