Where Things Stand

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s convincing victory will transform Washington. He will enjoy a comfortable majority in the Senate that will be prepared to confirm the ardent loyalists that he has said will fill his government. Control of the House is not yet known, but Republicans may keep their grasp of it.

Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at Howard University after calling President-elect Donald J. Trump to congratulate him. “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” she told supporters.

Ms. Harris offered her supporters reassurance, particularly the younger generation. Repeating her “when we fight, we win” mantra, she added, “Here’s the thing: Sometimes the fight takes a while.”

Our correspondents Katie Rogers and Jonathan Weisman sum up a historic result:

Updated

Nov. 6, 2024, 8:26 p.m. ET

Jonathan Weisman and

Harris conceded the race at her alma mater.

Vice President Kamala Harris, conceding defeat to President-elect Donald J. Trump on Wednesday, sought to allay her supporters’ deep fears about the future of American democracy, vowing that the fight for pluralism and equality would continue. “It’s going to be OK,” she assured them.

“For everyone who is watching, do not despair,” she told a cheering crowd at her alma mater, Howard University, a historically Black institution in Washington, D.C. “This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.”

Trying to sound upbeat in a 12-minute address that ended a failed, 107-day presidential campaign, Ms. Harris seemed to tap into the anxieties of much of the nation — albeit not a majority — that the United States was entering dark times, with a president at the helm who has expressed authoritarian ambitions to punish his enemies, exert his authority ruthlessly and be a “dictator,” if only on Day 1.

She called accepting defeat “a fundamental principle of American democracy,” her meaning clear even as she made no mention that her opponent had done no such thing four years earlier. And to her most worried supporters, she offered a proverb: “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

Mr. Trump is the first former president in more than 120 years to win a second term after a re-election defeat. His big gains across the country helped deliver Senate control to his party. Control of the House has not yet been declared, but Republicans may well hold on to their slender majority — now with the undisputed leader of the party in the White House exerting control over the unruly House crew.

The Republican majority in the Senate was secured with the defeats of Democratic incumbents Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana, as well as the capture of the West Virginia seat of the retiring Senator Joe Manchin III.

But the Republican majority will not be the historically large margin that it appeared it could be. Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, eked out a victory over her Trump-backed opponent, Eric Hovde. And Representative Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, won her race to replace the retiring Senator Debbie Stabenow, keeping the seat in Democratic hands. Swing-state Senate contests in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona remain uncalled.

Even so, the former president’s victory left no doubt Republican power was surging. Voters chose Mr. Trump as the stronger leader for uncertain times and as one they saw as a proven economic champion. He rode a wave of anxiousness over inflation and illegal immigration by promising to bring his strongman-style of politics to the White House. They looked past his 34 felony convictions, his role inspiring an assault on the Capitol and his indictments on charges of trying to subvert the 2020 election and to hold on to classified documents.

Mr. Trump’s victory in one of the most tumultuous campaigns in recent memory — including two failed assassination attempts — makes him, at 78, the oldest man to be elected president.

World leaders congratulated the president-elect, in some cases setting aside longstanding concerns over his proposed taxes on imported goods and his foreign policy views — particularly whether he would roll back American support for Ukraine as it attempted to fight off the Russian invasion.

For Ms. Harris, who sought to make history not only as the first woman but as the first Black and Asian American woman to be elected president, the hard-fought contest was a three-and-a-half-month sprint that began after President Biden abandoned his re-election campaign under pressure.

In the end, the headwinds of post-pandemic inflation, soaring housing prices and economic uncertainty were too much for Ms. Harris to overcome, even though the Biden administration’s sprawling economic agenda helped to stimulate the nation’s recovery from recession and make America’s economic growth the envy of the world.

Mr. Trump centered his campaign on sealing the U.S.-Mexican border and deporting undocumented immigrants by the millions. He promised to impose sweeping tariffs to strengthen domestic industries. And in the final weeks of the campaign, he made a flurry of expensive financial promises to different sectors of the electorate, promising to abolish taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits.

