US Election 2024: Kamala Harris wins her home state of California

Vice President Harris has won her home state of California, scoring a victory in the Western Democratic stronghold.

Harris taking California’s 54 electoral votes was expected. She hails from San Francisco, and the last time a Republican won the state was President George H.W. Bush in 1988.

California holds 54 electoral votes, the most of any state in the country (it actually lost one for the first time after the 2020 Census). Its polls closed at 11 p.m. ET.

The state, which is home to some 39 million people, supported Republicans for much of the late 20th century but has reliably voted blue in recent years.

President Joe Biden won the state by some 30 points over Trump in 2020, the fourth consecutive election in which the Democratic nominee got more than 60% of the California vote.

The magic number to win the presidency is 270. Observers expect the hotly contested race for the White House to come down to a handful of key battleground states.

The following is a list of the states won by each candidate and the corresponding number of electoral votes, based on the projections of US media including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC/NBC News, ABC and CBS.

Read more about US Election 2024

In the United States, a candidate becomes president not by winning a majority of the national popular vote but through a system called the Electoral College, which allots electoral votes to the 50 states and the District of Columbia largely based on their population.

Here are some of the rules that could decide the Nov. 5 contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican challenger Donald Trump.

WHAT IS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE?

When voters go to the polls to pick a president, they usually only see the names of the presidential and vice presidential candidates. However, voters are actually voting for a group — or “slate” — of electors.

Nationally, there are a total of 538 electoral votes, or electors, meaning a candidate needs to secure 270 to win.

Electors are typically party loyalists who pledge to support the candidate who gets the most votes in their state. Each elector represents one vote in the Electoral College.
In 2020, President Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes to defeat Trump, who had 232 electoral votes.

Donald Trump

Donald Trump, a 78-year-old Republican, survived two assassination attempts, one by millimeters, just weeks after a jury in New York – the city whose tabloids first elevated him to national fame and notoriety – made him the first former U.S. president to be convicted of a felony.

Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris, 60, was catapulted to the top of the Democratic ticket in July – giving her a chance to become the first woman to hold the world’s most powerful job – after President Joe Biden, 81, had a disastrous debate performance and three weeks later dropped his reelection bid under pressure from his party.

For all of that turmoil, the contours of the race have changed little. Polls show Harris and Trump running neck and neck nationally and in the battleground states. More than 77 million voters have already cast ballots, but the next two days will provide a critical test of whether Vice President Harris’ or former President Donald Trump’s campaign does the better job of driving supporters to the polls.

Voters, both Democrats and Republicans, have broken century-old records in the last two presidential elections, a sign of the passion that Trump stirs in both political parties.

In the final days of this campaign, both sides are flooded social media sites and TV and radio stations with a last round of ad campaigns, and racing to knock on doors and make calls.

Harris’ campaign team believes the sheer size of its voter mobilization efforts is making a difference and says its volunteers knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors in each of the battleground states this weekend. ”We are feeling very good about where we are right now,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters.

The campaign says its internal data shows that undecided voters are breaking in their favor, particularly women in the battleground states, and that they see an increase in early voting among core parts of their coalition, including young voters and voters of color.

Donald Trump’s campaign has its own in-house canvassing operation, but has effectively outsourced most of the work to outside super PACs, allied political groups that can raise and spend unlimited sums of money.

They were more focused on contacting “low propensity” voters, or voters that often do not go to the polls, instead of appealing to middle-of-the-road voters who can flip to either side.