Projected President-elect Donald Trump has made a number of sweeping proposals for a second term in office, outlining a wide-ranging agenda that targets federal regulations, taxes, immigration, and social issues.
As of Wednesday morning, The Associated Press projected that Trump is the winner of the election after securing enough electoral votes over his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris.
Early Wednesday, the former president and president-elect claimed victory in the 2024 presidential contest, telling supporters that voters had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” Early projections show that Trump may win not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote, something he’s never done in his previous two campaigns.
During the campaign, Trump often said that he would initiate the largest “mass deportation” effort in U.S. history if elected. Recently, he also warned Mexico that he would impose a 25 percent tariff targeting the country if it fails to curb illegal immigration and that he would raise that tariff if Mexico doesn’t comply.
Also, he’s suggested more enhanced screenings for immigrants, ending birthright citizenship—which may require a constitutional amendment—and reimposing certain policies enacted during his first term such as the “remain in Mexico” protocol.
Tom Homan, a former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who is expected to join the new administration, told media outlets last year that the scale of deportations depends on what resources are available.
During a “60 Minutes” interview in October, Homan was asked about whether families would be separated. Homan responded, “Families can be deported together.”
Vice President-elect JD Vance said in his debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Oct. 1 that deporting criminals would be a second Trump administration’s initial focus.
“You’ve got to reimplement Donald Trump’s border policies, build the wall, reimplement deportations,” Vance said, adding that the United States has 20 to 25 million illegal immigrants in the country.
“What do we do with them? I think the first thing that we do is we start with the criminal migrants.”
His team has also proposed a further round of individual and corporate tax cuts beyond those initiated in his first term.
Trump has pledged to reduce the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent for companies that make their products in the United States. In a bid to win Nevada, Trump earlier this year pledged to end the taxation of tips and overtime wages to aid some service workers and waiters.
He has pledged not to tax or cut Social Security benefits. Trump also has said that as president, he would pressure the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates but wouldn’t make any demands on the central bank.
Some of his proposals would require congressional action. As of Wednesday morning, the GOP is projected to retake the Senate, but the picture around the House is murkier.
He has also said he should have the authority to set higher tariffs on countries that have put tariffs on U.S. imports. He has threatened to impose a 200 percent tariff on some imported cars, saying he is determined in particular to keep cars from Mexico from coming into the country.
Trump has targeted China in particular. He proposes phasing out Chinese imports of goods such as electronics, steel, and pharmaceuticals over four years. He seeks to prohibit Chinese companies from owning U.S. real estate and infrastructure in the energy and tech sectors.
“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariffs,’” Trump said in an interview with John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, in October. “It’s my favorite word.”
He added at the time, “You see these empty, old, beautiful steel mills and factories that are empty and falling down,” referring to facilities that used to make goods in the United States.
“We’re going to bring the companies back. We’re going to lower taxes for companies that are going to make their products in the USA. And we’re going to protect those companies with strong tariffs,” Trump said.
Micklethwait said that some economists have projected that the former president’s economic policies, including tariffs, could add trillions to the U.S. deficit. But Trump said that a number of countries, including “allies” have “taken advantage of us, more so than our enemies. ”
Meanwhile, he would pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords, a worldwide plan that claims to reduce carbon emissions. Trump also said he would roll back some federal policies around electric vehicles.
In his campaign, Trump has often said that gas prices were much lower under his administration than they have been under the Biden administration. He has suggested that prices would again fall when he takes office.
“When I left office ... gasoline had reached $1.87 a gallon. We actually had many months where it was lower than that,” Trump told reporters over the summer. “But we hit $1.87, which was a perfect place, an absolutely beautiful number.”
According to AAA, the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline stands at around $3.10. The highest recorded average price for a gallon was on June 14, 2022, when it reached $5.01, AAA figures show.
The federal Energy Information Administration’s data show that the average annual price for a gallon of gasoline did not exceed $3 under the first Trump administration.
He said he would direct the Justice Department to pursue civil rights cases against schools that engage in racial discrimination. At K–12 schools, Trump would support programs allowing parents to use public funds for private or religious instruction. Trump also wants to abolish the federal Department of Education and leave states in control of schooling.
Regarding abortion, Trump has said that a federal ban on abortion is not needed and that the issue should be resolved by states. He’s also said he backs rules that advance in vitro fertilization, birth control, and prenatal care.
In campaign events and interviews, Trump has been critical of schools allowing transgender individuals to compete in women’s sports, saying that he would impose a ban on such practices.
“It’s a man playing in the game,” Trump said at an October town hall event. “Look at what’s happened in swimming. Look at the records that are being broken.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
Former President George W. Bush on Wednesday congratulated President-elect Donald Trump’s victory during Tuesday’s presidential election.
“The strong turnout in this election is a sign of the health of our republic and the strength of our democratic institutions. Laura and I are grateful to the election officials, poll workers, and volunteers who oversaw a free, fair, safe, and secure election,” Bush said in a statement, referring to former First Lady Laura Bush.
“We join our fellow citizens in praying for the success of our new leaders at all levels of government,” the Republican former commander-in-chief added, while also thanking President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris “for their service to our country.”
Bush did not endorse any candidate in the 2024 election, despite calls from former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican and the daughter of his former vice president, to back Harris. Former Vice President Dick Cheney had issued a statement saying he is endorsing Harris for president.
Trump defeated Bush’s younger brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, during the 2016 Republican presidential primary before he won the general election to secure his first term.
Bush’s daughter, Barbara Pierce Bush, announced that she was backing Harris and knocked on doors in battleground states for the Democratic presidential candidate’s behalf. “It was inspiring to join friends and meet voters with the Harris–Walz campaign in Pennsylvania this weekend,” she told People magazine last week.
In a social media statement Wednesday, Liz Cheney wrote that Americans should accept Trump’s win and that “our nation’s Democratic systems functioned last night” during the election.
“Citizens across this country, our courts, members of the press and those serving in our federal, state and local governments must now be the guardrails of democracy,” she added.
The Epoch Times contacted a Bush spokesperson in September regarding his possible endorsement, but the spokesperson declined to comment.
Former Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter have not yet publicly offered comments on Trump’s win. And neither have Harris or Biden, although Harris is expected to give a concession speech later Wednesday.
Since stepping away from politics in 2009, Bush has kept a relatively low profile and did so during both the first Trump administration and Biden administration. In contrast, both Obama and Clinton had stumped for Harris in multiple battleground states during the 2024 contest.
As recently as this past weekend, Obama spoke to rally attendees in Wisconsin again made a plea for undecided voters in the battleground to back Harris. The Associated Press has projected that Trump will win Wisconsin by around 30,000 votes.
And Clinton spoke to attendees of an event in North Carolina last week. Trump is also projected to win that state as well, according to AP.
Carter, who turned 100 earlier this year, has been in hospice care since early 2023.
Aside from those two battleground states, the race has been called for Trump in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Results from Arizona and Michigan are still to come. AP and other news outlets are predicting that Trump will win the popular vote, too.
Trump and his wife Melania Trump had met with George and Laura Bush ahead of former President George H.W. Bush’s funeral in late 2018.
Former Wyoming congresswoman and Harris campaign surrogate Liz Cheney on Wednesday responded to Donald Trump’s Tuesday night election win.
“Our nation’s democratic system functioned last night and we have a new President-elect,” Cheney said in a statement hours after Trump was projected to win the presidential election.
“Americans are bound, whether we like the outcome or not, to accept the results of our elections. We now have a special responsibility, as citizens of the greatest nation on earth, to do everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years.
“Citizens across this country, our courts, members of the press and those serving in our federal, state and local governments must now be the guardrails of democracy.”
Over the years, Trump and Cheney have clashed on a multitude of issues, perhaps culminating in Cheney having taken a leading role in the House Jan. 6 committee that made accusations against the former president and now president-elect.
She lost her 2022 congressional reelection bid during the Republican primary, bringing an end to three terms in the House. After leaving the House, she continued to be critical of the former president.
During the 2024 presidential election, Trump is projected to win Wyoming by more than 40 percentage points.
And earlier this year, Cheney announced she was backing Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and often stumped for her on the trail. Around the same time, her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, also endorsed Harris for president.
About a week before the election, Trump criticized Cheney as a “war hawk” who has backed U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts. He then suggested that if Cheney were in a combat situation, she wouldn’t have the same feelings.
“You know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they are all war hawks when they are sitting in Washington in a nice building,” he told Tucker Carlson.
In response, Cheney wrote on social media platform X that Trump’s comments were authoritarian. However, members of the Trump campaign said that the Harris campaign, Cheney, and media outlets took Trump’s comment about Cheney out of context and did not focus on his broader message about U.S. involvement in wars.
Aside from the presidential election, the GOP had a good night in the Senate, flipping multiple seats and gaining control over the congressional chamber. Republicans defeated Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), according to projections.
So far, President Joe Biden and Harris have not publicly commented on Trump’s win.
“I said that many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Trump told supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Wednesday morning. “And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness, and now we are going to fulfill that mission together.”
Also in his speech, he said that “it is time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us. It is time to unite, and we are going to try. We have to try.”
Abortion-related ballot measures have been popular following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to overturn the federal right to abortion and send the issue of legislating the procedure to the states.
The ruling set off a domino effect as state after state moved to either tighten restrictions on the procedure or strengthen protections for access.
By the 2024 general election, seven out of seven states had sided with abortion advocates at the ballot box. As voters in California, Michigan, Ohio, and Vermont approved measures to cement abortion as a right, those in Kansas and Kentucky rejected initiatives to limit abortion access. Meanwhile, a referendum to require medical care for infants born alive during botched abortions failed in Montana.
As voters in 10 more states decided on abortion-related ballot measures on Nov. 5, they showed that the ideological divide on the procedure still runs deep.
Abortion is currently legal in Arizona through 15 weeks of pregnancy, following the recent repeal of an 1864 law that banned all abortions except those performed to save the life of the mother.
Proposition 139, a citizen-led initiative, sought to establish a “fundamental right to abortion” through fetal viability, and up until birth when deemed necessary “to protect the life or health of the pregnant individual.”
Fetal viability is typically recognized at about 22 weeks to 24 weeks of pregnancy, although premature babies have survived with medical assistance as early as 19 weeks.
The amendment also barred the state from penalizing those who help someone obtain an abortion.
The proposition passed with roughly 62 percent of the vote.
Abortion is already accessible throughout the entirety of pregnancy in Colorado. The state does not impose any limits on the procedure’s legality, although there is a parental notification requirement for minors younger than age 18, which can be waived by a judge.
Colorado requires a 55 percent majority to add language to the state’s constitution. The amendment surpassed that threshold, passing with 61 percent of the vote.
The amendment aimed to establish a constitutional right to abortion through fetal viability or “when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s health care provider.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks out against Amendment 4, which would expand access to abortion, during a news conference with Florida Physicians Against Amendment 4, in Coral Gables, Fla., on Oct. 21, 2024. (Lynne Sladky/AP Photo)
Although a majority (57 percent) of voters supported the amendment, it fell short of the 60 percent threshold required to pass, making Florida voters the first in the nation to reject an abortion-related ballot measure in the post-Dobbs era.
Amendment 4 was fiercely contested by Florida’s Republican leadership, who argued that it was deceptively written to trick voters.
The petition’s circulators also remain embroiled in a fraud investigation amid allegations that they forged signatures to secure the measure’s spot on the ballot. The state’s Office of Election Crimes and Security has referred 60 circulators to law enforcement for further investigation.
Currently, abortion is legal in Maryland through fetal viability and illegal after that, with exceptions for the mother’s life or health.
A simple majority was needed to adopt the new law. It passed with an overwhelming 74 percent of the vote.
Those matters include—but are not limited to—abortion, prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, miscarriage care, and “respectful birthing conditions.” It also calls for the regulation of abortion to be permitted after fetal viability, except in cases in which the procedure is deemed necessary to protect the mother’s life or physical or mental health.
Receiving 52 percent of the vote, the measure just achieved the simple majority needed to pass.
While voters rejected the proposed “Born Alive” referendum in 2022, they were asked this time to decide whether the state’s constitution should provide “a right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including the right to abortion.”
Montana already recognizes a right to abortion thanks to a 1999 Montana Supreme Court ruling that found that the procedure was covered by the state’s right to privacy.
CI-128 sought to safeguard that right by codifying it through fetal viability, with exceptions for the mother’s life and health. It passed with a 57 percent majority.
The state currently allows abortion through 12 weeks.
Initiative 434, which passed with 55 percent of the vote, will codify that restriction in the state’s constitution. It declares that “unborn children shall be protected from abortion in the second and third trimesters” of pregnancy, except in cases involving rape, incest, or medical emergencies.
Initiative 439, the “Protect the Right to Abortion” amendment, sought to establish that “all persons shall have a fundamental right to abortion until fetal viability,” or if considered necessary, to protect the mother’s health or life. That amendment was rejected by a 51 percent majority.
Question 6 aimed to modify that law by enshrining in the state’s constitution a right to abortion until fetal viability and prohibiting state regulation of the procedure within that period, except in situations involving a “compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”
While voters ultimately passed the amendment with 63 percent support, they will need to approve it again in 2026 for it to be adopted.
The state already allows abortion through fetal viability and when deemed necessary to protect the mother’s life or health.
Proposal 1, a legislatively referred constitutional amendment, sought to prohibit the denial of a person’s civil rights based on “pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care and autonomy,” among a litany of other factors and traits.
The amendment passed easily with 62 percent of the vote.
The amendment stipulated that the state could not regulate abortion within the first trimester of pregnancy. In the second trimester, regulation would be allowed “only in ways that are reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman.” And in the third trimester, abortion could be prohibited except when deemed necessary to preserve the woman’s life or health.
The effect would be legal abortion through 28 weeks—past the point of fetal viability—and until birth if considered medically necessary.
The proposal contrasted starkly with South Dakota’s current law, which prohibits abortion in all circumstances except to save the mother’s life.
The new measure was rejected, getting only 40 percent of the vote.
The 2024 race for the White House came to a close early in the morning on Nov. 6 with former President Donald Trump winning the presidency after taking several swing states.
With a win projected in Wisconsin by the Associated Press, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency.
Republicans regained control of the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House majority is still unknown, and decisions were made on important ballot measures in several states.
Here are 7 of the biggest takeaways from Election Night.
Trump called it a “magnificent victory” as it appeared he may secure enough votes to also win the popular vote, the first time a Republican has done so in 20 years.
A Trump victory makes him the first president since Grover Cleveland to win two nonconsecutive White House terms.
Polls showed a neck-and-neck race leading into late October, with some surveys throughout the battlegrounds tipping in Trump’s favor.
The Harris campaign saw promise in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, spending much of their resources in those states throughout the final weeks. All three were called for Trump by early Wednesday morning.
Trump improved on many of his 2016 margins in key states, and is currently leading in votes tallied in Nevada, the one battleground he lost in 2016.
Based on some early estimates, particularly in Michigan and Georgia, turnout this year may exceed what the nation saw in 2020.
While official turnout data will not be available until all counties in each state finalize their election results, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said early on Election Day that, based on early voting numbers, the Peach State would likely surpass 2020 turnout by the time polls closed that evening.
Raffensperger expected more than 5 million votes in total, outpacing the state’s numbers four years prior when just under 5 million voted in the presidential election.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson had a similar message while addressing reporters on election night.
When asked if she thought turnout would exceed 2020, she said, “That’s my hope.”
“We’re very hopeful that we'll bring that turnout record we set in 2020. No matter what, it’s very clear turnout is high,” Benson said. “I’m really proud of that.”
Nearly 7 million ballots were cast in Pennsylvania in 2020. By Wednesday morning, when 96 percent of ballots were tallied in the state, the Keystone State had nearly reached the same threshold.
In the National Election Pool exit poll conducted by Edison Research on Nov. 5, Trump made key gains with the minority group that makes up at least 13 percent of the American electorate.
Among respondents who identified themselves as Latinos, 53 percent of respondents said they voted for Harris and 45 percent said they voted for Trump. That is a 13 percentage point improvement over Trump’s performance with the group in 2020 when he ran against President Joe Biden.
Trump also saw significant improvements with Latino voters in the battleground states. In Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, he improved his performance with Latino voters by at least 10 percentage points over 2020.
In Nevada, a state where one-third of the population identifies as Latino, Trump tied with Harris among Latino voters. According to the responses given to exit pollsters, both candidates received 47 percent of the Latino vote.
In Ohio, three-term incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) lost his race to Republican businessman Bernie Moreno by four percentage points. Brown was the last Democrat to hold statewide office in Ohio, which has been highly receptive to former President Donald Trump’s manufacturing-focused political message. Trump has won Ohio in the last three presidential elections (including 2024), which is also the home state of his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).
In West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) won the open race to succeed retiring Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.). The state, despite being a historically Democratic stronghold, has rapidly become Republican since 2015, when Trump emerged as a force in national politics. Justice had been widely expected to win the race.
Republicans will formally assume the majority on Jan. 3, 2025, when the 119th Congress takes office, after nearly four years in the minority. The Senate GOP will have significant influence over their agenda, controlling both executive and judicial nominations as well as all legislation.
The victory comes amid a moment of flux for the Senate GOP leadership. Longtime Senate Republican Conference Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has held the office for 17 years since 2007, will depart his role in November. The conference will, thus, be led by a new Senate Republican Leader, who will quickly become the Senate Majority Leader — one of the highest-ranking offices in the United States government.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) won re-election to a third term, beating his Democratic rival Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas). Cruz won by over 10 percentage points, stymying Democrats’ hopes of winning a statewide race in Texas amid changing demographics.
In Nebraska, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) won re-election to a third term after defeating Independent candidate Dan Osborn, a union leader who closed the polling gap with her in the final weeks of the campaign. In response, Republican groups spent millions of dollars on attack advertisements in Nebraska to defend Fischer, despite the state’s overwhelming Republican lean. Fischer won by less than 5 percentage points.
Meanwhile, in the non-battleground Florida, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) won re-election to a second term. He defeated former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.) by a landslide margin of 13 percentage points. The defeat deepens Democrats’ deficit in Florida, once a swing state but now overwhelmingly Republican — and Trump’s home state, too.
At the time of publication, the Associated Press projected that Republicans would take at least 198 seats and Democrats would take at least 180. Races that will ultimately decide which party controls the lower chamber in the 119th Congress have yet to be called.
For Trump, control of the House will be essential to carrying out his legislative agenda, particularly on issues like tax policy.
In his remarks, after many news outlets declared him the victor, Trump expressed confidence about his party’s prospects in the House.
Early returns paint a conflicting picture of the race so far.
In New York, home to several crucial House races, some Republican incumbents seem on track to retain their seats, including Reps. Mike Lawler and Nick LaLota.
However, Democrats also unseated two incumbents in the state: Josh Riley unseated Rep. Marc Molinaro while Democrat John Mannion won over Rep. Brandon Williams.
In New York, where the GOP won key races in 2022 in taking back the House, Democrats picked up seats in the state’s 19th and 22nd congressional districts.
In nearby Pennsylvania, Republicans also seemed poised to unseat two Democratic incumbents, Reps. Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright, with 99 percent of the vote reported.
In neighboring Ohio two Democratic incumbents, Reps. Emilia Sykes and Marcy Kaptur were positioned to retain their seats.
Several California races crucial to both parties remain too close to call.
Control of the House will likely not be known for days.
In the blue states of Colorado, Maryland, and New York, voters approved measures to enshrine abortion access in their constitutions. In conservative South Dakota, where abortion is almost totally banned, a push to establish abortion access was soundly rejected.
In Florida, where the electorate is more politically diverse, a similar amendment that many thought might pass failed to reach the 60 percent majority needed for adoption. The result handed the pro-life movement its first win at the ballot box since Dobbs.
