Balance of power: Presidential, Senate and House 2024 live results
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(WASHINGTON) — The election will not only decide who will occupy the White House for the next four years, but also which party controls both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 34 seats in the Senate are up for grabs.
Republicans currently control the House while Democrats retain a narrow majority in the Senate.
See how the balance of power is playing out as election results come in:
Significant shifts and what to watch in the Senate race
Jim Justice is projected to win the Senate seat in West Virginia, which flips the state from Democrat to Republican. Incumbent Joe Manchin decided not to run for reelection, putting Justice against Democrat Glenn Elliot and Libertarian Party candidate David Moran.
ABC News also projects that former President Donald Trump will win in West Virginia. As Dan Hopkins, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote for ABC News’ live election coverage, “In most years, a Senate where every state votes for the same party for Senate and president is a Senate where the Democrats fall short of a majority.”
Another Democratic seat was lost in Ohio, where Republican nominee Bernie Moreno is projected to take the Senate position previously held — for three terms — by Sherrod Brown, the Democratic incumbent. The presumed victory makes a large Republican majority in the Senate seem all the more likely.
In Maryland, Democratic Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks is projected to win against former Gov. Larry Hogan, a moderate Republican. She is expected to replace Sen. Ben Cardin, also a Democrat, who did not run for reelection, putting the state’s Democratic Senate seat at risk in a year where the party had none to lose if they hoped to retain their narrow majority.
Alsobrooks currently serves as the first woman elected to a county executive position in Maryland, and she now seems positioned to become the state’s first Black senator. She would also be making history, as Alsobrooks and Lisa Blunt Rochester are projected to be the first two Black women to serve on the Senate at the same time.
(PHILADELPHIA) — A Philadelphia judge is allowing Elon Musk’s America PAC to continue its million-dollar giveaway to registered swing state voters.
Common Pleas Court Judge Angelo Foglietta denied Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s request for an injunction to stop the giveaway, which has handed out $17 million to voters across the swing states. According to defense attorneys, America PAC plans to announce their 18th and final prize winner on Tuesday in Michigan.
The decision followed a nearly six-hour hearing Monday, during which an attorney for Musk and America PAC revealed that the winners were preselected despite Musk saying publicly it was a “random” lottery.
A lawyer for Krasner called Musk’s giveaway “one of the great scams of the last 50 years” by deceiving more than a million swing state voters to sign a petition in the hopes of winning a million dollars.
“There is nothing random about that process,” the lawyer, John Summers, said. “This was a profound, devastating and widespread deception.”
Summers argued that Musk attempted to “influence the election” by encouraging hundreds of thousands of voters to sign a petition while preselecting the winners based on their “suitability” to serve as spokespeople for the political action committee. Summers argued that even if the lottery was not random, it’s still illegal under Pennsylvania law.
“They essentially advertised this as a lottery. It’s not a defense that what we said it was isn’t true,” Summers said.
Andy Taylor, a lawyer for Musk’s America PAC, argued that the DA’s case falls apart after today’s revelation that the alleged lottery awarded preselected winners.
“It’s an opportunity to earn. It’s not a chance to win,” Taylor said, emphasizing the winners’ roles as spokespeople for the PAC.
Taylor emphasized that the case centers on a petition in support of the First and Second amendments, arguing that shutting down the giveaway would infringe on free speech.
“You are going to smother in the crib the rights of millions of Pennsylvanians from exercising constitutional magnitude free speech,” Taylor said.
Speaking outside court, Krasner’s attorney declined to comment on the specifics of the case, simply acknowledging, “It’s in the hands of the judge.”
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump on Friday made his first public show of support for Pete Hegseth, his embattled pick for defense secretary, since Hegseth began making the rounds on Capitol Hill speaking to Republican senators amid misconduct allegations.
“Pete Hegseth is doing very well. His support is strong and deep,” Trump wrote on his social media platform.
