What to watch for on Election Day

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

65% : The red and blue 'mirages' to expectFour years ago, with Trump undermining many Republican voters' confidence in mail-in ballots, the early hours after polls closed showed a "red mirage" in several key swing states - with the initial returns looking better for Trump than the final results would show hours or days later.
61% : With the usual caveat that anything can happen, and, in recent years, it often has - here are a few potential paths for Harris and Trump, respectively:For Harris, the map is in many ways simpler.
61% : In that scenario, Trump would likely need to win Michigan or Wisconsin and supplement it with a dominant performance across the Sun Belt, from Georgia on the East Coast to Arizona and Nevada out west.
55% : Trump did the same in 2016.
55% : The math is expected to favor Trump in the earlier hours of the count, in part because of which states report and when.
52% : The only 2024 battleground Trump won in the last election was North Carolina.
52% : That means Harris could see a sizable early lead, before late-arriving mail-in ballots and Election Day votes (both of which favored Trump in 2020) are counted.
52% : That phenomenon created what's been called a "red mirage" - the appearance that Trump and Republicans are winning big when, in reality, their votes were just being reported first.
51% : Will Trump declare victory early?
50% : Still, the question remains: Will Trump declare victory before the race is truly decided?
49% : Trump has encouraged supporters to vote by any means, including mail, after discouraging it in 2020.
48% : What's less clear, even now, is whether - and if so, how - Trump and his allies might agitate to hold-up or close-down the process.
42% : A GOP trifecta would give Trump close to carte blanche to pass his agenda into law.
36% : Simply put, both parties will be watching the returns closely for signs of a pink wave, or surge in turnout among women voters, that could be an early warning sign for Trump and Republicans anxious about a gender gap in polling that shows Harris with, in many cases, a larger lead among women than Trump has with men.
35% : The fate of the House could take on even greater importance if Trump returns to the Oval Office and Republicans win the Senate.
31% : If the "blue wall" cracks and Pennsylvania goes for Trump, her path becomes more complicated.
29% : Victory without Pennsylvania, for Trump, likely means the "blue wall" cracks somewhere else.
19% : Victory for Eugene Vindman, the Democratic nominee, and a clear lead for Harris could spell trouble for Trump up and down the ballot.
11% : Both campaigns will be on close watch for isolated problems on Election Day -- well aware that Trump has twisted some of those incidents to bolster his false claims that Harris is cheating.
10% : Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are battling over seven swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three Great Lakes states that make up the "blue wall" that Trump cracked in 2016 but President Joe Biden carried in 2020, and Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, the four Sun Belt battlegrounds.

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