Election 2024 live updates: Latest news and results as voters head ...

RALEIGH, N.C. — At a pre-Election Day rally here yesterday, Trump was speaking at a venue that was about 70% full — a sight that has become increasingly familiar in the past week.

Trump has been holding his signature rallies since he first burst onto the political scene in 2015, and in the nine years since then he has routinely drawn massive and enthusiastic crowds around the country, from the urban cores to the remote rural fields, where supporters have consistently shown up despite sometimes icy conditions or extreme heat.

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Voters in battleground Arizona will play a crucial, and possibly time-consuming, role in today's election.

Long lines are expected at polling stations across Maricopa County, where voters will tackle a two-page, double-sided ballot.

Maricopa voters will be asked to weigh in on 79 different contests (the number changes depending on the legislative district in which they reside).

There are also 13 statewide ballot measures before Arizonans today, in addition to White House, Senate, House and state legislative races.

Will Clark

Kosovo artist Alkent Pozhegu created grain and seeds mosaics of Harris and Trump in the town of Gjakova, where he was putting on the finishing touches today.

While President Joe Biden played a limited role in the Harris campaign’s closing weeks, first lady Jill Biden quietly was one the busiest of campaign surrogates.

Since early October, she has held more than two dozen campaign events in all seven battleground states, including three stops Sunday in southeast Pennsylvania and three yesterday in North Carolina.

A source familiar with Jill Biden’s role said her team made clear to the Harris campaign she would travel anywhere to support the vice president, and many of her stops included smaller, targeted markets in battlegrounds meant to engage suburban women on issues such as education, lowering costs and reproductive rights.

“I know you can feel it, the excitement of people who are all ready to elect a new generation of leadership,” she said at a union-focused event in King of Prussia on Sunday.

The first lady hailed Harris as a “decisive, strong leader” who inherited from her mother “the power to create change.” But she also made an argument that other surrogates have largely left to the side, asking the audience at one point: “Are we better off today than we were four years ago?”

“Yes,” she said, rebutting a primary argument of the Trump campaign. “In Donald Trump’s America, our country was shut down because of the pandemic. ... Schools were closed, and at every turn Donald Trump created even more chaos.”

At her final stop in North Carolina yesterday, Jill Biden grew emotional as she said it has been her “life’s honor to be your first lady.” She returned to her home in Wilmington, where she is expected to vote today before joining her husband at the White House for election night.

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After months of near-nonstop campaigning, both Trump and Harris will have a relatively quiet day before mingling with supporters tonight.

Trump is expected go to the polling booth in Florida, before joining Vance at a watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center.

Harris will attend a watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C., tonight, in addition to joining some radio interviews today. Walz is set to make one more pitch to voters late this morning in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, before joining the vice president tonight in Washington.

The first in-person votes of the New Hampshire general election were cast at midnight in Dixville Notch, where there are six registered voters this cycle.

The result of the presidential race was a tie: Harris and Trump each received three votes. The polls opened at midnight and closed at 12:07 a.m. ET after all voters cast their ballots.

The small town has a tradition dating to 1960 in which voters place their ballots in a wooden box shortly after midnight. The results are announced minutes later.

In the 2020 general election, Joe Biden won all five of the votes cast in Dixville Notch. In New Hampshire’s 2024 Republican primary, six votes were cast for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley; none were cast for Trump.

On the last day of a brutal, wild and tightly contested campaign, Trump and Harris blitzed voters with their final pleas for turnout.

With the race tied at 49% nationally in an NBC News poll Sunday and battleground surveys showing all of the decisive states within margins of error, millions of Americans will cast their ballots today. It’s not yet clear how long it will take for those votes to be counted.

The last two elections were decided by historically narrow spreads, with Trump defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton by roughly 77,000 votes across three states in 2016 and Joe Biden beating Trump by about 44,000 spread across the same number of states in 2020.

In other words, the final pitches could be decisive.

Harris sees herself as a candidate on the upswing at the crucial moment. She held her last rally in Philadelphia late last night, standing on the steps of the city’s art museum made famous by the “Rocky” movies.

“It’s good to be back in the City of Brotherly Love, where the foundation of our democracy was forged,” Harris said. “And here, at these famous steps, a tribute to those who start as the underdog and climb to victory.”

“The momentum is on our side,” she added at her rally, which featured celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga and Will.i.am. “Our campaign has tapped into the ambitions and the aspirations and the dreams of the American people.”

Trump told supporters in Raleigh, North Carolina, that he’s ahead and just needs their votes to seal his return to the White House.

“Hopefully everything will work out well; we’re way leading. All we have to do is close, we have to close it,” he said. “I hate the expression, actually, but it’s ours to lose. Does that make sense to you? It’s ours to lose. If we, if we get everybody out and vote, there’s not a thing they can do.”

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

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

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

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

“Leave her out of politics,” read one all-caps comment on X. “She’s the one good thing left on this planet.”

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

Millions of Americans across the country are poised to pour into the polls, where they will choose today whether to send Harris or Trump to the Oval Office. 

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

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

Reporting from Grand Rapids, Michigan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s amazing. I love you all. You’re very special. This is my last, my last rally. Can you believe it? The rallies, these big, beautiful rallies, there’s never been anything like it,” Trump said. 

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

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

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

This week, the world is anxiously awaiting the answer.

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

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

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Mark Murray

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

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

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John Lapinski and Charles Riemann

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

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