| Long before Election Day, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris knew that the path to holding the White House ran through Pennsylvania – the biggest of the seven swing states. As Tuesday night bled into Wednesday morning, that path was cleared for Trump. The Harris campaign's aggressive ground game in the state's major population hubs wasn't enough to counter Trump's strength in Pennsylvania's deindustrialized small cities and vast rural center. Trump was declared the winner of the state just after 2 a.m. He already had claimed two other battleground states — North Carolina and Georgia — making Pennsylvania and its 19 Electoral College votes pivotal to the outcome.  Election workers flatten ballots at the Philadelphia City Commissions Office & Elections Warehouse. Photographer: Hannah Beier/Bloomberg That left Trump just three electoral votes shy of the 270 needed to win the presidency. Even if Harris ran the table of the other battleground states — and Trump was leading in all four — a win in Republican-dominated Alaska would put Trump over the top when it was called. Trump attended a dinner in the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago yesterday evening with roughly 250 people, my colleague Nancy Cook reports. Among those sharing his table was billionaire Elon Musk, who had become one of Trump's biggest boosters. The ex-president later took the stage at the Palm Beach County Convention Center a few miles north to declare victory. "This was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time," Trump told the cheering crowd. At Harris' election night headquarters on the campus of Howard University in Washington, the mood was subdued even before Pennsylvania was called and she put off making any statement until later today. Neither campaign had made any secret of the primacy of Pennsylvania in its electoral math, even as they argued they could make up the difference elsewhere and find another route to the electoral votes needed to secure the presidency. As Election Day wore on, the outlook was bleaker than Democrats would have hoped, especially in Philadelphia and its suburbs, where party operatives had earlier in the day been buoyed by what seemed to be massive turnout. In a fortified brick warehouse in Philadelphia's far northeast, staffers of the city's elections office planned to work through the night flattening and tabulating mail ballots and same-day votes from more than 1,700 voting precincts across the state's largest city. Although the count goes on, the result is baked in. — Ted Mann Key Reading: | 
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