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US House of Representatives election: live results

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On November 5th America will pick its next president, as well as the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. The Economist will publish live results and analysis covering every race. Check back here soon after first polls close at 6pm EST / 11pm GMT to see in real-time how many votes Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are picking up, and which of them will win the White House, as well as which party will control the two chambers of Congress.

Before then, this page provides a guide for what to look out for ahead of the election. Elsewhere, our daily updated election forecasts calculate each presidential candidate’s chances of winning, and who might take the House and the Senate. Our poll tracker rounds up the latest presidential polls. And The US in brief, our daily update delivered by newsletter, gives you all the election stories that matter.

What to watch

This year, given large numbers of people have voted early, many expect the counting will be slow. Officials, however, insist that ballot tallying will be faster than in previous years. The results could be known just a few hours after polls close across the country—as they were for seven of the past ten elections (see chart). Or they could take days to become clear.

The first states to conclude voting will be on the east coast. Six states, including the key battleground of Georgia, will finish voting statewide at 7pm EST. By 8pm, 19 more states will have joined them and a flurry of data will be published. Readers should exercise caution: little of substance will be revealed at this stage of the night, unless the election is a landslide.

In some states, where one candidate is heavily favoured, the election result will be called almost immediately. Unless there is a major upset or a striking trend, these calls may not say much about the election overall. The absence of a call may be more informative: it may indicate that an expected landslide has not happened, for instance.

The final result will probably come down to seven key states. Of those, Georgia and Michigan may be the fastest to count. North Carolina is also traditionally quick to count but may experience disruption due to Hurricane Helene.

Others could well be slower. Pennsylvania will not start processing millions of postal ballots until the morning of election day. Arizona and Nevada, in the west, finish voting later that day and take longer to count their mail-in ballots, which are popular in both states. Nevada accepts and counts ballots which arrive after election day, too (although these are unlikely to flip the state).

Read more about what to watch on the night, and in the days that follow.

What are the candidates’ paths to victory?

Pennsylvania is the most important state for both candidates. (Mr Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016, but it flipped to Joe Biden in 2020.) According to our forecast model, as of November 4th, Ms Harris wins in 92% of our simulations when she takes the Keystone State’s 19 electoral votes; Mr Trump wins in 88%.

Mr Trump has even better odds when he wins Michigan (95%), but he has more alternative routes to the presidency without Michigan than without Pennsylvania. Other swing states are less influential: Ms Harris and Mr Trump win the election in only 71% and 67% of simulations, respectively, when they win Nevada, a state with only six electoral votes.

The most likely outcome—occurring in 19% of our simulated elections on November 4th—is that Mr Trump will win all seven swing states and go on to win the presidency. The second-most likely is the exact opposite: our model gave Ms Harris a 9% chance of sweeping the seven. The third would give all of the swing states except Nevada to Mr Trump—that would be a repeat of the 2016 result. But based on all of our model’s scenarios, the race is a toss-up: neither candidate has a lead big enough to offset the kind of polling errors seen in previous presidential elections.

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Economics

Trump and Fed Chair Powell could be set on a collision course over rates

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Jerome Powell and President Donald Trump during a nomination announcement in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Nov. 2, 2017.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell could be on a policy collision course in 2025 depending on how economic circumstances play out.

Should the economy run hot and inflation flare up again, Powell and his colleagues could decide to tap the brakes on their efforts to lower interest rates. That in turn could infuriate Trump, who lashed Fed officials including Powell during his first term in office for not relaxing monetary policy quickly enough.

“Without question,” said Joseph LaVorgna, former chief economist at the National Economic Council during Trump’s first term, when asked about the potential for a conflict. “When they don’t know what to do, oftentimes they don’t do anything. That may be a problem. If the president feels like rates should be lowered, does the Fed, just for public optics, dig its feet in?”

Though Powell became Fed chair in 2018, after Trump nominated him for the position, the two clashed often about the direction of interest rates.

Trump publicly and aggressively berated the chair, who in turn responded by asserting how important it is for the Fed to be independent and apart from political pressures, even if they’re coming from the president.

