They say the opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings. The fat lady is currently giving her vocal cords a few last squirts of throat spray. And she’s stepping onto the stage.

10:00 p.m. Update

The Associated Press Electoral Count: Trump has locked up 198 electoral votes, Harris 99

However, just breaking, The New York Times is now projecting Donald Trump will win the popular vote!

The Overview

The Blue Wall is under siege. Kamala Harris needs all three states — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — to take home the gold. At this hour, all three states appear to be moving away from her. If even one goes, Melania Trump gets to re-redecorate the White House.

Our source for this is The New York Times, which is predicting the final tallies.

Eric Daugherty tweeted the graph for us to make it easy for our bleary eyes:

JUST IN: NEW YORK TIMES final estimates, 10:15PM ET

🔴 WI: Trump+1
🔴 NV: Trump+1.6
🔴 MI: Trump+1.8
🔴 PA: Trump+1.9
🔴 GA: Trump+2.6
🔴 NC: Trump+3.3
🔴 AZ: Trump+4.1

Win odds: 78%

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 6, 2024

The NYT is now projecting Trump with a 1.9% win in Pennsylvania, a 1.8% win in Michigan, and a 1% win in Wisconsin.

Political analyst Mark Halperin also told Newsmax within the past few minutes that Harris is “fading.” “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Kamala Harris’ one path to 270 electoral votes appears to be fading.”

What’s Happening in Michigan?

Michigan is getting very interesting.

The New York Times now thinks Trump has a 1.8% advantage in Michigan. That advantage has crept up from dead even an hour ago. The Great Lakes State was leaning toward Harris this morning. According to CNN, Harris is — here’s that word again — underperforming where Biden was in Washtenaw County. NBC’s exit polls show Trump with a 5% advantage among 18- to 29-year-olds.

Update: NYT just put Michigan at 2.1%. They’re changing faster than I can type them. 

What’s Happening in Wisconsin?

Like Michigan, Wisconsin started the day leaning toward Harris. In the past hour, The New York Times has moved Wisconsin toward Trump by 1%.

What’s Happening in Pennsylvania?

Trump has gained four points with voters in suburban Pennsylvania, while Harris has registered little gain with suburban women.

Are we going to know the results from Pennsylvania tonight? Probably not, according to CBS News. “Delay doesn’t mean anything nefarious is happening.” (Sure. And Philadelphia sports fans are as gentle as the morning dew.)

9:00 p.m. Update

The Associated Press Electoral Count Has Trump at 137 to Harris’s 99

Kamala Harris is now projected to win New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Virginia, according to Decision Desk HQ. However, not by the margins Joe Biden won them in 2020. I thought Trump had a real shot in New Jersey and a good shot in Virginia. It will be interesting to see what the final tallies are in those states later.

Trump has picked up North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Wyoming. 

Polls are closing at 9 p.m. Eastern time in Texas, Wyoming, and Wisconsin. The dream of Texas going blue will have to wait. The New York Times is projecting .– though not officially yet — that Trump should win the state and its 40 electoral votes by 10 points. 

The Overall at This Hour

The one word we’re hearing over and over is “underperforming.” Kamala Harris is underperforming with key demographics, in key locations, and underperforming what Joe Biden did in a race he won in a squeaker four years ago.

Meanwhile, what have we been hearing from Republicans this evening? “Stay in those lines!” They’ve been seeing long lines at polls in rural and red areas.

Still, we are far from having a clear winner. As we learned from 2020, it’s not over even after it’s over.

What’s Happening in Pennsylvania?

The good news? There are signs Trump may be taking Pennsylvania.

The bad news? How many hundreds of thousands of votes was he ahead in Pennsylvania in 2020 when America went to bed? And could that happen again tonight?

Let’s look at some details. NBC’s exit polling shows Trump with a 6% advantage over Harris with independents. If that holds, the math gets really tough for Miss Venn Diagram. We’re also reportedly seeing a 20% shift for Republicans in mail-in ballots in Pittsburgh.

https://twitter.com/Maloney/status/1853970454655987820

Overall, Harris is underperforming Joe Biden’s haul in 2020.

Another sign: The New York Times is putting Trump’s vote tally in Pennsylvania at +0.2.  

What’s Happening in Arizona?

The big news at the moment is that there’s no big news in Arizona. The state that had massive issues and irregularities in 2020 (and 2022) has been operating relatively smoothly, according to former Stream writer Rachel Alexander, who now covers the state the way chocolate covers a Snickers bar for a different news organization. Incidentally, she will be doing a video interview with John Zmirak later this week about election integrity. That one will be worth the price of admission (if we charged admission).

But how are the poll results looking in Arizona? Earlier in the night, The New York Times was giving Trump a 65% chance of winning there.  

8:00 P.M. Update

Polls have now closed in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maine, and Maryland. (Florida’s Panhandle is in the Central Time zone, hence the hour difference.)

Polls in North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia closed at 7:30 p.m.

The Election Tally: Trump Has 95 Electoral Votes, Harris Has 35

The electoral board is starting to fill up.

Donald Trump has taken Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, South Carolina, and West Virginia … with Florida set to go his way any moment.

Kamala Harris has won Vermont, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont.

According to CNN exit polling, Trump has an 11-point advantage among independent voters.

Sunshine State Shining for Trump

Florida is looking to be a Harlem Globetrotters-sized route for Trump. Before the polls closed, he had already run up a 1.2 million-vote lead. The West Palm Beach resident even took Miami-Dade County in the early vote by 11 points.

