BBC reporters on story of the night in swing states
EPASeven battleground states are expected to decide who will be the next US president - former President Donald Trump or Vice-President Kamala Harris.
Trump has been projected to have won three - North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
On the ground, our correspondents are bringing us the mood from the swing states as results continue to trickle in.
By Madeline Halpert in Dearborn and Ione Wells in Detroit
It’s too early in Michigan to tell which candidate has won, though Donald Trump has a slight lead, excluding most of the votes from the biggest Democratic County of Wayne.
We spent the day speaking with voters across the state, which was on pace to break voter turnout records earlier in the day, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said.
A host of issues were pushing people to the polls. For some women, reproductive rights were top of mind, while both men and women raised concerns about the economy.
Yian Yian Shein, a restaurant owner in the Detroit suburb of Warren, said Trump would lower income taxes and boost her small business.
Meanwhile, Tania Slaughter, who lives in neighbouring Oakland County, began crying as she told me about voting for Kamala Harris.
“It’s time” for a woman president, she said.
At a watch party in Detroit, we've been speaking to a couple of Democrat donors and strategists past and present.
There are increasingly a lot of nerves in the room, with some saying privately they’re feeling “very pessimistic”.
Now, of course there’s a bit of expectation management going on and, with a race this close, that’s in part because the ers here don’t want to get their hopes up while the margins are so tight.
We’re expecting to know the result of the race by midday on Wednesday - perhaps even earlier.
By Brandon Drenon, Raleigh
The mood at the North Carolina Democratic watch party in Raleigh early on Tuesday was very festive - there was a marching band, a DJ, free-flowing cocktails, and lots of smiles.
By late night the crowd had noticeably quieted. Trump had just been projected winner in the state.
The last of the crowd that remains has mixed emotions. They are glad to see three major Democratic candidates projected to have won here - governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general - but are dejected by Harris’s defeat.
“It’s hard. I’m sad,” Saira Estrada tells me.
“I don’t know if I can live through another Trump era.”
Voters in North Carolina have said they felt the weight of being in a closely watched battleground state.
“It’s exciting but it’s also a lot of pressure,” one woman told the BBC earlier in the day.
She is a freshman at University of North Carolina (UNC) and had just cast her ballot in her first presidential election, alongside three friends, who are also voting for the first time.
The group didn’t want to say who they were voting for, or give their names, they said, because of how “very polarised and divisive” US politics are.
This was a common response across the state expressed by anxious voters.
Immigration was the students’ main concern, they said, an issue that Trump emphasised throughout his campaign.
From the mountains of western North Carolina, to UNC in Chapel Hill over 200 miles away, immigration was a major focal point for many voters in the state - a good sign for Republicans.
By Bernd Debusmann in Allentown
There was a mood of cautious optimism as the night wore on in Allentown, Pennsylvania - a majority Latino city which was the scene of intense campaigning from both Harris and Trump.
At a watch party organised by Republican House candidate Ryan Mackenzie, drinks were free flowing and, early on, Trump ers were encouraged by signs that he was doing well in the state. At every sign that Trump gained ground, the crowd erupted into loud applause and chants of “Trump” and “fight”.
Speaking to Trump ers at the rally, several common themes emerged: the economy, and a perception that drugs and crime are flowing across the US-Mexico border.
In the days and weeks after this election, much of the focus will be on the state’s Latino voters, and the impact that they had on the outcome, with early data suggesting that Trump - for the third consecutive election - overperformed among that electorate.
For many Latinos in Pennsylvania, it comes as no surprise. Their concerns, they said, are the same as the wider US population.
“We liked things, the economy, better four years ago,” said Samuel Negron, a Pennsylvania state trooper and Puerto Rican-American. “You pay $5 for a dozen eggs now. It was much less before. A lot of us have woken up.”
Trump is projected to win Pennsylvania.
By Carl Nasman in Madison and Mike Wendling in Milwaukee
We are at Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin’s election night party in Madison, Wisconsin.
A cheer went up in the room when early results flashed on the large TV screen here, showing Baldwin leading against her Republican challenger Eric Hovde.
But moments later the state’s Lieutenant Governor, Sara Rodriguez, took the stage with a bit of a reality check.
"Let me level with you: we likely won’t see (final) results until much later," she said. "This is normal. This is what we expect in Wisconsin."
The campaign feels confident that the math can add up to a victory, but the mood in the building hasn’t reflected that for a few hours.
The hope for Democrats is that Milwaukee - a large Democratic area of the state that has yet to report its results will be enough to push Harris and Baldwin to a narrow victory.
In Milwaukee, there is a dispute over around 30,000 ballots that had to be re-run through tabulation machines.
The state’s Republican Senator Ron Johnson accused election workers of being “sloppy”.
But Paulina Gutierrez, head of the city's Election Commission, rejected those charges and told reporters: “We have nothing to hide here.”
“Every ballot that was here that was legitimate was counted, it was counted accurately, it was tracked, there is a paper trail, there is a chain of custody and we are going to get this done,” she said.
By Christal Hayes in Phoenix
The count here in the swing state of Arizona is likely to go on for days.
At the Democrats' watch party at a Hyatt hotel in Phoenix, large TVs showed MSNBC and music blared from big speakers throughout the evening but the sing-a-long tunes and vibrant beats weren't enough.
Optimism seems to be cracking with each state projected for for Trump. The line for the bar wraps through the ballroom.
As Trump was declared the projected winner in the swing state of North Carolina, a collective sigh filled the ballroom.
Wade Sumner, 25, continued to refresh his phone. Ruth Garcia, 25, let out an exhausted "how">Republicans have won control of both chambers of Congress, yielding Trump limited congressional oversight for at least 2 years.
