Live swing state election results maps

This Election Day, all eyes are on seven critical swing states that will determine which candidate – Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump – will be the next commander-in-chief.

This year, turnout is especially crucial in Michigan’s Wayne County (Detroit), North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) and Georgia’s Fulton County (Atlanta). These large, Democratic-leaning cities and their inner suburbs are an important source of Democratic votes in statewide elections. Republican candidates have tended to do well in the more rural areas of these states.

It takes 270 electoral votes to win the White House, and these swing states have a collective 93 votes that will ultimately decide who wins.

Here’s the latest presidential election coverage from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin:

Arizona (Electoral votes: 11)

Arizona, once considered reliably red, is now a key battleground state in the race to the White House.

Biden won the state by 0.3% in 2020, and his 49.4% support was the highest level for a Democratic candidate since 1964.

More than 60% of ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election in Arizona came from Maricopa County, the home of Phoenix and much of the state’s population. Biden won 50.3% of the vote in Maricopa in 2020, beating Trump by about 45,000 votes, and that was enough to win the state by just over 10,000 votes.

Georgia (Electoral votes: 16)

Georgia remains one of the top prizes in the presidential election. It has been a fairly reliable Republican state for presidential candidates in recent history, but 2020 showed the state can swing from red to blue when Biden won by a very slim margin of 12,670 votes, or 0.25% of the roughly 5 million ballots cast.

Before that, the Peach State hadn’t voted for a Democratic president since Bill Clinton in 1992.

In statewide elections, Republicans tend to perform best in the smaller, more rural counties in the northern, central and southeastern regions of the state, while Democrats post their best numbers in the population centers of Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Macon, Savannah and Athens.

In particular, the counties in the Atlanta area typically are vital to a statewide victory but for different reasons. Fulton and DeKalb are overwhelmingly Democratic, giving Biden 73% and 83% of the vote in 2020. Hillary Clinton also carried both counties overwhelmingly in 2016 but with 69% and 81% of the vote, respectively. She lost Georgia to Trump.

Michigan (Electoral votes: 15)

Michigan has traditionally been a Democratic stronghold, supporting blue candidates from 1992 to 2012.

The state was one of three presidential battlegrounds, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that went narrowly for Republican Donald Trump in 2016 after almost 30 years of supporting Democrats for president. Four years later, Democrat Joe Biden won all three states back for Democrats, with a margin in Michigan of about 154,000 votes out of more than 5.5 million votes cast.

Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris have campaigned heavily in pursuit of Michigan’s 15 electoral votes since becoming their parties’ nominees, with a focus on vote-rich Detroit and its suburbs and Kent County in the west, home of Grand Rapids and a key swing area of the state.

Nevada (Electoral votes: 6)

Nevada only has six electoral college votes, making it the smallest prize of the seven presidential battleground states. Biden narrowly won Nevada in 2020 – he got 33,596 more votes than Trump.

Nevada has one of the nation’s best track records as a presidential bellwether. The candidate who won the state has gone on to win the White House in 27 of the last 30 presidential elections. It voted for the losing candidate only in 1908, 1976 and 2016, when Democrat Hillary Clinton carried the state. Democrats have won Nevada in the last four presidential elections.

More than two-thirds of Nevada votes came from Clark, home to Las Vegas. In Nevada, Biden lost 14 of the state’s 15 counties, but his 91,000-vote margin over Trump in Clark was enough to secure his statewide victory of 34,000 votes.

North Carolina (Electoral votes: 16)

North Carolina has voted for a Democrat for president just once in the last several election cycles (Barack Obama in 2008). In 2020, Trump’s margin of victory in North Carolina was just 74,481 votes in 2020, a little more than 1 percentage point and the tightest of any state he won that year over Biden.

Hurricane Helene could have a significant impact on voter turnout in North Carolina. The storm’s impact was severe in Buncombe County and the Asheville area, one of two counties in western North Carolina carried by Biden four years ago. The other counties in the region are reliably Republican, and suffered alongside Buncombe a level of destruction described by the state’s governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, as "unlike anything our state has ever experienced."

This year, political observers are also curious whether the scandals surrounding Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s controversial Republican candidate for governor, will help Democrats at the top of the ticket.

Robinson’s campaign has been in a tailspin since September, when CNN reported that he posted racist and explicit messages on a pornography website message board more than a decade ago.

Another media report claims Robinson, who was endorsed by Trump, was a regular at porn shops in Greensboro in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

Pennsylvania (Electoral votes: 19)

With its 19 electoral votes, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania is the largest prize among the battleground states and an important piece of both campaigns’ path to victory.

Pennsylvania was one of three "blue wall" swing states that went narrowly for Trump in 2016 after almost 30 years of voting for Democratic presidential candidates; the others were Michigan and Wisconsin. Four years later, Democrat Joe Biden won all three states back for Democrats with a margin in Pennsylvania of about 80,000 votes out of more than 6.9 million votes cast. The states remain key electoral prizes this year.

In Pennsylvania, the suburbs of Philadelphia will play a significant role. Philadelphia’s collar counties of Bucks, Montgomery, Chester and Delaware are among the state’s wealthiest. They are historic Republican strongholds that have shifted left for decades. Democratic presidential candidates have carried three of them since the 1992 election; Chester flipped between the parties throughout the 2000s.

Wisconsin (Electoral votes: 10)

Wisconsin is no stranger to close presidential elections. The margin of victory was less than a percentage point in the state’s 2020, 2016, 2004 and 2000 elections. So it might be again this Election Day.

Wisconsin was one of three "blue wall" states (Michigan and Pennsylvania are the others) that went narrowly for Trump in 2016 after almost 30 years of voting for Democratic presidential candidates. Four years later, Democrat Joe Biden won all three states back for Democrats with a margin in Wisconsin of about 20,000 votes out of nearly 3.3 million votes cast.

In Wisconsin, the turnout in counties surrounding Milwaukee will be significant. Those key counties are Washington, Ozaukee and Waukesha — known colloquially as the "WOW" counties. These historically Republican-leaning communities have been slowly moving to the left: Republican presidential candidates have won them in recent elections, but by increasingly smaller margins.

This forces Republicans to turn to more rural areas of the state rather than relying on those counties to offset losses in the state’s urban counties of Milwaukee and Dane, home to Madison, the state capital and the University of Wisconsin’s main campus. It will be a good night for Trump if high turnout and margins in the "WOW" counties look more like the early 2000s, rather than 2020.