A similar shock came with the failure of Florida’s Amendment 3, which sought to legalize recreational marijuana use in a state where the drug’s medicinal use is already legal. As with the abortion amendment, the measure was supported by a simple majority but not enough of the electorate to pass.
On the other hand, in red Nebraska, voters approved measures to legalize the possession and use of medicinal marijuana and create a commission to regulate the industry.
Another noteworthy result came with Californians’ approval of Proposition 36, a measure that will increase the penalties for fentanyl dealers and repeat shoplifters. The proposal reverses part of a 2014 initiative that relaxed penalties for nonviolent drug and property crimes in the state.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
First-time candidate Republican Tim Sheehy has ended Montana Sen. Jon Tester’s (D-Mont.) three-term tenure in the U.S. Senate, capturing a seat that boosts the GOP’s newly-gained majority in the chamber.
The race was called at 6:26 a.m. Eastern Time on Nov. 6 by The Associated Press, with Trump-endorsed Sheehy leading 52.8 percent to 45.4 percent over Tester, the only statewide-elected Democrat in deep red Montana.
“We The People made our voices heard, we completed our mission, and now we will secure our children’s future and save America together!” Sheehy wrote on the social media platform X.
Republicans had already secured control of the Senate even without the flip in Montana.
Tester, 68, was seeking reelection in a supermajority GOP trifecta state that former President Donald Trump won by 16.5 percentage points in 2020 that has been reliably Republican for decades; state voters haven’t elected a Democrat to the House since 1994 and only two Democrats since 1952—Bill Clinton in 1992 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964—have won presidential elections in Montana.
Sheehy, 38, a Minnesota-born former U.S. Navy SEAL and Iraq/Afghanistan war veteran, founded aerial fire-fighting company Bridger Aerospace in 2014, which employs more than 200 Montanans.
Trump maintains that Tester is out-of-step with the people of the state, often citing the senator’s two votes to impeach him. In recent ads, Montana ranchers say Tester “votes with Biden 95 percent of the time” in imposing unpopular policies.
The pair debated twice, a June 9 Sunday morning clash in Fairmont Hot Springs and a Sept. 30 exchange on the University of Montana campus in Missoula.
Tester, who never endorsed Democrat presidential candidate Vice President Harris, in both debates and in campaign stumps, touted his key vote in the Senate to secure billions for union job-generating infrastructure projects for the state in 2021’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act.
He was critical of the Biden administration’s border policies, calling the repeal of Trump’s stay-in-Mexico policy “a bad decision” among “other decisions [Biden] made I thought were bad for the border,” he said during the second debate.
Sheehy denied Tester’s claims he’d privatize Medicare and Medicaid but in stumps said the way those programs are funded must change and “private healthcare is going to be our answer” in making health insurance affordable for all.
He opposes any federal “single-payer” healthcare system and any effort to sell federal lands.
The Republican challenger said he not would support a federal law limiting or banning abortion, noting he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.
Tester made abortion access a campaign cornerstone. There is an abortion rights measure on the state’s Nov. 5 ballot that Democrats believe will incidentally boost his reelection odds.
Democrats entered the 2024 election cycle with a 51-49 chamber advantage. Unlike 2022’s midterms, when the GOP was defending 20-of-34 seats in the split 50-50 chamber, Democrats and the four independents who caucus with them are defending 23-of-33 seats on Nov. 5.
Republicans needed only flip two to notch chamber leadership and began Nov. 5 near-certain to take one seat, when two-term Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) became an independent and announced his retirement. West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican, is the overwhelming favorite to succeed him in a state where Trump garnered nearly 69 percent of the vote four years ago.
Tester and three-term Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), facing a “toss-up” challenge from Republican Bernie Moreno in Ohio, are the other top two targets for Republicans in their efforts to retake the Senate.
More than $250 million has been spent in Montana’s U.S. Senate race, making it the most expensive election in state history, with Democrats committing millions in boosting Tester’s campaign.
Through mid-October, dozens of state and national PACs spent more than $160 million in ads supporting or opposing the candidates, according to OpenSecrets. GOP-supporting PACs have spent nearly $83 million and Democratic-leaning PACs have spent almost $82.37 million, it reports.
According to Tester’s last quarterly Federal Elections Commission (FEC) filing, on Oct. 16, he had raised $88.16 million, spent $84.5 million, and had $4.15 million cash-on-hand.
In Sheehy’s Oct. 16 FEC filing, his campaign reported raising nearly $25.8 million, spending $21.9 million, with $4 million in the bank. At least $2.45 million is self-funded.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.—Former President Donald Trump declared his projected election win a “victory for the American people” while addressing hundreds of jubilant guests and campaign volunteers at the Palm Beach County Convention Center at about 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 6.
Surrounded by his family, campaign staff, and allies, Trump said: “I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president, and your 45th president.”
Trump said he believed he would win Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Alaska, in addition to projected victories in the battleground states of North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If that happens, he would secure 315 Electoral College votes, far exceeding the minimum 270 such votes needed.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), told the crowd: “I think that we just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America.”
The former president sought reelection by opposing two separate Democratic Party candidates—first President Joe Biden, then Vice President Kamala Harris—and faced significant obstacles, including criminal charges and assassination attempts.
He called the election results “an unprecedented and powerful mandate” because Republicans could be poised to secure control of both chambers of Congress in addition to the presidency.
Trump said the “Make America Great Again” movement would ascend to “a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal.”
“I want to thank the millions of hardworking Americans across the nation who have always been the heart and soul of this really great movement,” he said.
Their reward will be “we’re going to do the best job.”
He promised every citizen: “I will fight for you, for your family, and your future. Every single day I will be fighting for you and with every breath in my body. I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe, and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve.”
Trump repeated a phrase he has used on the campaign trail, saying he would usher in “the golden age of America.”
He said he hopes his supporters will look back on the 2024 election and see that casting their vote was one of the “truly important moments” of their lifetimes.
“This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country,” Trump said.
He said many people told him that his life was spared from would-be assassins so he could “restore America to greatness.” He said he would fulfill that mission with the help of the American people.
“I will bring every ounce of energy, spirit, and fighting that I have in my soul to the job that you’ve entrusted to me,” Trump said.
He asked people to set aside political differences following a contentious campaign.
“It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us. It’s time to unite, and we’re going to try,” he said, adding, “Success is going to bring us together.”
As supporters exited the venue, they sang in unison, “How Great Thou Art.”
Cedric Richmond, co-chair of the Harris-Walz campaign, said earlier in the evening at the campaign’s watch party at Howard University in Washington, D.C., that Harris would not be addressing those gathered until tomorrow, but thanked all of her supporters for being present on Tuesday evening.
“We still have votes to count. We still have states that have not been called yet. We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken,” Richmond said.
Reactions from world leaders have begun to pour in, congratulating Donald Trump on winning the presidency again.
Decision Desk HQ has projected that Trump will return to the White House, being the first president to win nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in 1892.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the first world leader to congratulate him.
“Dear Donald and Melania Trump, Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!” Netanyahu posted on social media. “Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.”
This comes as Israel has been fighting Hamas and Hezbollah since the former launched an attack on the Jewish state on Oct. 7, 2023—the deadliest single-day anti-Semitic attack since the Holocaust.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also congratulated Trump, who has called for a resolution between Ukraine and Russia amid the latter’s invasion of the former.
“I appreciate President Trump’s commitment to the ‘peace through strength’ approach in global affairs. This is exactly the principle that can practically bring just peace in Ukraine closer. I am hopeful that we will put it into action together,” he posted on X.
He continued, “We look forward to an era of a strong United States of America under President Trump’s decisive leadership. We rely on continued strong bipartisan support for Ukraine in the United States.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a social media post, “I warmly congratulate Donald J. Trump. The EU and the US are more than just allies. We are bound by a true partnership between our people, uniting 800 million citizens. So let’s work together on a strong transatlantic agenda that keeps delivering for them.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who belongs to the left-wing Labour Party, congratulated Trump on a “historic election victory.” He posted on X: “As the closest of allies, we stand shoulder to shoulder in defense of our shared values of freedom, democracy and enterprise. From growth and security to innovation and tech, I know that the UK-US special relationship will continue to prosper on both sides of the Atlantic for years to come.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte congratulated Trump.
“I just congratulated @realDonaldTrump on his election as President of the United States. His leadership will again be key to keeping our Alliance strong. I look forward to working with him again to advance peace through strength through NATO,” he posted on X.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent his best wishes to Trump, saying, “Heartiest congratulations my friend [Donald Trump] on your historic election victory. As you build on the successes of your previous term, I look forward to renewing our collaboration to further strengthen the India-US Comprehensive Global and Strategic Partnership. Together, let’s work for the betterment of our people and to promote global peace, stability and prosperity.”
His post was accompanied by four images of himself and Trump during the latter’s last stint in the White House.
President Emmanuel Macron of France also took to X with messages in French and English saying: “Congratulations, [President Donald Trump]. Ready to work together as we did for four years. With your convictions and mine. With respect and ambition. For more peace and prosperity.”
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a longtime ally of Trump, said on X that the election result was “the biggest comeback in US political history.” He congratulated Trump “on his enormous win,” and said it is a “much-needed victory for the World!”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said: “On behalf of myself and the Italian government, my most sincere congratulations to the President-elect of the United States, Donald Trump. Italy and the United States are ‘sister’ nations, linked by an unshakeable alliance, common values, and a historic friendship. It is a strategic bond, which I am sure we will now strengthen even further.”
Polish President Andrzej Duda also took to X to congratulate Trump. “You made it happen!” he said.
His post was accompanied by a trio of clapping emojis, as well as the Polish and U.S. flags on either side of a handshake image.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders, leader of the largest party in the Netherlands but not the nation’s prime minister due to a coalition agreement among parties to form the government, posted an all-caps message on X: “Congratulations President Trump! Congratulations America! Never stop, always keep fighting and win elections!”
His post also featured a flurry of emojis, including three star-spangled banners flanked on each side by a trio of flexed biceps.
Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs posted on X that he “look[s] forward to working with you to strengthen bilateral relations and transatlantic partnership. Europe needs strong US and US needs strong Europe. Latvia is and will be a strong and reliable partner of the US.”
According to a national exit poll, former President Donald Trump is doing substantially better in this election with young men in three of the Rust Belt battleground states than in previous elections. However, he has lost ground with older men.
In the National Election Pool exit poll conducted by Edison Research on Nov. 5, Trump grew his advantage among young and early middle-aged men in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
The results are considered preliminary and will be updated as responses continue to arrive.
According to the exit pollsters, more than 50 percent of male respondents aged 18 to 44 voted for Trump in all three of the states. Moreover, Trump lost to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2020.
According to the exit poll, in 2024, Trump carried 57 percent of the under-44-year-old male vote in Michigan, 54 percent in Wisconsin, and 53 percent in Pennsylvania.
In 2020, Biden took 53 percent of the cohort in Pennsylvania and beat Trump by a 2 percentage point margin in Wisconsin. Trump narrowly beat out Biden, by a 2 percentage point margin, with men under the age of 44 in Michigan in 2020.
However, Trump performed substantially worse with men over the age of 65 in all three battleground states.
In 2024, male voters over the age of 65 who participated in the exit poll said they voted for Vice President Kamala Harris rather than Trump in both Wisconsin and Michigan.
According to the exit poll, male voters over 65 chose Harris over Trump by a 17 percentage point margin in Wisconsin and by a 13 percentage point margin in Michigan. In Pennsylvania, older men continued to back Trump by a 3 percentage point margin.
Nevertheless, that support fell in all three battleground states. In 2016, male voters older than 65 voted for Trump rather than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by a 1 percentage point margin in Wisconsin, a 4 percentage point margin in Michigan, and a 10 percentage point margin in Pennsylvania.
The three battleground states could prove decisive for the 2024 Electoral College. Wisconsin will cast 10 electoral votes, Michigan will get 15, and Pennsylvania will send 19 electoral votes.
RICHMOND, Va.—Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) won his reelection for a third term, defeating Republican challenger retired Navy captain Hung Cao.
Virginians also handed the Commonwealth’s 13 electoral votes to Vice President Kamala Harris, who won by 4.4 percent with 88 percent of the total votes counted.
The Associated Press called the Virginia Senate race for Kaine at about 11:30 p.m. He won by 5.4 points, with 77 percent of the votes counted.
At his watch party in Richmond, Kaine thanked his supporters and vowed to continue to “expand health care options, reproductive freedom, and fight for a cleaner environment.”
According to the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), a Richmond-based watchdog, Kaine raised about $17 million, more than twice Cao’s war chest.
Kaine ran his campaign on the economy, abortion, and health care affordability. Cao’s top issues are securing the southern border and achieving American energy independence.
Kaine gave his speech to the watch party attendees at about 11 p.m.—before his race was called—as he had the victory in the bag, given his 5 percent lead. Votes in precincts of the deeply blue Fairfax County in northern Virginia were still to be counted.
At a rally in Chantilly, northern Virginia, on Oct. 16, he told the crowd, “Virginia polls close first in the nation at seven o'clock Eastern time. We could get a call if we do our work for a clear win for Kamala and send a message to the rest of the country of a blue tsunami with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.”
Tonight’s result was different. At one point, former President Donald Trump edged over Harris based on rural votes and votes in the Virginia Beach area. Although the Associated Press hasn’t called the race in Virginia for Harris when Kaine ended his watch party, both Kaine and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who isn’t facing reelection this year, said the victory would be Harris’s.
According to VPAP, 2.3 million Virginians voted early, half of the overall 2020 turnout and a half-a-million decrease from 2020’s early vote counts. TargetSmart estimated 65 percent of the votes for Democrats and 22 percent for Republicans; the Commonwealth doesn’t register voters with party affiliations.
The 2024 voter turnout percentage of the 6.4 million Virginia registered voters is not yet available by the Department of Election. Virginia’s voter turnout was 75 percent in the 2020 presidential election.
Once again, the 2024 general election results confirmed Virginia as a blue territory. The Commonwealth has not voted red in presidential elections since 2008. With the Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s victory in 2021 and a few polls showing Trump within five points of Harris, some Republicans had hoped that Virginia would be “in play” this time.
The Trump campaign also saw some hope in Virginia. The Saturday before Election Day, Trump rallied in Salem, southwest Virginia, about 200 miles from Richmond, to turn out more Republican voters from the deeply red rural areas.
Republicans wanted to repeat Youngkin’s success by turning out more in the rural areas in southwest Virginia, getting a slight edge in the Virginia Beach area—the Commonwealth’s swing zone—while reducing loss margins in northern Virginia. Trump executed the playbook to some degree, but not enough.
Before the election, the Republicans in Virginia made a series of efforts to ensure election integrity.
In September 2022, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares established an election integrity unit. According to his office, the unit would provide legal advice to the Department of Elections, prosecute violations of the state election law, and “work with law enforcement to ensure legality and purity in elections.”
On Aug. 7, Youngkin issued an executive order to clean up the voter roll by removing deceased voters, noncitizens, and those who had moved out of Virginia. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights and other local groups sued the governor, alleging that he violated the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits states from running “systematic” removal programs in voter registration rolls within 90 days of a federal election.
A federal and appellate judge ordered the Youngkin administration to reinstate the 1,600 voters they removed from the registered voter database. Eventually, on Oct. 30, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6–3 to allow Virginia to continue removing noncitizens from registration rolls.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which represented the federal government in the proceeding, criticized the ruling.
“The Department brought this suit to ensure that every eligible American citizen can vote in our elections,” a DOJ spokesperson told The Epoch Times previously. “We disagree with the Supreme Court’s order.”
According to the results of the National Election Pool Exit Poll, former President Donald Trump is receiving more support from Latino voters in 2024 than he did in 2020.
According to the national sample collected by the NEP Exit Poll, conducted by Edison Research on Nov. 5, Trump’s support among Latino voters grew by 13 percentage points between 2020 and 2024.
The results are considered preliminary and will be updated as results continue to arrive.
By race, according to the poll, white voters tended to say they voted for Trump, while minority voters more often said they cast their ballots for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Among white voters, Trump leads Harris by 12 percentage points. However, Harris holds a commanding lead with black voters.
Black Americans told the NEP pollsters they prefer Harris over Trump by a 75 percentage point margin.
The lead is smaller among other races.
Latino voters said they broke for Harris by an 8 percentage point margin, while Asian voters said they supported Harris over Trump by an 18 percentage point margin.
However, among those who said their racial group did not fall into any of these categories, Trump is winning by 12 percentage points.
By gender, more men are backing Trump while more women are supporting Harris. According to the poll, Trump leads among men by 9 percentage points, while Harris leads with women by 12 percentage points.
By religion, respondents who identified as Catholic or Protestant are more likely to say they voted for Trump.
In contrast, more of those who identified themselves as Jewish, another religion, or not following any religion said they voted for Harris.
Among Protestants, Trump leads Harris by 24 percentage points. With Catholics, he leads the Democrat candidate by 56 percentage points.
Harris leads among Jewish voters by 56 percentage points, with those who adhere to another religion by 28 percentage points, and among those who said they do not have a religion by 47 percentage points.
By income, among respondents who said they are making less than $50,00 a year, Harris was preferred over Trump by 1 percentage point.
With those who said they are making more than $100,000 a year, Harris is leading by 7 percentage points.
Trump is ahead of Harris among voters making between $50,000 and $100,000 annually by 2 percentage points.
More younger voters and voters over the age of 65 said they preferred Harris over Trump.
Harris’s widest lead is among voters aged 18 to 29, by 13 percentage points.
Among voters between the ages of 30 and 44, Harris has a 7 percentage point advantage over Trump. With voters over the age of 65, she holds a slight one percentage point advantage.
Trump is leading Harris among voters aged 45 to 64, by 6 percentage points.
With Americans who said they switched their vote from one party to another, Trump is leading.
According to the exit poll, 5 percent of respondents said they switched their vote from President Joe Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024.
By comparison, 4 percent of the respondents said they voted for Harris in 2024 and Trump in 2020.
Among black respondents, Harris leads Trump by 75 percentage points.
With white respondents, Trump leads Harris by 22 percent.
Harris is leading Trump with Latino voters by a 2 percentage point margin in the state.
An equal percentage of respondents who voted for either side told exit pollsters they switched their vote from one party to another in 2024.
All told, 3 percent of respondents said they switched from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024, and another 3 percent of respondents said they moved from Trump in 2020 to Harris in 2024.
Pollsters asked North Carolina voters about Hurricane Helene, which heavily affected the western portion of the Tar Heel State, “Is federal hurricane aid going to the people who need it?”
Forty-nine percent of respondents agreed, whereas 46 percent disagreed.
Respondents who said “Yes” to the hurricane relief question were much more likely to be Harris supporters than Trump supporters, according to the poll.
Among that group, Harris is preferred over Trump by a 59 percent margin. Trump leads Harris by 62 percent among voters who said “No” to the question.
Among union households, Harris leads Trump by a 13-point margin, with 56 percent of this group saying they voted for Harris and 43 percent for Trump.
As for fracking, 55 percent of respondents said they “favor fracking in Pennsylvania,” and 37 percent said they oppose it.
Among those who favor fracking, Trump leads Harris by a 50-point margin. Conversely, Harris leads Trump by a 63-point margin among those who oppose fracking.
Many voters interviewed on Election Eve night by The Epoch Times about their Election Day plans and levels of anxiety said they plan to stay up late to watch the results and will return to their normal work schedules the following day.
Voters from Washington, Virginia, New Jersey, and Tennessee weighed in on how late they plan to stay up, with some planning to watch Election Night coverage until 3 a.m.
Several voters said they would only stay tuned to coverage if it warrants their attention.
“I will stay up as late as late as I can until there is no news to report,” said Claire Marckesano from Knoxville, Tennessee. “I don’t expect the results to come out Tuesday night, I think most people won’t expect we will have a result on that night.”
Rose Rizzo, a resident of Holmdel, N.J., said, “I’ll stay up until I know the results or until I can’t stay up any longer.”
