In 2016, the world knew that Donald J Trump had won the presidency by the time it woke up the morning after Election Day. In 2020, the race wasn’t called for Joseph R Biden Jr until the following Saturday.
This year, either timeline is conceivable, depending on how close the race is. If the result comes down to a few thousand votes in a handful of states, we could be in for a 2020-style wait. But if one candidate outperforms the current polls, which are showing the closest race in many years, the outcome could be clear much sooner.
What happened in 2020?
The 2020 election was held on Tuesday, November 3, but seven decisive states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — remained uncalled the next morning.
The Associated Press called Michigan and Wisconsin for Mr. Biden on Wednesday, bringing him to the brink of an Electoral College majority but not over the threshold.
US Then — because of the time required to count mail ballots, which had been cast in greater numbers than ever before thanks to the pandemic — the nation watched results trickle in slowly for three days before any more states were called.
It was not until Saturday, November 7, that news organizations confirmed Mr. Biden as the winner of Pennsylvania and, with it, the presidency. (Nevada, Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina were called even later, but the overall verdict arrived shortly before noon on Saturday.)
On election night itself, understanding how states are leaning can be complicated by red and blue “mirages” — artifacts of some states counting mail ballots before in-person ballots, and some states that do the reverse. Because Democrats were disproportionately likely to vote by mail and Republicans disproportionately likely to vote in person, one candidate sometimes appeared to be far ahead, only for the other candidate to surge later.
Does that mean something went wrong?
No. While Mr. Trump seized on the mirages to try to bolster his claims of fraud — and he and his allies may do so again — the results didn’t change. The initial picture was incomplete, and it took a few days to become clear.
While Americans were accustomed before 2020 to knowing who won on election night — at least, setting aside 2000 — vote counting in modern US elections has never been completed in one day. Before the Covid pandemic, news organizations like The Associated Press usually had enough information on election night to state who had won, but that didn’t mean the results were all in. That was the big change in 2020: Because of the increase in mail voting and the partisan divide in who used it, the portion of results available on election night wasn’t representative enough of the whole to make projections in close races.
Is anything different this time?
The composition of the early and mail vote is likely to be less disproportionately Democratic, as more Republicans take advantage of those options. And some states — including Michigan — have changed their laws to allow election workers to begin processing mail ballots before Election Day, which should speed up reporting.
But there will still be partisan disparities within each voting method, and many states have not changed their rules, so the fundamental landscape is not likely to be different.
When is the earliest we could know results?
Polls in the seven swing states that will determine the presidential race will close from 7 to 10 p.m. Eastern.The earliest indications of how the night is going will come in Georgia shortly after 7 p.m. and in North Carolina after 7:30 p.m. If Ms. Harris does well in those states, that could suggest the result won’t come down solely to the slower-counting so-called Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Conversely, if Mr. Trump is winning the Southern battlegrounds, Ms. Harris will still have a plausible path to victory through the Blue Wall, but we’ll have to wait longer to know.
The polls close at 8 pm Eastern in Michigan and Pennsylvania, 9 pm in Wisconsin and Arizona, and 10 pm in Nevada.
