ABC News is projecting that Trump is expecting to win North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming -- all reliably red states. With this, the former president will pick up the four state’s combined 49 electoral votes.

With about 57% of the expected vote in for the Lone Star State, Trump currently leads Harris by 8 percentage points (53% to 45%). If this trend continues, Harris will have underperformed Biden’s 2020 margin. That year, Biden lost by about 5 percentage points -- one of the closest Texas races for the White House in the last quarter century. In 2016, Trump carried the state by 9 percentage points over Hillary Clinton.

It's now 9 p.m. Eastern. The last polling places have closed in another big batch of states: Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Here are our forecasts for the races in those states:

Election observers are closely watching Loudoun County, a suburban and exurban county outside Washington, D.C. In 2020, Biden won 62% of its votes, but with more than 95% of the expected votes in, Harris has just 57%. That's probably not enough of a deficit to cost Harris Virginia, but what might it say about Pennsylvania's southeastern suburbs, where Harris will need to run up the score to win this keystone state in her Electoral College strategy? Looking at elections since 2000, I calculated how Loudoun's performance correlates with the so-called "collar counties" — the suburban counties that surround Philadelphia. It turns out that Loudoun has correlated very highly with the swings in Delaware County, which is just to the west of Philadelphia.

With Florida's Senate race off the table for Democrats, the outcome of Ohio's Senate race is now even likelier to determine control of the Senate. As of 8:40 p.m. Eastern, with 44% of the expected vote reporting, Democrat Sherrod Brown leads Republican Bernie Moreno by about 50,000 votes or 2% of the current vote count. Right now, there's a lot of outstanding ballots left in the big cities -- Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati especially. But there's a lot of rural votes in Ohio, potentially enough to flip Brown's current tenuous lead.

This cycle, both Trump and Harris made appearances on several newer, unconventional media shows, reflecting a broader shift in political communication and raising questions about how democracy functions when potential voters receive information about the candidates from less traditional news sources.

The audience for the shows where Trump appeared, like the Nelk Brothers' Full Send Podcast, This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von, and The Joe Rogan Experience, skew male and right-leaning. For her part, the audiences for shows where Harris appeared are somewhat more mixed, though similarly targeted at demographics she may be stronger with. She spoke with Alex Cooper, host of Call Her Daddy, whose audience leans young and female, but also appeared on All the Smoke with hosts Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, whose audience leans young, male and Black.

But both campaigns are appearing on podcasts for a similar reason — to motivate niche audiences that may be otherwise uninclined to tune into the presidential election, or even vote. In some sense this isn't a new strategy by campaigns. In past presidential elections, candidates visited daytime and late-night talk shows for the same reason, like Bill Clinton's appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show, or John McCain's appearance on The View — precursors to Harris' recent TV appearances, where she drank a beer with Stephen Colbert on the Late Show (), and [appeared with her likeness on SNL — as Trump did with Jimmy Fallon in 2015. It's the same reason that endorsements from non-political figures, from Oprah to Taylor Swift, also matter: They help reach people who aren't seeking out political information and news.

But as Americans' distrust of traditional mainstream media grows and their media habits shift, these unconventional platforms may be increasingly central to presidential campaigns' media strategies, and they may be decisive, electorally.

By appearing on platforms with highly specific demographics, campaigns may build direct rapport with targeted groups, but this also bypasses the broader public discourse traditionally facilitated by mainstream media. As media habits evolve, we're left to wonder: Will this shift enhance democratic participation or deepen polarization?