The US election fight between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump remained tight as results rolled in on Tuesday night, with a victor in the election unlikely to emerge until Wednesday or even later in the week.
Here are some takeaways as polls close across the country and votes are tabulated:
Trend lines
As the evening progressed, Harris and Trump each prevailed in the early states they had been projected to win. Trump had the early lead in electoral votes.
The Associated Press and Edison Research projected Trump would win the battleground state of North Carolina, while Decision Desk HQ said Trump would win Georgia as well as North Carolina. Edison Research had yet to call the two races, or any of the other swing states that will decide the election.
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Black and Latino voters, the age gap, gender lines: Early takeaways from the US presidential election
While it was still too early to suggest which candidate might be in the best position to win the contest, there were some emerging trends that could prove determinative.
Though many blocs of voters were supporting the Democratic or Republican candidate in surprisingly similar numbers to 2020, according to exit polls conducted by Edison, Trump was showing greater strength with male voters of colour and with voters under 45 compared to four years ago.
He also was possibly holding on to enough women supporters in America’s suburbs to prevail despite Harris’s best attempts to pull them away. The national exit poll showed Trump with a 51 per cent to 47 per cent edge with suburban white women voters.
Voters of colour
The Trump campaign put a great deal of effort into persuading black and Latino voters to defect from the Democratic Party – and there were some early indications those efforts were paying off.
In North Carolina, exit polls showed Trump boosting his share of the black vote to 12 per cent, from 5 per cent in 2020. He garnered the support of 20 per cent of black male voters, the poll said.
According to the Edison national poll, Trump's support among Latino male voters jumped 18 percentage points from four years ago.
Trump was up 11 percentage points with Latino voters in Nevada, according to the poll, and up four points in Arizona from four years ago.
In North Carolina, Trump was projected to win despite exit polls showing a five-point slide in support among white voters compared to four years ago.
In Pennsylvania, perhaps the most coveted state by both sides, Trump's support among white voters dropped three percentage points compared to four years ago, Edison said – and his support was down four points among white male voters.
Even so, white voters were on pace to comprise a larger share of the electorate than four years ago.
According to preliminary results from the national exit poll conducted by Edison, 71 per cent of voters nationwide were white, compared with 67 per cent in Edison’s 2020 exit poll.
Gender gap?
Harris’s campaign was looking to exploit a large gender gap in the electorate, with the hope that legions of women voters would flock to the vice-president because of issues such as abortion rights.
But so far, Trump seemed to be holding on to the support of at least white women voters, according to exit polls. Black women overwhelmingly supported Harris.
In Pennsylvania, Trump was maintaining close to the same level of support among white women voters that he enjoyed in 2020. That was also true in Georgia.
North Carolina, on the other hand, showed some real potential erosion for Trump. He dropped eight points among white women compared with four years ago, Edison said.
Trump's campaign, conversely, paid significant attention to pulling in male voters, particularly young men, through social media, sports, podcasts and online gaming.
Early national exits (with many polling places across the country still open) showed Harris picking up less support among women – 54 per cent – than Biden did in 2020 when he gained 57 per cent.
An age gap
The national exit poll showed Trump slightly edging Harris among men between the ages of 18 and 44 and beating her solidly with men 45 and up.
In Michigan and Wisconsin, Trump was up five percentage points with overall voters under 45 compared with four years ago. In Nevada, he jumped six points with those voters.
But at the same time, Trump appeared to be losing ground with older voters.
In Wisconsin, Trump's share of voters 65 and older fell 11 points from 2020. In Michigan, he fell six points.
Trump won the 65-and-over vote over Biden in 2020 by three percentage points. In the Edison national poll for 2024, Harris and Trump were essentially tied. – Reuters