Yeah, OK, for all real intents and purposes, it's a Trump victory in 2024. But, there's math on the side of Kamala that allows her to win.

Taking the data from The AP election updates, which are likely to change over time (thus this snapshot...) there are still enough votes in play to allow a Kamala comeback.

There are still a small number of states, with about 46 electoral votes in play. They have more outstanding votes than the current leader (Trump in each case) has ahead of the follower (uh, Kamala). If we remove those states, the electoral map shows a little bit of hope.

In the table below, the incomplete states are shown with the AP projections. Each candidate's votes, so far, tallied and the reported percentage used to estimate how many total votes are expected, giving us numbers to compare for the candidate lead versus the remaining votes. Of course, based on estimates all over, and ignoring votes to other candidates, so all sloppy math.

To be sure, I checked all the states with enough gap remaining to potentially stage a comeback. There are also possibilities that the estimates are all off, and not as many voters will turn out. And there are possibilities that main-in or other ballots could still be counted (or might be in the gap already).

Still, for playing-with-numbers fun, looking at the chart, using Alaska (first on the list), we can see that with only 76% of the votes reported, Trump's lead of 38,618 votes has room for the Kamala comeback out of the remaining 76,817 votes, if she can pull more than 50% of those votes. That's pretty unlikely.

However, using the same estimates on the others, she only needs to eek out a bit. She needs less than a 1% lead on the remaining votes in Arizona to take those electoral votes; and Arizona has a lot of votes, unlike the other states, with close to a million and a half outstanding! Not as close in Nevada, where she'd need to gain 25% over Trump. Georgia and Wisconsin are closer to 80% needed.

For fun, if all of those go Kamala's way, she wins. In reality, she's probably not going to pull ahead by 50% in any of these races, where she's showing only about 40% of the votes now.

But that means there's a chance.

If Alaska goes to Trump but the rest jump to Kamala, and the other projection not included (Maine, with its split EC voting), that's a 269-269 electoral vote tie! Then it goes to the Republican-majority Senate for a vote.

So, realistically, yeah, Trump won. But there's still room for excitement.