What to know on Election Day
- Millions of Americans head to the polls to cast ballots for Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump. Either winner will make history, marking the first woman elected president or the second president to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms.
- There was a surge of early and mail voting, with almost 80 million people casting their ballots.
- Harris and Trump aggressively campaigned late into last evening. 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 the 2020 election.
- Control of the House , the Senate and many key states is also up for grabs, in addition to a number of crucial ballot measures.
- NBC News will have live updates and live video coverage into tomorrow from our correspondents and reporters across the country.
Voters cast their ballots in Michigan
A man looks over a ballot paper at a polling site at Henry Ford Elementary School in Dearborn, Mich., this morning.
Texas drops bid for order barring DOJ from polling sites
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office has withdrawn its request for a temporary restraining order against the Justice Department after the two sides reached an agreement on election monitoring.
According to a court filing from Paxton's office, DOJ monitors will remain outside of polling and central count locations in the state, and "Texas recognizes that voters may speak with DOJ personnel at the referenced locations should they so choose."
A DOJ spokeswoman confirmed the agreement was accurately described in Paxton's court filing, and said it was what the department had planned to do anyway — monitors do not go inside polling places unless local officials agree to their presence.
Voters will decide on almost 150 ballot measures. Here are the ones to watch.
Voters across the country are set to decide on almost 150 ballot measures that will shape the future of a wide variety of policy issues in their states.
Constitutional amendments related to abortion rights have drawn the most national attention in an election year that has otherwise been dominated by the presidential race.
But ballot measures in dozens of other states will also put decisions about how to handle marijuana regulations, voting procedures, economic issues and immigration laws directly in the hands of voters.
More than 1.2 million people in Michigan turned out for early voting. It’s the first presidential election in which voters there had the option of casting ballots early in person. It’s a key swing state for Harris and Trump, with multiple polls showing Harris holding a very narrow lead there. NBC’s Maggie Vespa reports for "TODAY."
Lead U.S. cybersecurity agency says no significant threats
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) does not see any serious threat to the country's election infrastructure as Election Day begins.
“We are not currently tracking any national level significant incidents impacting the security of our election infrastructure,” Cait Conley, the agency’s senior election adviser, said in a press call.
Conley did warn, however, that countries such as Russia and Iran were likely to continue to try to spread falsehoods about election fraud.
“We may see more of this activity today and in the coming weeks, with a particular focus on influence narratives impacting swing states,” she said.
‘I feel good’: Vance speaks after casting his vote in Cincinnati
Vance voted in Cincinnati this morning, telling reporters afterward that Trump had called him at 3 a.m. but he was asleep and missed it. He said they had not spoken yet today.
Vance also said he’s too “superstitious” to talk about who would fill his Senate seat should he be elected vice president.
“I think that what today represents is an opportunity to pay down a debt that I owe to this country, and if I am the vice president, I’m going to work as hard as I can to pay down that debt,” Vance said.
In response to a question from NBC News about am outlier poll by independent pollster J. Ann Selzer that showed Harris leading in Iowa by 3 percentage points and whether he thinks that may spread to Ohio and other states, Vance said he wasn’t worried about it. Trump won Iowa in 2016 and in 2020.
The small village of Thulasendrapuram in southern India, where Harris’ maternal grandfather was born, held a prayer ceremony on Election Day for her victory.
Biden declares victory at the end of Boeing’s 53-day strike
President Joe Biden declared victory in Boeing machinists’ approval of a new labor deal, ending a 53-day strike that halted most aircraft production at a top U.S. exporter and military contractor and dented the last jobs report before today’s presidential election.
The deal “was achieved with the support of my economic team, including Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard,” Biden said in a statement.
“Over the last four years, we’ve shown collective bargaining works. Good contracts benefit workers, businesses, and consumers — and are key to growing the American economy from the middle out and the bottom up,” he said.