His closing message focused on blaming Ms. Harris for all the perceived failures of the unpopular Biden administration, under the slogan “Kamala Broke It. Trump Will Fix It.”

Jim Tankersley contributed reporting.

A correction was made on

Nov. 6, 2024

:

An earlier version of this article misstated the location in Florida where Donald Trump gave his victory speech. It was West Palm Beach, not Palm Beach.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

“We know there are still thousands of ballots outstanding that have not been counted or even received yet because they’re in the mail or they’re in the drop boxes,” Ms. Rosen said Tuesday night, after it was clear that a winner would not be declared.

On Tuesday evening, once the first results were released, Ms. Rosen took a narrow lead. But then as more ballots rolled in, the race tightened. And after ballots from a rural Nevada county were reported on Wednesday morning, Mr. Brown led at one point by nearly 6,000 votes.

That margin has since shrunk, with both sides eyeing what’s left in favorable counties.

One of the state’s larger rural areas, Nye County, still had more than 10,000 mail ballots left to count as of Wednesday afternoon, according to Arnold Knightly, a county spokesman. These ballots are expected to favor Mr. Brown.

“We’re running them now and we’re going to run them another hour and a half, and then whatever we get done, we’ll get done,” Mr. Knightly said in an interview on Wednesday afternoon. “Part of the challenge is, this is a huge county, so to run the ballots from Pahrump up to Tonopah is three hours, that’s 167 miles.”

Tonopah, the county seat, is an old silver mining town. Back in 1982, an article in The New York Times described it as a place “built for the business and pleasure of miners, where gamblers, desert amateurs and motoring funlovers are asked to fit in as best they can.”

“We will see what the final results are, but this has been quite a journey. I am just filled with so much love,” Mr. Brown, an Army veteran who survived a blast from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan and has never held elected office, said in a video posted to X Wednesday morning.

The race will not decide which party controls Senate; the Republicans already recaptured the chamber after victories in Ohio and Montana.

At the moment, Mr. Brown is running almost 60,000 votes behind President-elect Donald J. Trump, who is comfortably leading Vice President Kamala Harris in Nevada — though most outlets, including The Associated Press and NBC News, have yet to call the race. Coming into Election Day, The New York Times polling average showed the race tied, and each candidate visited the state multiple times in the campaign’s final months.

Only one of the state’s House races has been called — a Republican incumbent, Representative Mark Amodei, has won his contest. In the other races, three Democratic incumbents were leading as of Wednesday.

Ms. Rosen is banking on an influx of mail ballots from Clark County, the state’s largest, which includes Las Vegas, and traditionally a Democratic stronghold. Voters who submit ballots by mail also are more often Democrats.

But it is unclear how many of those ballots might eventually come in. Lorena Portillo, the county’s registrar of voters, said on Wednesday that her office had 55,000 mail ballots that were dropped off on Election Day or received in the mail on Tuesday. These ballots still need to be verified and counted, and more flowing in for days will be eligible for counting. Ms. Portillo said she hoped to provide another update Wednesday evening.

Washoe County, Nev. — which includes Reno, the state’s third most-populous city — is slightly favoring Ms. Rosen. She held onto that advantage after the county released results for about 13,000 ballots on Wednesday night, with county officials still counting about 30,000 ballots.

Who won the Senate race could take several days to figure out. Under Nevada law, mail ballots postmarked on Election Day can be counted up until 5 p.m. local time on Saturday. Ballots with no postmark or one that’s unclear can be counted up until 5 p.m. on Friday.

If the results remain razor tight, uncertainty here in the Silver State will be compounded by the ballots that need fixing if they are to be counted, which numbered roughly 13,000 as of Wednesday morning. Mail-in ballots are generally rejected when a voter’s signature on the envelope does not match the one in a voter registration database.

Voters in Nevada have until Nov. 12 to fix, or “cure,” problematic ballots, further delaying the determination of the outcome. Both parties are expected to put canvassers in the field to encourage voters with rejected ballots to take the necessary steps to cure them.

