Wednesday briefing: Trump wins in Georgia and North Carolina put Harris on the brink

Good morning. The votes are still being counted, and it is not yet possible to call the winner of the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. But the pattern of votes cast so far suggests that Trump is a very strong favourite to win. He has been called as the winner of key states North Carolina and Georgia. The remaining battlegrounds are not yet decided, but he currently appears on course to win all five of them, and could win the popular vote. While there is still a theoretical path for Harris, it looks very remote.

Trump is expected to address his supporters soon. Harris did not appear at her HQ at Howard University, and her campaign told supporters that she would speak on Wednesday morning.

You can follow the very latest on the Guardian’s live blog. The story so far, with the help of Guardian US reporters in key states and the campaign HQs, is after the election night headlines.

Five US election stories

1. Swing states go to Trump | Donald Trump won the key states of North Carolina and Georgia, leaving Kamala Harris needing wins in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to prevail.

2. Live results | Follow along with our live tracker to get all the results as they come in across the day in every state, and for every House of Representatives seat.

3. Harris HQ | The mood was sombre at Howard University, where Harris supporters gathered, as it was confirmed the vice-president would not be speaking – and with hopes that she could be the first president to graduate from a historically Black college diminishing.

4. Senate | Republicans have retaken the Senate, achieving what was billed in advance as the most attainable goal for the party in this year’s election. They picked up seats in West Virginia and Ohio, and are now in a position to confirm any potential Supreme Court picks in the event of a Trump victory.

5. TV | Boris Johnson was “fired for banging on about his book” during a guest appearance on Channel 4’s coverage of the US election, according to the programme’s co-host Krishnan Guru-Murthy. The former UK prime minister had repeatedly tried to turn conversation to his book during discussions of the US election.

In depth: ‘You feel a sense of deja vu for 2016’

Of the states that had been called a few minutes ago, Donald Trump has 248 electoral college votes, with Kamala Harris on 214. (It’s 270 to win.) But the signs are devastating for Harris. She is underperforming Joe Biden’s 2020 performance across the swing states and in the popular vote at the same stage. Meanwhile, the Republicans have recaptured control of the Senate.

As deeply and closely divided as America is, the result could look comfortable in electoral college terms: if Trump wins all the states currently trending in his direction, he would end up with around 300 electoral college votes. And in what looks as if it could be his first popular vote majority, even reliably Democratic states such as New York and New Jersey appear to have shifted up to 10 points in his favour against 2020.

“It isn’t absolutely over yet,” said David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief. “But there is a clear sense that the momentum is with Trump.”

Here’s what we know about the state of play.

Swing states | Results in North Carolina and Georgia leave Harris well behind

The first of the seven battleground states widely expected to decide the election, North Carolina, was called for Donald Trump by the Associated Press at 11.18pm EST, 4.18am UK time. An hour and a half later, Georgia was also called for Trump. Those results left Harris with a formidable task.

Harris now needs to win Pennsylvania if she is to have any chance of winning the presidency. About half an hour ago, Sam Levine, the Guardian’s reporter on the ground there, said that her chances now seem very thin. “There is still a big batch of votes to be counted in Philadelphia, where she is strong. But the margin for Trump in the votes that have been counted is now so big that it will be hard for them to overcome it.”

Sam spent the day in two bellwether counties talking to voters, and heard from people preoccupied with the cost of living who were supporting Trump. “The overwhelming issue was the economy,” he said. “People said that they had been undecided but had gone for him over the price of gas and groceries. They said that things just haven’t got better in the last four years.”

One subplot: there was a lot of excitement over the weekend at an outlier poll that showed Kamala Harris with a three-point lead in Iowa, where she had been widely been expected to lose. But that appears to have been a mirage. The Associated Press called Iowa for Trump at 10.41pm EST.

Trump HQ | Jubilation as the signs point to Trump

At the Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, supporters of the former president were increasingly confident, David Smith said a couple of hours ago. “There’s been a palpable shift in the mood,” he said. “As the TV coverage cycles through the states where he’s leading, a big cheer goes up. You feel a sense of deja vu for 2016.”