The new Boeing contract for its 33,000 unionized machinists, mostly on the West Coast, includes 38% raises over four years, a $12,000 signing bonus and a deal with the company that it builds its next aircraft in one of the unionized factories in the Seattle area. Workers go back on the job as early as tomorrow, though the company isn’t out of the woods with several delayed aircraft programs, including the late-arriving Boeing 747s that will serve as the next Air Force One planes.
Where congressional leaders will be on election night
Both Democratic leaders in Congress — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — will be in Washington, D.C., today, sources close to the two New York Democrats said.
Schumer, of New York, will be in D.C. as election results come in; Jeffries, also from New York, will be in D.C. this afternoon, a source said, although he hasn't decided whether to return to New York later in the night. That's because control of the House majority isn't expected to be known for days given how tight the margins are and how long voting takes in places like California, where there are a handful of critical swing seats up for grabs.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said last week he'll host an election night party with family, friends and longtime supporters in his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana.
A (sort-of) illustrated guide to the voting systems of three crucial swing states
Election officials — and reporters like me — have spent years explaining that voter fraud is incredibly rare. There aren’t millions of noncitizens registering and casting ballots. Voter impersonation is extremely uncommon. And there’s no legion of dead voters.
We know that because voting systems are designed with checks and balances to make it pretty hard to cheat. But most of that isn’t obvious or even visible to voters.
So with false claims of voter fraud already swirling ahead of this pivotal election, we've created a guide to walk you through the basics of the voting systems in three key battleground states — Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania — and how four essential elements of our election system prevent widespread voter fraud.
Vance casts his ballot in Cincinnati
Vance arrives to vote at the St. Anthony of Padua Maronite Catholic Church in Cincinnati.
GOP megadonor, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus dies
Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot who became a billionaire philanthropist and major GOP donor, has died at the age of 95.
At age 49, Marcus formed the Home Depot with Arthur Blank, the Atlanta Falcons owner and a billionaire supporter of Democrats, in Atlanta in 1978 after both were fired from another home improvement firm. They were assisted with financing from Ken Langone, also a major philanthropist and Republican donor.
In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Marcus initially donated to a political action committee that supported candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. He eventually threw his support behind Trump.
Election workers participated in a swearing-in ceremony led by the commissioners of the election board for Philadelphia County before ballot counting started.
Officials brace for a flood of disinformation and legal claims as Election Day finally arrives
As Election Day finally arrives, election officials, legal experts and researchers are bracing for a flood of disinformation and legal claims as vote counting begins.
The final week of the campaign featured three dynamics that could lead to a protracted legal dispute if the results are close, legal experts said.
Scores of lawsuits — many of them frivolous — have already been filed, domestic and foreign actors are spreading false accounts of voter fraud, and Trump continues to claim that the election will be rigged against him. “They’ve already started cheating,” he said Sunday at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Election experts say that if a clear winner emerges quickly and voting proceeds without major disruptions, large numbers of Americans may have faith in the results. But they warned that delays in the counting or a tight race in which a single state decides the presidency could lead to a divisive legal battle.
Busloads of New Yorkers heading to Pennsylvania to help get out the vote
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine tweeted out a video of a lengthy line of New Yorkers lining up to go to Pennsylvania in an effort to mobilize Democratic voters in the crucial swing state.
"This is not a line outside a poll site. This is a line of Harris volunteers filling up six buses on W. 62nd St., headed to PA this a.m.," Levine wrote, while showing video of what appeared to be well over 100 people waiting to get on buses.
Judges deny two Republican bids to block DOJ observers at polling sites
Federal judges in Missouri and Texas have blocked bids by Republican state officials to ban Justice Department observers at polling sites in those states, at least for now.
In Missouri, the state's attorney general and secretary of state had sought an order to keep federal election monitors out of St. Louis following a DOJ announcement last week that it was one of the 86 jurisdictions in 27 states that it would "monitor for compliance with federal voting rights laws."