But the counties also reached out to voters.

“We try every which way,” said Ms. Portillo, during a news conference on Tuesday night. “If we have the email, we try the email,” she said, as well as sending a letter. “If we have a phone number, we also send robocalls to the voter, and we’re doing that every single day. If they’re on the list, we’re going to go ahead and send that to them every single day up until Nov. 12.”

In 2022, when Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, won re-election by just 7,928 votes, there were 7,074 mail ballots that needed curing. About 3,000 ballots were successfully cured, of which 42 percent ended up Democratic, according to the Nevada secretary of state’s office.

She is not alone. The New York Times spoke with two other voters in Montgomery County, and a third in Philadelphia, who had similar experiences and had to rush back to Pennsylvania at the last minute to vote.

Ms. Wu provided 12 emails documenting her efforts to obtain a mail-in ballot, as well as screenshots from Pennsylvania’s voter portal. They show that she requested her ballot on Sept. 10, that it was marked as sent, and then that it was marked as “CANC - UNDELIVERABLE.”

She requested another one, but the request was rejected because she had already requested the first, “undeliverable” one. That happened multiple times. After several attempts to contact the Montgomery County voter services offices, she heard back from someone who told her she needed to file a form to cancel the first request. She did that on Oct. 28 — less than five hours after being told to — but did not receive confirmation that the cancellation form had been received until Oct. 30.

On Monday, Nov. 4, now thoroughly panicked, she tried to contact the county voter services office again. This time, she received a response that her ballot would arrive within “24 to 48 hours” — too late for her to return it in time.

She went and bought the plane ticket.

A friend of hers, Malana Li, 23, lives in Philadelphia but often travels to New York for work, and she is in New York now. She requested a mail-in ballot on Sept. 24 and received an email on Sept. 25, which she provided to The Times, confirming that her application had been approved; she then received another on Sept. 27 saying her ballot was about to be mailed. Nonetheless, like Ms. Wu’s ballot, Ms. Li’s never arrived.

“To the best of our knowledge these were isolated incidents,” Kevin Feeley, a representative for the Philadelphia City Commissioners, said in an email.

Montgomery County officials did not comment. The Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office also did not comment.

A third woman, Tara Mehta, 26, also splits her time between her home in Montgomery County and New York and had a similar experience to Ms. Li’s. For her, returning to Pennsylvania to vote in person wasn’t a major inconvenience, but there was “just a lot of uncertainty and unnecessary panic it created,” she said.

Ms. Wu’s, Ms. Li’s and Ms. Mehta’s accounts follow an account earlier on Tuesday from Lexi Harder, who is registered to vote in Montgomery County but is studying in Berlin. Ms. Harder told The Times that she had paid more than $1,100 to fly home on Tuesday after the absentee ballot she had submitted was returned to her on Saturday.

Multiple other people posted about similar experiences on social media, including in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Iowa, though The Times has not independently verified their accounts as it did Ms. Wu’s, Ms. Li’s and Ms. Mehta’s.

John Yoon contributed reporting.

As Republicans in the region celebrated Mr. Trump’s performance, which cleared his path back to the White House and proved that his 2016 victories there were no one-off, Democrats were faced with a fractured base and urgent questions about their path forward.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of conversations in the days ahead about next steps and what comes next,” said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson of Michigan, a Democrat, adding, “as I’ve personally reflected on things and talked to folks, people are very concerned about their pocketbook.”

Great Lakes Democrats have been here before and rebounded. After Mr. Trump’s 2016 victories brought another round of liberal introspection, Democrats dominated the 2018 midterm elections by winning back governorships and congressional seats. President Biden continued that momentum by carrying all three Blue Wall states in 2020, and his party had another solid election in 2022.

But the results on Tuesday pointed to more fundamental questions about the old Democratic coalition in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Mr. Trump had aggressively courted many of the blue-collar white voters, including union members, who had long sided with Democrats. And he made inroads this year with young men, Arab Americans and Black voters, also longstanding parts of the Democratic base.

