Presidential election results 2020

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. 

If Donald Trump has any chance of winning the presidency, he can’t stand to lose his home state of Florida.

The President carried the state in 2016 by just over 1 percentage point, but recent polls have found a narrow race in the state, with a series of surveys showing the race between Trump and Joe Biden within the margin of error. Both candidates have blanked the state of late, with both Trump and Biden headlining events in the state on the Thursday before the election.

Florida is a remarkably diverse state with a series of key areas. Trump and his campaign have hopes of cutting into Biden’s expected margin in Miami-Dade and Broward County with a stronger than expected showing with Latinos, particularly Cubans, in South Florida.

The area around Tampa is also central to a Trump win: The President unexpectedly carried Pinellas County in 2016, a swing that signified it would be a tough night for Democrats. And then there was Duval County, which includes all of Jacksonville, a population center Trump won in 2016, but swung back to Democrats two years later when the party’s gubernatorial candidate carried the county.

Turnout will be key for Biden in Florida. A surge of rural voters propelled Trump to victory in 2016, an outpouring that was strengthened by a lack of turnout among Black and Latino voters four years ago. Democrats saw warning signs in early vote numbers from areas with large Black and Latino populations, so the ability for the party to get both key demographics out on Tuesday could prove critical.

CNN's John King explains: