We still do not know which candidate won Nevada and Arizona’s electoral votes, with ballot counting ongoing in both western states, and the Associated Press yet to determine a winner.

Donald Trump is ahead in both states thus far, but even if he slips, it would not change the outcome of the presidential election. The real races to watch in the states are for its Senate seats, which also have not yet been called by the AP.

Democratic incumbent Jacky Rosen seems to have the edge over her Republican challenger Sam Brown in Nevada, with 96% of the ballots counted.

In Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego has a lead over Republican Kari Lake, though only 76% of results have been reported.

Even if both Democrats win, it will not prevent the GOP from taking control of the Senate next year. Their victories in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana, along with Trump’s re-election, ensured their majority.

Andrew Sparrow

The UK foreign secretary David Lammy has suggested that Donald Trump may be invited to the UK for a state visit – but not next year.

Asked about the prospect of a state visit, in an interview with BBC’s Newscast, Lammy said that organizing one for 2025 might be “a bit of a tall order” because of the time needed to prepare. But he said the UK would want to be “generous with our American friends”.

A state visit is the most prestigious category of visit that a foreign head of state can make to the UK. There are normally only about two a year, and they involve almost all the royal and ceremonial trappings the UK is able to lay on.

Theresa May was criticised when she was prime minister for inviting Trump to the UK on a state visit only seven days after his inauguration. The offer was seen as premature and ingratiating, although it seems to have played a role in enabling May to become the first foreign leader to visit Trump in the White House.

At a joint press conference in Washington in January 2017 May said the state visit would come later that year. But Trump later told May he did not when to come if there were going to protests, and the state visit did not take place until 2019. There were other visits before then, including one featuring a reception at Blenheim Palace that was almost as grand as a state visit event.

Asked if Trump would be offered a state visit in 2025, Lammy said:

State visits take a while to organise. So in the next year, I’ve got to tell you, I think that would be a bit of a tall order. But (Trump) was genuine in his respect and his affection for the royal family.

Asked if a state visit might be offered later, Lammy said the government would “want to be generous with our American friends as they will be, I imagine, with us, particularly in a second term”.

Donald Trump won over more Catholics in the 2024 presidential election than he did when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, an AP analysis suggests.

Among religious voters as a whole, the president-elect faired roughly as well as he did during the previous election. But 54% of Catholic voters lent him their support this year, while Kamala Harris was backed by 44%. That compares to a split of 50% pro-Trump and 49% for Biden, a church-going Catholic, in 2020, according to AP’s VoteCast.

VoteCast also documented a racial divide. About six in 10 white Catholics supported Trump, and about four in 10 supported Harris. By contrast, about six in 10 Latino Catholics supported Harris, and about four in 10 supported Trump.

Archbishop Thomas Wenski, of Miami, who has worked closely with migrant and refugee communities in South Florida and beyond, sounded a note of “cautious optimism” about a second Trump term, believing that the reality of migrants’ contributions to the US economy will matter more than the “hyperbole” about mass deportations.

“If he wants to accomplish ‘the greatest economy ever,’ he’s going to have to work on some type of accommodation on the immigration issues,” Wenski said.

Andrew Sparrow

David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary, said in an interview that he had expected Donald Trump to win the presidential election “for some time”.

He told the Newscast podcast that when he met people from the Republican campaign in the spring he was impressed by how organized they were and he said: “I felt in my bones that there could be a Trump presidency.”

He also said he was surprised the Democrats did not focus more on the economy in their campaign. He said:

Because we had just come out of a campaign effectively, as the British Labour party having won an election, I was a little bit surprised that the Democrats had made a decision not to centre particularly the economy in their approach to the election.

We obviously had been really clear about growth for us. We knew that cost of living crisis, that’s where the public’s (attention was).

Robert Booth

When the US election result pushed shares in the artificial intelligence chip giant Nvidia to a record high and did the same to the price of bitcoin cryptocurrency, the market gave its verdict on what Trump redux means for at least parts of the technology world – a boom.

Stock in the electric vehicle (EV) company Tesla surged by nearly 15%, which must have cheered its boss, Elon Musk, whom Trump called a “super genius” on Wednesday.

But what about the people who do not own stock in Silicon Valley firms, but do use their products? Tens of millions of users of Musk’s social media platform, X, will now have to decide if they are willing to post in a place owned by a figure who looks set to be a central part of Trump’s administration.

Musk could be tasked with “making recommendations for drastic reforms” aimed at the efficiency and performance of “the entire federal government”, Trump had said. This could grant him huge power over the agencies that regulate his and other tech companies.

X had already become, according to the independent tech analyst Benedict Evans, “a coordinating site for misinformation” and many felt its amplification of false claims polluted the election. Might a Trump administration then do anything about misinformation on social media?