“I think we’re witnessing, in real time, a political realignment,” said State Representative Bill G. Schuette, a Michigan Republican who led his party’s legislative campaign effort in the state this year, and said Mr. Trump’s willingness to visit traditionally Democratic places like Detroit and Dearborn helped build support.

Representative Hillary Scholten, a Democrat who won re-election on Tuesday in a historically conservative part of West Michigan, said there were still reasons for electoral hope in her party. Democrats narrowly held Senate seats in Michigan and Wisconsin, while a race in Pennsylvania remained too close to call.

Still, Ms. Scholten said the Democrats’ economic message was in urgent need of an overhaul.

“We got too lost in the data and weren’t listening enough to the American people about how they were feeling,” she said. “You try to tell a working mom of four kids that she shouldn’t be worried about the economy because the G.D.P. looks really strong, she’s going to say, ‘Get out of here, you don’t understand.’”

In the buildup to the election, Democrats used the Blue Wall as a sort of electoral battle cry, urging Vice President Kamala Harris’s supporters to knock on doors and convince their friends to vote in a region that pollsters had said provided her most straightforward path to the presidency.

Over the weekend, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan told a crowd of canvassers that she was “confident Michigan is going to show the world that we are a strong part of the Blue Wall that is intact.”

It was not to be.

“Hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright,” she added. “As long as we never give up. And as long as we keep fighting.”

Ms. Harris, her voice cracking with emotion at times, made the final speech of her presidential campaign at Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington. The results, still trickling in as Ms. Harris spoke, showed her on track to lose both the national popular vote and the top seven battleground states.

Ms. Harris ran a 107-day campaign under extraordinarily rare circumstances after President Biden dropped out of the race and she ricocheted to the top of the Democratic ticket. But burdened by the legacy of her incumbency, the history of a nation that was reluctant to elect a woman of color, and her unwillingness to articulate a meaningful separation from the unpopular Biden administration, Ms. Harris lost ground among most major groups of voters.

Her 12-minute concession was more than Mr. Trump ever offered to President Biden and Ms. Harris after they defeated him in 2020. To this day, Mr. Trump has not conceded that race, in public or private. Now, he returns to the White House after a resounding win, still technically facing federal charges over his attempts to overturn the election four years ago.

On Wednesday, in what seemed a pointed reminder, Ms. Harris said she had called Mr. Trump earlier in the day to offer her congratulations — but also to promise that the Biden administration would “engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”

“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she said. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it.”

Many of her female supporters were crying as they left the campus’s grassy quad, known as the Yard. Against the backdrop of Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall, Ms. Harris used her speech to encourage generations behind her not to be deterred by the outcome of her barrier-breaking campaign.

“Don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before,” said Ms. Harris, the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to ascend as the nominee of a major political party. “You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world. And so to everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.”

When she delivered her speech on Wednesday, Ms. Harris thanked Mr. Biden, who was watching from the West Wing, as well as her family and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.

Mr. Walz stood off to the side, grimacing and seeming on the verge of tears. Doug Emhoff, her husband, embraced their daughter, Ella.

Ms. Harris also took a moment to address the young people watching.

“It is OK to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be OK,” she said. “On the campaign, I would often say, ‘When we fight, we win.’ But here’s the thing, here’s the thing: Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.”

The crowd of supporters gathered at Howard was far sparser than the one that had awaited her on Tuesday evening for her election night party, hoping to witness a historic victory. Jack Ludd, 79, had missed the watch party because he was tired after his fourth trip to Pennsylvania canvassing for the Harris campaign, but he showed up to hear Ms. Harris concede.

Resting on the seat of his walker as he waited for the vice president, he said he felt “afraid” about the prospect of four more years under Mr. Trump.

“I don’t know what to expect,” said Mr. Ludd, a retired taxi driver from Washington. “I depend on Social Security.”

But he was not entirely surprised by her defeat. On his canvassing trips, Mr. Ludd said, “the buses were almost empty.”