One voter in Fairfax, Va., expects to be up late, into the early hours of the morning, to watch the poll results pour in.
“I will probably be up until 2 to 3 a.m. on Election Night,” Sam Simpson said. She added that she still plans to work tomorrow.
When asked about election anxiety, Simpson said it can be exacerbated by “obsessive poll research and constant social media coverage.”
Washington resident Michael Ward said he plans to stay up until midnight, and said he is not dealing with election anxiety during this divisive election year.
“It will not impact how I perform at work,” Ward said. “I don’t feel overwhelmed by ads—actually wish I’d have seen more.”
He added that he is indifferent about election season. “Someone will always be running for something,” he said.
Marckesano shared Ward’s outlook: “When I go to bed tomorrow night, I’m giving it to God; it’s not for me to worry anymore,” she said.
“After you vote, what more can you do? I truly believe, faith-based, the outcome of this will be God’s plan, and his plan will survive [no matter] what we believe or what we want.”
Rizzo also said she will still go to work tomorrow, and said she was not nervous heading into Election Day.
“It’s out of my control and no matter what happens, life will go on anyway,” Rizzo said.
Anthony Falconeri, a resident of Sea Bright, N.J., said he plans to be in bed by 1 a.m. and he does not have election jitters. He said the day after the election he plans to take “deep breaths and [a] diversion to something other than the news.”
When asked if he believes the outcome is out of his hands after his vote, he responded, “Not at all. You can encourage and assist neighbors with voting and getting them to the polls. You can also volunteer to send texts and make phone calls on behalf of Get Out the Vote organizations.”
Falconeri said he is “a political news junky so I’m interested in this stuff. Hopefully, the election doesn’t drag on for days or longer because I think most people, including myself, need a break.”
Kate Vitelli, also from Sea Bright, said she will probably not watch the election. Her “anxiety is higher than normal,” she said.
Another Virginia voter said he plans to stay up late to watch poll results, but he'll still go to work tomorrow.
Fairfax resident Talon Ribsam said he plans to stay up until midnight.
When asked how he deals with anxiety surrounding the election, Ribsam said, “As long as I vote my conscience, I’m not bothered by election anxiety.”
In Maryland, Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat, defeated former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan on Nov. 5, keeping the seat blue as Democrats seek to hold their edge in the Senate, projected The Associated Press.
With her win, Alsobrooks will become the first black senator from the former slave state and Maryland’s first female senator since Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.). She takes office on Jan. 3, 2025.
While the GOP is expected to take back the Senate, Republicans saw Hogan as making the race competitive.
More than $39 million was poured into the contest, according to the Federal Election Commission. As of Oct. 16, Alsobrooks raised more than $28 million, while Hogan raised almost $11 million.
Hogan touted his willingness to stand up to Democrats and Republicans and reiterated his staunch criticism of former President Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee.
“One voice standing up can make a difference. And I don’t think we need more partisan politicians who are going to be rubber stamps for their party,” said Hogan during the Oct. 10 debate with Alsobrooks, their only meeting.
“What we need are people that are willing to stand up and work with both parties or to criticize both parties when they’re wrong.”
Nonetheless, Trump endorsed Hogan.
“I’d like to see him win,” Trump told Fox News in June. “I think he has a good chance to win. And we’ve got to take the majority.”
Hogan declined Trump’s endorsement.
“I didn’t seek it, I didn’t want to have it, and I have no interest in it. It’s not something we’re going to be promoting, that’s for sure,” he told WTOP, a radio station in Washington.
“In a state that Donald Trump lost by 33 points, it doesn’t really carry a lot of voters over to our cause,” he said.
Hogan said he will not vote for Trump or Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Neither one of the two candidates has earned my vote, and the voters in the country are going to be able to make that decision,” he told CBS' “Face the Nation” in September.
Alsobrooks has been the executive of Prince George’s County, just outside Washington, since 2018 as the first woman in that role and Maryland’s first black female county executive. She previously was the top prosecutor in the county.
In May, she become the Democrat nominee for Senate after defeating Rep. David Trone (D-Md.), who mostly self-financed his own campaign, putting in more than $62 million.
Alsobrooks has expressed support for Harris and the Democrat agenda and spoke in August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
During the debate, Hogan and Alsobrooks agreed on the issues of abortion and guns. The two called for codifying the overturned Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade and for a national so-called assault weapons ban.
However, the two disagreed on the issues of inflation and Israel.
Regarding the former, Hogan blames reckless spending by both parties, while Alsobrooks blamed what she said is corporate greed.
Alsobrooks also said that while Israel has a right to defend itself, there needs to be a cease-fire between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group. Hogan unequivocally expressed support for the Mideast country.
“I don’t think you can try to walk down the middle on this issue,” he said. Finally, Alsobrooks has called for abolishing or reforming the filibuster, which requires 60 votes in the Senate to overcome. Alsobrooks called the procedural maneuver “destructive.” Hogan said it should be preserved in the name of bipartisanship.
A push to legalize recreational marijuana use in Florida failed on Nov. 5 as voters rejected a ballot initiative to that effect.
At present, the state authorizes only the use of medicinal marijuana. Amendment 3 would have made it legal for adults ages 21 and older to purchase and possess up to 3 ounces of marijuana and use the drug recreationally.
By 9:30 p.m. on Election Day, with 92 percent of the vote in, the proposal had received 55.8 percent of the vote. It needed a 60 percent majority to pass.
In a statement, Smart Approaches to Marijuana President Kevin Sabet heralded the measure’s failure as “one of Big Marijuana’s biggest defeats yet.”
“Floridians have dealt a remarkable blow to one of the largest commercial marijuana companies in the U.S. and others in the addiction industry,” said Sabet, who served as White House drug policy adviser under the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations.
“With the rejection of Amendment 3, Floridians have taken a firm stance against the dangerous drugs the pot profiteers tried to convince the public are harmless.”
In the final weeks of election season, ads encouraging Floridians to support Amendment 3 dominated the airwaves. At the same time, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis toured the state warning that the measure was not as it seemed.
“This amendment was written and put on the ballot and is attempting to be passed because of one mega marijuana company,” the governor said at an Oct. 30 news conference in Tampa.
The amendment was largely bankrolled by Trulieve, the state’s largest medical marijuana operator, with 159 dispensaries statewide. The company is incorporated in British Columbia, Canada, but has made Quincy, Florida, its home base.
DeSantis accused Trulieve of being behind the drafting of the amendment, saying it poured $141 million into promoting the initiative. The publicly traded company’s goal, DeSantis alleged, was to “maximize profits” for its shareholders, not expand the freedoms of Floridians.
The governor said that the amendment would expand the right to possess and smoke marijuana, but only if Floridians buy it from Trulieve.
“They do not give you the right to grow your own marijuana in this amendment,” DeSantis said.
Trulieve is suing Florida’s Republican Party, alleging defamation over ads targeting the amendment.
“Tonight, a strong majority of Floridians voted in support of legalizing recreational marijuana for adults,” Smart and Safe Florida, the campaign promoting the amendment, said in a statement.
“While the results of Amendment 3 did not clear the 60 percent threshold, we are eager to work with the governor and legislative leaders who agree with us on decriminalizing recreational marijuana for adults, addressing public consumption, continuing our focus on child safety, and expanding access to safe marijuana through home grow.”
A fierce battle over the legality of abortion in Florida came to a head on Nov. 5, when the state’s voters became the first in the nation to reject a push to enshrine abortion in the state’s constitution since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
After overcoming multiple legal challenges to secure its spot on Florida’s general election ballot, Amendment 4 failed to clear the final obstacle to its passage: the voters.
A 60 percent majority was required for the measure’s adoption. At 9 p.m. on election night with 91 percent of the vote in, the measure had received 57 percent of the vote.
The amendment sought to establish a right to abortion until fetal viability—the point at which a baby can survive outside the womb—or at any time if deemed necessary to protect the mother’s health by a “healthcare provider.”
Its adoption would have nullified the state’s six-week abortion law, which took effect in May. That law states that abortion is illegal once a pregnancy passes the six-week mark. The law includes limited exceptions for situations involving rape, incest, human trafficking, or a serious threat to the mother’s physical health.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser celebrated the voters’ decision in a statement.
“The demise of pro-abortion Amendment 4 is a momentous victory for life in Florida and for our entire country,” Dannenfelser said. “Thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis, when we wake up tomorrow, babies with beating hearts will still be protected in the free state of Florida.”
DeSantis fought hard against the ballot amendment, arguing that its broad language failed to define the specific conditions under which an abortion could be performed, and by whom.
He also held that the law would undo existing parental consent requirements for minors seeking abortions, bar the state from enacting regulations to protect pregnant women, and effectively allow for abortion up until the moment of birth.
“This Amendment 4, this is an intentional deception on the public,” DeSantis said at an Oct. 30 press conference in Clearwater, surrounded by a group of doctors who opposed the amendment.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody made the same arguments in challenging the amendment’s validity before the state’s Supreme Court. The court found those arguments unconvincing and approved the measure for the ballot.
Floridians Protecting Freedom, the yes campaign for the amendment, sued the Florida Health Department over its attempts to stop TV stations from airing ads supporting the measure that state officials said misrepresented the state’s current law.
A ruling has yet to be issued in the case.
Yes on 4 Campaign Director Lauren Brenzel criticized the state’s opposition to Amendment 4 in an Oct. 16 statement.
“The State cannot coerce television stations into removing political speech from the airwaves in an attempt to keep their abortion ban in place,” Brenzel said.
The amendment faced another obstacle in the final weeks of the election: allegations of fraud.
The state’s Office of Election Crimes and Security alleged that the petition’s circulators forged signatures to secure the amendment’s placement on the ballot. Law enforcement is reportedly investigating 60 individuals in connection with the case.
CHARLOTTE, N.C.—North Carolina’s election season has been anything but normal.
Hurricane Helene ravaged 25 counties in the western part of the state, leading former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to say that he initially thought that only half of the voters in those mostly conservative-leaning communities would head to the polls.
Instead, the North Carolina State Board of Elections reported that more than 4.2 million ballots were cast during the state’s early voting period, which ended on Nov. 3.
Early voters in the 25 counties that were impacted by Helene turned out in numbers 2 percent higher than the state average.
Todd Andrews and his wife, Mary Andrews, live at the end of a long gravel road atop a mountain outside of Old Fort, North Carolina, in an area that was hard hit by flooding and mudslides from Helene.
He told The Epoch Times that many residents in western North Carolina are unhappy with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to the disaster. In rural mountain towns that are Republican strongholds, that will have an impact at the voting booth.
“It seems like every election, voters on both sides say it’s the most important election in our lifetime. There is more truth to that statement this time than there ever has been in my lifetime,” Andrews said.
“The result will not just shape the next four years, but will define the direction of our country long after that.”
The border crisis is a significant reason why so much is at stake, Andrews said.
“As long as Democrats keep an open border, illegals will keep coming in and we will become a nation of Democratic primaries. Republicans won’t be able to win. I don’t think we will ever have a fair two-party system again if Kamala Harris wins,” Andrews said of the Democratic presidential nominee and current vice president.
As evidenced by their frequent campaign visits to the state, North Carolina is coveted by Trump and Harris.
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, speaks to the media in Swannanoa, N.C., on Oct. 21, 2024, after observing cleanup efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which devastated the region. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
The 25 counties that comprise the disaster area have 1.3 million registered voters.
In 2020, Trump won 604,119 votes to Joe Biden’s 356,902 votes in those counties, according to political analyst Ray Bonifay, who highlighted the region’s importance in an Oct. 18 commentary on RealClearPolitics.
Andrews is not surprised that the destruction from Helene didn’t prevent residents from casting their ballots. He said he believes that many people in the region who did not vote early will head to the polls on Election Day.
“Republicans and Democrats here understand the importance of this election. No matter what, people are going to get to the polls and vote,” Andrews said.
Andrews said a Trump victory will help rebuild the economy, seal the borders, reduce crime, and target corporate corruption of government agencies and government weaponization against citizens and political opponents.
If Harris wins, he said, conditions in the United States will “deteriorate even more because of open borders, high crime, more inflation, an out-of-control cost of living, and a packed Supreme Court.”
Andrews said that he is also concerned about how conservatives and Christians will be treated should Harris occupy the Oval Office.
If Trump prevails, Andrews thinks that unrest could erupt across the country.
“We’re going to have all of these people who want to sow chaos, and they’re going to start the riots up again. It is doubtful that Democrats will accept a Trump victory quietly,” he said.
Michael Wood and Danielle Naidow, a married couple with two young children and two adult children, live in Marion, North Carolina, which was hard hit by Helene. They believe that conflict will arise in the United States if Trump does not win.
“I fear there will be unrest and more foreign wars, the economy will get worse, and censorship will get worse,” Wood told The Epoch Times. “We will keep heading closer to becoming a socialist country.”
Naidow said: “Our country was in great shape when Trump was president. It’s hard to process just how bad it has gotten in just four years under [President] Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Wood said he thinks that the Biden–Harris administration, and the Democratic Party as a whole, only care about urban areas like Asheville, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Durham. He feels the mountain towns and rural communities statewide don’t matter to them.
His wife agrees.
“They think we are uneducated rednecks who are Bible thumpers. But we are people who rally around each other, and we are people who vote. I pray that so many people from rural areas come out and vote that it gives Trump a win in North Carolina,” Naidow said.
Wood is optimistic that if Trump wins, the United States will rebound because of the unity movement with figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk.
“If Harris wins, it will get worse, but if Trump wins, just think of the possibilities with an administration that truly covers a wide range of bases,” Wood said. “Trump is called a far-right conservative, but he is showing he is not what they say he is. We will head in a positive direction for a long time if Trump wins. He has to win.”
North Carolina is expecting around 1 million to 1.5 million voters to cast their ballots on Election Day in addition to the 4.2 million ballots cast early, State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell said in a Nov. 5 press conference.
Polls close at 7:30 p.m. When that happens, officials across North Carolina’s 100 counties will start tabulating early voting results, she explained.
Around 98 percent of unofficial election results will be reported by the end of the night, Brinson Bell said.
In 2008, Barack Obama became the first Democrat presidential candidate to win North Carolina in 30 years. Trump prevailed in 2016 and then edged Biden out by 1.3 percent of the vote in 2020.
Just before daybreak on Election Day, cars started to arrive at the Olde Providence Elementary School voting precinct in Charlotte, a city typically won by Democrats in state and federal elections.
Sarah Pierrie, 37, was one of the first voters in line. She was prepared to cast her ballot for Harris.
“I have two young daughters, so preserving their rights to make decisions for themselves about their health and their body is important to me,” Pierrie told The Epoch Times between sips of coffee on a rain-soaked morning.
“Trump, the person, is dishonest and selfish. Harris will act and speak on behalf of all Americans.”
Jennifer Boyd, 47, arrived early at the poll, too. She said she voted for Trump.
Jennifer Boyd, 47, of Charlotte, N.C., talks about her decision to vote for former President Donald Trump in Charlotte, N.C., on Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024. (Jennifer Podis for The Epoch Times)
“He does a great job of putting people around him that are competent and capable,” Boyd told The Epoch Times. “And overall, I think it’s about what is best for our country. What way do we want our government to be run? I agree with Trump’s policies.”
Boyd said she voted on Election Day for family reasons.
“My husband and I usually go together, but our oldest son is voting for the first time today, and he didn’t want to get up early,” Boyd said with a smile.
Outside the lavish Mint Hill Town Hall, volunteers from the Mecklenburg County Republican and Democratic parties manned tables and talked to voters.
On the GOP side, Debby Presson and her husband, John Presson, stood next to a life-size cardboard cutout of Trump adorned with a “Make America Great Again” hat.
Mint Hill is a suburban town in southeastern Mecklenburg and northwestern Union counties. Mecklenburg leans to the left with voting habits while Union is more conservative.
“We don’t have a single Republican commissioner in Mecklenburg County. Not one,” Debbie Presson said as she talked to a voter who stopped at the table.
The Pressons told The Epoch Times that as of 8:30 a.m., voter turnout had been light.
Debby and Johnny Presson of Mint Hill set up their table, complete with a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump, outside the Mint Hill Town Hall precinct in Mint Hill, N.C., on Nov. 5, 2024. The Pressons volunteer with the Mecklenburg County GOP. (Jennifer Podis for The Epoch Times)
“It was good that so many Republicans voted early because things can happen on Election Day to keep you from making it to the polls. Democrats traditionally come out early. Republicans did this year. We haven’t seen the normal crowds this morning. It’s much lighter for both sides, I think,” Debby Presson said.
Four volunteers at the Mecklenburg Democratic Party booth preferred not to give their names but agreed that turnout had been smaller than normal.
They are hopeful that Mint Hill starts to mimic voting patterns in urban Charlotte.
“A lot of new people have moved here in recent years, so I think the town is getting more Democrat voters,” one volunteer said.
A Democratic poll watcher told The Epoch Times that turnout among the early morning crowd voting before work was sparse.
North Carolina has 7.8 million registered voters, and more than 4.4 million ballots were cast before Election Day, including absentee voters, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
“I voted early, and I know a lot of other people who did. It will be interesting to see if the traffic picks up after people get off work,” the poll watcher said.
On Tuesday afternoon, voters filed into the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections headquarters with their absentee ballots.
A mother arrived with her baby swaddled in warm clothes. A woman with a service dog handed over her absentee ballot. There were no lines, and people quickly walked in and out of the building.
Mecklenburg County Board of Elections Director Michael Dickerson stands outside the BOE office in Charlotte, N.C., on Nov. 5, 2024. (Jennifer Podis for The Epoch Times)
Michael Dickerson, who has served as director of the elections board for 26 years, told The Epoch Times that traffic was light compared with previous presidential election cycles. He attributed that to the 4.2 million ballots already cast, which is more than half of the state’s 7.8 million registered voters.
Tucked away in a neighborhood in Charlotte’s historic arts district, Highland Mill Montessori School’s voting precinct is surrounded by homes with Harris banners hanging from porches.
Christian Daniel and Renee Provost are conservatives in a Democratic stronghold. The couple, who recently became engaged, talked to The Epoch Times as they emerged from casting their ballots.
“We’re in a left-leaning community, and we love it here, but I’m disgusted with the direction our country has gone in the last few years,” said Provost, 30. “I’m proud to be a young American who has conservative values.”
Renee Provost and her fiancée, Christian Daniel, speak to a reporter after having voted in Charlotte, N.C., on Nov. 5, 2024. Renee explained why she voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election, but Christian declined to say who he voted for. (Jennifer Podis for The Epoch Times)
The couple entered and departed the precinct without a wait, a common phenomenon at most polling locations across Mecklenburg County, which is anchored by Charlotte.
“Last week, I was having dinner and saw a polling place where the line was super long, so many people did vote early. We both share the same sentiment that Election Day is special. I travel a lot for work, but I wanted to make sure I was off today so we could vote in person together,” Daniel said.
Daniel said that his mother, who is Filipino, has lived in the United States for more than 30 years. She became a U.S. citizen two years ago and voted in an election for the first time on Election Day in Connecticut.
Provost told The Epoch Times that she recalls going with her parents to the polls during elections.
“There was something so exciting about it to me as a kid. I remember thinking how I couldn’t wait for the day when I can exercise this right. There’s something about Election Day that is special. Early voting is convenient, and I’ve done that before, but this is a presidential election, and we wanted to vote in person,” she said.
The GOP has flipped the open West Virginia Senate seat as Gov. Jim Justice defeated Democrat Glenn Elliott, The Associated Press has projected.
Justice, who has been governor of the Mountaineer State since 2017, was expected to win. He will succeed retiring Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.).
Manchin has served in the Senate since 2010. He left the Democratic Party earlier this year.
Justice was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee.