“He won’t,” said Evans. “He likes misinformation. There is a widespread view in tech that content moderation got out of hand and we need to pull back on this. At most you might need to think about amplification (of misinformation) but not deleting stuff.” So expect a wilder ride on social platforms, perhaps, as they pitch towards the right.

Millions of Americans could lose health insurance after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

Subsidies that helped many pay for insurance are due to expire at the end of 2025 – and it is up to the new Congress and president whether they are extended. The subsidies were part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan, and Trump and Republicans have signaled they don’t support extending the measure, according to a report on NBC News.

“If Republicans end up winning the House, in addition to the Senate and White House, having a GOP sweep, I think the odds are less than 5% they get extended,” Chris Meekins, who was a senior HHS official in Trump’s first term, told NBC.

In 2024, more than 20 million people got health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, official figures show.

Without the financial support, estimates show health insurance could be out of reach for nearly 4 million people. Trump’s campaign did not comment on the report.

Marina Hyde

Guardian columnist Marina Hyde has written this piece on the Democrats’ failure to learn the lessons of 2016 – and how both sides look set to forget any lessons learned from Trump 2.0:

My husband knows masses more about US politics than me, so do imagine how much he enjoyed me spending the best part of the past two years telling him “Trump’s going to win” simply because I felt it in my vibes. However, earlier this year, he started to agree with me, which I had to concede meant a lot because he was basing it on actual information, and had the first clue what he was talking about. Scrolling back through my text messages to him, I am reading things such as: “Sorry, Harris is ‘selling joy’???? Please tell me the election anywhere in history that was won on joy because I would LOVE to hear about it.” (Sidenote: I can see from reviewing the data that I’ve really over-leaned into the sassy question mark this year.)

Anyway, there’s plenty more in this vein. “I don’t believe all this polling, I just think it’s all some massive cope?” Yet when I was asked on the afternoon of election day who I predicted would win it, I promptly said “Kamala Harris?” Later that night, on the phone, my husband wondered mildly why I had abandoned the conviction of long months of kitchen rants and annoyingly punctuated text messages. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess I just … forgot?”

Forgetting is a very seductive thing. But then, irrational behaviour so often is. I can only say that I did want the opposite of the thing I forgot to be true.

Right now, the Democratic party should be looking back at the past few months and wondering how a lot of stuff slipped their minds. Picture their trip down memory lane. “We should definitely run a coastal elite woman against Trump and call his supporters weird. I forget how that goes for us. We should definitely go heavy on the culture war stuff. I forget how that goes for us. We should definitely present the choice as being between darkness/fear/hate and moral superiority. I forget how that goes for us. We should definitely not present the choice as being between his economic plan and our clear and better one. I forget how that goes for us.”

Ben Beaumont-Thomas

Madonna has expressed outrage at the re-election of Donald Trump, describing him as “a convicted felon, rapist, bigot”.

Writing on Instagram, she said: “Trying to get my head around why a convicted felon, rapist, bigot was chosen to lead our country because he’s good for the economy?” She also posted a picture of a cake with the words “Fuck Trump” etched in frosting along with the caption: “Stuffed my face with this cake last night!”

The singer has previously castigated Trump, saying at the Women’s March in Washington DC in January 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration, that she’d thought “an awful lot about blowing up the White House”. After a backlash among Trump supporters, she said: “I do not promote violence and it’s important people hear and understand my speech in its entirety rather than one phrase.”

Billie Eilish has also expressed dismay in the wake of Trump’s election. She told a concert audience in Nashville on Wednesday: “A person who is a … let’s say convicted predator, let’s say that … someone who hates women so, so deeply is about to be the president of the United States of America.”

Nadia Khomami

Artists need to “keep the flag of truth flying” after Donald Trump’s election victory, the legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox has said.

Cox, who played Logan Roy in the hit HBO series Succession, also said the world has “never been in a more dangerous place than it is at the moment” as he reflected on the US election campaign and a second impending Trump presidency.

“As artists we have to bang the drum, we have to keep going,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “We mustn’t put up with it. That’s why I admire people like Mark Ruffalo (a longtime advocate for social justice).

“I’m not going to give up on my criticism of Trump. I think it behoves artists to not give up, to keep the flag of truth flying, because it’s been so abused in recent years.”

Cox went viral on Tuesday night after making his disdain for Trump known during a virtual appearance on Channel 4 alongside the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson.

The 78-year-old, who splits his time between London and New York, said he was “acutely depressed” about the election and felt like he just had to “ride it out”.

Cox said:

There’s probably nobody more surprised than Trump himself. I think he was expecting to talk about voter fraud. But the American people have bought into him, which I find absolutely astonishing.

It’s extraordinary that he has so many Catholic voters. I’m not religious at all, but I was born a Catholic. So I know about the Catholic doctrine and Trump’s sins are unbelievable. How can they possibly rationalise their faith in relationship to him?

He added:

I’ve got two sons in America, I worry about what’s in store for them. The only person Trump cares about is himself. It’s hard to predict what he’ll be like.