Principals

1. The Bellwethers
2. Harris, Trump camps project optimism
3. Your Senate guide
4. Your House guide
5. Wall Street waits
6. Cyber chief says election secure

PDB: NYT grapples with tech staffer strike

Harris to spend election night at Howard University; Trump at Mar-a-Lago … Boeing workers vote to end strike … Ukraine says it attacked North Korean troops

Weigel’s Bellwethers

The 2024 US election, which has riveted and at times alarmed the nation and the world for two years, ends today. Tonight, they count the votes. Polls close in Indiana at 6 p.m., and that’s where Dave Weigel’s vital, hour-by-hour guide to understanding the election begins, looking for any evidence of Kamala Harris picking up support from Republican voters who broke for Nikki Haley during the primary. At 7 p.m., keep an eye on Fulton and DeKalb counties in Georgia for signs of Donald Trump increasing his support among Black voters. Polls in crucial Pennsylvania close at 8 p.m., and Harris will be in trouble if she slips well below Joe Biden’s 2020 performance in Lackawanna County. Don’t forget to vote, then do your best to ignore the nonsense that inevitably circulates on election day before the only poll that matters.

Harris, Trump camps project optimism

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are both cautiously optimistic as they stare down a historic — and possibly extremely close — election. The Trump campaign has felt optimistic for weeks, though some worry about being overly so. The Harris campaign, meanwhile, has grown more bullish on her chances in the past week. In what polls say is effectively a tied race, both have reasons to be hopeful: The Trump campaign has been touting early voting numbers, sending out a memo on Monday declaring that “Democrats are facing a massive turnout deficit” based in part on numbers from Democrat data expert Tom Bonier. In response, Bonier argued that “all turnout is down” and that the Trump campaign was “going to great lengths to twist numbers from a distance to appear good for them.” Team Harris, meanwhile, said late deciders are breaking for her by overwhelming margins and reported “greater enthusiasm” for the vice president.

— Shelby Talcott

How to think about tonight’s Senate races

This year’s quirky Senate map means election night could go one of three ways. In the conventional-wisdom scenario, Republicans pick up Montana and/or Ohio and narrowly flip the Senate while falling short in battleground states. In the Trump-wave scenario, the former president pulls candidates across the finish line in purple states and pushes the GOP majority in the neighborhood of 55 seats. And in the Democrats-overperform scenario, they hang onto the majority by picking up a seat in Texas or Florida and/or Jon Tester shocking everyone in Montana, while holding all their seats elsewhere. The smart money is on the conventional wisdom outcome, but don’t follow politics if you don’t like surprises… or drama. Speaking of which, this election has more senators campaigning against each other — and is likely to further shrink the number of bipartisan delegations.

— Burgess Everett

House control sits on a knife’s edge

Control of the US House is still a tossup heading into Election Day — but going into the homestretch, Republicans seem slightly less confident than Democrats. “Gun to my head? Speaker Jeffries deals with the same clown show we’ve dealt with the last two years,” as one GOP aide put it. Democrats are looking beyond New York and California races to pick up seats in Nebraska, Iowa, and Arizona. At the same time, Republicans hope to flip seats in Alaska, Washington, and Maine. Concerns over lagging early turnout among Black voters in North Carolina have Democrats nervous and could have implications for Rep. Don Davis there. Republicans are afraid they may have sacrificed their advantage among Puerto Rican voters in another swing Pennsylvania district after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s now-infamous “garbage” remark at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally.

— Kadia Goba

How Wall Street will react to the results

Investors are watching the US presidential election obsessively. The threat of a ramp-up in tariffs if Donald Trump wins and the implications for the looming tax fight carry huge implications for investors, as do potential changes to clean energy policy and the corporate tax rate. Big firms are planning for all-nighters and increasing staff on trading desks with teams overseas in anticipation of the election, Bloomberg reports. Wall Street has been “overconfident” about a Trump win, said Henrietta Treyz, director of economic policy research at Veda Partners. If Kamala Harris prevails, clean energy stocks will rise, while cryptocurrency and banks will likely take a hit, she said. Trump’s media company could also see extreme volatility. And what happens if the result isn’t clear tonight? “Not knowing will probably increase conviction that Trump is going to win,” Treyz told Semafor.

— Morgan Chalfant

US official assures public election is secure

Americans can have confidence in the US election system, the nation’s top cybersecurity official assured voters, as officials prepare to smack down false narratives amplified by foreign actors and thwart physical threats against election workers. “Our election infrastructure has never been more secure,” Jen Easterly, who leads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told reporters. While officials have seen “small-scale incidents” like distributed denial-of-service attacks and destruction of ballot boxes during early voting, she added, “at this point, we see no evidence of activity that has potential to materially impact the outcome of the presidential election.” Federal officials have warned of escalating Russian and Iranian election influence operations, and they say foreign actors may stoke violence post-election. Easterly’s job will get trickier if Trump casts doubt on the results as he did in 2020.