“Strong on the Border, our Great Military & Vets, CLEAN COAL & Energy Dominance, the Economy, Stopping Inflation, & Protecting our 2nd Amendment, Big Jim will be a Great UNITED STATES SENATOR, and has my Complete & Total Endorsement,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Oct. 18, 2023.
“He will never let you down!”
Justice accepted Trump’s endorsement.
“It’s an incredible honor to have his endorsement and confidence in me. It seems like every day, we see the Biden administration falling all over itself,” Justice said in a statement the day after the endorsement.
“Those days are numbered, thank goodness. Soon, we will welcome the second term of President Donald J. Trump.”
Trump was projected by The Associated Press to win West Virginia at the moment polls closed.
The GOP needs one more seat to flip the Senate, as the Democrats control the upper congressional chamber, 51–49, with Manchin and retiring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) caucusing with them.
The party has a solid chance of doing so in Montana against incumbent Democrat Sen. Jon Tester. Other competitive races include Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Justice, who is known for his English bulldog, Babydog, will take office on Jan. 3.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will re-tabulate roughly 31,000 absentee ballots after finding that their tabulation machines were not properly closed, city officials told reporters hours before the polls were set to close on Nov. 5.
City spokesperson Jeff Fleming said that officials do not believe that the voting equipment was “tampered with in any way.” Nonetheless, they will err on the side of caution and start the process again.
“There have been extensive discussions with election officials here in consultation with people in Madison and our attorneys, and they said, let’s make sure there’s absolutely no question, and so that part of the process will be redone,” Fleming said.
He said that officials will reset the voting equipment to zero and rerun the ballots through the machines. The process could delay the city’s election results by several hours.
That’s unwelcome news for many who are watching the results closely as the battleground state is set to play a deciding role in determining the next U.S. president.
Fleming noted that the processing of the absentee ballots and their envelopes—the most time-consuming aspect of the process—will not be re-done in this case.
The Milwaukee Election Commission (MEC) told media outlets in an emailed statement that it was alerted to the issue in the afternoon.
“Each machine has a door that should have been locked and sealed. It appears some doors were not fully secured by senior election officials,” the commission said.
While noting that officials had “no doubt” as to the integrity of the election, the commission said the tabulation process would nonetheless be restarted to ensure transparency.
“This decision was made in consultation with both Republican and Democratic officials,” the commission said, adding that there was no estimate for how long the final count would be delayed.
At a press conference before 6 p.m. local time at the Baird Center, where absentee ballots were being tabulated, MEC Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez confirmed the issue was with voting equipment, not with ballot envelope sealing.
“The mistake was, they sealed the machine, but did not properly close it,” she said. “It’s a human error. It’s been a long day.”
Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said she found the news that counting had occurred in “unsecured conditions” to be unacceptable.
“This is an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration in a key swing state: voters deserve better and we are unambiguously calling on Milwaukee’s officials to DO THEIR JOBS and count ballots quickly and effectively. Anything less undermines voter confidence,” Trump said in a statement.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
Shares of former President Donald Trump’s social media company took a wild ride on Election Day, surging by double digits in morning trading before taking a sharp dive in the early afternoon, with the whipsaw price moves triggering repeated trading halts as investors navigated a volatile session while awaiting the results of the tight presidential race.
The price of Trump Media and Technology Group stock, which trades under the ticker DJT, rose steadily in morning trading on Nov. 5, soaring as high as 18 percent—before rolling over shortly after 2 p.m. ET and falling sharply.
The first circuit breaker that halted trading in DJT was triggered at 2:48 p.m., with trading resuming five minutes later. A second trading halt followed at 3:02 p.m., resuming at 3:07 p.m., with Trump Media closing the day’s session down just over 1 percent, after being down as much as 8 percent intraday.
Trump Media stock, which some analysts say is bought by Trump fans as a show of support or is traded by investors seeking to speculate on the result of the presidential election, has seen increased volatility in the run-up to Election Day. After hitting a record low of $12.15 on Sept. 23, DJT embarked on a feverish rally that sent its stock price soaring by more than 320 percent to a recent peak of around $51 per share on Oct. 29. A nearly 50 percent pullback followed, sending Trump Media to around the $28 per share mark on Nov. 1, before rebounding by nearly 30 percent on the eve of Election Day.
Trump owns about 57 percent of Trump Media, which currently has a market cap of around $6.79 billion. The company saw its value balloon to nearly $10 billion one day after its Wall Street debut, when DJT hit a record high of $66.22 per share on March 27. Currently, Trump’s share in DJT is worth around $3.9 billion.
According to Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes, the commencement of DJT’s trading on public markets was a testimony to the U.S. demand for free speech online, rejecting the “stifling censorship” imposed by big tech companies.
“We built this company to protect the American people’s voices and their freedom,” Nunes said in March shortly after DJT made its trading debut. “Having transformed into a public company, Truth Social remains committed to maintaining and vehemently defending a digital space for free expression.”
In August, Trump Media reported its second-quarter 2024 financial results, ending with $344 million in cash and no debt. At the time, the company announced it had launched its TV streaming service, Truth+. Despite a net loss of $16.4 million for the quarter, the company said in the report that it expects potential revenue growth from the new streaming platform.
This year, a new group is joining California’s voter base as two school districts grant 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote.
For the first time in California, teens this age in two Alameda County school districts—Berkeley and Oakland—have the right to vote in school board races this November.
“The fact that 16- and 17-year-olds now have the right to vote in Board of Education races in Oakland means they are now more engaged in our political process earlier in life, and more invested in what happens in their schools for them, their classmates, and all students who follow in their footsteps,” John Sasaki, director of communications at Oakland Unified School District told The Epoch Times on Nov. 5.
The Alameda County Registrar of Voters is using California’s preregistration system to register 16- and 17-year-olds for school board races in Oakland and Berkeley. Eligible teens in these cities must sign up as “youth voters” through the state’s preregistration platform.
To vote in these school board elections at ages 16 and 17, one must be a resident of the city and a U.S. citizen.
According to the county registrar of voters, about 1,500 youth had registered to vote by the Oct. 21 deadline.
The Epoch Times contacted Berkeley Unified School District for further comment.
I VOTED stickers are available in multiple languages at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk in Norwalk, Calif., on Oct. 7, 2024. (Sophie Li/The Epoch Times)
The district’s decision is supported by studies emphasizing the benefits of building voting habits early. A recent study from the University of California–Los Angeles found that it’s easier to develop these habits in high schoolers before factors such as relocating for college or work begin distancing them from civic institutions.
Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín echoed this message and said that it can foster a culture of civic engagement.
“By giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote about their education, we help to create lifelong voters who are more likely to participate in future local and national elections,” Arreguín said in the statement. “Early involvement fosters a sense of civic duty and strengthens our democracy for generations to come.”
Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao also praised this change.
“Voting is not just a right but a civic duty, and extending this right to 16- and 17-year-olds will foster a culture of civic participation from an early age,” Thao said in the statement.
Berkeley passed the ballot measure granting voting rights to 16- and 17-year-olds in school board races in 2016, followed by Oakland in 2020. However, implementation was delayed until this year due to technical challenges with the new system.
“This has never been done before in California, and we had to make sure that it was done properly,” Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis said in the statement. “I would like to thank the Board of Supervisors for their support in helping make it possible for 16- and 17-year-olds in Oakland and Berkeley to vote for school board in November 2024.”
Several California cities have rejected similar measures. San Francisco voters defeated youth voting measures in both 2016 and 2020, and Culver City voters narrowly rejected a similar measure in 2022.
Critics cite age-based restrictions, such as the legal drinking age and higher car insurance rates for teenagers, as evidence of young people’s limited decision-making and risk assessment abilities.
Passwords for Colorado’s voting systems were online for four months, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a Nov. 4 statement.
An employee with the secretary of state’s office uploaded the spreadsheet containing the passwords on June 21, Griswold said. The spreadsheet remained online until Oct. 24.
The employee who posted the passwords is no longer working for the office, Griswold has said. In the new update, the Democrat clarified that the staffer “amicably left” the job “before this matter took place.”
The public was not informed about the security problem until Oct. 29, five days after Griswold’s office said it discovered the issue. The Colorado Republican Party first informed the public about the situation.
“Making this public without understanding the size and scope of the disclosure, and without having a concrete plan for determining our technical and outreach strategy, would run contrary to cybersecurity best practices and carried a significant risk of fueling the major disinformation environment that surrounds elections today,” the secretary of state’s office said.
The passwords were for some voting system components. Officials say they aren’t enough by themselves to access a system. The passwords can only be used when people access the system in person, and voting equipment, under state law, must be stored in rooms that require a secure identification badge to enter.
The disclosed passwords covered systems in 34 of Colorado’s 64 counties, according to state officials. The Colorado Republican Party has said the disclosure affected 63 of the 64 counties.
Colorado officials said they since have changed all the passwords.
“Colorado’s elections are safe and Coloradans will have their voices heard on Election Day. Our elections have many layers of security. Ensuring that Colorado’s elections are secure and accessible has been and will always be our top priority, which is why the Department of State, along with County Clerks and election workers across the state, address any and every potential risk to our elections with the utmost seriousness,“ Griswold said on Monday. ”I am regretful for this error. I am dedicated to making sure we address this matter fully and that mistakes of this nature never happen again.”
The secretary of state’s office has hired an unidentified law firm to investigate how the situation unfolded and how it could be prevented in the future. The office says it will “release any findings as the law permits.” It is also planning to mandate all staff members take additional cybersecurity training.
Colorado Republicans have called for Griswold to step down in the wake of the password disclosure, but she has so far declined to do so. The 40-year-old, who once worked for former President Barack Obama’s campaign, has been in office since 2019.
The Colorado Libertarian Party sued Griswold and her top employee, Christopher Beall, alleging they breached their legal duty with the disclosure of the passwords and improperly changed the election rules to allow for the passwords to be changed.
“We are compelled to take this legal route to ensure that such lapses in security are not only corrected but are prevented in the future,” James Wiley, a candidate in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District and one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “Voter confidence is at stake, and it is our duty to safeguard the trust in our electoral systems.”
Vice President Kamala Harris raised far more money than former President Donald Trump in the final days before the 2024 general election.
As required by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the principal campaign committees backing both the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees disclosed each donation of more than $1,000 received between Oct. 17 and Nov. 4. The totals showed that Harris’s account pulled in nearly three times as much as Trump’s.
According to the sum of the 48-hour notice documents filed by the FEC, the principal campaign committee Harris for President raised about $29.2 million between Oct. 17 and Nov. 4. By comparison, the principal campaign committee Donald J. Trump for President 2024 Inc. raised about $10 million over the same period.
Those results are consistent with the final monthly filings the campaigns filed at the end of October. Those reports, reflecting fiscal performance from Oct. 1 to Oct. 16, showed the Harris campaign was collecting $3 for every $1 the Trump campaign received.
During the entire election season, from Jan. 1, 2023, to Nov. 5, 2024, the Harris campaign significantly outraised and outspent the Trump campaign.
The committee known as Harris for President was formerly backing President Joe Biden. In a controversial move, the Harris campaign claimed the Biden principal campaign committee and its hundreds of millions of dollars when she took over as the de facto and then official Democratic Party candidate in late July.
According to the FEC, Harris for President raised a total of $997.2 million between Jan. 1, 2023, and Oct. 16, 2024. If the last-minute fundraising total were added to that amount, the Democrats’ total fundraising haul would be north of $1 billion.
On the other hand, Trump’s presidential campaign raised about $388.1 million during the same span.
The duplicate public records show that the Harris campaign spent about $880.2 million during the election cycle, while Trump’s campaign spent about $354.9 million.
These figures do not include all of the outside spending in support of and opposition to the presidential candidates. Over the past two years, multiple, well-financed political action committees and nonprofit organizations have spent heavily on the race for the White House.
According to political spending tracking firm AdImpact, about $1.6 billion was spent on advertising supporting either Harris or Biden during the election cycle. By comparison, about $932.5 million was spent on pro-Trump ads.
A report issued in October by watchdog organization OpenSecrets said Republicans were the primary beneficiaries of outside spending in 2024.
The OpenSecrets report said that the most prominent boosters of the candidates were Future Forward, or FF PAC, and Make America Great Again Inc.
FF PAC, a hybrid PAC working to boost Democrats with a special focus on the presidency, raised more than $394 million between the beginning of 2023 and the middle of October and spent $373.4 million during the same timeframe.
The most significant supporter of the PAC was the 501(c)(4) Future Forward Action USA. According to its most recent filing, FF PAC received a total of about $128 million from the nonprofit in 2024. In 2023, Future Forward Action USA sent FF PAC about $8.4 million.
According to the groups’ documents filed with the FEC and the IRS, Chauncey McLean serves as both the treasurer of Future Forward and the president of Future Forward USA Action.
As a 501(c)(4), Future Forward USA Action is not required to reveal its donors nor the amount they give to the organization. According to its most recent filings with the IRS, the organization did not disclose its 2022 donors.
According to the FEC, MAGA Inc., a super PAC working to elect Trump. raised about $331.5 million between Jan. 1, 2024, and Oct. 16, 2024, and spent about $354.5 million.
The reclusive Mellon family heir, Timothy Mellon, was the primary sponsor of MAGA Inc. In 2024, according to federal records, he gave $140 million to MAGA Inc. Mellon also sent the super PAC $10 million in 2023.
Former President Donald Trump cast his ballot on Tuesday at a polling site in Palm Beach, Florida, and encouraged supporters to stay in line to vote on Election Day.
Speaking beside his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, he told reporters that “many more Republicans” appear to be voting than Democrats.
“I’m hearing that we’re doing very well everywhere,” he said, referring to Election Day voting.
Trump urged Republicans on multiple occasions during the press event “to stay in line” at polling sites across the United States on Election Day.
On social media platform X, the Republication presidential nominee said that “voter enthusiasm is through the roof” and that “lines are going to be long.”
“I need you to deliver your vote no matter how long it takes. Stay in line!” he told his supporters on the platform, adding that Democrats “want you to pack up and go home.”
Trump also said that illegal immigration is the “number one issue” of the presidential race in 2024.
“We can’t allow criminals to be put back into our country or to be put into our country,” Trump said about illegal immigrants.
He said that the issue outpaces inflation or the economy.
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), cast his ballot at a church in Cincinnati, Ohio, and said he has a good feeling about the election.
Referencing how he would govern if elected vice president, Vance told reporters that his attitude would focus on healing the political divide.
“The best way to heal the rift in the country is to try to govern the country as well as we can, create as much prosperity as we can for the American people and remind our fellow Americans that we are all fundamentally on the same team however we voted.”
During an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said, “We’re going to be patient,” warning that some battleground states won’t be finished until later in the evening.
“We’re going to be very focused on what’s happening in the early part of the night. But we know some of our bigger battleground states are not going to be fully tallied until later in the night or early in the morning.”
O’Malley Dillon said she is hopeful that early turnout in Georgia and North Carolina was a positive sign for the Harris campaign.
By the time early voting in North Carolina had ended on Saturday, more than 4.4 million voters had cast their ballots. It was particularly robust in the 25 western counties affected by Hurricane Helene. Georgia, meanwhile, saw more than 4 million voters cast early ballots, a record-breaking number for the state.
Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, already cast his vote on Oct. 23.
In a break from their stance in 2020, Republicans including Vance and Trump have urged their supporters to vote early. Data provided by the University of Florida show that significantly more people voted early in person during the 2024 election than in the 2020 contest, which saw significant mail-in voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic and government restrictions.
Harris plans to attend an election night party at Howard University in Washington, a historically black university where she graduated with a degree in economics and political science in 1986 and was an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he plans on watching the Election Day results come in at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Voting hours have been extended in Pennsylvania’s Cambria County after what officials described as a software problem disrupted the casting of ballots on Nov. 5.
“The Cambria County Board of Election learned early this morning that a software malfunction in the County’s Electronic Voting System has prevented voters from scanning their ballots,” county commissioners said in a statement to news outlets on Tuesday morning.
After the board filed to the Court of Common Pleas for an extension, the court extended the poll closing time from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., local media reported.
“No one should be turned away from the polls if they wish to cast their vote,” the board said.
It added later: “All completed ballots will be accepted, secured, and counted by the Board of Elections. The County Board of Elections has express voting machine at precinct locations to continue to allow voting electronically, while still allowing hand ballots to be cast. The County Board of Elections will be continuing to monitor this issue and take any necessary action to ensure that all voters have an opportunity to cast their ballots.”
The board also said it has brought in information technology specialists to review the software issue.
The county did not respond to a request for more information.
The Pennsylvania Department of State said it has been in contact with Cambria County officials.
“Voters are continuing to vote by paper ballot, in accordance with normal operations, while the county resolves the issue with in-precinct scanning,” the department said on the social media platform X. “We are working with the County to resolve this technical matter and remain committed to ensuring a free, fair, safe, and secure election.”
The Republican National Committee said it submitted a filing in support of the county’s legal filing.
“This morning’s ballot processing issues in Cambria have resulted in delays—this is unacceptable, plain and simple,” Michael Whatley, the chairman of the committee, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. “Our legal team acted immediately to support extended hours to give voters the opportunity to vote—we need voters to STAY IN LINE!”
Cambria County, located east of Pittsburgh, has about 133,000 residents. In 2020, candidate Joe Biden received 30.7 percent of the votes in the county. Former President Donald Trump received 68.1 percent. The rest of the votes went to a third-party candidate.
This is a developing story that will be updated.
LAS VEGAS—More than 1 million Nevadans—nearly 53 percent of the state’s registered voters—have already cast ballots in the 2024 election, with Republicans turning out in higher numbers than Democrats in a triple-tier battleground state where nonpartisan voters will decide the Nov. 5 election.
According to the Nevada secretary of state’s daily 9 a.m. update on Nov. 4, 1,072,640 registered Nevadans had voted either by mail or during the Oct. 19–Nov. 1 early voting period.
Registered Republicans had cast 405,602 of those votes, 43 percent of the tally, with 247,263 voting in-person early and 158,339 voting by mail, according to the state data. That is approximately two-thirds—67 percent—of the state’s 600,000 registered Republicans.
The GOP turnout is nearly 43,200 more than the 362,424 registered Democrats who have already voted, giving Republicans a 4-percentage point lead between the two parties in the tallies cast before Election Day.
More than 150,000 Democrats voted early, and more than 212,000 have done so by mail, meaning that 59 percent of the nearly 610,000 registered with the party have already voted.
While GOP voters cast nearly 100,000 more in-person early votes, Democrats have mailed in about 65,000 more ballots, the secretary of state’s office documents.
Democrats were trailing Republicans in the turnout by as much as 6 percent before the last few days of the two-week early voting period.
The early vote turnout edge is a reversal of trends in recent election cycles where Democrats often build a “blue wall” in mail-in ballots that Republicans fail to overcome in Election Day turnout.
The start of 2024 Election Day is ahead not only in voter turnout but also in registered voters.
According to a Nov.1 statement by Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, there was an increase of 60,076 active registered voters in October, boosting the state’s enrollment to 2,035,166 “active” registered voters—2.34 million are registered, but about 300,000 haven’t voted in repeated election cycles—609,954 are Democrats (29.97 percent); 600,754 are Republicans (29.52 percent); a third, 675,982, are nonpartisan; and the remainder are with assorted minor political parties.
That is a dramatic decline in Democrats’ triple-figure registration advantages from as recently as four years ago, with now only 9,200 fewer registered Republicans in the state than Democrats.
The trends have GOP boosters confident that former President Donald Trump could be the first Republican to win the Silver State since 2004, challenger Sam Brown could unseat Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), and at least one Democrat-held Las Vegas-area congressional seat could be flipped in the Nov. 5 election.
But the wild card is nonpartisan voters—now Nevada’s largest voting constituency.
According to state data, 304,614 Nevadans not registered with either party or with third parties have voted in the election, 159,096 by mail, and 145,518 in-person during early voting.
