Joe Biden to address the nation after Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris – live election updates | US elections 2024

Reporters have just been let into the Rose Garden, where Joe Biden will soon address the nation on the results of the presidential election.

There is a healthy crowd of journalists here to see Biden, who campaigned for his vice-president Kamala Harris after withdrawing from the race in July.

Joan E Greve

Bob Casey, Democratic senator, continues to trail his Republican opponent, Dave McCormick, in Pennsylvania, but the incumbent’s campaign remains confident in his re-election.

“The count in Pennsylvania is still continuing. Yesterday, the vote margin shrunk by 50,000 votes and this race is now within half a point, the threshold for automatic recounts in Pennsylvania,” Maddy McDaniel, a spokesperson for Casey, said in a newly released statement.

“With tens of thousands more votes to be counted, we are committed to ensuring every Pennsylvanian’s vote is heard and confident that at the end of that process, senator Casey will be re-elected.”

As of this morning, Casey still trailed McCormick by about 30,000 votes.

Donald Trump’s sentencing scheduled for later this month on the business fraud charges he was convicted of in New York is unlikely to happen, Politico reports.

Trump was convicted in May on 34 felony counts related to falsifying business documents, but his lawyers have managed to get his sentencing date delayed twice. Now, he’s the president-elect, and legal experts that Politico spoke to say that it’s unlikely judge Juan Merchan will go through with sentencing him on 26 November:

“I think any reasonable judge wouldn’t sentence the president-elect,” said Jill Konviser, a retired New York trial judge.

Imposing a sentence now — even a non-prison sentence like home confinement, probation or community service — would interfere with the soon-to-be president’s duties, legal experts say.

In theory, the judge who presided over the hush money trial, Justice Juan Merchan, could try to proceed with the sentencing as scheduled and order that any sentence be deferred until 2029, when Trump will complete his term. But even that would pose problems, as Trump’s lawyers are sure to argue that hauling the president-elect into a state courtroom in the middle of the presidential transition would impede the orderly transfer of power.

“His lawyers will say he’s busy with the transition and therefore he won’t show up, and they will ask that any sentencing be adjourned until after the presidency,” predicted former prosecutor Catherine Christian.

The Associated Press has just published a look at how different demographic groups across the US voted in Tuesday’s election, which offers some clues into the question of how Donald Trump triumphed over Kamala Harris.

Trump won by getting lots of voters who traditionally support Republicans out to the polls, while also shaving off slivers of support from groups that typically vote for Democrats. Harris, meanwhile, did not make comparable gains among groups that lean towards the GOP, despite spending the run-up to the election campaigning alongside Republicans who had broken with Trump.

Here’s more, from the AP:

Donald Trump won the presidency after holding tight to his core base of voters and slightly expanding his coalition to include several groups that have traditionally been a part of the Democratic base. That finding comes from AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide that shows what issues mattered to voters in this election.

Trump picked up a small but significant share of Black and Hispanic voters, and made narrow gains with men and women. As Trump chipped away at parts of Democrats’ coalition, Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t able to make enough of her own gains. Trump succeeded in locking down his traditionally older, white base of voters, and he slightly expanded his margins with other groups into a winning coalition.

Here’s how five key demographic groups voted, according to AP VoteCast.

Most Trump voters were white, a trend that continued from 2020

Slightly more than 8 in 10 Trump voters in this election were white, roughly in line with 2020. About two-thirds of Harris’ voters were white, and that largely matched President Joe Biden ’s coalition in the last election. White voters make up a bulk of the voting electorate in the United States, and they did not shift their support significantly at the national level compared to 2020.

A majority of white voters cast their ballot for Trump, unchanged from the 2020 election that he narrowly lost. About 4 in 10 white voters backed Harris, which is about the same as Biden received in 2020. White voters were also more likely to support Trump over Harris and Biden in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, even though Trump lost those states in 2020.

Joe Biden is scheduled to address the nation from the White House after Donald Trump won the presidential election.

The 11am speech will likely be a tough one for the Democratic president, who cut short his own re-election bid in July and endorsed his vice-president Kamala Harris, only to see her lose to Trump. Biden’s predecessor attempted to block him from taking office after losing to him in 2020, and has vowed to undo many of his policies once he returns to power.

Biden and Trump spoke by phone yesterday, and agreed to soon meet to discuss the transition between administrations. The date of that meeting has not yet been set.

This is more of a formality than anything, but we still do not know the official winner of two swing states, as well as three close Senate races.

The Associated Press, who the Guardian relies on to call races, has not determined the election result in Nevada and Arizona, but Donald Trump already has the electoral votes he needs to become the next president, and appears poised to win both states. When the AP speaks, we’ll let you know.

The AP has not yet called the winner of the Senate race in Nevada, where Democrat Jacky Rosen is neck-in-neck with Republican Sam Brown. The GOP has already regained control of the chamber, after picking up seats in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana, but a victory by Brown would make their majority even larger.

Also uncalled is the Senate race in Arizona. The independent incumbent Kyrsten Sinema is not running again, and Democrat Ruben Gallego is ahead in the votes counted so far. Republican candidate Kari Lake, who still has not acknowledged her defeat in the governor’s race two years ago, is trailing.

