2024 Election: Live Updates

According to Yahoo Finance, Donald Trump’s 60 percent stake in Trump Media (ticker symbol: DJT), the company that runs Truth Social, is currently worth about $4 billion. Trading was halted today due to volatility. Despite having revenue of only about $1 million in its last quarterly report, the company has a market cap of nearly $7 billion. If Trump loses, the share price could go to zero, since the company has not been very successful at attracting a dedicated user base for Truth Social outside the former president himself and its financials are already poor. If he wins, he might be forced to sell his stake for ethics reasons. Either way, DJT shareholders will be in a for a wild ride.

West Palm Beach — Tonight’s also a big night for the people who have known the GOP nominee the longest. When it comes to campaign hands, that list includes Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign adviser in 2016 who was in and out of the former president’s orbit for years. After being brought on for the Republican National Convention over the summer, he’s now helping the campaign in an advisory role.

“I’ve been at a front row seat of history,” Lewandowski tells National Review inside tonight’s Trump-Vance election night party venue of his roughly decade-long working relationship with the GOP nominee.

Any regrets about how this cycle’s campaign was run from a strategy standpoint? “I never have regrets,” he said. “You don’t look back you just look forward you can’t change the past. So let’s just go forward.”

CNN’s exit polling found that 2 percent of the electorate had a favorable view of both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Eight percent counted themselves “double haters,” an increase of five points from the final exit polling in the 2022 midterms.

West Palm Beach — Cautious optimism from the GOP campaign here tonight inside the Trump-Vance election night party venue. “Polling wise, Donald Trump has never been in as strong a position as he is right now,” says Trump adviser Tim Murtaugh.

Political junkies and pollsters are all eyeing how big the gender gap will be this cycle. Pressed by National Review about the outlier Selzer/Des Moines Register poll showing Kamala Harris 3 points ahead of Trump in Iowa, Murtaugh said: “From our perspective, we just dismissed it….You could describe that poll as a voter suppression poll. There’s no question about that. It is so wildly out of line with everything that everybody else has seen and reported about Iowa.”

Added Murtaugh: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Donald Trump wins Iowa by double digits tonight.”

CNN’s exit polling shows 80 percent of voters locked their choice for president in before September. Just 3 percent decided in the last few days, and another 3 percent decided in the last week. Again, all the caveats associated with early exit polling are applicable. But, if there was a late surge in the last week for Kamala Harris among undecided and unaffiliated voters, that would apply to a very small slice of the electorate.

You should really throw out all the analysis of Nevada based off of the margin between Republican and Democratic turnout. It’s clear that independents will be the X factor in the state

If Trump is already claiming, without evidence, “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” over on Truth Social, is that a sign that he’s seen some news out of Pennsylvania he doesn’t like, or just standard-issue Trump being Trump?

For what it’s worth, Seth Bluestein, the Republican city commissioner of Philadelphia, says on X, “There is absolutely no truth to this allegation. It is yet another example of disinformation. Voting in Philadelphia has been safe and secure.”

I had been wondering how the exit polls accounted for the nearly 86 million Americans who voted early or absentee. CNN shed some light on the subject:

Exit polls are conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool on behalf of a consortium of media companies: CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC. They get their name because interviewers on Election Day are stationed outside roughly 500 polling locations throughout the country, where they conduct surveys with a randomly selected sample of voters who’ve just cast their ballots. The polling locations were themselves selected through random sampling, meaning the resulting interviews should be representative of Election Day voters across the state or nationally. The interviewers call back to report their results several times throughout the day – which means that the early numbers will likely change as more data comes in.

But the exit poll doesn’t start on Election Day: It also seeks to represent the views of the millions of Americans who cast their ballots before November 5. Interviewers are also posted at roughly 100 early in-person voting locations in some states.

And the results also include voters who cast early absentee ballots or voted by mail. This part of the electorate is reached by more traditional preelection surveys, which are conducted by calling, emailing and sending text messages to people chosen from lists of all registered voters.

Now, I might feel a little better with more interviewers at more early in-person voting locations, but I guess we’ll see how reliable these exit polls turn out…

A reminder as we await results: Any “late surge” theory of the race you may have should be reduced in its intensity by about 40 percent, because probably about 40 percent of the votes in this election were cast before Election Day.

One CNN correspondent on the ground at a polling place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, described it as “a little bit quiet” at her site. In 2020, Joe Biden won Kent County, Michigan, where Grand Rapids is located, by six points (52 to 45.9 percent).