That means more than 55 percent of nonpartisans—more than 370,000 of 675,982 registered to vote—have not voted yet. Comparatively, less than 32 percent of registered Republicans haven’t voted, and 41 percent of those signed on with the Democrats have yet to cast ballots.
That nonpartisan turnout—and who they vote for—will be the deciding factor in determining who wins and loses Nevada’s Nov. 5 election.
Unlike in past elections, mail-in ballots are already being counted, and county election officials will begin counting early in-person votes the morning of Election Day—a policy change enacted in April that should allow results to be posted sooner after polls close at 7 p.m. The first release of numbers, including the early vote tallies, should be substantial.
In 2020, the Nov. 3 Nevada presidential race was not called until four days after Election Day because hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots still had to be counted after polls closed. Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden won the 2020 election in Nevada by 2.39 percent, about less than 33,580 votes.
Nevada is one of the nation’s best bellwether states. The candidate who won the Silver State has won the White House in 27 of the past 30 presidential elections, the last time in 2016.
While Vice President Kamala Harris has consistently, but narrowly, led in Nevada polls since succeeding Biden as the Democrat’s nominee in July, two of four late surveys showed Trump suddenly surging as a clear favorite.
In an Atlas Intel Nov. 1–2 survey, 782 likely voters had Trump leading by 5.5 percentage points, and a Susquehanna Oct. 28–31 poll of 400 likely voters had Trump up by a breakaway 6 percentage points.
Meanwhile, a New York Times/Siena Oct. 24–Nov. 2 survey of 1,010 likely voters had Harris up by 2–3 percentage points, and an Emerson Oct. 29–Oct. 31 poll of 700 likely voters put her up by 1 percent.
Six proposed constitutional amendments on Nevada’s ballot are also driving turnout, including measures that would adopt a ranked voting primary system, require a voter ID to cast ballots, and enshrine the right to abortion access.
Nevada is one of 10 states where voters will see an abortion measure on their Nov. 5 ballots in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
Election Day rapid response legal teams are being deployed in major Texas counties by the state’s attorney general to monitor polling stations, enforce election laws, and address any issues that arise, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office said in a Nov. 4 statement.
The teams are ready to deal with “issues seen in previous cycles,” such as extended polling location closures, ballot shortages, and improper extension of voting hours, according to Paxton’s office.
“Similarly, the OAG will prepare to take defensive action against activist groups who might attempt to influence the election through litigation,” Paxton’s office said in its statement. “The Election Day Rapid Response Legal Team will coordinate with the Texas Secretary of State to ensure that all issues are addressed immediately, and that Texas elections are fair and secure.”
Paxton said the deployment of the teams is also to ensure the election process runs smoothly and without interference.
“There is no issue more important and more fundamental to our nation than election integrity,” he said. “Our Election Day Rapid Response Legal Team will be on the frontline on November 5th. We will defend the ballot box from any bad actors seeking to unduly influence or illegally undermine Texas elections.”
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a Nov. 1 statement that it plans to deploy poll monitors in 86 jurisdictions in 27 states across the country, including eight in Texas.
Paxton announced in a Nov. 4 social media post that he was suing the federal government for allegedly “dispatching federal agents to ’monitor' Texas elections without any legal authority and in violation of State law.”
The lawsuit argued that “under Texas law, the list of persons who may be present in voting locations or central counting stations does not include federal authorities.”
A judge later rejected the bid by Texas officials to block the federal government from sending election monitors to the state.
Federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered the DOJ to confirm that “no observers” would be present in polling locations in Texas but did not issue the restraining order the state had requested.
“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,” Kacsmaryk said in the ruling.
In a similar case, a federal judge on Nov. 4 also rejected a bid by Missouri officials to block DOJ poll monitors.
The DOJ declined to comment on the lawsuits.
Reuters and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
Federal judges have rejected bids by Missouri and Texas officials to block U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) poll monitors.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk on Nov. 5 rejected a motion for a temporary restraining order that was lodged by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Paxton, a Republican, did not provide written certification that he attempted to provide notification to defendants, which is required to enter such an order, the judge said in a 2-page order.
“Further, considering the public interest, 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,” he wrote.
Paxton had argued that the DOJ lacked legal authorization to dispatch personnel to monitor state elections. Texas law says DOJ monitors are not allowed inside polling places.
U.S. District Judge Sarah Pitlyk late Monday also turned down a motion from Missouri for a temporary restraining order to block DOJ personnel from monitoring polls.
“On expedited consideration of the parties’ arguments, the Court finds that the State of Missouri has not carried the burden of justifying extraordinary relief,” Pitlyk wrote in a 4-page order.
Missouri’s secretary of state and attorney general earlier on Monday sued to block the DOJ from sending personnel to monitor polling places. In an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order, they said that the court should quickly order the DOJ not to send personnel because “absent immediate relief, Defendants will unlawfully enter Missouri polling locations on Election Day, displacing state law without clear authority.”
DOJ officials disagreed, saying a settlement between the agency and the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners allows monitoring on Election Day.
The 2019 settlement states in part that the city “will cooperate fully with the United States’ efforts to monitor compliance with this Agreement, including but not limited to providing the United States with timely access to polling places (including on Election Day).”
To receive a temporary restraining order, plaintiffs must show a likelihood of success. Pitlyk said the plaintiffs in this case have not.
“In practical terms, the expected harm is monitoring by two individuals at one polling place to ensure compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, as contemplated by an agreement that has been in place for several years, and as already done at least twice without incident,” she wrote.
“The harms to persons with disabilities that led to the Settlement Agreement and the presence of federal observers are documented and uncontested, whereas the harms that the State of Missouri anticipates are speculative—a defect underscored by the fact that similar observers have been present at least twice and their presence apparently went unnoticed,” she added later.
While Missouri may be harmed by not being able to enforce its election laws, the United States may be harmed by not being able to enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act, and it’s not clear Missouri’s interests outweigh the federal interests, according to the judge.
The outcome is different from 2022 when the DOJ said it would send employees to monitor polls in a different Missouri County but rolled back the plans after pushback from Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft.
The 2024 presidential election will see the first application of a 2022 amendment to the laws governing the transfer of power between administrations.
There are 77 days between the Nov. 5 election and the Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration of the next president, during which the president-elect will ready his or her administration to take over from President Joe Biden.
The handoffs between an outgoing administration and a government-in-waiting have been largely drama-free for decades, and they have been governed by the rules enumerated in the Presidential Transition Act of 1963.
The Electoral Count Reform Act will take effect this year, ensuring that five days after the election, the team of the winning candidate (or both candidates if the winner is not yet identified) will begin readying for the White House.
Unless another authority is designated by state law, the act appoints governors as the principal officials responsible for filing certificates of state presidential electors. By providing expedited court review of matters pertaining to electors, it guarantees that Congress can establish a final slate of electors.
The vice president’s involvement in the electoral vote count is defined by the new act as purely ceremonial, and he or she is not given any power to affect the count in any way. The law also reduces the possibility of challenges by raising the threshold for congressional objections to one-fifth of each house. Previously, only two members, one from each chamber, were needed to enter an objection to an elector or slate of electors.
Additionally, the General Services Administration (GSA) is now required to provide money to both candidates in the event that a candidate does not withdraw their candidacy within five days following the election. This change affects the presidential transition process. The GSA will cut off financing to the unsuccessful campaign once the results are finalized.
The initial responsibility of the successful candidate is to acquire knowledge of the current agency missions, policies, and ongoing projects, as well as to commence the process of filling political positions in the executive branch, ranging from Cabinet secretaries to press assistants.
The new team receives guidance by career leaders and appointees from the outgoing administration to assist in the launch of its government. The outgoing administration also provides briefings on significant issues and facilitates inquiries. An orderly transition has long been dependent on this flow of resources.
Delays occurred following the 2020 presidential election as President Donald Trump questioned the validity of the election results as they were being reported. Because Trump was contesting the results in court, there was a delay in the start of the transition from Election Day on Nov. 3 to Nov. 23 in 2020.
Emily Murphy, then head of the GSA, reviewed the transition law from 1963 and concluded that she lacked the legal authority to determine a winner and commence funding and collaboration with the transition to a Biden administration.
Weeks after the election, Murphy sent a letter of ascertainment to Biden and commenced the transition process after Trump’s efforts to contest the results had collapsed across key states.
According to the GSA’s guidelines on the new rules, the amendment eliminates lengthy delays and states “an affirmative ‘ascertainment’ by GSA is no longer a prerequisite for obtaining transition support services.”
However, the new law also effectively mandates federal support and cooperation for both candidates to initiate a transition. It is stated that such support should persist until “significant legal challenges” that could affect electoral outcomes have been “substantially resolved” or until electors from each state convene in December to formally select an Electoral College winner.
Under this mandate, Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris may find themselves forming rival administrations for weeks.
The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement amendment to the Presidential Transition Act was passed in December 2022.
During a committee hearing on the Electoral Count Act on Aug. 3 that year, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) said: “We were all there on Jan. 6. ... We have a duty [and] responsibility to make sure it never happens again.” Manchin was referring to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, when protesters breached the U.S. Capitol while Congress was counting electoral votes.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said in her testimony: “In four out of the past six presidential elections, the Electoral Count Act’s process for counting electoral votes has been abused with frivolous objections being raised by members of both parties. But it took the violent breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6 to really shine a spotlight on how urgent the need for reform was.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) opposed the bill, stating in a press statement: “This bill is a bad bill. ... It’s bad policy and it’s bad for democracy. There are serious constitutional questions in the bill. The text of the Constitution, Article Two says, ‘Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.' This bill is Congress trying to intrude on the authority of the state legislatures to do that.”
While Americans’ attention has mostly been focused on the top-of-the-ticket presidential race, the contest between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t the only one that will determine the balance of power in 2025.
The two major parties are also competing for control of the House, seen as a toss-up, and the Senate, which Republicans are favored to win. More than 140 ballot measures will also be considered across the United States.
Here are the biggest races to keep an eye on as results come in on Nov. 5 and the days following.
Current polling in the core seven swing-states shows an advantage for Trump, but one within the margin of error.
Republicans enter election night with a strong advantage on the current map.
Sen. Joe Manchin’s (I-W.Va.) departure from the race earlier this year almost guarantees a Republican flip in West Virginia, America’s second reddest state.
Other outcomes are less certain. These races will decide control of the upper chamber:
These districts will remain crucial as the GOP looks to keep its majority in the lower congressional chamber.
An election worker moves early voting ballots at the Salt Lake County election offices in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Nov. 4, 2024. (Photo by George Frey/AFP via Getty Images)
These races are considered close enough that they could go either way. The outcomes will depend in part on both candidates’ top of the ticket performance in the region.
But many of its House races are more competitive, and GOP gains here were crucial to the Republican reclamation of the House in 2022.
These races will again be pivotal this year as both parties seek to claim control of the House.
A voter drops off ballots at an official ballot drop box on the final day of early voting ahead of Election Day at City Hall in San Francisco, on Nov. 4, 2024. (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)
Here are the ones to watch:
Results will start rolling in at 6 p.m. EST on Election Day.
Starting with Kentucky, which closes at 6 p.m. EST, and ending with Alaska and Hawaii, which close at midnight, results will come in every hour.
The largest set of states close their polls at 8 p.m. Every time listed in this article is Eastern Standard Time.
According to various state election authorities, voters waiting in line when the polls are scheduled to close are typically allowed to vote.
Seven more states will close their polls at 7 p.m. Florida, with 30 electoral votes, is the largest state to close at 7 p.m.
According to various state election authorities, Indiana, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia will close their polls at 7 p.m.
At the same time, two more states—Ohio and West Virginia—will close their polls. Ohio, with 17 votes in the Electoral College, is the biggest.
At the top of this hour, Michigan and Pennsylvania—the site of much of the last-minute campaigning by the Democrat and Republican Party’s nominees—will close their polls.
Michigan casts 15 votes in the Electoral College in 2024. As Michigan covers two time zones, some of its polls will close an hour later, at 9 p.m.
Pennsylvania gets 19 votes in the 2024 Electoral College. That’s the highest number of any of the battleground states.
Texas, the second-largest state for electoral votes in the union, will also close its polls at 8 p.m. The Lone Star State gets 40 votes in the Electoral College.
Along with these three key states, polls close at 8 p.m. in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, the District of Columbia, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Tennessee.
Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Texas all straddle two time zones, so some of the polls in their western counties will close at 9 p.m.
New York, the largest state in the 9 p.m. set, is also the latest on the East Coast to close its polls. The Empire State hands out 28 Electoral College votes.
Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming also close their polls at 9 p.m.
Four other Western states —Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Utah—will close their polls at 10 p.m. Oregon, with 12 votes, will count the most in the 2024 Electoral College in the 10 p.m. set.
As polls close on Nov. 5, Americans will be eager to learn the result of the presidential election. Sometimes experts are able to accurately predict a winner on election night or early the next day, usually when the result is lopsided.
In close elections, it can take several days—even weeks—to find out who won. Here’s what we’ll be watching on election night, and when both unofficial and official results may be available.
Technically, that’s true of all states. Yet some states have reliably favored one party or the other for decades, so there’s little doubt about who will win in 2024.
This year polling suggests that either presidential candidate could win in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.
Watch for results in these states, which are likely to be decisive in the 2024 election.
Poll closing times range from 6 p.m. ET in parts of Indiana and Kentucky to midnight ET in Alaska and Hawaii.
Polls close in Georgia at 7 p.m., North Carolina at 7:30 p.m., Pennsylvania and Michigan at 8 p.m., Arizona and Wisconsin at 9 p.m., and Nevada at 10 p.m. All times are stated in Eastern Time.
Those first results are unofficial, or preliminary, results. And early returns can be misleading because they represent a small portion of a state’s voters. Precincts with larger populations generally take longer to count, and mail-in ballots can take longer still because the voter’s identity must be verified. Some states allow for mail-in ballots to arrive and be counted after Election Day.
According to the AP, that comes down to analyzing the known vote tallies and asking: Is there any scenario in which the trailing candidate can catch up?
When they are satisfied that the answer is no, they project the winner.
Those forecasts are merely predictions, however. Only Congress can declare the winner of a presidential election. More on that below.
In 2016, the AP declared Donald Trump the winner at 2:29 a.m. ET on Nov. 9, less than three hours after the last polls closed.
But in 2020, the AP didn’t declare Joe Biden the winner until 11:26 a.m. ET on Nov. 7, four days after Election Day.
Many states have worked to speed up the process this year by using ballot-counting machines and implementing rules to allow early votes to be tabulated before Election Day.
In Michigan, for example, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson estimates that unofficial election results will be available by the end of the day on Nov. 6.
In Nevada, where more than three-quarters of votes were cast early in the 2020 election, early vote counting cannot begin until 8 a.m. on Election Day.
In close races, neither candidate may concede for weeks, if at all.
In 2000, Vice President Al Gore initially conceded defeat shortly after the polls closed but retracted his statement when additional returns showed the race in Florida was too close to call.
After losing a court battle concerning the Florida recount, Gore conceded a second time on Dec. 13.
Concession speeches are not legally binding, however. The outcome of a presidential race is determined by the electoral process, not the candidates themselves.
Michigan’s certification is scheduled for Nov. 22 and North Carolina’s for Dec. 26.
The latest date certification can occur in other battleground states is as follows: Georgia, Nov. 23; Nevada, Nov. 26; Wisconsin, Dec. 1; Arizona, Dec. 2.
Pennsylvania does not have a specified state deadline for certification of election results, but governors in all states must issue Certificates of Ascertainment designating electors to the Electoral College by Dec. 11.
Electors in each state will meet in their state capitols on Dec. 17 to cast the Electoral College votes.
The final certification will occur on Jan. 6, 2025, when the U.S. Congress meets in a joint session to count the electoral votes.
President Joe Biden has repeatedly said that the U.S. economy is “the envy of the world.” That message, however, doesn’t seem to be resonating with many voters who are heading to the polls to elect the next president on Nov. 5.
In battleground states, dozens of voters interviewed by The Epoch Times said that the economy is one of their top concerns and discussed how their lives have been affected by rising costs over the past four years.
Maria Orozco, a nurse from Fort Valley, Georgia, is a supporter of former President Donald Trump who says the economy is her single most important issue.
“I don’t think it’s in good state, to be honest. It could do a lot better. I’m hoping for a change,” she told The Epoch Times on Oct. 28.
“No matter how much money you’re making or how many extra jobs you’re picking up, your money isn’t lasting the way it used to. It doesn’t stretch as far for groceries and everything else in general,” she said.
Latest polls show the presidential race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is a statistical tie.
About 80 percent of registered voters said the economy would play a significant role in their voting decisions for the 2024 presidential election, according to a September report from the Pew Research Center.
Nearly 93 percent of Trump supporters cited the economy as very important to their vote, while 68 percent of Harris supporters said the same thing.
Maria Orozco, a nurse, speaks outside the early voting center at Peach County Government Center in Fort Valley, Ga., on Oct. 28, 2024. (The Epoch Times)
Carolyn Strickland, a Trump supporter from Atlanta is disappointed that women’s rights, particularly the abortion issue, has dominated much of the election discussion this year.
“Honestly, I think our economy needs to be stabilized and we need to reduce our national debt,” she told The Epoch Times on Oct. 27.
As a college student, Stickland feels the struggle of trying to buy groceries and make ends meet each week.
She wants a healthier economy and a country with fewer illegal immigrants.
“I want to see a happier America overall,” she said.
During a press briefing on Oct. 30, Jared Bernstein, who chairs the White House Council of Economic Advisers, presented a chart showing how the U.S. economy has outperformed other advanced economies since the pandemic. In another chart, he said, Biden has achieved the highest cumulative economic growth of any recent president.
Chart taken from the White House's GDP Issue Brief.
But public perception remains stubbornly negative.
In a recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC, seven in 10 respondents said the country is going in the wrong direction.
“Prices are still too high for too many people, for too many products, too many households,” Bernstein noted when asked about the public sentiment.
During an interview a few weeks ago, he mentioned that he had not yet decided who to support.
Joshua Goodman, an independent voter, said he doesn't know who he will support in the election, in Tucson, Ariz., on Oct. 4, 2024. (Darlene McCormick Sanchez/The Epoch Times)
“This year, it’s going to boil down to people like me,” he said, referring to which party will control Congress and the White House in 2025. “I flip back and forth; I don’t have a political allegiance.”
Goodman said his finances have gotten tighter over the past four years. He wants to move, but he can’t afford a mortgage with the current high rates hovering around 8 percent.
Inflation ties in with the country’s biggest problem, which is the open southern border, he said.
“We’ve got to shut it down.”
Goodman said if Harris wants to use taxpayer dollars to build affordable homes, then she needs to stop letting illegal immigrants into the country.
He complained about the price of groceries and eating out.
Shahan Mirza from Pittsburgh calls himself independent, but he’s leaning toward Trump in this election.
“The stock market is going up and the unemployment rate is going down, but inflation is really killing us right now. We can’t afford anything,” the accounting and finance student at Penn State University said at an Oct. 26 Trump rally in Pennsylvania. “Inflation is still ravaging.”
His classmate Shivani Kohl agreed.
“I support Trump on all the policies besides his stand on abortion,” Kohl said.
Numerous polls have shown that when it comes to the economy, voters are more inclined to favor Trump over Biden and Harris.
Surveys also reveal a significant gap between the positive economic data released by the government and the realities voters face in their daily lives.
Biden issued a statement on Oct. 30, celebrating the third quarter GDP report, which showed 2.8 percent growth.
“Since I took office, the economy has grown 12.6 percent, we’ve had the lowest average unemployment in 50 years, 16 million jobs have been created, and incomes have risen $4,000 more than inflation,” Biden said in the statement.
“While critics thought we’d need a recession to lower inflation, instead we’ve grown around 3 percent a year on average, while inflation has fallen to the level right before the pandemic,” he said.
