WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Trump vows to fight 'for your family and your future' in speech to supporters.
Trump supporters gathered at his election night watch party were hugging one another, making calls, jumping up and down, and throwing their MAGA hats in the air every chance they got to celebrate as results continued to trickle in.
Republicans reclaimed control of the Senate, picking up seats in West Virginia and Ohio. Top House races are focused in New York and California, where Democrats are trying to claw back some of the 10 or so seats where Republicans have made surprising gains in recent years.
For all the concerns about a tumultuous process that could leave Americans waiting for days to learn who its next president would be, news outlets instead experienced an election night Tuesday that hewed close to tradition.
From the first hints provided by exit poll results shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern time, the election night story moved methodically in Donald Trump's direction. The Associated Press called the first of seven battleground states, North Carolina, for the former president at 11:18 p.m. ET. By midnight, The New York Times' predictive Needle judged Trump with a 90 percent likelihood of winning the presidency over Vice President Kamala Harris.
Also by midnight, CNN's count had Trump leading Harris in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — the so-called blue wall that was central to her strategy for victory.
The Harris campaign announced at 12:45 a.m. that the Democrat would address the nation later Wednesday, quickly breaking up an audience that had gathered at Washington's Howard University.
Coverage went deep into the night
Broadcast, cable news networks, digital news sites and one streaming service — Amazon — covered the count steadily into Wednesday morning. Many of their journalists had warned viewers that determining the winner could be a protracted process.
Instead, they moved swiftly into postmortems for Harris' campaign.
“This looks a lot more like 2016 to me than 2020,” NBC's Chuck Todd said, a reference to Trump's victory that year over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Fox News Channel pointed to exit poll results that showed Trump making gains among young voters and Latinos. “The Biden-Harris people pushed them into Trump's open arms,” said Fox's Dana Perino, a former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush.
Hours earlier, when the first exit poll results showed the unpopularity of President Joe Biden and Americans with a dim view of where the country was headed, CNN's Chris Wallace said that “it would be a miracle if Harris could win with that.” His colleagues, Dana Bash and Audie Cornish, warned him of jumping to conclusions that Harris would be blamed for that, but Wallace sounded more prescient as the night progressed.
“She was trying to do something as a sitting vice president that had never been done before — succeed an unpopular president,” Todd said.
While votes continued to be counted, Fox News' Brit Hume said that Harris' “chance of pulling this off would be the most amazing thing we have ever seen.”
Many journalists were expecting a multi-day saga
Due to remarkably close pre-election polls, the outcome was considered a mystery that could take many days to resolve. In his last pre-election prediction, statistician Nate Silver said it was no better than a coin flip, giving an ever-so-slight edge to Harris.
“The future of American democracy is on the line tonight,” ABC News' David Muir said at the start of his network's coverage.
The Times' Needle had begun the night rating the race as a toss-up, leaning slightly toward Trump. A few hours later, The Times said Trump had a better-than-even chance of winning all seven battleground states.