With this win, Harris’s path increasingly narrows.
Former President Donald Trump has won the crucial battleground state of Georgia, The Associated Press (AP) projects.
AP called the race for Trump at 00:58 a.m. ET on Nov. 6.
The victory marks a huge win for the former president in a state he narrowly lost in 2020 after having won it in 2016. The result aligns with polling from the weeks leading up to the race, which showed Trump with a consistent lead.
The final poll taken by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of the most accurate 2020 pollsters in the Peach State, predicted a Trump +4 result in their final poll, slightly overestimating the final result in the state.
On the evening before the election, RealClearPolitics projected a more modest 1.7 percent margin for Trump.
It’s the second of the core seven swing states to move to Trump’s column. Earlier in the evening, the Associated Press also projected Trump had won in North Carolina.
Ahead of the election, there were signs that Harris was struggling with the state’s crucial black voters, who overwhelmingly favor Democrats. High turnout among the demographic in 2020 was crucial to Biden’s roughly 11,000-vote margin in the historically red state.
But many polls suggested Harris was lagging with the bloc.
This year, Harris received roughly similar margins to those achieved by President Joe Biden in 2020 in the urban areas.
Trump’s campaign made low propensity voter turnout a priority, targeting the state’s many rural counties, where Trump historically receives 65 percent or more of the vote.
That appears to have paid off, as returns show that turnout was higher in many rural counties than in 2020.