Annual inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022.
While the rate of inflation has significantly slowed after the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, prices have surged by more than 20 percent since Biden took office. Since January 2021, prices have risen by 23 percent for food, approximately 38 percent for gasoline, and more than 23 percent for housing, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Harris has struggled to differentiate herself from Biden’s record on inflation, the controversial Afghanistan withdrawal, and the Gaza crisis. This has affected her approval ratings, according to strategists.
In a recent interview with The Epoch Times, Karen Hult, a political science professor at Virginia Tech, agreed that this has presented a dilemma for the Harris campaign.
However, Hult emphasized the difficulties in changing public perceptions regarding inflation.
“There is not much that Vice President Harris can do to distinguish herself from the Biden–Harris record,” she said. “There is nothing they can do about perceptions of the economy.”
“I am not too much affected by it. I’m retired. My wife’s retired. We’re doing okay,” Reilly said at a Harris campaign rally on Oct. 14 in his hometown.
Reilly, who worked as a retail manager for 45 years before retiring, said that his vote in this year’s election is not influenced by any specific policy issue.
“It’s about freedom. It’s about the Constitution,” he said. “This election is not about policy for me.”
On Oct. 26, the first day of early voting in Michigan, locals shared a range of views on the state of America’s economy.
“Worldwide, we’re in good shape,” Bill Keller said at an early voting center in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
Yet the Harris supporter worried that anger over grocery prices might be eroding support for Democrats in Michigan.
He noted that price inflation is a problem for everyone. Keller, however, attributed it to price gouging by large corporations—in line with Harris’s proposal to target big businesses.
Emma Wolford, another voter from Farmington Hills, voiced her frustration with Harris’s approach to inflation.
“It frightens me to hear a candidate say that they can bring the prices down,” said Wolford, who supports Trump.
To Wolford, whose family moved from England when she was a child to avoid what she describes as encroaching socialism, Harris’s talk of altering corporations’ prices sounds “a little socialist.”
Emma Wolford after voting in her first election as a U.S. citizen in Farmington Hills, Mich., on Oct. 26, 2024. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times).
Michelle Stankus waited roughly an hour in line to vote in Waterford Oaks, Michigan.
Harris supporter Stankus believes the American economy has regained its footing following COVID-19.
She acknowledged the high prices driving many complaints by Americans. She suggested she was comfortable with the tradeoff between financial costs and a prized value.
“I’d rather pay extra for a gallon of gas and still have my rights,” she said, referring to abortion access.
Surprisingly, some Michiganders with diverse political views agreed on one point: Trump’s tariffs on China could benefit their state.
As part of his platform, Trump proposes tariffs of at least 60 percent on Chinese imports and a 10 percent universal tariff on all imported goods.
Some critics argue that these tariffs could lead to higher prices for Americans.
“The economy is my biggest competition when I’m selling,” said early voter Andy Kollin from Michigan, who works in sales. “Things are expensive.”
The Harris supporter has found that Trump’s pro-tariff message resonates in Michigan, a state built in large part on heavy industries that could stand to gain from protection.
“There’s been a lot of election talk in my sales calls that I make every day, and certainly, tariffs come up,” he said.
Farnsworth Howard, a retired union representative for the United Autoworkers, also sounded positive about protective trade measures championed by Trump. He and his wife voted for the former president in early voting in Michigan.
“They should pay their fair share,” Howard said of the United States’s foreign industrial competitors.
Diane Dawson, 50, from Chester County, Pennsylvania, plans to vote for Harris. She feels that Harris will tackle rising prices and hold corporations accountable for price gouging.
“Economy is tough. Yes, I agree. Prices are high. However, we’re doing way better than we were four years ago when Donald Trump was exiting office. My 401K is going up,” she said.
“However, I do believe that a lot of companies have taken advantage of what happened in COVID. I have a friend who lives in Florida. She tells me she pays $12 for a dozen eggs, and I’m like, ‘I don’t pay that much. I pay $4 for eggs. So, I think your grocery store is clearly taking advantage of you.’ I think Kamala Harris is going to do something about it.”
David Munson, an early voter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, sought to see it from all angles. The health of the economy, Munson said, “depends on your perspective.”
It isn’t so bad for “those that have the ability to earn more income,” he said.
But for those like him, who live on a fixed income, life has been harder.
Joshua Philipp and Darlene McCormick Sanchez contributed to this report.
Early voting has exploded in popularity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but some voters still prefer to cast their ballots in person on Election Day.
For those preparing to join those lines, here are the answers to some common questions they might have.
Additionally, all states and territories except North Dakota require voter registration.
Each state has its own registration deadline, though some offer same-day registration or conditional registration and provisional ballots for those who missed the cutoff.
Voters can check the status of their registration here. A list of state registration deadlines and policies can be found here.
Some states require that voters present a valid photo ID at the polls to vote. Others allow voters to present other identifying documents, such as a birth certificate, current utility bill, bank statement, paycheck, or government-issued document that shows the individual’s name and address.
In some cases, voters may be allowed to vote without showing any form of identification.
Confirm your state’s requirements here.
Toss-up Senate races in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will receive plenty of attention as the night progresses. So will Montana’s contest, where three-term Democrat Sen. Jon Tester is expected to lose his seat to Republican newcomer Tim Sheehy.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) are also defending their seats, while Arizona’s Democrat Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) will face off against former Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in the race to replace Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.).
In the House, every seat is up for grabs. The Epoch Times has identified 20 races that could decide control of the chamber.
State deadlines vary for returning absentee ballots, as do the times when officials may start processing and counting them.
In Arizona, for instance, officials may count absentee ballots immediately upon receipt, though they must be received by the elections office by 7 p.m. MST on Election Day.
In Illinois, ballots can be received and counted as late as 14 days after the election, provided that they are postmarked by Election Day. Officials begin the counting process after the polls close.
Verify your state’s ballot return deadlines here or with your elections office.
The U.S. Postal Service encourages those voting by mail to mail their completed ballots before Election Day and at least one week before their state’s deadline to ensure their vote is counted.
Other authorities you may contact include a local FBI office, U.S. attorney’s office, or the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division.
The Department of Justice also has an online form through which voters may report incidents of voter suppression or intimidation.
Podcaster Joe Rogan has formally endorsed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on the eve of Election Day.
In a Nov. 4 statement posted on X, accompanying a video of his interview with Elon Musk, Rogan said during the podcast the billionaire had made the “most compelling case for Trump you'll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way.”
“For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump. Enjoy the podcast,” Rogan wrote.
During the two-and-a-half-hour interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” Musk and Rogan discuss a range of topics.
Musk, who has been campaigning for Trump in the past month, called the current election a “turning point,” and said he hadn’t been politically active in past elections because he didn’t think anything was at stake.
However, he said the situation was different this time because he fears the loss of democracy in America.
Musk said if the large number of illegal immigrants entering the swing states can vote, it could top the place of power in favor of one party and result in a “permanent victory,” where only one side has a feasible chance of winning any election.
“There’s only like six or seven swing States and the margin of victory in those States is small—often like 10,000 or 20,000 votes,” Musk said.
After President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he signed an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to determine the population of each state without regard to whether residents have lawful immigration status.
Some Republican senators, such as Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), have raised concerns over illegal immigrants being counted in the national census, warning that their numbers could go toward apportioning House seats and the Electoral College.
Rogan’s endorsement came after an interview with Trump on Oct. 26, and another with the Vice Presidential Candidate of the Republican Party, JD Vance on Oct. 31.
According to Rogan, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s campaign tried to arrange an interview but was unable to agree on the location and length.
In his recent interview with Musk, Rogan said he considered agreeing to the Harris campaign’s suggestion of traveling to meet her and only recording for 45 minutes.
However, he decided it would be unfair to allow unique stipulations when Trump traveled to the Joe Rogan Experience Studio in Texas and agreed to the standard format of several hours long.
Rogan’s podcast is number one globally, with three billion listeners and millions of subscribers.
Update: An earlier version of this article has been updated with more information.
ATLANTA—Voters in Georgia have been inundated with appeals for their support—campaign rallies, texts, and calls encouraging them to donate to one candidate or the other, and perpetual advertisements—for months now.
Billboards, yard signs, and bumper stickers expressing support for one candidate or the other litter Buckhead, a neighborhood to the north of Atlanta’s city center.
Several Atlanta residents told The Epoch Times they’re sick of it, and look forward to the end of the election season.
With Election Day just a day out, many have already cast their ballot in the Peach State.
According to the Georgia secretary of state, more than 4 million Georgians, more than 55 percent, of the state’s 7.28 million active voters, have voted early or by absentee ballot.
While Georgia was once a solidly red state, demographic and political trends have made the state friendlier to Democrats in recent cycles.
In 2020, candidate Joe Biden received Georgia’s 16 electoral voters by a razor-thin 0.24 percent margin, or just 11,779 votes. It marked the first time since 1992 that a Democrat carried the Peach State.
Also in 2020, Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) won their Senate bids, the first time Georgia had two Democrats in the Senate since 2003. Two years later, Warnock again beat off a challenge from former football star Herschel Walker.
But though Democrats have had a run of good luck in the state in recent years, maintaining that edge this year could be difficult due to demographic shifts toward former President Donald Trump, particularly among young men and black voters.
Trump’s strategy involves seizing as many new votes among these demographics as possible, along with ensuring that he increases turnout in the 129 Georgia counties that backed him in 2020.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s strategy, meanwhile, hinges on high turnout in the areas around Atlanta and other urban centers, staunching the bleeding among crucial demographics, and increasing her share among women and college-educated whites, who have shifted to be more favorable to Democrats in recent cycles.
She likely needs to run up her total in the 30 urban and suburban counties that backed Biden in 2020 to counter the Trump campaign’s efforts to increase turnout among low propensity and rural voters.
It’s no secret that Trump in 2024 is heavily favored in the Peach State, however.
The RealClearPolling averages place him with a 1.7 percent lead over Harris on Nov. 4.
A recent poll by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—whose final 2020 poll predicted a Biden +1 environment, which roughly aligned with Biden’s performance in the state—found Trump ahead by 4 points.
Here’s how the race in Georgia stands with just a day until the 2024 election.
Most of them—124—are designated as “rural” by state officials—and are thus highly favorable to Trump. And indeed, in 2020, 129 counties in Georgia ultimately sided with Trump over Biden.
Biden’s victory came from the handful of urban counties in the state, where favorable demographics turned out in droves for him. Still, it only barely pushed him over the line to win.
“Here is the deal: Georgia has 159 counties. The Democrats are going to lose at least 125 of those,” Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia, told The Epoch Times.
“They have to run up the numbers in the urban counties.”
In 2020, he noted, Democrats’ support was heavily concentrated in the counties that make up the Atlanta metropolitan area: “If you look at a color-coded map, it’s all red with islands of blue. Nine of those [counties that voted for Democrats] are clustered in [the] Atlanta metro area.”
Indeed, Biden only won three counties in the Atlanta area—Fulton, Clayton, and DeKalb—and two outside it—Hancock and Clarke County—by a total of more than 70 percent of the vote. Many counties that did back Biden did so relatively narrowly, winning by less than 10 percent.
Trump, by contrast, won dozens of rural counties by greater than 70 percent margins, including some where Biden received only single-digit support.
Thus, Bullock said, for Democrats, the strategy is to “run up the totals and hope they hold on” when rural county votes are counted.
Daniel Cronrath, a government professor at Florida State University at Jacksonville, said that early returns in Fulton County, the seat of Atlanta’s city center, on election night will be revealing of national trends.
“[Georgia is] kind of a microcosm with what you see in other states,” Cronrath said. “If Fulton County doesn’t turn out, it is going to be a long night for Harris. Harris has a turnout model that relies on Fulton County and some of those other Atlanta area counties.”
For Trump, meanwhile, the strategy is to run up his totals and draw out low-propensity voters in the state’s GOP-favorable counties.
Cobb County Republican chairwoman Salleigh Grubbs told The Epoch Times, “Our thing is to concentrate on our local candidates as well as the federal elections, and our tactic is to just get out … the low propensity Republican voter … people who didn’t get out for the primary or 2022, 2020 votes.”
Grubbs is also hoping Republicans can expand their margins in light blue counties like Cobb. In 2020, Biden won Cobb County—part of the Atlanta metro area—by 14.3 percent.
“We’re definitely thinking this is a winnable county,” Grubbs said. “There are more people motivated than ever before and people are fed up.”
According to early voting data from the secretary of state, there are some positive signs for Trump in the state.
In several northern counties, which voted overwhelmingly in favor of Trump in 2020, early turnout has already been high.
Towns County, for instance—a county where 80 percent of residents backed Trump in 2020—has the highest early turnout in the state today, with 72.2 percent of active voters in the county having already cast a ballot.
By contrast, in Clayton County—an Atlanta-area county where 85 percent of residents backed Biden—43 percent have already voted.
Ultimately, however, the outcome is likely to hinge on black turnout and support in predominantly black counties—but among this historically Democrat-faithful bloc, too, there are warning signs for Harris.
That year, in the midst of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests and riots, Biden was able to win nearly 90 percent of the black vote in Georgia. That was aided in part by former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ vast voter turnout machine, which helped increase black turnout through nonprofit groups and fundraising.
That year, black voters made up an estimated 28 percent of the statewide electorate. Their vast support for Biden was enough to push the state just over the tipping point.
While the state is 50.8 percent white, according to data from the 2020 census, black residents make up the next biggest share of the population at 31.1 percent.
But it’s unclear if Democrats will be able to motivate as much turnout as they did in 2020 among the crucial bloc—or to win as much support among those who do go to the polls.
Atlas Intel, which was among the most accurate national pollsters in 2020, showed in an October poll signs of dwindling support for Democrats among black voters.
That poll shows a 2-point lead for Trump in Georgia as a whole. It found that Trump is favored by about 25 percent of black voters, compared with 73 percent that backed Harris.
Another poll conducted in the state by ActiVote found similar results, with Trump winning 24 percent of the black vote to Harris’s 76 percent.
A national poll conducted by The New York Times/Siena found lower margins for Trump, with 15 percent of black voters expressing support for him, but it aligned with other polls in finding around 78 percent support for Harris.
Seven of 15 black voters who spoke to The Epoch Times in Georgia said they were backing Trump. Another seemed to be leaning toward Trump. Those backing Harris, meanwhile, appeared unenthusiastic about their vote, with one describing a vote for Democrats as a type of “obligation.”
Joe Lou, a 68-year-old Uber driver, said that he and “everybody” he knows supports Trump—particularly young black men.
“Folks are finally waking up—that we voted for [Democrats] for 40 years, and all we have is bigger, worse ghettos,” Lou said.
Through much of her campaign, Harris has focused on targeting the female vote, emphasizing abortion access as a key pillar of her campaign.
As women tend to vote in higher numbers than men in Georgia and elsewhere, it’s a viable strategy. In 2020, 56 percent of the Georgia electorate was female.
Sarah Chamberlain, who leads The Main Street Republican Partnership, focuses on trends among women.
“Certainly, Harris is playing for the female vote,” Chamberlain said.
She told The Epoch Times that in her polling, she’s found that even some pro-life women have been frightened by strict abortion laws.
Chamberlain wasn’t confident in Trump’s prospects in winning over a larger share of women, particularly in the midst of the abortion issue and other social issues, which she described as more important to women than they are for men—particularly among younger women. Several young women who spoke to The Epoch Times cited abortion, or a dislike of Trump’s personality, as leading issues.
Men, Chamberlain said, tend to be far more focused on the economy.
Increasing support among female voters “is not [Trump’s] play. I think his play is to get the men,” Chamberlain said.
And indeed, there are signs of burgeoning support for Trump among men as a whole, driven by rising support among young men of all races.
Trump has historically won men by relatively broad margins, lagging behind among 18-to-29-year-old men but outperforming among men aged 30 and older. In Georgia, young men already tended to be more Republican, with 53 percent backing him in 2020 compared to 46 percent that backed Biden.
This year, Trump seems poised to improve substantially among male voters.
The dozens of young men The Epoch Times spoke to across Georgia and other states, even among those who support Harris, consistently expressed that their leading issue is the economy. Many others mentioned Trump’s personality as a draw to the candidate.
But the outcome in Georgia will ultimately hinge on Election Day turnout, even as nearly half of the state’s active electorate has already cast a ballot.
News Analysis
The 2024 road to the White House has been riddled with more potholes, landmines, and detours than anyone could have imagined.
Amid a string of historic events, a few stand out as the most pivotal. The Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, faced multiple criminal and civil court cases, and survived two assassination attempts. His opponent for the majority of the two-year campaign, President Joe Biden, exited the race after a difficult debate; then the Democratic Party chose Vice President Kamala Harris as a last-minute replacement to oppose Trump.
“By all accounts, everyone regards this as the most unique election of their lifetime,” said Susan MacManus, a retired political science professor who has studied U.S. elections for more than 50 years.
Any one of those events “would have turned the election on its heels” during past election cycles, MacManus said.
“It really hasn’t,” she said, “and it shows the competitiveness and the polarization of the country.”
The word “unprecedented” accurately describes many occurrences this campaign season. But that term doesn’t rightfully apply to the overall political climate of the season, Jeff Bloodworth, a professor of American political history at Gannon University, told The Epoch Times.
“The late 19th history was like this,” he said. “The early Republic also featured rough-and-tumble elections.”
From an historical perspective, “the post-1945 era is a placid outlier in American political life,” Bloodworth said.
“We aren’t used to this sort of politics, because the era we are exiting was defined by consensus.”
Through the ups and downs of the 2024 campaign, an important barometer of voters’ tendencies has remained steadfast—only about 30 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction, according to the Ballotpedia polling index.
With such a low approval rating for the U.S.’s current trajectory in governance, people will vote for “which of these two candidates they feel is the best to change that direction,” MacManus said.
As voters look back at the 2024 election season, they are “disgusted with the way the campaigns have gone,” she said, because of the vitriol that both sides have lobbed at each other.
Even so, MacManus said, many Americans have held on tight during this bumpy ride because “they’ve been fascinated by this election and all the twists and turns.”
Here are a few of those.
In August 2022, the FBI raided Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. No such search had ever been conducted at the home of a president or former president.
Agents seized documents, some with classified markings—a search that later led to federal charges against Trump and some of his allies.
Trump announced he was seeking reelection three months later. “From now until Election Day in 2024 … I will fight like no one has ever fought before,” he said at the time.
In March 2023, five days after he held his first campaign rally in Waco, Texas, the 45th president became the first former U.S. commander-in-chief to be indicted on criminal charges. In that case, he was accused of violating New York business records laws by the state.
Three other indictments followed, alleging that he mishandled classified documents, orchestrated false challenges to Biden’s 2020 election win, and incited protesters to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was poised to certify the election results.
Trump says the years-old accusations were filed as “lawfare” to derail his reelection bid. He has denied any wrongdoing. Prosecutors have said they were following the law.
Later in 2023, Trump became the first president to be photographed for a mugshot.
His photo was taken in conjunction with his fourth indictment, an alleged election interference conspiracy in Fulton County, Georgia. That case has been on hold because of a scandal that has swirled around the prosecutor who brought the charges, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis; the outcome could affect the case’s future.
The accusations centered on money paid to an adult film actress, Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels. She said he had an affair with her—a claim that could have hurt his chances of winning the 2016 presidential election. Trump’s lawyer paid her to keep that allegation quiet; Trump won the election. Prosecutors allege that business records were illegally altered to hide the true purpose of the payments.
The resulting guilty verdicts on 34 charges left some of the nation’s foremost legal scholars mystified over the hard-to-define crime that jurors believe he committed.
The Biden and Trump campaigns rapidly deployed public messages spinning the conviction news their way.
Trump’s campaign labeled him a “political prisoner,” calling on Americans to oppose his conviction by a “rigged” system and to help him prevent others from being targeted for their political views.