— Morgan Chalfant

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: House Republican leaders are tentatively planning to fly to Palm Beach this evening if Donald Trump appears to be winning the presidential election or plans to declare victory.

Playbook: Republican women are bracing for setbacks in the House, where several incumbents may lose their reelection battles and House GOP female committee chairs are all leaving their roles.

WaPo: Election officials are preparing for Trump supporters potentially disrupting voting and certification. “There is the potential for small flare-ups throughout our state and other states — little fires everywhere,” said Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Axios: Election Day ends a “a year of political and cultural whiplash unlike any in history.”

White House

• President Biden celebrated the contract agreement between Boeing and the International Association of Machinists that ended a crippling worker strike. “Over the last four years, we’ve shown collective bargaining works. Good contracts benefit workers, businesses, and consumers — and are key to growing the American economy from the middle out and the bottom up,” he said in a statement.

Polls

• Kamala Harris has a 4-percentage-point advantage over Donald Trump among likely voters nationally, according to the final NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll.
• The Nevada Independent’s Jon Ralston predicted that Harris would win a very close election.
• We asked Aaru, an AI polling startup started by three teens, to ask their thousands of bots, simulating voters across key battleground states, who they were voting for. The result: A (very) narrow win for Harris.

On the Trail

• Podcaster Joe Rogan endorsed Donald Trump.
• Jamie Dimon’s wife knocked on doors for Kamala Harris. — Bloomberg
• The Trump campaign fired a field director after learning he is a white nationalist. — Politico

Business

• Walgreens will pay $100 million to settle a proposed class-action lawsuit that accuses the company of fraudulently overcharging customers for generic drugs.

Courts

• Elon Musk won a legal fight over his $1 million voter giveaway in Pennsylvania.
• The Supreme Court agreed to hear a dispute over Louisiana’s congressional map after the election.

National Security

• Western officials believe Russia tried to start fires aboard planes flying to the US and Canada by shipping flammable devices via DHL. — WSJ

Foreign Policy

• The US and Saudi Arabia are talking about a potential security agreement that would not be part of a broader deal with Israel. — Axios
• An outgoing US commander warned that China’s navy may use a megaport being built in Peru. — FT

Technology

• Casey Newton warns that X and Elon Musk’s account on it “will be a central clearinghouse for voter fraud election claims and other election misinformation.” — Platformer
• Meta is letting US defense contractors use its AI models.
• Meanwhile, Meta will expand its ban on new election ads already in place for a week before Election Day until a few days after polls close. — Axios

Media

• The New York Times is grappling with a strike of its software engineers, designers and other tech employees, who walked out amid ongoing contract negotiations. In an email to the Times newsroom, publisher AG Sulzberger said it was “troubling that the Tech Guild would try to block this public service at such a consequential moment for our country,” Semafor’ Max Tani reported.
• Kamala Harris’ team rejected Kareem Rahma’s request to ask the vice president about the war in Gaza during a planned interview on his show. — NYT
• A new season of The Bachelor in Ukraine features a war veteran.

Big Read

• The US should acknowledge that Ukraine will not be able to completely expel the Russians from its territory and embrace a “more plausible outcome” for the war, Richard Haass writes in Foreign Affairs. Washington “should still define victory as Kyiv remaining sovereign and independent, free to join whatever alliances and associations it wants. But it should jettison the idea that, to win, Kyiv needs to liberate all its land,” he writes, urging the US to “take the uncomfortable step of pushing Kyiv to negotiate with the Kremlin.”

Blindspot

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, curated with help from our partners at Ground News.

What the Left isn’t reading: A Massachusetts man was arrested for allegedly vandalizing a Donald Trump sign by painting a swastika on it.

What the Right isn’t reading: Trump told a crowd in Georgia that he would put former NFL player Herschel Walker in charge of a new US missile shield if elected.

Principals Team

Editors: Benjy Sarlin, Elana Schor, Morgan Chalfant

Reporters: Burgess Everett, Kadia Goba, Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Shelby Talcott, David Weigel

Mike Lawler is a Republican congressman from New York.

“To restore trust in news we need radical innovation and visionary leaders — particularly at the handful of great, legacy outlets positioned to survive,” Justin Smith, Semafor’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in an open letter to Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. The letter was published shortly after the Post refused to endorse a candidate in the presidential election, a decision that Bezos said came in response to falling trust in news media.