In the last two presidential elections, there have been some major surprises. Surprise was, of course, the theme for 2016, when Trump won a decisive Electoral College victory with the crumbling of the "blue wall" of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. With Clinton ahead in the polls that year, this a significant upset. In 2020, Biden's victories in Arizona and Georgia came as a surprise to many observers -- neither had gone to the Democratic presidential candidate since the 1990s.

Is it possible for us to be surprised this year? Most race predictions allowed for a wide range of outcomes, with either candidate winning the popular vote, the Electoral College or one but not the other. The major competitive states still seem like anyone's guess. A Harris victory in North Carolina, where votes are still being counted, might be a slight surprise -- Trump won there in both 2016 and 2020 -- but so far, we haven't seen anything unexpected, and it's not clear that we will.

ABC News projects that Trump will win the presidential contest in Arkansas, gaining the state's six electoral votes. He won with 61% of the state's votes against Clinton in 2016 and 62% against Biden in 2020. His former press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the state's current governor.

It's now 8:30 p.m. Eastern, and polls are fully closed in Arkansas. Here are our forecasts for races in the Natural State.

ABC News projects that Republican Mike Braun will win the governor's race in Indiana over his Democratic opponent, Jennifer McCormick, a former Republican who left the party over disagreements on education policy. He'll extend the party's 20-year hold on the position.

If it’s after 5 p.m. Eastern on Election Day, it’s exit poll time! If you’re watching the news or scrolling social media tonight ,you’re likely to encounter findings from this mega-poll of voters throughout the night (and coming weeks). But there are some reasons to take what you see, especially early, with a grain of salt.

The exit poll is a survey of voters nationally and in key states that asks people questions like who they voted for, when they made up their mind and why they voted the way they did. The exit poll is conducted by Edison Research (a survey research, voter data and election returns company) and sponsored by a consortium of news networks in the U.S. (ABC News is one of them.) ABC News will be reporting exit poll results nationally and in 10 states: the seven battleground states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) plus Florida, Ohio and Texas.

Long ago, the exit poll only interviewed people in person as they left their polling places after casting ballots in person on Election Day. With the rise of mail-in and in-person early voting, the pollsters and statisticians behind the exit poll added telephone interviews to account for early and mail-in voters.

The exit poll is an incredible feat of engineering and a rich source of data on voter behavior in America, and you can expect it to be cited frequently after the election as a measure of “ground truth” (or at least one of the highest-quality estimates available) about how and why people voted. However, at the end of the day, the exit poll is just a very detailed survey, so it is not infallible. In particular, the way it is conducted warrants two main caveats:

First, the results of the exit poll can and will change over time, especially at the subgroup level. The earliest results of the exit poll are essentially toplines and crosstabs from a very large poll of voters, but which contain a lot of guesses about the eventual demographic composition of the country. As the votes roll in over the course of the election night (or week), the pollsters behind the scenes adjust the results of the poll to match the results of the election.

As a result, the findings of the exit poll can and do change as more votes are counted, especially for subgroups. In Wisconsin in 2020, for example, preliminary exit poll results had Trump +1 among men. In final data (weighted Wednesday morning), Trump was +10 among men. Overinterpreting the poll — say, if you had hitched your horse to the wagon of low or no gender gap in the electorate — risks setting up narratives that are swiftly knocked down with actual data.

The second word of caution is to remember the exit poll is just one imperfect estimate. Yes, it is generated with a lot of data and care, but misspecified weights or sampling noise can impact results just like with any other poll. Interpretations of the final exit poll results should be used with caution. As a result of all these caveats, 538 rarely cites exit polls, and we prefer to wait for actual results before wedding ourselves to narratives. If you are going to cite the exit poll, we recommend waiting until it has been at least somewhat weighted to be representative of actual election results.