When Trump takes office in January, the two will be operating against a different backdrop. During the first term, there was little inflation, meaning that even Fed rate hikes kept benchmark rates well below where they are now.

Trump is planning both expansionary and protectionist fiscal policy, even more so than during his previous run, that will include an even tougher round of tariffs, lower taxes and big spending. Should the results start to show up in the data, the Powell Fed may be tempted to hold tougher on monetary policy against inflation.

LaVorgna, chief economist at SMBC Nikko Securities, who is rumored for a position in the new administration, thinks that would be mistake.

“They’re going to look at a very nontraditional approach to policy that Trump is bringing forward but put it through a very traditional economic lens,” he said. “The Fed’s going to have a really difficult choice based on their traditional approach of what to do.”

Market sees fewer rate cuts

Futures traders have been waffling in recent days on their expectations for what the Fed will do next.

The market is pricing in about a coin-flip chance of another interest rate cut in December, after it being a near-certainty a week ago, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch. Pricing further out indicates the equivalent of three quarter-percentage-point reductions through the end of 2025, which also has come down significantly from prior expectations.

Investors’ nerves have gotten jangled in recent days about the Fed’s intentions. Fed Governor Michelle Bowman on Wednesday noted that progress on inflation has “stalled,” an indication that she might continue to push for a slower pace of rate cuts.

“All roads lead to tensions between the White House and the Fed,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. “It won’t just be the White House. It will be Treasury, it’ll be Commerce and the Fed all intersecting.”

Indeed, Trump is building a team of loyalists to implement his economic agenda, but much of the success depends on accommodative or at least accurate monetary policy that doesn’t push too hard to either boost or restrict growth. For the Fed, that is represented in the quest to find the “neutral” rate of interest, but for the new administration, it could mean something different.

The struggle over where rates should be will create “political and policy tensions between the Federal Reserve and the White House that would clearly prefer lower rates,” Brusuelas said.

“If one is going to impose tariffs, or mass deportations, you’re talking about restricting aggregate supply while simultaneously implementing deficit finance tax cuts, which is encouraging an increase in aggregate demand. You’ve got a basic inconsistency in your policy matrix,” he added. “There’s an inevitable crossroads that results in tensions between Trump and Powell.”

Avoiding conflict

To be sure, there are some factors that could mitigate the tensions.

One is that Powell’s term as Fed chair expires in early 2026, so Trump may simply choose to ride it out until he can put someone in the chair more to his liking. There’s also little chance that the Fed would actually move to raise rates outside of some highly unexpected event that would push inflation much higher.

Also, Trump’s policies will take a while to make their way through the system, so any impacts on inflation and macroeconomic growth likely won’t be readily apparent in the data, thus not necessitating a Fed response. There’s also the chance that the impacts might not be that much either way.

“I expect higher inflation and slower growth. I think the tariffs and the deportations are negative supply shocks. They hurt growth and they lift inflation,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “The Fed will still cut interest rates next year, just perhaps not as quickly as would have otherwise been the case.”

Battles with Trump, then, could be more of a headache for the next Fed chair, assuming Trump doesn’t reappoint Powell.

“So I don’t think it’s going to be an issue in 2025,” Zandi said. “It could be an issue in 2026, because at that point, the rate cutting’s over and the Fed may be in a position where it certainly needs to start raising interest rates. Then that’s when it becomes an issue.”

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Economics

Congestion pricing in New York gets the go-ahead after all. Maybe

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NOVEMBER 20th marks the first “Gridlock Alert” day of New York City’s holiday season. This is the official designation for the city’s busiest traffic days of the year. But traffic is bad most days, with more than 900,000 cars entering Manhattan’s central business district. INRIX, a traffic-data firm, found that New York City leads the world in urban traffic congestion among the cities scored, with the average driver stationary for 101 hours a year. After years of false starts, including a cowardly pre-election pause by Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor, congestion pricing has the green light.

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Economics

Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump’s pick for commerce secretary

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Editor’s note: On November 19th Donald Trump chose Howard Lutnick to be commerce secretary in his new administration. We published this profile of Mr Lutnick on November 16th and have updated it to include his appointment.

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