They contended the DOJ was barred from doing so by state law, but U.S. District Judge Sarah Pitlyk disagreed, citing a 2021 settlement agreement between the city and the DOJ "over concerns about compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act" that allowed such monitoring.
In Texas, the state attorney general sought a temporary restraining order to block the DOJ from monitoring polling places in eight counties, contending it infringes on the state's "constitutional authority to run free and fair elections.”
A judge refused to immediately sign the restraining order, but asked the Justice Department to respond to the lawsuit by noon. The court "cannot issue a temporary restraining order without further clarification on the distinction between 'monitoring' and 'observing' on the eve of a consequential election," U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk wrote.
Bidens will have a quiet day as they wait to see who wins
Just outside the White House this morning, construction crews are making steady progress in building the viewing stand for the inaugural parade that’s now just 76 days away. Inside the White House, President Joe Biden will have a quiet Election Day as he waits to see if he will be handing off power to the woman he chose to be his running mate or back to the man he defeated to win the office four years ago.
The president returned to the White House yesterday after spending most of the weekend in Wilmington, Delaware, with a final campaign stop in his home town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. First lady Jill Biden begins Election Day in Wilmington this morning, where she will cast her vote in person before returning to join her husband tonight.
A White House official tells NBC News that the president and the first lady will watch election results in the White House residence with longtime aides and senior staff. Biden will receive regular updates on the state of the races across the country but has no public events.
An hour-by-hour guide to watching the races on election night
When the polls start closing on Election Day, a wave of vote totals showing the results of this long campaign will start pouring in.
But we won’t get everything at the same time from the same place, with different presidential battleground states finishing voting and starting counting at different times.
And it’s not just the presidential race — dozens of Senate and House races, as well as ballot questions and more local races, will make big news on Election Day (and the days after).
As you watch the results come in and keep track at home, here’s an hour-by-hour guide to when the battleground state polls close, the most competitive congressional races and many of the key ballot questions to watch, all organized by poll closing times.
Steve Kornacki joins "Morning Joe" this morning to break down when the polls close where and what he’ll be watching when they do.
Trump’s once enthusiastic crowds dwindle in election’s closing days
RALEIGH, N.C. — At a pre-Election Day rally here yesterday, Trump was speaking at a venue that was about 70% full — a sight that has become increasingly familiar in the past week.
Trump has been holding his signature rallies since he first burst onto the political scene in 2015, and in the nine years since then he has routinely drawn massive and enthusiastic crowds around the country, from the urban cores to the remote rural fields, where supporters have consistently shown up despite sometimes icy conditions or extreme heat.
Arizonans in it for the long haul today with lengthy ballot
Reporting from Phoenix
Voters in battleground Arizona will play a crucial, and possibly time-consuming, role in today's election.
Long lines are expected at polling stations across Maricopa County, where voters will tackle a two-page, double-sided ballot.
Maricopa voters will be asked to weigh in on 79 different contests (the number changes depending on the legislative district in which they reside).
There are also 13 statewide ballot measures before Arizonans today, in addition to White House, Senate, House and state legislative races.
Kosovo artist creates grain and seed mosaics of Harris and Trump
Kosovo artist Alkent Pozhegu created grain and seeds mosaics of Harris and Trump in the town of Gjakova, where he was putting on the finishing touches today.
Jill Biden was quietly one of Harris' most ardent campaigners
While President Joe Biden played a limited role in the Harris campaign’s closing weeks, first lady Jill Biden quietly was one the busiest of campaign surrogates.
Since early October, she has held more than two dozen campaign events in all seven battleground states, including three stops Sunday in southeast Pennsylvania and three yesterday in North Carolina.
A source familiar with Jill Biden’s role said her team made clear to the Harris campaign she would travel anywhere to support the vice president, and many of her stops included smaller, targeted markets in battlegrounds meant to engage suburban women on issues such as education, lowering costs and reproductive rights.