Biden and his allies repeatedly denounced Trump as “a convicted felon.” In response, some Trump supporters began declaring they will vote for “the convicted felon.”
In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s conviction, both sides had surges in financial contributions.
After the election, Trump is scheduled for sentencing in the New York case. Although probation is possible, so is jail or prison time. In addition, Trump faces several other potential trials. Although a judge dismissed the Florida classified documents case he had faced, federal authorities have appealed that ruling.
Meanwhile, Republican-led congressional inquiries are focusing on the “weaponization” of government agencies, alleging that political animus has fueled prosecutions of Trump, his allies, and other political figures.
His two most formidable challengers were Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, a former North Carolina governor who had also served as the United Nations ambassador during Trump’s administration.
In an early test of the strength of his candidacy, however, Trump defeated his fellow Republicans in a landslide in the first-in-nation Iowa Caucus on Jan. 15, 2024. It was the coldest Iowa Caucus night in recorded history, following a blizzard that dumped heavy snowfall across the state.
The former president’s victory broke two records. By finishing nearly 30 percentage points ahead of his nearest competitor, DeSantis, he beat the prior record Republican margin of victory. That record, set in 1988, was 12.8 percent.
Trump also became the first Republican candidate to win more than 50 percent of the votes in an Iowa Caucus with more than two candidates.
His Iowa win caused the field of contenders to rapidly winnow; it proved to be the death knell for DeSantis’ campaign. Haley, however, hung on for races in a few other states before dropping out of the race in March.
A Biden–Trump rematch appeared to be a foregone conclusion.
On June 11, a jury convicted him of all three gun charges. Jurors found Hunter Biden guilty of falsifying information on a gun purchase application, inaccurately stating that he had not used drugs. The jury also found he had unlawfully possessed the weapon.
Hunter Biden later pleaded guilty to all nine federal charges he had faced in the tax evasion case.
Sentencing is expected later this month in both cases.
Hur made the decision even though he found Biden had “willfully retained” the materials after he exited the White House as vice president under President Barack Obama in 2017, when Trump took office.
Because Biden comes across as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” a jury would be unlikely to convict him, Hur wrote.
Trump and his supporters pointed out that the treatment of Biden contrasted with how his classified documents case was handled, noting that Biden’s properties weren’t subject to an FBI raid.
In an instant poll after the debate, 67 percent of CNN viewers said they thought Trump had won.
Some members from Biden’s own party began calling for him to withdraw from the race, based partly on his debate performance, which included frequently clearing his throat and taking long pauses between some of his sentences.
His campaign later said he suffered from a cold that day. Biden’s allies said he shouldn’t be pressured to leave the race because of one bad night; at the time, Harris said Biden had started slow but made a strong finish.
At least 15,000 people were in attendance at the Butler Farm Show grounds when the gunfire erupted, wounding the former president and two rallygoers. A third attendee, retired firefighter Corey Comperatore, 50, was slain as he shielded his wife and daughter from the bullets.
A Secret Service countersniper returned fire, killing the gunman who fired from an unguarded rooftop. Amid the gunfire, agents clustered around Trump, forming a human shield. He had crouched down after a bullet grazed his right ear. As he climbed back onto his feet, Trump raised a fist, with blood streaking down his face, and said, “Fight, fight, fight.” A photographer captured the moment in an image that instantly became iconic, with a blue sky and the American flag serving as the backdrop.
Biden issued a statement and made a brief address to the nation, denouncing the violence.
The four-day convention featured Trump’s announcement of Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate, along with Trump’s formal nomination. In his acceptance speech on July 18, the former president described what he experienced during the shooting.
The newly minted Trump–Vance ticket held their first joint rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20 under heavy police presence.
Until then, the president had repeatedly denied rumors that he might exit the race amid pressure over his poor debate performance and a series of public gaffes beforehand and afterward.
After Biden exited the race, the Democratic National Committee scrambled to corral enough votes to ensure Harris would become the party’s nominee within just a few days.
Some raised concerns over the process, considering that no other candidates had been given a chance to ascend to that position, and Harris had not been on Democratic voters’ primary election ballots.
Harris officially locked up the nomination after delegates finished a virtual vote on Aug. 5, pitting her against Trump.
Biden symbolically passed the torch to her during a speech on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 19; Harris named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate at the convention, passing over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, among others.
Harris initially avoided media interviews but broke her two-month silence with a Sept. 25 interview on MSNBC.
She also granted a number of other interviews, including one that triggered a lawsuit from Trump. He alleges that CBS deceptively edited the Oct. 7 interview, constituting “election interference.” The suit filed Oct. 31 seeks $10 billion in damages.
“Remember this—she is Biden,” Trump said, tying Harris to Biden’s policies, which he said caused inflation and high prices. Harris countered: “Clearly, I am not Joe Biden.”
Harris said she supports a federal right to abortion, and accused Trump of wanting to sign “a national abortion ban.” He said he would not.
For weeks afterward, people were talking about Trump’s allegation that he had been told that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ domesticated animals, spawning a plethora of internet memes about “eating the cats.”
Moderators fact-checked Trump’s claim on live TV, stating that a Springfield official denied any such credible reports. Vance later stated that, as a senator, he had heard these claims from his constituents and was making a sincere effort to listen to their concerns. Sensational pet-eating claims aside, Vance also said that mass illegal immigration is causing other serious problems that need to be brought to light.
A Secret Service agent spotted a gun barrel protruding from a bushy area along a perimeter fence line. The agent fired, causing the suspect, later identified as Routh, to flee before he had been able to take aim at the former president. Agents scurried to protect Trump, who remained unharmed in the incident.
Routh remains in custody awaiting trial. Authorities have released little additional information about Routh, but The Epoch Times produced a special report tracing Routh’s path from North Carolina, to Hawaii, to Ukraine, and, eventually, to Trump’s Florida golf course.
Trump also said late September that he had been briefed on “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him.”
Singer Beyonce took the stage with Harris on Oct. 25 for a Houston rally. Previously, pop music star Taylor Swift endorsed Harris. Both entertainers have millions of fans.
Two former Democratic presidential candidates have been campaigning for Trump in recent weeks. They are Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who comes from a storied Democratic family that included President John F. Kennedy Jr.; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman who represented Hawaii. She recently announced she was joining the Republican Party.
In addition, the world’s richest man, high-tech innovator Elon Musk, revealed his support for Trump online after the first assassination attempt. Musk then spoke at Trump’s emotional return to Butler Township, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5 to honor the shooting victims and finish the rally that was disrupted by gunfire.
On Oct. 20, both candidates visited swing states. Harris celebrated her 60th birthday with speeches at Georgia churches while Trump served fries at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.
On Oct. 27, Trump capped a series of rallies in deep blue states—where he was considered a long shot to win—with a rally at New York City’s historic 20,000-seat Madison Square Garden.
He urged people to “Dream Big Again,” a spinoff of his “Make America Great Again” slogan.
For her “closing argument,” Harris spoke Oct. 29 at the Ellipse in Washington, with the White House as a backdrop. She, too, drew tens of thousands of people. Harris called for people to “turn the page” on the Trump era.
Biden stole some of Harris’s thunder, however, by making a comment that drew controversy, as it was heard to be calling Trump’s supporters “garbage.” He was responding to the stir that came from Trump’s New York event after a comedian joked about Puerto Rico’s problem with disposing of garbage.
Trump responded to the “garbage” characterization by showing up at an Oct. 30 Wisconsin rally riding in a garbage truck, wearing a workman’s neon orange-and-yellow vest.
On Nov. 2, a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner raised concerns that Harris’s “SNL” appearance on Saturday night may have violated the agency’s rule about equal time being given to candidates.
Savannah Hulsey Pointer, The Associated Press, and Epoch Times staff contributed to this report.
With the hours ticking down to the 2024 presidential election on Nov. 5, many voters on both sides of the political aisle worry about the outcome, they told Epoch Times reporters dispatched across the country.
It’s no wonder. It’s been a long—and unusually chaotic—election cycle.
After being beaten as the incumbent in 2020, former President Donald Trump announced his intention to run again in mid-November 2022, just shy of two years before Election Day 2024.
At the time, there was uncertainty about whether he ultimately would see a rematch with President Joe Biden.
Biden was declared the victor over Trump in 2020 thanks to slim margins in a handful of swing states.
Then, in April 2023, Biden announced his bid for reelection, starting a rematch.
The process was thrown into chaos in June when Biden faced massive pressure from within his party after a poor debate performance. In July, the president withdrew from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who quickly became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee.
Now, with the long-anticipated election nearly here, voters feel anxious, many told The Epoch Times.
Trump’s backers said they’re worried about what will become of the nation if Harris wins.
Harris supporters expressed fears over access to abortion and the future of democracy if Trump wins.
Epoch Times reporters canvassed voters across the United States in the closing days of the election. Here’s what Americans had to say about the upcoming contest.
Adam Stankus, a resident of Farmington, Michigan, is one of those.
“Anytime there’s going to be a tight race, they’re always trying to put pressure on us,” the Harris voter said of election season in Michigan, considered a swing state that could go either way. “It’s nothing new.”
Nathan Rehm, a student at Michigan State University, described a high-pressure environment on his college campus.
Nathan Rehm (L) stands with friends near an early voting site in Waterford Oaks, Mich., on Oct. 26, 2024. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
“There’s a lot of people stopping you on the side saying, ‘Here, take this pamphlet,’” Rehm said. “There’s a lot of money going into this.”
In Kenosha, Wisconsin, David Munson said all the advertising was “a little annoying.” He'd already cast an early ballot.
“I sit there with the mute button in my hand when I’m watching TV because you can watch two hours of TV and get 50 political commercials,” he said.
Fellow Wisconsin voter Tom Hinz said the print material mailed to him sometimes persuades him.
“I read ‘em first, then they go in the circular fire,” he joked.
Adalyce Cruz, a teenage, single mother in Wisconsin, also is tired of all the ads.
“Everything is just, ‘Trump,’ ‘Kamala.’ It’s too much!” she said.
Dale Eggleston, Jr. of Las Vegas dismissed that fear as he walked to his car after casting his ballot on the last day of Nevada’s early, in-person voting. But he knows others who are wary of revealing their choices.
And that means Trump will have a secret—but muted—weapon that will become visible when the votes are counted, he predicted.
“I personally know a lot of Democrats who changed over to Trump” but aren’t openly talking about it, Eggleston said.
It’s a problem Harris supporters mentioned, too.
Bill Keller, also of Farmington Hills, figures he’s the only one in his workplace with pro-Harris views.
“I try to be civil, but I get so incensed,” he said.
Bill Keller said he was discouraged by long lines on the first day of early voting in Farmington Hills, Mich., on Oct. 26, 2024. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Cruz, the teenage, single mother, said she’s faced a lot of pressure from her family to back Trump.
Her family is “very political,” she said. Her brother and uncle urged her to vote for the former president.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Vote for Trump! It supports us in this, this, and this way.’ But I’m like, ‘How’s that supporting me and my child?’… There’s nothing coming out of it for me.”
Adela Luna, a 42-year-old from Houston, Texas, is backing Harris. But members of her extended family espouse competing political ideas this election cycle, she said.
Although Texas is predominantly Republican, she’s noticed a significant political divide between urban and rural communities. Her mother, she said, is a Democrat, and her father is a Republican.
Adela Luna sits at her desk at her office in Houston, Texas, on Oct. 25, 2024. (Emel Akan/The Epoch Times)
“Even within my own family, it’s a battleground, because part of my family lives in the city, while my dad’s side is rural,” Luna said.
Political polarization also divides young people, said Ryder Shaw, a Trump supporter and student at East Carolina University.
“At least in our generation, it’s definitely become more split,” he said outside an early-voting site in Apex, North Carolina.
“Same for the old people,” injected his mother, Trump voter Ashley Anderson.
She’s noticed people “unfollowing” each other on social media over political disagreements.
Ryder Shaw (L), Alaina Tumminelli (C), and Ashley Anderson (R) cast their ballots in Apex, N.C., on Oct. 17, 2024. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
At Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia, some students said they felt uncomfortable talking about politics. Several cited what seemed to be an unspoken campus norm making the mention of political preferences taboo.
Students Amon Matar-Philpot and Jaala Hudson said their families discouraged them from revealing voting choices.
“Growing up, they always said ‘Oh, you’re not supposed to expose who you’re voting for,’” Hudson said. “Who you vote for is a private thing.”
Matar-Philpot noted, “We’re in the South. There’s a lot of conflict.”
Farmington Hills resident Andy Kollin reflected on his position as a battleground state voter in Michigan.
“From my perspective,“ he said, ”It’s just, ‘Don’t let Trump have another term.'”
Andy Kollin stands next to his wife after voting in Farmington Hills, Mich., on Oct. 26, 2024. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
“I can’t take four more years of open borders and Kamala,” said Jack, a voter in Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin, who declined to provide his last name.
He had shown up to cast his in-person absentee ballot wearing an “IBEW Union Proud” T-shirt, accompanied by his wife.
“I’m diehard MAGA,” Jack said.
It’s his third time voting for Trump.
Fellow Mt. Pleasant Trump voter Anne Brosier shared concerns about the economy, a common worry for voters interviewed by The Epoch Times, especially for those backing Trump.
“I really can’t afford much more of the Biden–Harris administration,” the retired paralegal said.
Ethan Jones, 41, of Traverse City, Michigan, said a Trump loss would cause him to feel panic.
“This country hasn’t done the best in the last four years, and to continue down that path, I feel, would be devastating for every generation, living and coming,” Jones said.
The uncertainty of the election outcome has become a source of anxiety for fellow Traverse City Trump supporters Ian and Karina Thompson, as well.
“I feel nervous,” Ian Thompson, 28, said. “We know where we’re siding, but you don’t know where everybody else is.”
“It’s scary for the future,” his 27-year-old wife added.
Rising international tensions and the threat of war worry them both, they said. Those have been common concerns among Trump supporters who’ve chatted with Epoch Times reporters.
John Haynes, an industrial engineering major at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta—better known as Georgia Tech—said he was alarmed about a possible Harris victory.
“Honestly, I don’t think that much will change in my life,” he said. “But I am nervous for the rest of the world, given the unrest in Ukraine in the Middle East. I think that Donald Trump will, you know, do a much better job of ending those world wars.”
Wendy Sherman, a resident of Elkhart, Indiana, has the opposite view.
She’ll be “absolutely devastated” if Harris loses, she said.
“The last time Donald Trump won, I cried.”
Tiffany Darby, 42, of Belleville, Michigan, also backs Harris.
“I feel confident she’s going to win,” Darby said.
But “if it doesn’t go in our favor,“ she added, ”I’m very worried about the future for us.”
Debi Steward, a 58-year-old from Gobles, Michigan, said she’s anxious but hopeful. She believes Harris will win.
The alternative would be depressing, she said.
“I cried last time” Trump won, she said.
“I’m nervous as hell,” said her husband, John Steward, 62.
Trump, he said, “will change our democracy in a negative way.”
Craig, a Kwik Trip employee, poses for a photo in Mt. Pleasant, Wis., on Oct. 29, 2024. (Nathan Worcester/The Epoch Times)
Craig, a young Trump voter who works at a Kwik Trip in Wisconsin, said a Harris win would be “stressful.” But he drew the line at using more forceful language.
“At the end of the day, it is not the end of the world,” he said. “This is not the last election.”
Kristin Short, 42, of Bay City, Michigan, said she was undecided about her vote. But she wasn’t terribly concerned about the implications of a win by either candidate.
“Because I don’t feel strongly about either one, it’s going to be a little anticlimactic no matter who wins,” Short said. “Either way, we'll be fine. The world’s not going to end.”
Harris supporter Jodi Wiersma, 51, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, had an equally sanguine outlook. She expressed hope that, no matter the outcome, it would inspire more cooperation between the two major political parties.
“I would feel that it’s only four years and that you would have to be kind and respectful and learn how to work with what we have so that it doesn’t make it worse,” Wiersma said. “We have to learn how to have tough discussions and work together … It’s only four years.”
Malik Jones, 25, who canvasses for Harris in Georgia, feels that the contest could go either way.
”I want her to win, but I feel like the other party is also strong,” he said. “They have some faithful believers that can’t change their mind for nothin’.”
Kristin Short of Bay City, Mich., and her son, Owen Short, attend a rally for former President Donald Trump in Traverse City, Mich., on Oct. 25, 2024. (Lawrence Wilson/The Epoch Times)
But Jones made clear he wouldn’t despair if Harris lost.
“I mean, my life is going to keep going regularly,” he said. “Hope for the best.”
Some are concerned because American politics have become increasingly confrontational in recent years, sometimes physically. And Americans on both sides of the political aisle have hurled accusations of election tampering at opponents in recent years.
Following Trump’s 2016 victory, many mass protests were held across the United States. In some places, such as Portland, Oregon, there were outbreaks of violence.
Many Democrats asserted that Trump’s 2016 victory was enabled by Russian collusion. That claim later was debunked by several multi-million-dollar federal investigations.
In 2020, politically charged protests espousing the values of Black Lives Matter and Antifa devolved into violent riots that caused billions of dollars in property damage.
Then after the 2020 presidential election, the results that put Biden in the White House sparked lawsuits and challenges. Those kept the election results in question and propelled Trump supporters to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Many Republicans contend the 2020 election was stolen, blaming many factors, including last-minute election-rule changes related to COVID-19, the pre-election suppression of information about revelations from Hunter Biden’s laptop, and alleged fraud by elections workers and others.
This cycle, Trump supporters have expressed hope to The Epoch Times that clear election results will come in closer to Election Day. A quick resolution this time could increase trust in the outcome, they said.
That’s the opinion of Jack, the retired IBEW worker.
“If [Trump] lost on Election Day, that’s fine. But if it’s a week later, two days, or a week later, how would you feel?” he asked.
He'd feel the same sense of dread if a protracted count ended in a Trump victory.
He'd prefer more limits on voting ahead of Election Day.
As Blake Marnell of San Diego, California, drove toward Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27 —one of many rallies he’s attended—he felt fairly confident about the election, he said.
When asked how he would handle it if the opposing candidate won, Marnell paused before answering.
He‘d spoken with other media outlets, he said. And he’d bristled when other reporters questioned if he would “accept” the election results.
Blake Marnell, known to some as Brick Suit for the garb he wears at rallies for former President Donald Trump, attends a campaign event at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa on Jan. 14, 2024. (Janice Hisle/The Epoch Times)
“That is a lot like asking a lawyer if they will accept the verdict of a trial before the trial,” Marnell, 60, said. “Asking somebody if they’re going to accept the verdict of an election, or that you know the outcome of an election prior to the election actually taking place—it’s just kind of a trap.”
However, Marnell said, “If there is nothing untoward about the way it is run, I honestly feel that ... President Trump will win.
“But if not, and it’s a fair election, and it’s demonstrably fair ... I feel like I have done almost as much as I can do as a private citizen in supporting his candidacy.”
And if Trump loses?
“I'll cross that bridge when I come to it,“ Marnell said. ”But I wasn’t happy with the last election, and I didn’t do anything crazy.”
If Trump prevails, North Carolina resident Todd Andrews—a strong supporter of the former president—expects that unrest could break out across the country.
“We’re going to have all of these people who want to sow chaos, and they’re going to start the riots up again,” he said.
Some Democratic voters said that if Harris loses, they'll remain politically engaged to oppose Trump’s priorities.
“I’m not one of the most political guys, but I’ve been getting into it more and more,” said Perry Ashtrove, a 42-year-old railroad worker in Palmyra, Pennsylvania.
If Trump wins, “I’m not going to stop following politics,“ he said. ”I’m going to try to find ways to get him out…Freedom [is at stake].”
Debbie White attends a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Harrisburg, Pa., on Oct. 29, 2024. (Arjun Singh/The Epoch Times)
Debbie White, a native of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, echoed that sentiment.