Trump was projected to win North Carolina while we spoke, and you could hear the celebrations down the line. A young man in a black Maga hat later shouted: “Fuck Joe Biden! Fuck her!”

Trump has not yet spoken to supporters. But at his Mar-a-Lago resort nearby, his team was also “pretty positive” about their chances, David said. And at the smaller party there, you could find signs of things to come. Pictures showed Elon Musk, the billionaire X owner who has contributed vast sums to pro-Trump groups, in conversation with the former president. Trump has said Musk, whose businesses are the subject of important government regulation, will lead a “government efficiency commission” during his second term.

“Whatever else is true about Trump, this would be one of the greatest political comebacks of all time if it is confirmed,” David said. “To go from the nadir of 2020 and January 6, and then suddenly to be back here, is an extraordinary arc.”

Harris HQ | Supporters file out

Kamala Harris supporters gathered at Howard University, the historically Black university in Washington DC that is the vice-president’s alma mater – and even as Republicans celebrated in Florida, Democrats in Washington were going home.

The mood there was “much more downbeat than when the night started,” Lauren Gambino said just over an hour ago. “There were no flashy displays of confidence, but people told me they were nervously optimistic as they arrived. Now they’re frantically refreshing their phones, and they have started to file out.”

As the tone of the TV coverage worsened, the audio feed was replaced with music. Then senior Harris advisor Cedric Richmond told the crowd: “You won’t hear from the vice-president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow.” He did not seem optimistic.

A memo sent out to Harris staff by campaign chief Jen O’Malley Dillon suggested the result would not be clear until the morning, but acknowledged that Harris’s path to victory now appeared to run through the so-called Blue Wall states. “Get ready to close out strong tomorrow,” she wrote. But most observers now suspect that by then it may all be over.

Central to the devastation felt by Harris supporters is the fact that, once again, a highly qualified woman has been rejected in favour of Trump, who has been accused of sexual assault by more than 20 women, and found liable for rape.

“I talked to a lot of women over the course of this campaign,” Lauren said. “There was a sense that Harris was the natural culmination of so many forces – Hillary Clinton’s loss, the backlash to Trump’s presidency, women running in greater numbers and the way the loss of abortion rights radicalised women. Harris kept saying: this is not who we are. But as things stand now, it would be hard to argue that.”

The national mood | Hopes that 2016 was an aberration dashed

Exit polls suggested that of five available options, voters were preoccupied with the state of democracy and the economy: 34% of voters said that the state of democracy mattered most to their vote, and 31% said the economy. Abortion and immigration were next, with 14% and 11% of voters saying those were the issues that dominated their thinking. (An important caveat: all of the exit poll numbers may change as they are weighted to match the final real-vote results.)

Another striking feature of the exit polls was that Harris appeared to have fared much worse with Latino voters – especially men – than Joe Biden did in 2020. Latinos appear to have broken strongly towards Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania, a very different story from 2020. There were also signs that Trump had improved significantly with Black men.

Predictions of a gender divide appear to have held up more generally, with 54% of women supporting Harris and 54% of men supporting Trump. But, as in 2020, the cornerstone of Trump’s support came from white voters. According to the exit poll, Harris had majorities in every other ethnic group, but Trump won 55% of white voters. Meanwhile, AP’s VoteCast suggested a small but meaningful shift towards Trump among younger voters: 44% of those aged 18-29 supported him, against 36% in 2020.

Set aside Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and outlandish behaviour, and the scale of the challenge that faced Harris is in one sense obvious: she was the vice-president to an unpopular incumbent against a backdrop of inflation and economic hardship. Even if the Biden administration cannot truly be blamed for those factors, his late withdrawal left Harris with an even greater task. And against a similar economic backdrop, incumbents across the ideological spectrum have been punished at the ballot box all over the world.

Of course, Trump’s character and track record are very big things to set aside. “The big picture is: Donald Trump, criminal, liar and demagogue, has now won tens of millions of votes in three consecutive elections,” David said. “Many people hoped this election would show that Trump was an aberration. But perhaps what it will show is something else about what kind of country America is.”

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