How to watch Election Night like a pro

A viewer’s guide.

Good morning! It’s Tuesday, November 5, 2024. It’s Election Day in America! 🇺🇸

We’ve officially made it, ladies and gentlemen. Ballots are being cast. Votes are being counted. Democracy is in action, and it’s a beautiful thing.

Take a step back and consider all the history that’s been made in this election cycle: An indicted nominee. A debate that actually mattered. A president who suddenly stepped aside. A 48-hour nomination process. Not one, but two, assassination attempts.

It’s been an honor covering this one-of-a-kind campaign for you all — my first as a full-time journalist. (Talk about being thrown into the deep end!) Now there’s one thing left to do: This morning’s newsletter will serve as a viewer’s guide for Election Night 2024 — everything you need to know to watch the results like a pro, from the big picture to the critical counties. I hope you find it helpful.

Tonight, I’ll be watching the results from Howard University, where I’ve been credentialed to cover Vice President Kamala Harris’ election night event. I’ve opened up a live chat for WUTP paid subscribers to come together and watch the results — I’ll be chiming in throughout the night, with reporting from the watch party and with my own observations and analysis from across the electoral map.

Feel free to follow along, and to share what you’re seeing and watching as well. Election analyst Niles Francis of Peach State Politics with Niles Francis will be popping in and out too. It should be fun, and hopefully help you watch the results roll in with a little more clarity!

Click here to become a paid subscriber and gain access to the chat:

Tomorrow morning, no matter what we know (or what we don’t), I’ll be in your inbox, helping guide you through the results — and the morning after that, and the morning after that, as we chart the future of this grand experiment, now in its 248th year. (If you haven’t yet added your voice to that grand experiment: here’s a link to find your polling place.)

With that, here’s everything you need to know as the 2024 election comes to a close:

1. Paths to 270 📊

Let’s start here. Somewhere around 160 million Americans¹ in all 50 states (and, thanks to the 23rd Amendment, the District of Columbia) will cast ballots in today’s election. But I don’t think I need to tell any readers of this newsletter that the Electoral College outcome will really come down to seven closely divided battlegrounds, listed here with their final FiveThirtyEight polling averages:

• Arizona: Trump +2.1

• Georgia: Trump +0.8

• North Carolina: Trump +0.9

• Nevada: Trump +0.3

• Pennsylvania: Harris +0.2

• Wisconsin: Harris +1

• Michigan: Harris +1

(See, I wasn’t kidding about closely divided.)

Barring any last-minute surprises — like Democrats flipping Iowa, or Republicans flipping New Mexico — this is where your mental electoral map should start out tonight, with those seven states up in the air and the other 43 divvied up between either Trump or Harris.²

From here, there are 21 potential combinations of the battleground states that would bring Trump to 270 electoral votes — the number needed for victory — and 20 that would do the same for Harris. (There are also, I’m afraid to say, three combinations that would yield a 269-269 Electoral College tie. These combinations are statistically unlikely,³ but if they were to happen, the House would pick the president in a contingent election.)

The polling averages (and historic voting behavior) make it fairly clear what each candidates’ easiest paths to victory would be. For Harris, it’s winning the Rust Belt trio of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — which would land her with exactly 270 EVs, no matter what the other four battleground states do. These three states have voted together in every election since 1992, and for the Democrat in each of those races except 2016, so they constitute Harris’ easiest route to the White House.

If the “Blue Wall” fractures, and Harris loses, say, Pennsylvania,⁴ she would have 10 remaining win combinations, while Trump would have 15. Her best paths to victory in that case would be to win: Michigan + Wisconsin + North Carolina + Georgia or Michigan + Wisconsin + (Georgia or North Carolina) + (Arizona or Nevada). That’s possible, but it would be a much harder task to pull off.

Unlike Harris, Trump cannot win simply by sweeping the battleground states (in his case, the four Sun Belt states) where he is strongest. (That would yield the above map, but with the tan states filled in red, which would leave him at 268 electoral votes, a whisker away from victory.)

That means Trump’s easiest path to victory is Georgia + North Carolina + Pennsylvania, which gives him 270 EVs, as seen below. (Call it the East Coast sweep.)