If Trump wins, “it would be very upsetting, but I’ve been there before,” White said. “You just have to deal with it, I guess, and keep fighting the way we can fight.”
The vice president has a secret weapon, Angon said. It’s “girl power.”
She’s proudly planning to vote for the first time on Nov. 5 for a woman to be president.
“I believe [Harris] has a lot of belief in me,” she said. “So I believe in her.”
This vote should be about the children, parents in Las Vegas told the Epoch Times. Which candidate can best serve the nation’s young families was a matter of opinion—and votes.
Phoenix Collins cast her early ballot at the Cambridge Recreation Center, not far from the Las Vegas Strip.
“This year’s vote is very important,“ Collins said. ”Honestly, I don’t like either one of them.”
Like the rest of the nation’s voters, she had to make a choice.
“I’m going with the lesser of the two evils—Harris,“ she said. ”She’ll be better for the kids. I’m voting for the kids.”
Austin Kloos of Las Vegas doesn’t agree. As a father, he worries about “the open border and grocery prices.”
He’d already voted for Trump when he attended a Nov. 2 rally headlined by Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
For Kloos, the choice was also clear: “I voted for our kids, our future.”
For more than a year, Epoch Times journalists have followed presidential campaigns and candidates across the country.
From the attempt on the life of former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, to violent protests outside the Democratic National Convention to “spin room” drama after Trump’s debate with President Joe Biden, we were there covering the news for you.
Today, we divert from our norm—putting aside our personal preferences and feelings and presenting all sides of an issue or event with neutrality—to reveal how we really felt and what we learned during one of the most turbulent presidential races in U.S. history.
On Aug. 21, outside the Israeli consulate in Chicago, I was at the center of what could be described as a human explosion.
A group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched straight into a line of Chicago police. I was caught between the two, a few feet from where cardboard signs made contact with Kevlar.
The two camps struggled against each other, sending jolts back through the throng of observing journalists. A photographer yelled, “Hold on!”
As bodies tumbled to the ground, I snapped pictures on a cellphone camera. Documenting the action is a reporter’s instinct even when danger looms.
A protester is toppled as police and demonstrators clash near the Israeli consulate in Chicago with the Democratic National Convention happening nearby on Aug. 20, 2024. (Nathan Worcester/The Epoch Times).
More than half a year earlier, the action was in Iowa.
The state was about to hold this election cycle’s first-in-the-nation Republican caucus, a contest that Trump ultimately would win.
Days before that Jan. 15 event, the National Weather Service called the region’s blizzard conditions “life-threatening.” Indeed, it derailed some campaigns. But for my news-gathering, I needed to drive 94 miles from Iowa City to Marshalltown.
A long stretch of U.S. Route 30 was under construction. Cars had been routed onto a temporary lane that would have been hard to make out in the best of conditions, but it was exponentially more difficult in the swirling snow.
Every 50 feet or so, I slowed before passing over a snowdrift that had blown into the road. Ba-CLUNK.
Candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and his team also pushed on through the tough weather. His spokesman, Zach Henry, conveyed their attitude in a message to me: “Full steam[,] baby.”
After much anticipation, Vivek Ramaswamy arrives at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Jan. 11, 2024. (Nathan Worcester/The Epoch Times)
Then there were the faster chases: attempts to catch notables, mostly candidates, and score a comment.
Some stick with you more than others.
Days before Biden exited the presidential race, I was prowling the halls of the Republican National Convention. I spotted David Axelrod, an ex-adviser to President Barack Obama. Axelrod wouldn’t stop, but he let me walk with him and lob a few questions.
I ended on the big one: Did he have any speculations about the then-breaking story that Biden would drop out very soon?
“I really don’t,” he said.
Ahead of decisive action, that single word—“really”—felt heavy with meaning, especially from a man who had raised concerns about a second Biden run as early as 2022.
Epoch Times reporter Nathan Worcester snaps a selfie while embedded with protesters near the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 22, 2024. (Nathan Worcester/The Epoch Times)
Among all those places, an unlikely location on the western edge of Pennsylvania—Butler Township, population 17,000—became the most memorable. Twice. But for a different reason each time.
The pop-pop-pop of the three initial gunshots aimed at the former president on July 13 will always ring in my head. Those three little pops left permanent impressions on my soul.
I think that’s true for nearly everyone who was at the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds when gunfire disrupted Trump’s rally a few minutes after it started on July 13.
Former President Donald Trump is surrounded by Secret Service agents after being shot at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13, 2024. (Evan Vucci, File/AP Photo)
Instantly, we Butler attendees became members of an “I was there” club—one we never wanted to join, just like so many other people who have been swept into traumatizing events ranging from wars to natural disasters.
At the same time, tens of millions of TV and internet viewers were watching the shooting live, as it happened—making them part of the club, too, albeit from a distance.
TV cameras capture a lot, but they can’t adequately convey the ripples of shock, terror, and confusion that spread through the crowd. Those feelings were palpable for those of us who were there.
When people gasped, we didn’t just hear it; we felt it. The same was true when people screamed and when they cried.
People in my part of the venue were stuck behind TV cameras that blocked our view of the stage. So after diving for cover, we were puzzled when the crowd suddenly began cheering.
We didn’t know that people surrounding the stage had seen Trump rise to his feet and make his now-famous, fist-pumping “fight-fight-fight” battle cry.
Relief over Trump’s survival was dampened as word spread: Three other men had been shot, one fatally.
At the same time, reporters like me were scrambling to “get the story” as police yelled for everyone to leave.
Many attendees patiently gave interviews, even though they were shell-shocked. Some asked reporters if they were OK.
But a few were angry.
They accused certain media outlets of biased, unfair reporting against Trump, implying that they may have played a role in radicalizing a would-be assassin.
Other reporters and I breathlessly interviewed people as we hustled to our cars.
Back at the hotel, I worked on the story with my colleagues. At 3 a.m., I collapsed onto my hotel room bed.
After just two hours of sleep, I was out the door, ready to travel to my next assignment. But the weather caused flight delays. So I had to drive 11 hours instead to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention.
Epoch Times reporter Janise Hisle trudges through the snow to get to a press event in Iowa on Jan. 13, 2024. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
After that four-day stint, I drove four hours to Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Trump’s first rally after the assassination attempt. It was also his first as the newly minted 2024 GOP presidential nominee.
As crowds lined the streets, police cruised past on bicycles, on horseback, and in vehicles. Everywhere those police went, Trump supporters cheered, applauded, and shouted, “Thank you.”
Later, when I finally had time to reflect, I wrote a first-person account of the rally in Butler, partly as therapy for myself and partly to give Epoch Times readers an unusual perspective.
Hearing that made me grit my teeth. Was this a good idea? Was he tempting fate? How would another rally at the same location affect the family of the man slain at Butler, Corey Comperatore?
When the “Back-to-Butler” date was announced, I knew I had to be there—as a reporter wanting to follow the story and as a person needing to come to terms with what had happened there on July 13.
Still, I felt leery. I hoped that the Secret Service had addressed the security lapses that contributed to the shooting, including failing to secure the rooftops of nearby buildings. I worried that things could go sideways just the same.
The night before “Butler 2.0,” I barely slept. Too many thoughts swirled through my mind.
Shortly after 5 a.m. on Oct. 5, I headed to the rally site—12 hours in advance of Trump’s scheduled remarks.
As I walked out of my hotel, I stopped in my tracks. A large American flag, illuminated in the surrounding darkness, was billowing gently in the crisp fall air. I paused to appreciate that sight before driving to the venue.
As I arrived at the rally grounds, my mind flashed back to the day of the shooting. A sense of déjà vu crept in. But after I saw how the stage and seating arrangements were set up, I felt reassured. So did the people I interviewed.
This time, bulletproof glass shielded the speaker’s podium. Taller bleachers and large white containers had been set up, concealing the rooftop that gave the July 13 gunman an unobstructed view of the stage.
And a display paying homage to Comperatore, the slain rallygoer, stood out in the bleachers, surrounded by flowers. Various speakers took the stage, all paying respects to him.
Then, when Trump began his remarks, he paused for a moment of silence in honor of Comperatore. Chimes sounded. Christopher Macchio, an operatic tenor, moved people to tears with a somber rendition of the 200-year-old song “Ave Maria.”
Elon Musk, founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX, speaks during former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa., on Oct. 5, 2024. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
Although the return-to-Butler event had its share of lighthearted and political moments, the tone of the rally was unique because of the emphasis on Comperatore and healing from the trauma of the July 13 shooting.
People said they were glad they came. One woman told me that she felt “restored.” A man told me that he thought the event “transcended politics.”
At the very end of the Oct. 5 event, Macchio spent about nine more minutes singing as the former president remained onstage, repeatedly mouthing “wow” at Macchio’s virtuosity.
The singer’s voice rang out so clearly and beautifully that it made me stop scribbling in my notebook.
I stood, listened, and reflected on this fact: In the spot where gunshots and shrieks had erupted 12 weeks earlier, Macchio’s soothing, harmonious tones were now the dominant sound in the air—a special memory I will cherish long after my wild ride on the 2024 campaign trail is over.
My reporting began in Iowa on July 4, 2023, when I covered an early appearance by former Vice President Mike Pence, then a Republican candidate for president.
Pence and his wife, Karen, marched in an Independence Day parade on a sweltering day in Urbandale, Iowa. Sweating, smiling, and shaking outstretched hands, they walked every step of the two-mile route.
The Pences traveled an hour north for a meet-and-greet with about 30 Iowans at a rural utility company. He spoke for about 20 minutes, then lingered for an hour or more, greeting every person in the room. I thought they would never leave.
Epoch Times reporter Lawrence Wilson prepares to cover the Republican presidential primary debate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa on Dec. 6, 2023. (Lawrence Wilson/The Epoch Times)
I witnessed scenes like that a dozen times with presidential hopefuls all over the state.
Iowans are nice, but they offer no place for a candidate to hide. A teleprompter is useless in a diner or VFW hall. To win votes, you have to look people in the eye, give simple answers to direct questions, and eat a lot of apple pie.
That was one view of the campaign trail.
Atlanta provided a distinctly different view.
That’s where the newly nominated Vice President Kamala Harris held her coming-out party on July 30. This Georgia event was everything Iowa is not: hype, energy, hip-hop, glamour, and celebrities.
More than 10,000 people waited in line for hours—braving the Atlanta heat and torrential rain—to get inside the venue. When Harris at last appeared, their pent-up anticipation, relief, and joy erupted in an ovation. Chants and cheers went on for minutes. It was like a rock concert or a Super Bowl, a moment when thousands upon thousands of people were focused, energized, and totally in sync.
Epoch Times reporter Lawrence Wilson (R) works alongside colleagues and other journalists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 22, 2024. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
I loved Iowa because it made me believe that politics, even at the highest level, is local. Ordinary folks—farmers, school teachers, accountants, auto mechanics—get to meet the people vying for the highest office in the land, then get together and make a decision about them.
I think we need more of that.
I loved Atlanta because it reminded me what it’s like to be part of a movement, to sense the excitement, energy, and optimism that flow when cheering in agreement with a crowd of fellow Americans.
I think we need more of that, too.
I was in CNN’s media “spin room,” where journalists can speak with candidates and their surrogates.
The event became one of the most significant debates in U.S. political history. It shifted the trajectory of the election, ultimately leading to Biden’s decision to exit the race just weeks later.
In the days following the debate, I attended numerous campaign events for Biden. At his final appearance in Detroit, he reassured his supporters that he was “not going anywhere.”
A week later, he announced his withdrawal from the race in a letter posted to social media platform X.
Witnessing this pivotal moment while closely following Biden was an interesting experience.
Epoch Times reporters Emel Akan (L) and Janice Hisle prepare to cover the presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in Atlanta on June 27, 2024. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)
I went on to attend campaign events for Harris, including her recent rally in Houston that featured an appearance from pop star Beyoncé in a packed stadium.
Then, at a rally in Washington, the Democratic candidate made her closing arguments. The joy, excitement, and anxiety of her supporters were palpable. I spoke with many of them, and one supporter became emotional when I asked what she would do if Harris were to lose the election. She told me she would be “devastated,” and she began to cry.
These moments highlight just how deeply people are invested in this election and the strong emotions they have toward their candidates. It’s a big part of why this election cycle has been so unforgettable for reporters.
Everything that’s happened since then in the most dysfunctional, distracted, discordant House in 170 years was predictable that spring. The never-back-downers, no-compromisers, celebrity-seeking grandstanders would dominate by sound bite, dictate by hyper-partisanship, and deliver speeches but bring about few results.
As a congressional energy reporter who dips into defense budgets and foreign policy, I get drafted to cover elections. This often means parachuting into a surreal disconnect between what candidates, including incumbents, say in campaigns and how they deliberate in hearings on actual decisions they’re called on to make.
In this election cycle, I glimpsed real Americans trying to make sense of it all.
There were Democrats in West Virginia fighting for relevancy as their once-dominant party and the unions that supported it disappeared.
There were North Dakota frackers all for “Drill, baby, drill” but fearful about fluids their trade flushes into the earth.
There were Wyoming coal miners rebranding themselves as “energy workers,” while federal public lands evolved into a vast industrial park of innovation.
There were Hudson Valley Democrats in districts Republicans won in 2022—among six seats the GOP flipped in blue New York—who voted for moderates such as Reps. Mike Lawler and Marc Molinaro. And they wanted to again. But, they said, they loathed the Republican party’s current national tenor.
There were the “Bridge People” on the Southern Boulevard Bridge that spans Florida’s Lake Worth Lagoon between Palm Beach and West Palm Beach. It’s 100 yards from pink-walled Mar-a-Lago. These supporters of the former president flew Trump flags, sentinels of the sentiment that, although he was not in office, he still was in their hearts. As a nod to their efforts, Trump sent them pizza.
There were Republicans campaigning in Nevada’s House primaries where, despite increasing GOP voter registrations, they couldn’t seem to break Democrats’ stranglehold in three Las Vegas-area congressional districts.
And there was Iowa.
Former President Donald Trump tosses caps to the crowd at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa, on Aug. 12, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)
In the summer of 2023, Kari Lake milked a cow at the Iowa State Fair, where real people get close to candidates unlike anywhere else. And there was Iowa in January, when caucuses were staged after back-to-back blizzards braced by minus-40-degree nights.
There was Fareway Meat & Grocery manager John Pentecost scrambling to stock shelves in Waverly, Iowa—milk and bread always go first—72 hours before the caucuses and three hours before he would don his “other hat.” As Bremer County Republican Committee chair, he would walk through the caucus process with 23 precinct captains.
The politicos gathered in the back room of the library in Readlyn, less town than neighborhood, a subdivision of single-family homes amid a patchwork of snow-bound slopes and fields. It has a Main Street with a park, a bank, and Grumpy’s Bar & Event Center. It’s where the 1984 movie “Country,” starring Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard, was filmed.
Many volunteers wore Trump regalia. A few sported DeSantis gear or garb promoting Ramaswamy or Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations under Trump. They sat elbow-to-elbow, ribbing each other, wondering whether the ice on Plainfield Lake or in Cedar River eddies was solid enough for fishing shanties. Winter walleye is the best-tasting fish, they agreed.
Some worried that Democrats could become “Republicans for a day” and crash their caucuses.
But that was unlikely, they decided. Democrats, they joked, “don’t get along good walking barefoot in the snow” and won’t get to caucuses for lack of electric vehicle charging stations. And besides, they agreed, everyone knows everyone. So they would spot a Democrat interloper trying to fool his Republican neighbors in an attempt to participate in their democratic process.
Several acknowledged that they would be joining “known Democrats” at Grumpy’s to talk football over a beer afterward.
Turnout for the 2024 Bremer County caucus was 938, down from 2016’s 1,445. Trump won with 437 votes, 45.6 percent, about 5 percentage points below his statewide tally.
Pentecost was relieved to have the process completed.
“I'll be happy to not have the texts and the junk mail and the phone calls all the time,” he said.
It was just the beginning, of course, even in Iowa. But no matter what, there would still be ice-fishing and football talk with “known Democrats” over beers.
That’s America. It still exists, if not in a nationalized mediascape, then in places like Readlyn, population 896 “and one grump.”
It propelled me to a new role covering the sights of the U.S. political scene from behind a camera for The Epoch Times—whose mission I support.
Epoch Times photographer Madalina Vasiliu (L) snaps a selfie as Epoch Times reporters Emel Akan (C), and Janice Hisle (R) make their way toward the venue for the presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in Atlanta on June 27, 2024 (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)
During my travels covering the 2024 presidential election candidates, I met talented, kind, and humble photographers. I learned to overcome my limitations and realized that there is more to what we see through a screen.
One day, I asked a photographer from another media outlet what he thinks when he and a colleague cover the same event but his colleague’s photo is chosen for publication instead of his.
“Well, if his picture is better, then I am happy to see his work being used,” he told me.
That answer stuck with me.
Since then, I’ve let go of competitiveness. I’ve made tremendous progress by studying other photographers’ work. I’ve admired their techniques, telling myself, “I never thought of that angle, perspective, or composition. How creative!”
Events are different when you experience them in real life rather than on a screen.
We’re all unique, and it’s normal to have different perspectives. However, I’ve noticed how visual journalism can project a particular image of a person. And not always accurately.
I’ve seen photographs of candidates that portray strength, confidence, or lightheartedness. Others portray anger, dullness, or bitterness.
Most political events last hours. The final products of journalism that appear online or in print represent only a small portion of an entire event.
The Democratic National Convention in Chicago is a good example.
The evening programs were intense, lasting up to seven hours. During the first hour, delegates and members of the media typically took their time walking through security before settling into seats.
This year, early videos on social media suggested that there were few people there. But those images showed only a few seconds of a lengthy program during which almost all seats were full.
Balloons drop during the last day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 22, 2024. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)
Then, during a town hall with Trump, he played his favorite music for an extended period of time while interacting with the audience.
Some reported that it appeared that Trump was “zoning out.” However, being there, I had a different experience seeing the whole picture: Trump on stage, other people around him, the live audience, the overall atmosphere. To those of us seeing the whole picture, he appeared to be having his regular good time.
One image or a few seconds of video footage from an entire event often doesn’t do much justice.
I also recall times when Biden would stumble over a few words during his speeches. Those moments would go viral on social media. But taking just a few seconds out of a full speech to define the whole performance seemed to be an inaccurate portrayal.
Through these experiences, I realized that I should always ask myself more questions when I see short content about someone online. I must do my research to find the complete context.
At political events, attendees are diverse. Some seem quirky.
But a majority of people who attend political rallies are ordinary folks. They dress and carry themselves normally. Nonetheless, through photography, it can be easy to focus on depicting a narrative of how a candidate’s supporters look.
During my trips following the candidates, I did my best to analyze the crowd and photograph multiple guests, trying to reflect the audience overall, not just the ones who stood out.
I recall a rallygoer walking up to me and asking sternly, “Are you reporting the truth?”
I asked her what she thought about that. She analyzed me for a number of seconds. Then she said I looked to her like an honest person, like someone who would report the truth.
It was then that I told her I work for The Epoch Times. She happily greeted me.
This interaction reminded me that I should always do my best to be truthful, professional, and alert to any biases I may have, in order to eliminate them when doing my work.
A recent assignment started on a Friday at 8 a.m. I rented a car in Maryland and drove to Pennsylvania to work with a reporter until late that evening interviewing voters about their thoughts on the election. The next morning, we left at 4 a.m. to catch a flight to Michigan to cover a rally. After a long day and a brief rest, I was up at 3:30 a.m. to catch an early flight home.
It’s been a hectic pace. But it’s also brought opportunities for self-improvement, meeting interesting people, seeing new places, getting to know fellow photographers and reporters, and making unique memories. And it’s given me a first-row ticket to witness history in the making.
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