Kadidra Hurst also traveled to Howard on Wednesday to show Ms. Harris her appreciation, although she knew that the crowd would not be as big as Tuesday’s.

“I wanted Kamala to know that I still support her,” Ms. Hurst said. “I think really, we need a message of, what do we do next? And I feel like she gave us that — that we continue to fight we, we keep our foot on the gas.”

Her 5-year-old daughter, Tasmin Hurst, said it was “very good” to see Ms. Harris onstage. She said she was sad about the loss, saying Mr. Trump was “very not a nice man.”

Adriane Lowrie was brought to tears as she talked about seeing Ms. Harris leave the stage one last time. “All that she did to fight,” Ms. Lowrie said, wiping away tears. “It’s just sad, the state of our country is so divided.”

The night before, thousands of people had gathered with high enthusiasm at Howard, watching CNN on giant outdoor screens. They cheered and waved American flags when good news came in for Ms. Harris, like her unsurprising victory in California.

But when the results from the battleground states showed up, the crowd was largely silent as an anchor ticked through Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina — she trailed in all — only celebrating when her soon-to-evaporate lead in Michigan was announced. Later in the evening, the Harris campaign shut off the sound to the television screens and started playing music after a CNN guest remarked that the election felt “more like 2016 than 2020.”

Ms. Harris’s sorority sisters, clad in the pink and green of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, streamed slowly out of the campus. One broke her prayer to decline to speak with a reporter. Just before Ms. Harris officially lost Georgia, the song she chose for her campaign, “Freedom,” by Beyoncé — an ode to the journey of liberation of Black women from slavery — began blaring through loudspeakers.

Jala Dowd, a 22-year-old senior at Howard who voted for Ms. Harris, sat and watched the crowd, reflecting on what Howard taught women like her and Ms. Harris, namely “being yourself, being Black and going into the world being proud of that.”

“I don’t know what the future holds at this point,” Ms. Dowd said. “I think the world is scared of a woman leading the country, let alone a Black woman. That’s just what we face. That’s where history has led us to now.”

Katie Rogers contributed reporting from New York and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Washington.

There’s a long answer and a short answer.

The long answer is about the volume of races and the number of competitive seats. With 435 House races across the country, a party needs to win 218 of them to capture the chamber. Dozens are in competitive districts, meaning there are many possibilities for races to be too close to call for days as elections officials count absentee and provisional ballots. One recent House campaign in Iowa came down to just a six-vote difference.

Currently, there are too-close-to-call races in more than a dozen states from Alaska to Maine. And some races whose outcome appear to be clear remain officially uncalled, even though both sides can see where they are headed, as happened on Wednesday in Pennsylvania, where Representatives Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright conceded defeat before the results were finalized.

The New York Times relies largely on The Associated Press to call House races. The A.P. employs a team of analysts, researchers and race callers who have a deep understanding of the states where they declare winners. In some tightly contested races, The Times independently evaluates A.P. race calls before declaring a winner. That all takes time.

But there’s an even shorter and simpler answer for why it takes so long to know who won the House: California.

The battle for control of the House runs through this large, populous blue state, where there are a number of closely contested races. Ten California House races this year were featured on the nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s list of competitive races.

California is famous for taking days (if not more than week) to count all its ballots. It allows mail ballots to be counted if they are received up to seven days after Election Day (provided they are postmarked by Election Day). And California sends mail ballots to all registered, active voters — meaning its volume of mail ballots is simply higher than other states.

The state currently has more than a dozen undecided House races.

California’s slow process has long frustrated House Republicans. It took more than a week in 2022 to call the House for Republicans. Former Speaker Paul Ryan in 2018 called the state’s process “bizarre.”

“We were only down 26 seats the night of the election, and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race,” he lamented at the time.

That comment prompted Senator Alex Padilla, who was then the California secretary of state, to defend the state’s vote-counting practices: “In California, we make sure every ballot is properly counted and accounted for. That’s not ‘bizarre,’ that’s DEMOCRACY.”