“I know you can feel it, the excitement of people who are all ready to elect a new generation of leadership,” she said at a union-focused event in King of Prussia on Sunday.
The first lady hailed Harris as a “decisive, strong leader” who inherited from her mother “the power to create change.” But she also made an argument that other surrogates have largely left to the side, asking the audience at one point: “Are we better off today than we were four years ago?”
“Yes,” she said, rebutting a primary argument of the Trump campaign. “In Donald Trump’s America, our country was shut down because of the pandemic. ... Schools were closed, and at every turn Donald Trump created even more chaos.”
At her final stop in North Carolina yesterday, Jill Biden grew emotional as she said it has been her “life’s honor to be your first lady.” She returned to her home in Wilmington, where she is expected to vote today before joining her husband at the White House for election night.
The barnstorming is over and vote watching begins
After months of near-nonstop campaigning, both Trump and Harris will have a relatively quiet day before mingling with supporters tonight.
Trump is expected go to the polling booth in Florida, before joining Vance at a watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center.
Harris will attend a watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C., tonight, in addition to joining some radio interviews today. Walz is set to make one more pitch to voters late this morning in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, before joining the vice president tonight in Washington.
New Hampshire town of Dixville Notch splits the vote: 3 for Harris, 3 for Trump
The first in-person votes of the New Hampshire general election were cast at midnight in Dixville Notch, where there are six registered voters this cycle.
The result of the presidential race was a tie: Harris and Trump each received three votes. The polls opened at midnight and closed at 12:07 a.m. ET after all voters cast their ballots.
The small town has a tradition dating to 1960 in which voters place their ballots in a wooden box shortly after midnight. The results are announced minutes later.
In the 2020 general election, Joe Biden won all five of the votes cast in Dixville Notch. In New Hampshire’s 2024 Republican primary, six votes were cast for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley; none were cast for Trump.
Trump and Harris hold blitz of rallies in battleground states on final day
On the last day of a brutal, wild and tightly contested campaign, Trump and Harris blitzed voters with their final pleas for turnout.
With the race tied at 49% nationally in an NBC News poll Sunday and battleground surveys showing all of the decisive states within margins of error, millions of Americans will cast their ballots today. It’s not yet clear how long it will take for those votes to be counted.
The last two elections were decided by historically narrow spreads, with Trump defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton by roughly 77,000 votes across three states in 2016 and Joe Biden beating Trump by about 44,000 spread across the same number of states in 2020.
In other words, the final pitches could be decisive.
Harris sees herself as a candidate on the upswing at the crucial moment. She held her last rally in Philadelphia late last night, standing on the steps of the city’s art museum made famous by the “Rocky” movies.
“It’s good to be back in the City of Brotherly Love, where the foundation of our democracy was forged,” Harris said. “And here, at these famous steps, a tribute to those who start as the underdog and climb to victory.”
“The momentum is on our side,” she added at her rally, which featured celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga and Will.i.am. “Our campaign has tapped into the ambitions and the aspirations and the dreams of the American people.”
Trump told supporters in Raleigh, North Carolina, that he’s ahead and just needs their votes to seal his return to the White House.
“Hopefully everything will work out well; we’re way leading. All we have to do is close, we have to close it,” he said. “I hate the expression, actually, but it’s ours to lose. Does that make sense to you? It’s ours to lose. If we, if we get everybody out and vote, there’s not a thing they can do.”
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.
Yesterday, 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 today whether to send Harris or 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.
'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.
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.
Red and blue 'mirages': How election night vote counts make it hard to tell who will win
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 — such as Florida, Georgia and North Carolina — report their vote quickly, while others such as 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.
What we’ve learned from the consistent poll numbers shaping the 2024 election
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.
Inside NBC News’ Decision Desk: When will we know who won the presidential race?
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 tomorrow, even by tomorrow morning.