“He was a great student – Princeton/Harvard educated – with a Military state of mind. He will be a fantastic, high energy, Secretary of Defense Defense, one who leads with charisma and skill. Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that,” Trump added.
The post comes after Trump’s public silence as Hegseth met with GOP senators every day this week in the face of new allegations of sexual impropriety, financial mismanagement, public drunkenness and other personal misconduct.
The New Yorker reported the claims over the weekend. ABC News has not independently confirmed the magazine’s account.
Hegseth has denied the accusations, but telling senators he’s a “changed” man and vowing not to drink alcohol should he be confirmed to head up the Pentagon.
ABC News previously reported Trump had not been working the phones for Hegseth as he did for Matt Gaetz, who similarly faced sexual assault allegations. Gaetz ultimately withdrew his name from consideration.
But Hegseth on Thursday vowed not to back down as he wrapped up sit-downs with senators who will be tasked with his confirmation.
“The conversations have been robust, candid at times,” he said. “There’s great questions on policy, personality, everything, so we are going to earn those votes, fighting all the way through the tape.”
His confirmation, though, remains far from certain. Republicans will have a narrow three-seat majority in the Senate next year.
Trump’s team, ABC News reported, was focused on figuring out where the nine female Republican senators stand on Hegseth. So far, one key female Republican on the Armed Services Committee — Joni Ernst — has notably not yet backed Hegseth. Two female senators — Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Katie Britt of Alabama — have endorsed Hegseth.
Several Republican senators have said they’d like to see background checks for Trump’s Cabinet picks.
Multiple sources, including a Trump transition official, have confirmed to ABC News that Hegseth will be getting a background check from the FBI. Hegseth informed the transition team earlier this week he’d be willing to get the check.
Hegseth’s attorney Tim Parlatore said Thursday on CNN that Hegseth’s name had been submitted to the FBI and that the FBI gave them the needed forms on Wednesday.
“I am expecting that the background check is going to take a lot of the false stories that have been circulated in the media and it’s going to put them completely to bed. I think that the surprise you’re going to find is how false all the reporting has been,” Parlatore said.
(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump has vowed, if he’s elected, to conduct a large-scale deportation operation that some immigration and military experts agree is theoretically possible but also problematic, and could cost tens — even hundreds — of billions a year.
In FY 2023, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers conducted 170,590 administrative arrests, representing a 19.5% increase over the previous year, and more than any year of the Trump presidency.
Should he win a second term, Trump has promised to exponentially increase this work and suggested deporting all of the estimated 11 million people living in this country without legal immigration status.
His team, at various points, has suggested starting with “criminals,” though they have provided few specifics about who would be prioritized.
One cost estimate: $88B – $315B a year
A new report from the American Immigration Council, an immigration rights research and policy firm, estimates that to deport even one million undocumented immigrants a year would cost over $88 billion dollars annually, for a total of $967.9 billion over more than ten years.
The report acknowledges there are significant cost variables depending on how such an operation would be conducted and says its estimate does not take into account the loss of tax revenue from workers nor the bigger economic loss if people self-deport and American businesses lose labor.
A one-time effort to deport even more people in one year annually could cost around $315 billion, the report estimates, including about $167 billion to detain immigrants en masse.
The two largest costs, according to the group, would be hiring additional personal to carry out deportation raids and constructing and staffing mass detention centers. “There would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass detention as an interim step,” the report reads.
Trump campaign official agree one of the biggest logistical hurdles in any mass deportation effort would be constructing and staffing new detention centers as an interim solution.
Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, has repeatedly said that should Trump win the White House, his team plans to construct facilities to hold between 50,000 – 70,000 people. By comparison, the entire U.S. prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, is currently 1.9 million people.
The American Immigration Council report estimates that to deport one million immigrants a year would require the United States to “build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than currently exists.”