It also appears Trump has flipped the bellwether counties of Duval and Pinellas, which he lost two years ago.

With the red Panhandle just closing and Trump having this sort of lead at this point, you can put Florida in the bag.

Georgia on My Mind

Trump’s gotta be feeling pretty good about Georgia at this hour. In a state decided by less than 12,000 votes in 2020, exit polling is showing independent voters have swung 20 points in his direction.

“Wow,” says CNN’s Jake Tapper.

https://twitter.com/_johnnymaga/status/1853954126951964767

According to Fox News exit polling, Harris is underperforming with black voters in the state, with Trump earning 25% of the black vote. Harris is also polling 6 points behind what Biden got with black women.  

Beat the Cheat: Wisconsin Forced to Recount Absentee Ballots After Issue with Ballot Boxes

Wisconsin is recounting 30,000 absentee ballots after an election worker in Milwaukee noticed panels on some ballot box tabulators were not closed correctly. The recount will take hours. The Republican National Committee is blasting Milwaukee election officials.

“Throughout the day we have been monitoring slow ballot counting in Milwaukee. Now, our legal team has learned that the counting took place in insecure conditions and the city now has to start over, wildly extending the counting timeline,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said. “This is an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration in a key swing state. Voters deserve better, and we are unambiguously calling on Milwaukee’s officials to do their jobs and count ballots quickly and effectively. Anything less undermines voter confidence.”

Keep checking in with The Stream here and follow along on our X feed @streamdotorg.

7:00 p.m. Eastern Time

It is 7 p.m. on the East Coast. Poll have just closed in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and New Hampshire. They closed an hour ago in Kentucky and Indiana. 

After all the talk and texts, surveys, and ads; all the campaigning, all the gaslighting, and all the drama — from assassination attempts on Donald Trump to the Democrats dumping their nominee from the ticket; all the comedy — from a billionaire serving fries at McDonalds to a radical serving word salads to the public, to the sitting president calling more than half the nation “garbage.” All the memorable lines, like, “Fight, fight, fight,” and not-so-memorable lines, like, “I was raised in a middle-class family.” After all the ink and all the stink, it’s time to actually find out who will be the next president of the United States. 

Trump is awaiting the results at Mar-a-Lago. Kamala Harris is holding her watch party at her alma mater, Howard University. Hundreds of millions of Americans are watching anxiously online and on TV … as is the rest of the world. 

During our 5 p.m. serving of Al’s Afternoon Tea, we went over some of the trends and tidbits that were emerging, clues presented by the turnout numbers for the two major parties and independents.

Let’s add a few more items before the results come in.

What Is Exit Polling Telling Us?

Early exit polling, which may turn out to mean little, would appear to lean Trump’s way.

According to CNN exit polling: 72% of voters say they are angry or dissatisfied by the direction the nation is headed.

According to The Associated Press’s exit polling: 40% say the economy is their top issue, up from 30% in 2020. Meanwhile, 60% say the economy is horrible or not so good.

Here’s an odd one from NBC’s exit polling: “Who do you trust on abortion?” This is Kamala Harris’s big issue, right? The only thing she speaks passionately about. According to her, Trump is going to turn women into characters from of The Handmaid’s Tale. Her whole pitch has been an attempt to scare women into voting for her. Yet, according to the exit poll, voters only trust her 50%-44% over Trump on the issue. Perhaps this means nothing in the long run, but it’s interesting.

Harris’s Last-Minute Goof

Harris paid a visit to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in D.C. to thank staffers for their work. That seems like it would be easy enough to pull off without bungling the job, but this is Kamala Harris we’re talking about it. She got caught pretending to be talking on the phone when she was actually using her camera app.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Kamala just pretended to call a voter but then accidentally showed her screen

She was on the camera app pic.twitter.com/pfvNaq1VdB

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 5, 2024

Suddenly Joe Biden talking to long-dead world leaders and shaking the hands of invisible people seems almost quaint.

Now further evidence that Harris is just playing a role … 

Campaign’s Last-Minute Admission: There Was a Plan to “Install” Kamala Harris

Do you still think “We the People” elect our leaders? That’s the whole point of today, right? But that’s not the way the powers behind Kamala Harris think about this topic. According to one of her senior campaign advisors:

“We are optimistic that we are literally about to turn the page on Donald Trump and install Vice President Harris as the next President of the United States.”

Harris Campaign Senior Advisor: "We are optimistic that we are literally about to turn the page on Donald Trump and install Vice President Harris as the next President of the United States." pic.twitter.com/4CpAll8BRY

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 5, 2024

Install? Really?

Jill Biden’s Last-Minute Signal?

Jill Biden voted this afternoon in Delaware. We’ve been wondering if her husband has been deliberately undercutting Harris’s campaign.

Whoa. @FLOTUS just voted in Delaware.

Is her outfit a sign? Feel like it's a sign. 😏

Nice suit, btw! pic.twitter.com/31aiZ52OsL

— Roxanne Hoge (@RoxanneHoge) November 5, 2024

Of all the colored outfits the First Lady could wear — and she’s put on some doozies the past four years — should we read anything into the fact that she’s wearing MAGA red? Especially when Democratic blue goes better with her blonde hair? Just like Joe donning the MAGA hat a few weeks back, knowing full well what that picture would mean — we think Dr. Jill is trying to tell us something.  

By the way, the Big Guy isn’t attending Harris’s watch party at Howard University.