On November 5th America will pick its next president, as well as the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. The Economist will publish live results and analysis covering every race. Check back here soon after first polls close at 6pm EST / 11pm GMT to see in real-time how many votes Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are picking up, and which of them will win the White House, as well as which party will control the two chambers of Congress.
Before then, this page provides a guide for what to look out for ahead of the election. Elsewhere, our daily updated election forecasts calculate each presidential candidate’s chances of winning, and who might take the House and the Senate. Our poll tracker rounds up the latest presidential polls. And The US in brief, our daily update delivered by newsletter, gives you all the election stories that matter.
What to watch
This year, given large numbers of people have voted early, many expect the counting will be slow. Officials, however, insist that ballot tallying will be faster than in previous years. The results could be known just a few hours after polls close across the country—as they were for seven of the past ten elections (see chart). Or they could take days to become clear.
The first states to conclude voting will be on the east coast. Six states, including the key battleground of Georgia, will finish voting statewide at 7pm EST. By 8pm, 19 more states will have joined them and a flurry of data will be published. Readers should exercise caution: little of substance will be revealed at this stage of the night, unless the election is a landslide.
In some states, where one candidate is heavily favoured, the election result will be called almost immediately. Unless there is a major upset or a striking trend, these calls may not say much about the election overall. The absence of a call may be more informative: it may indicate that an expected landslide has not happened, for instance.
The final result will probably come down to seven key states. Of those, Georgia and Michigan may be the fastest to count. North Carolina is also traditionally quick to count but may experience disruption due to Hurricane Helene.
Others could well be slower. Pennsylvania will not start processing millions of postal ballots until the morning of election day. Arizona and Nevada, in the west, finish voting later that day and take longer to count their mail-in ballots, which are popular in both states. Nevada accepts and counts ballots which arrive after election day, too (although these are unlikely to flip the state).
Read more about what to watch on the night, and in the days that follow.
What are the candidates’ paths to victory?
Pennsylvania is the most important state for both candidates. (Mr Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016, but it flipped to Joe Biden in 2020.) According to our forecast model, as of November 4th, Ms Harris wins in 92% of our simulations when she takes the Keystone State’s 19 electoral votes; Mr Trump wins in 88%.
Mr Trump has even better odds when he wins Michigan (95%), but he has more alternative routes to the presidency without Michigan than without Pennsylvania. Other swing states are less influential: Ms Harris and Mr Trump win the election in only 71% and 67% of simulations, respectively, when they win Nevada, a state with only six electoral votes.
The most likely outcome—occurring in 19% of our simulated elections on November 4th—is that Mr Trump will win all seven swing states and go on to win the presidency. The second-most likely is the exact opposite: our model gave Ms Harris a 9% chance of sweeping the seven. The third would give all of the swing states except Nevada to Mr Trump—that would be a repeat of the 2016 result. But based on all of our model’s scenarios, the race is a toss-up: neither candidate has a lead big enough to offset the kind of polling errors seen in previous presidential elections.
