Can Kamala Harris Still Win? Where the presidential race with Trump stands.

Editor’s note, November 6 at 2:35 a.m. ET: Donald Trump was expected to win Pennsylvania, making it nearly impossible for Harris to win. For more of our 2024 campaign coverage, click here.

The presidential race is still too close to call and will likely again come down to the Rust Belt trio of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But the results so far suggest that former President Donald Trump improved his performance in large swathes of the country over 2020, and that if Vice President Kamala Harris still manages to win, it would be by an extremely narrow margin.

The two swing states called by a major news outlet as of early Wednesday are North Carolina and Georgia, both of which were won by Trump. Harris likely can’t count on Arizona, the swing state where she had polled the worst, though it will take some time to count the votes there.

If Georgia and Arizona do indeed fall to Trump — and keep in mind they haven’t been called yet, but he looks formidable there — Harris’ path to victory depends on winning all three of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If she loses just one in this scenario, it’s over for her. (The other remaining swing state, Nevada, will be very slow to count, but it would be too small to make much of a difference in the Electoral College.)

All three Rust Belt states are still close. Trump leads the current count in all three, though many uncounted votes remain from Democratic-leaning precincts.

But especially outside the swing states, Trump is on track to do significantly better than he did in 2020, so a Harris win scenario depends on the Rust Belt defying an apparent nationwide shift in Trump’s favor.

For example, Biden won Virginia by 10. As of Tuesday, with more than 80 percent of the vote in the state counted, Harris led Trump by just 1.7 percentage points. That margin will certainly expand when more Democratic areas count, but as of The New York Times’ forecast of the countless vote, she’ll likely end up with somewhere around a 5-point win, significantly worse than Biden.

Similar dynamics are at play in many other states, and Trump completely romped in Florida, winning it by about 13 percentage points. (In 2020, Trump won Florida by just over 3 percentage points.)

Indeed, it seems very possible that Trump could win the national popular vote. It will take some time to determine that, as it will depend on the final margin in slow-counting states like California.

But what really matters is how the Rust Belt states end, and we’re still waiting to learn that.

Update, November 6 at 1:07 a.m. ET: This piece, originally published the evening of Nov. 5, was updated to include Georgia calling for Trump.