It all comes down to this, folks. After attacks and counter-attacks, billions of dollars in ads, enough twists and turns to fuel a pulpy thriller, today is Election Day 2024 and the first in-person votes have been cast.
How did the first votes for Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump go when they were cast at midnight in tiny Dixville Notch, New Hampshire?
The six votes were tied, evenly split between Trump and Harris ... in a polling station scene that pundits called a perfect exemplification of the split between American voters.
With only six registered voters and polls open at midnight on Election Day, the town is unique and its traditionally the first stop for journalists covering the election. This time officials read out the official tally at 12:10 a.m. Three votes were for Trump and three were for Harris.
In the last election, President Joe Biden swept all the votes in Dixville Notch while in 2016, four people voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton, two for Trump and one for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.
New Hampshire has been a blue state in every presidential election since 2004, so the early tie "could be bad news for the Democratic Party," Newsweek reported.
Still, there's another way to look at the results since one of the Harris votes came from a registered Republican, Les Otten, who said he's considered himself a fan of the GOP since he was 7 years old. He explained his vote for Harris to CNN.
"Nowhere in the Pledge of Allegiance does it say anything about pledging your allegiance to a person," Otten said. "And I think at the end of the day, Trump has made it clear that you need to pledge allegiance to him, and he alone can fix this, and that is as antidemocratic as I can understand."
This is the first time ever that Dixville Notch's votes were tied.
But before polls had opened, nearly 80 million Americans had already participated in early voting, either in person or via mail-in ballots. The Washington Post noted that’s about half the overall number who voted in 2020 and "tens of millions more will vote Tuesday."