Election 2024 live updates: Latest news and results as voters head to the polls to vote for Harris or Trump

Control of the House, Senate and many key states is also up for grabs, in addition to a number of crucial ballot measures.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

What to know on Election Day

Millions of Americans are heading to the polls today to cast ballots for Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump in an election that will end with either the first woman elected president or the second president to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms. More than 75 million people voted early or by mail.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, have been aggressively campaigning across the country in recent weeks. The latest NBC News poll found a tight race, with an enormous gender gap.
Trump and his allies have already been sowing distrust in the election results, amplifying false or misleading claims about voter fraud and repeating the lie that the 2020 election against Joe Biden was stolen from him.
Control of the House, the Senate and many key states is also up for grabs, in addition to a number of crucial ballot measures.

Moo Deng is Team Trump

Moo Deng, the pygmy hippopotamus who became a TikTok star, has joined the ranks of U.S. election prognosticators, predicting a win for Trump.

On Monday, the baby hippo’s caretakers at Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Thailand offered her two fruit platters, each with a piece of watermelon carved with the local spelling of either Trump’s or Harris’ name. In a video the zoo posted on X, Moo Deng digs straight into the Trump concoction when called by the caretakers to feast, snubbing Harris.

The hippo became an internet sensation in September when her caretakers began uploading videos of her toothless chewing and her going about her day, which mostly includes napping and walking around her enclosure.

Not everyone welcomed Moo Deng’s intervention in the campaign.

“Leave her out of politics,” read one all-caps comment on X. “She’s the one good thing left on this planet.”
Election Day has arrived. It’s Harris vs. Trump in the final push to the polls.

After months of enduring a deluge of punditry, polling and ad pitches, voters finally get their say.

Millions of Americans across the country are poised to pour into the polls, where they will choose Tuesday whether to send Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump to the Oval Office.

A bruising campaign exposed deep ideological divisions between the two parties and a yawning gender gap between Harris and Trump, with women supporting Harris by a 16-percentage-point margin and men backing Trump by 18 points, according to the latest NBC News poll.

Already, more than 77.3 million people have cast mail-in and early in-person ballots, according to an NBC News analysis.

But both candidates believe their fates rest with seven battleground states that will ultimately decide the contest. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina ended up consuming the campaign’s most precious resources: time and money. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ads blanketed the airwaves in the battlegrounds as Harris and Trump held large-scale, competing rallies.

Read the full story here.
‘My last rally. Can you believe it?’ Trump predicts victory, hurls insults in final rally of his campaign

Reporting from Grand Rapids, Michigan

At his final campaign rally of the 2024 cycle, Trump sowed uncertainty about the upcoming ballot counting process, again asserting that paper ballots are safer and more efficient.

“Well maybe it will take these machines that we pay so much for two weeks. Can you believe it?” Trump said. “You know, have you used very highly sophisticated watermark papers, very simple. It’s more sophisticated than the machines.”

Finishing his speech in the early hours of Election Day, Trump set expectations for the results of the race and projected he has a 95% chance of victory. The former president has routinely claimed that he is winning in all states, despite polling pointing to that claim being patently false. Trump also said he’s leading by hundreds of thousands of votes already.

Trump also hurled insults at former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., stopping short of calling her a b—-, but still mouthing the “b” sound, cutting himself off after muttering into the mic.

“She’s a crooked person,” he said. “She’s a bad person, evil. She’s an evil, sick, crazy, b- — oh no. It starts with a ‘B,’ but I won’t say it. I want to say it.”

When speaking about recent jobs reports, Trump said that migrants have taken 100% of newly created jobs. “Went to migrants, not people,” he added.

After a judge ruled that Elon Musk’s America PAC can keep writing checks to voters as part of his $1 million-per-day giveaway, Trump said, “He won the big case today too. He won the case.”

Trump spoke at length about the first attempted assassination against him. He described the speed of the bullet, conversations with his doctors, and retold the story, for an extensive amount of time — clearly speaking off prompter and calling his survival a miracle.

As expected, Trump reflected on the finality of his last campaign rally after about nine years.

“It’s amazing. I love you all. You’re very special. This is my last, my last rally. Can you believe it? The rallies, these big, beautiful rallies, there’s never been anything like it,” Trump said.
Trump and Harris face a persistent gender gap heading into Election Day

For the second time in a decade, a Democratic woman is running against Trump in a presidential race. And once again, the former president is facing a persistent gender gap.

It is unusual that both Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns are focused on the same slice of voters, but as the race narrows, both Harris and Trump have found themselves pulling out the stops to mobilize women.

Read the full story here.
All eyes are on America as an uncertain world awaits critical election result

LONDON — War in the Middle East and Europe. Rising far right in Europe. Economic uncertainty. And even the climate emergency. Around the world, discussion of these crises invariably turns back to a common refrain: “Well, a lot depends who wins the United States presidential election.”

This week, the world is anxiously awaiting the answer.

Read the full story here.
Red and blue ‘mirages’: How election night vote counts make it hard to tell who will win

Andrew Arenge

John Lapinski

Once the last voter casts their ballot in a state and the polls close, the process of revealing the winner begins. That’s when Election Day turns into election night, and each state starts reporting its vote totals.

Some states — like Florida, Georgia and North Carolina — report their vote quickly, while others like Arizona, Nevada and California typically take longer, upward of a week or two to tabulate most of their ballots. Within many states, the patterns of how votes are reported can make it difficult to tell in the middle of election night who the winner is going to be in the end.

Read the full story here.
What we’ve learned from the consistent poll numbers shaping the 2024 election

Mark Murray

Let’s get one thing straight: The polls can’t tell us who is going to win the presidential election. Or which party will control Congress. Or who will win a particular state.

They don’t tell us who’s going to win — but we’ll know that soon enough. What the polls can do already is help explain the forces that shaped this election and how either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris could emerge victorious.

Read the full story here.
Inside NBC News’ Decision Desk: When will we know who won the presidential race?

John Lapinski

John Lapinski and Charles Riemann

Americans have two big questions as they head into another election with a deeply divided electorate: who will win, and when will they know it?

In 2020, election week replaced election night: Joe Biden wasn’t declared the winner until Saturday. This year, it could go either way. It may take as long as a week for the NBC News Decision Desk to project a presidential winner, or it could happen as early as Wednesday, even by Wednesday morning.