Finally, the AP has not yet called the winner of the Senate race in Pennsylvania. Democratic incumbent Bob Casey has been trailing his Republican challenger David McCormick, but it’s close. A loss for Democrats here would give them 47 Senate seats in the next Congress, and Republicans 53.

This post has been updated to note that the Arizona Senate race has not yet been called

Americans sent Donald Trump back to the White House and handed Republicans control of the Senate in Tuesday’s election, but we still don’t know who controls the House of Representatives.

That’s largely due to ballot counting in western states, particularly California, which is ongoing and may take days to resolve. Republicans currently have a tiny majority of about three seats in the chamber, and Democrats were hoping to gain back that ground.

Should Democrats win the chamber, it will likely be by only a small amount, but will put them in a position to block many of Trump’s legislative proposals.

At a Republican watch party early Tuesday evening in the Milwaukee suburbs, Dimitra Anderson, a 64-year-old bellydancer, clutched her boa constrictor – a pet that travels with her everywhere – and issued a confident proclamation: “I’m ecstatic because I believe he’s going to win in a tidal wave.”

The night was young, no swing states had been called yet, but Anderson, who describes herself as a born-again believer, had been following the preachings of the self-styled prophets of the Christian right. They were saying Donald Trump would win.

And they were right.

After a narrow electoral defeat in 2020 and two assassination attempts in 2024, Trump has emerged victorious – an event that Christian nationalists are celebrating as a critical win for their movement.

Now that Trump has secured his victory, figures on the Christian far right whose prominence grew during Trump’s 2016 presidency will enjoy larger followings and most importantly, close proximity to the highest office in the US. Among these figures are leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement which rejects secularism and embraces “Christian dominionism”, the idea that Christians are tasked by God to rule over society and government.

During his election night broadcast on YouTube, Lance Wallnau, a Trump ally and televangelist whose “seven mountains” mandate for Christian leadership of key pillars of society has taken hold on the Christian far right, celebrated the results.

“This is a reformation on America,” said Wallnau, describing a strategy for activists who share his ideology to capture key positions in local and state government. “It’s not done, it’s not over, it’s just starting.”

When the presidential election results were handed down on Wednesday, Rebecca Gomperts, the founder of Aid Access, the No 1 supplier of abortion pills by mail in the United States, was huddled in a Paris apartment with her team of eight American physicians and 15 support staff. The group – which usually operates remotely, shipping out more than 9,000 abortion pills a month – had convened in person before the election, knowing they might have to spring into action.

They were right: as news of Donald Trump’s victory spread, the website received more than 5,000 requests for abortion pills in less than 12 hours – a surge even larger than the day after Roe v Wade fell. “I can see all the new requests ticking in as we’re talking,” Gomperts said in a phone call on Wednesday afternoon. “We’ve never seen this before.”

The scenario repeated itself across the country as news of Trump’s victory broke, with women’s health and trans health providers getting inundated with requests for services that their patients feared might be banned in a Trump administration. The telehealth service Wisp saw a 300% increase in requests for emergency contraception; the abortion pill finder site Plan C saw a 625% increase in traffic.

“Clearly, people are trying to plan for the reproductive apocalypse that we anticipate will be happening under a Trump presidency,” said Elisa Wells, the co-founder of Plan C.

For Gomperts and her team at Aid Access, the moment did not come as a shock: they’d been preparing for it since the last Trump administration, when Gomperts, a Dutch physician, expanded her international abortion pill service into the United States. Since then, Aid Access has devised a system in which physicians in states where abortion is legal prescribe and ship abortion pills to patients in states where it is not. The nonprofit eventually expanded to the team of eight physicians in four states they have now, along with a help desk that is available 24/7.

Nevada appears to be on the precipice of electing a Republican to the White House for the first time in two decades.

“I feel so happy right now, I feel fantastic,” said Yolanda Wright, 47, beaming as state after state lit up red on the big screen at the Republican watch party in Las Vegas. Like many voters in this swing state, Wright voted with the GOP for the first time this year.

“I’ve been a Democrat my whole life,” she said. “And I haven’t seen any benefit from it.”

The Associated Press has yet to project Donald Trump as the winner of the presidential race in the Silver state, and it could take days before all the state’s mail-in ballots are counted and a true tally of votes is revealed. Regardless of the final results, the former president’s political gains in this deeply diverse state are emblematic of a national political realignment.

“Here it’s clear that what we knew as true in politics, a lot of the normal rules we had, those are dead and gone,” said Mike Noble, an independent pollster who has been studying the electorate in Nevada, Arizona and Utah. “Now we have new rules, a new game to play.”

In a state with one of the largest proportions of working-class voters and blue-collar workers, where the economy is dominated by the service and entertainment, as well as mining and construction, a populist message seems to have overcome prior political allegiances. Voters who felt trapped in a dark economic rut chose the person they thought would bring the most change.

Exit polls indicate that more than half of white and Asian voters, and about half of Hispanic/Latino voters cast ballots for Trump. Both the NBC and Washington Post exit polls found that majorities of white women and white men without a college degree backed Trump, and polls suggest he had also gained support among non-white voters without college degrees. Overwhelming majorities of those who voted for Trump said the economy was doing poorly.