There are currently an estimated 1.1 million undocumented immigrants in the country who have received “final orders of removal.” Those individuals, in theory, could be removed immediately by ICE agents, but because of limited resources ICE agents have instead focused lately on those people who have recently arrived or who have dangerous crimes
“I think it is possible that they could execute on this. The human resources would be the hardest for them to overcome. They would have to pull ICE agents from the border if they want to go into cities,” Katie Tobin, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served as President Joe Biden’s top migration adviser in the National Security Council, told ABC News.
ICE agents currently help Customs and Border Patrol agents on the border, carrying out expedited deportations of new arrivals who have recently crossed into the country illegally and provide logistical support to the Department of Homeland Security.
A new mandate to round up and deport individuals who have been living in the country for some time could mark a significant change for the law enforcement agency.
The American Immigration Council report estimates that to carry out even one million deportations a year, ICE would need to hire around 30,000 new officers, “instantly making it the largest law enforcement agency in the federal government,” the report reads.
Trump campaign: Deportation cost less than migrant costs
The Trump campaign has argued the cost of deportation “pales in comparison” to other costs associated housing and providing social services to recent migrants. “Kamala’s border invasion is unsustainable and is already tearing apart the fabric of our society. Mass deportations of illegal immigrant criminals, and restoring an orderly immigration system, are the only way to solve this crisis,” Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for Trump’s campaign, told ABC News in a statement.
Trump has promised to mobilize and federalize National Guard units to help with the deportation effort, which would likely be a first for the military.
Under U.S. law, military units are barred from engaging in domestic law enforcement, although Trump has proposed invoking the Insurrection Act, a sweeping law, that could give him broader powers to direct National Guard units as he sees fit.
“We don’t like uniform military in our domestic affairs at all,” William Banks, professor at Syracuse University and Founding Director of the Institute on National Security and Counter Terrorism, told ABC News in a phone interview. “The default is always have the civilians do it. The cops, the state police, the city police, the sheriffs,” he went on.
Using the military for domestic law enforcement would be a fundamental shift, one which Banks argues too few Americans have considered or grappled with.
“It would turn out whole society upside down … all these arguments about him being an autocrat or dictator, it is not a stretch,” he said. For example, uniformed military officers are not trained in law enforcement and if they were asked to conduct civilian arrests there could be significant civil liberties conflicts and violations.
In order to, target and deport immigrants whose have not received “final orders of removal” but whose cases are still pending, Trump has discussed using another rare legal maneuver to himself broad authority to target and detain immigrants without a hearing, specifically invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law last used during World War II to detain Japanese Americans.
Trump would also need other nations to accept deported individuals and allow deportation flights to land back on their soil.
Katie Tobin, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served as President Joe Biden’s top migration adviser on the National Security Council, told ABC News, “Last time the Trump administration did not hesitate to threaten punitive action to countries that didn’t cooperate with them on immigration, but there are some practical issues there in terms of just how many flights a country like Guatemala or Colombia can accept per week.”
There would likely be less tangible and more indirect costs of a mass deportation effort as well. Inevitably there would be ripple effects throughout the economy. In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes, according to the report, and “undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.”
The human toll
Experts also predict that if a future Trump administration were to follow through with some large, initial and highly visible deportation operation, a significant number of individuals and families would likely choose to self-deport in order to avoid family separations or having to spend time in a military-style detention center.
The authors of the American Immigration Council report argue that the effect of a mass deportation program, as described by Trump and his advisers, would “almost certainly threaten the well-being” of even those immigrants with lawful status in the United States and “even, potentially, naturalized U.S. citizens and their communities.”
“They would live under the shadow of weaponized enforcement as the U.S. went after their neighbors, and, as social scientists found under the Trump administration, would be prone to worry they and their children might be next,” the report says.
In recent interviews and conversations with reporters, Trump’s running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance has dodged the question of whether a future Trump administration would separate families during a new deportation effort or in detention centers along the border.
“If a guy commits gun violence and is taken to prison, that’s family separation, which, of course, is tragic for the children, but you’ve got to prosecute criminals, and you have to enforce the law,” Vance told reporters in September when visiting the border.
