Vice President Kamala Harris is projected to win three of Maine’s four Electoral College votes.
With 91 percent of precincts reporting in the state, Harris leads President-elect Donald Trump 52.3 percent to 45 percent for three of Maine’s four Electoral College votes, according to the Associated Press, which called the race on Wednesday evening, after Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election.
Trump, meanwhile, is projected to win Maine’s Second Congressional District, taking one of the state’s four Electoral College votes.
The 45th and soon-to-be 47th president winning this district makes for the second time there has ever been a split Electoral College vote in Maine, the first time being in 2016, when Trump also won the state’s Second Congressional District.
Maine’s Electoral College Votes Explained:
While the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in a state usually receives all of that state’s Electoral College votes, two states have taken a different approach: Maine and Nebraska.
These states have instead decided to allocate two Electoral College votes to the state’s popular vote winner, and one Electoral College vote to the winner of each of the states’ congressional districts.
As for Maine, the state has a total of four Electoral College votes, with two of those votes representing the winner of the popular vote in Maine’s two U.S. Congressional districts. The state’s two other Electoral College votes represent the winner of the popular vote statewide.
Notably, this method creates the opportunity for there to be a split Electoral College vote.
Maine, which established this method ahead of the 1972 presidential election, saw its first split Electoral College vote in 2016, when Trump won the state’s Second Congressional District, which consists of the majority of Maine’s land area sitting north of the Portland and Augusta metropolitan areas.
The last time a Republican candidate won Maine’s statewide Electoral College vote was 36 years ago, when former President George H. W. Bush defeated former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election.
On Tuesday, Trump won the 2024 presidential election against Harris in a landslide victory with — at the time of this writing — 292 of Electoral College votes, according to the election results called by the Associated Press (AP).
The 45th and soon-to-be 47th president is expected to take home 312 of the Electoral College votes after the races for Nevada, Arizona, and Alaska are officially called, outperforming his own election results from 2016, when he won 304 of the Electoral College vote.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
