Trump wins North Carolina as Pennsylvania and Georgia are too close to call; Last polling stations closed

We won't know for hours (or even days) whether Trump or Harris won the 2024 election.

But even now, while the votes are still being counted, it looks like “the polls” had a pretty good night.

This was not a given. In both 2016 and 2020, polls significantly underestimated Trump's support in key battleground states. Many political observers wondered whether the same thing would happen again in 2024 — or whether, in trying to avoid underestimating Trump a third time, pollsters would adjust their methods too much and underestimate Harris instead.

This time around, however, the best nonpartisan polling averages appear to have been…pretty accurate?

Again, it is still too early to tell what the final margins of victory will be in the seven key battlegrounds – let alone nationally. However, pre-election polls estimated that none of the swing states would be decided by more than one point, two or at most three points. And at this point, they are all too close to forecast, and final margins are unlikely to be outside of that range.

Certainly all or most swing states could narrowly prevail over one candidate, giving him or her a comfortable victory in the Electoral College. (With his win in North Carolina and his lead in Georgia, Trump has a much better chance of pulling that off than Harris.) But even a swing-state sweep is well within the possibilities given the deadlocked pre-election polling – assuming none of these victories fall outside the usual margin of error.