Presidential election results 2020

Four years after Hillary Clinton lost North Carolina by over 3 percentage points, Democrats are growing more confident that the state is moving away from its red neighbors to the South and closer to its bluer neighbors to the north.

The reason is demographics: The number of Hispanic and Asian voters is growing; North Carolina’s cities and suburbs are booming with growth from people moving from more liberal northern states; and seniors, a demographic moving away from a Trump-led Republican party, have been flocking to the state’s coast.

All of this is coupled with a troubling trend for Republicans: The state’s reliably conservative rural areas are shrinking.

This has led Democrats to believe North Carolina is in reach for them this year, creating a key chance for Joe Biden and the party to take another state Trump won in 2016. North Carolina’s polls are closing at 7:30 p.m. ET, so if this scenario plays out for Democrats, the state could be an early signal for how the night is going for each party.

The presidential is far from the only competitive race in a state that has seemed to be the center of the political universe for much of the year: The state also has a competitive Senate race between Republican incumbent Thom Tillis and Democrat Cal Cunningham, as well as a less competitive race for governor between incumbent Democrat Roy Cooper and Republican Dan Forest.

After Donald Trump's 8-point win in Ohio in 2016 and GOP Gov. Mike DeWine's win in 2018, what was once the quintessential swing state appeared to have shifted solidly into Republican hands — part of a long-term realignment that was unlikely to reverse itself anytime soon. 

But polls for months showed Joe Biden and Trump locked in a close race. Biden's campaign invested in the state late, pumping millions of dollars into TV ads in the closing weeks while sending Biden through the eastern portion of the state on a whistle-stop Amtrak tour. 

A final indicator that Biden believes it is within reach came Monday morning, when he made a last-minute campaign stop in Cleveland. 

Ohio is a must-win for Trump. No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio. If Trump doesn't win, it's almost certainly a fatal blow to his chances of winning re-election. And if the race there is neck-and-neck, it's a problematic sign for Trump's performance in other key states, including neighboring Pennsylvania and Michigan and fellow Midwestern battleground Wisconsin. 

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said that she was pleased with an earlier federal decision mandating the United States Postal Service to sweep certain processing facilities by 3 p.m. ET for election mail. 

Update: The US Postal Service said later this evening, however, that it wasn’t able to meet the court ordered deadline.

The postal service had done previous morning sweeps for ballots in recent days, including Tuesday, with personnel reporting data to the court by about 10 a.m.

Postal officials, however, reported to the judge that they were unable to make it happen. 

“Given the time constraints set by this Court’s order, and the fact that Postal Inspectors operate on a nationwide basis, Defendants were unable to accelerate the daily review process to run from 12:30pm to 3:00pm without significantly disrupting preexisting activities on the day of the Election,” the Postal Service wrote to the judge. 

Polls have closed in Georgia and an early exit survey of voters there show around 4 in 5 White voters without a college degree went for Donald Trump.

Slightly over half of White voters with a college degree also backed Trump, the early exit polls show. The slim lead marks a big difference from 2016, when Trump won White college graduates in Georgia 69% to 28%.

Trump leads among another key group in Georgia this year, with more than half of seniors backing the President. He won seniors in 2016, 67% to 31%. 

Joe Biden leads strongly among voters under the age of 30 in the state, with around 3 in 5 of those voters backing the former vice president.

Voters in Georgia who say they want a candidate who is a strong leader voted strongly for Trump, with around three-quarters of voters doing so. Another three-quarters of voters who want a candidate who can unite the country voted for Biden.

About this year's exit polls: CNN's exit polls this year incorporate in-person interviews at early voting locations and telephone interviews to target by-mail voters. Those surveys are in addition to the in-person interviews with voters on Tuesday. In every state where exit poll results are available on election night, there will be a combined result to reflect a complete picture of voters across the country.

To account for the large share of early in-person voters in critical states such as North Carolina, Florida and Texas, Edison Research has spent the past month conducting the same type of in-person interviewing that it does on Election Day at a random selection of early voting locations around eight states.  

Read more about exit polls during a pandemic here.

Polls are closing in some states tonight. Here's where polls are closing at 7:30 p.m. ET:

Remember: North Carolina’s election results will be delayed by at least 45 minutes after the board of elections extended voting at some locations that were having problems this morning. 

Follow along here and see CNN's Election Center for full coverage.

Suburbs are at the center of the 2020 presidential race, with Joe Biden's path to 270 electoral votes dependent on turning in a stronger performance there than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

The suburban shift toward Democrats is the biggest change to the political landscape during Donald Trump's presidency. In 2017, the northern Virginia suburbs handed Democrats a big win in a closely watched governor's race. Then, in 2018, suburban congressional districts were at the center of a Democratic wave that handed the party control of the US House of Representatives for the first time in eight years.

Trump's 2016 win was rooted in big margins of victory in working-class suburbs. He has sought to galvanize those voters again by warning that violence that has accompanied protests against racial injustice would spread to the suburbs. However, Biden's stronger performance in polls among well-educated voters and with White women, in particular, have positioned him to build on Democratic gains in recent years.

Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton.

That is a central thought in the minds of Biden aides as they have been studying data throughout the day – they are seeing far more Democrats (and presumably Biden supporters) turning out in rural areas.

They don’t see blow outs they did four years ago. There’s no doubt that President Trump will carry the rural swaths of so many battleground states, but they believe Biden will hold his own far more than Clinton did.

The entire campaign, comparisons have been drawn to 2016 — but one Biden adviser said this map could be more like 2012, the last time Biden was on a ballot as the vice president, with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket.

With an hour to go until polls close, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf cautioned voters to “remain calm.”

He released a video message calling for patience as every vote is set to be counted in the crucial battleground state. 

Polls in the Keystone State are set to close at 8 p.m. ET. 

Georgia is a must-win state for President Donald Trump, and -- with a relatively quick vote count expected there —it could offer an early window into how Election Night will unfold. 

Like Florida and North Carolina, it's a state Joe Biden has invested heavily in, and a place where his campaign is bullish. But unlike those states, it has not voted for Democrats in recent presidential elections. 

Georgia has long been a Republican stronghold, with the GOP currently controlling every statewide office and the state legislature. Democrats haven't won a major statewide race in the last two decades, but have had a series of close calls —a 2017 special election for a House seat; the 2018 governor's race — in Georgia during Trump's presidency. 

This year in Georgia, the stakes are especially high: Two Senate seats are up for grabs in “jungle primaries,” which go to one-on-one runoffs if no candidate finishes above 50% of the vote. Jon Ossoff is challenging Republican Sen. David Perdue, while Rev. Raphael Warnock is the leading Democratic candidate against Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, GOP Rep. Doug Collins and other contenders in a special election that’s almost certain to head to a runoff. 

Biden chose Georgia to deliver what his campaign billed as its closing argument with a speech last Tuesday. His running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, campaigned there Sunday. And Biden dispatched former President Barack Obama to Atlanta on Monday. Trump, meanwhile, campaigned in Georgia on Sunday night, underscoring his campaign's recognition of its competitiveness.