Presidential election results 2020

As exit polls trickled in early on Election Night, viewers who support either candidate should be prepared for both ups and downs, CNN political commentator Van Jones warned 

"We are on a little bit of a roller coaster here, a little bit of a seesaw," said Jones, acknowledging some of the early exit polls had worried him, while he'd found other data points encouraging. 

Former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, a CNN senior political commentator, expressed the same sentiment moments later, suggesting he had already experienced multiple emotions. 

"I'm gonna agree with Van that I was feeling much more confident with these early exits," he said.  

CNN's Anderson Cooper, who was moderating the exchange, then predicted in jest that both commentators might be "basket cases" by the end of the night.

President Trump will win Indiana, CNN projects.

There are 11 electoral votes at stake in Indiana. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the 2020 presidential election.

Who won in 2016: President Trump carried the state and won the general election.

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

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

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is now at his home in Wilmington, surrounded by his family, waiting for returns to start coming in at any moment.

For now, a friend says, he’s trying to take in the weight and history of it all,

It’s a day of nostalgia for a man who could be the oldest president ever elected – should he win. His first bid for the presidency came three decades ago when he was the youngest candidate.

He visited his late son Beau’s grave today and went to his boyhood home in Scranton, where he wrote on the wall: “From this house to the White House, with the grace of God.” 

He loves an election night, a friend says, and this is the biggest of a lifetime of them. 

He has a speech prepared – for either outcome – and the transition is already well underway. But he knows that what unfolds over the next few hours will determine if he will deliver that speech or launch that transition.

Some presidents take a zen-like approach to Election Day, viewing their work as finished as voters vote. Barack Obama played basketball with Scottie Pippen in 2012; George W. Bush worked out on his elliptical trainer in the residence gym. 

President Donald Trump has adopted a somewhat less relaxed attitude. He has spent most of the day in his third-floor residence, where televisions are set to election coverage, on the phone and speaking in person to family members and advisers about the current state of play. 

He has asked for updates on key battlegrounds, asking how turnout is looking and inquiring what his people on the ground are reporting back to headquarters, people familiar with the matter say. 

He has appeared particularly focused on Pennsylvania. “How’s Pennsylvania looking?” he has asked multiple times over the course of the day. He has repeated to his advisers his frustration at a court decision that will allow extended counting of mail-in ballots, saying he believes it will cost him. 

Over the last several weeks, Trump has been making similar calls from Air Force One as he conducted his frenzied rally schedule. Aides provided him reams worth of printouts showing polls (public and private), maps, early voting data and more that piled up on his desk. 

Advisers have been careful about what data to provide the President. They have largely stuck with only the most positive pieces of information, leaving out anything that might make him angry. Often that meant printing out a favorable opinion column or news article instead of actual numbers or data. 

Early returns could suggest a strong night for either President Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden.  

But this year more than most, it's important to emphasize that these returns are early. And the mail-in votes, a larger portion of votes in this pandemic year, could prove decisive in each of these states. 

Election officials in some Pennsylvania counties won't even start processing mail-in ballots until Wednesday. Republican-controlled portions of the state legislature objected to changing the rules and processing the vote faster, compounding the problem.

But we’ve seen this in other races in recent years. In Florida in 2018, mail-in votes made the governor's race tighten substantially in the days after Election Day. In Arizona, another close battleground state, the 2018 Senate race saw a decisive lead change after Election Day and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, won the race.

This phenomenon, known as the "blue shift," is common in recent US elections and it's a big reason why Trump, despite election law and common decency to the contrary, has argued that whoever appears to have won on Election Night should be crowned the winner. That's not the way it works, of course. Ballots in North Carolina and Pennsylvania can arrive in the days after Election Day as long as they have a November 3 postmark.

See how all the states count ballots here.

In a call with reporters, the Trump campaign expressed confidence that Election Day turnout would boost their vote count despite a lead for Democrats among early voters, with campaign manager Bill Stepien pointing to Florida as an auspicious sign for the campaign. 

“We, very much are of, we don’t agree with the Biden campaign on very much, but we do agree with their assessment of the way the election, the pre-election day vote has broken down, most notably Florida at nearly a dead heat heading into election day,” Stepien told reporters.

“Where we, where we disagree with the Biden campaign is their view of what is happening on election day. They believe that election, and the makeup of voters who are voting today on Election Day, will resemble those who voted on election day in 2016. Where their theory breaks down, is that the Biden campaign cannibalized their votes, something you've heard a lot of over the course of the last week, something we've been saying and predicting quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. They simply moved those who traditionally vote on election day to vote early. Congratulations.”

The idea that Democrats are “cannibalizing” their own votes was one they hit hard, and one that they credited to their stronger ground game. “They very much were hoping to slam the door shut on Pennsylvania and Florida and Wisconsin and Arizona before elections, before Election Day even started, that simply hasn't happened,” Stepien said. “With the lack of a round game on the Biden campaign side, they left a ton of votes on the table. And we are driving turnout today, very much making up whatever advantages Democrats built up heading into Election Day.”

It looks like Maine set a record for turnout this year, Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap told CNN.

The previous turnout record was 72%. Before the polls opened on Tuesday morning, more than half of all registered voters in the state had cast mail ballots. The state will not get exact turnout totals for several days when the vote is certified, but Dunlap said everything he has seen suggest this will be a record.

“When I voted this morning in the city of Old Town the line was 50 deep, and at 7:30 in the morning that's not something I expected in the middle of a snowstorm,” said Dunlap, a Democrat. 

Despite concerns about trouble at polling places, there have been no disruptions during the day.  

“We were prepared to talk about public safety. We talked with Maine emergency management and the attorney general's office about how to deal with possible disruptions at the polling stations,” Dunlap said. “We just haven't seen it. And that's because we're a small town. And people know each other and they take care of each other and we don't see some of the threats to election disruption of election disruption that you've heard about in other states.”

Voters who back Joe Biden are much more likely to view US efforts to contain the coronavirus negatively, with around 4 in 5 saying it’s going badly, compared to around 1 in 5 who say it’s going well. 

Slightly less than 9 in 10 of Trump backers, however, say the efforts to contain the virus are going well.  

Around 5 in 6 Biden voters say wearing a face mask is more of a public health responsibility, while Trump voters are split, with around half who say it’s a public health responsibility and half who say it’s a personal choice. 

About this year's exit polls: 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