If Trump loses Pennsylvania — the closest of the close states — he would need to win at least four of the remaining battlegrounds. Some potential permutations there include Georgia + Arizona + Wisconsin + (North Carolina or Michigan) or Georgia + North Carolina + Michigan + (Arizona or Wisconsin). Again: that’s possible, but like for Harris, it won’t be easy to win without Pennsylvania.

You can play around with the electoral map yourself here.

2. When we’ll know what 🕑

Here’s a handy map of when polling places close in each state:

Of the seven key battleground states, the final polling places close at 7 p.m. ET in Georgia; 7:30 p.m. ET in North Carolina; 8 p.m. ET in Pennsylvania; 9 p.m. ET in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin; and 10 p.m. ET in Nevada.

But each of these states have different counting processes, of course. Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan are expected to process their ballots relatively quickly. Arizona and Nevada are known for counting slowly. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will likely be somewhere in the middle, because of state laws that prevent mail ballots from being processed until Election Day.

So, buckle up. The 2020 election wasn’t called until the Saturday after Election Day; polls show this year’s race could be even closer. If that’s true, we could be looking at days (and even weeks) of counting and recounting. Or…

3. What if the polls are wrong? 😮

Right now, everyone is (wisely) girding themselves for a razor-thin race — and a days-long limbo period — because the polls in every single battleground state are neck-and-neck.

But, it wouldn’t take some unimaginable level of polling error for either candidate to emerge with a fairly comfortable lead. In fact, if you simply apply 2020 or 2022 levels of polling error — as the NYT’s Nate Cohn does below — suddenly we’re looking at Trump or Harris sweeps, respectively, of the battleground states.

This isn’t too hard to fathom. These battlegrounds often swing together: all seven of them went for Trump in 2016, and six of the seven (all except for North Carolina) went for Biden in 2020. In fact, in Nate Silver’s model, the likeliest scenario tonight is a Trump winning all seven swing states (20% odds). The second-most likely scenario is Harris winning all seven (13.9% odds).

If either of those scenarios come true, we could be looking at an earlier call than some people are expecting — probably not tonight, but perhaps in the wee hours of tomorrow morning.

Some experts have accused pollsters of herding, making the race appear artificially close to avoid getting the race wrong. If Trump overperforms his polls, it would mean — for the third straight cycle — pollsters have been unable to reach his voters and accurately represent his popularity. If Harris does, it might signal that pollsters overcorrected from 2016 and 2020, and underrepresented the Democrats this timer around. (Late deciders are also relevant here. They broke for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but some indications show they may be breaking for Harris this time around.)

Prepare yourself for a long, hard-fought battle (that’s certainly what every poll and forecast currently projects)… but also prepare yourself for the possibility that either Trump or Harris outperform their polls a tad, and clean up the seven key states without much trouble.⁵

4. Downballot intermission 📜

Of course, the presidency isn’t the only thing on the line today. 435 House seats are up for grabs. 34 Senate seats. 13 governorships. 5,807 state legislative seats. Countless referenda. Here’s a primer of what else to keep your eye on:

The Senate. Republicans have a clear edge to take control of the Senate. If you combine seats that aren’t up for re-election and seats that are safe red-or-blue, Republicans head into the night with 47 Senate seats (four away from a majority)⁶ while Democrats head into the night with 42.

Add Montana (where Democrat Jon Tester is underwater in most polls) to the Republican column, plus Nebraska, Texas, and Florida (where Republican incumbents are favored to win re-election), and the GOP has made it to 51, even without the tossup races (MI, WI, OH, PA) that could also go their way.

That means Democrats need to run the table in states where they’re favored to win (NV, AZ, and MD) and the tossups and defend Tester and (if they lose the White House) flip either NE, TX, or FL.

Nebraska’s race will be especially interesting to watch: Independent Dan Osborn (who has said he would not caucus with either party) has turned Republican Deb Fischer’s sleepy re-election race into a real contest. Keep an eye on it.

The House. Control of the House could not be closer, and most observers expect the chamber will move in tandem with the presidency. Democrats only need to flip four seats to win control of the chamber; many of the key races to watch here are in New York and California, as well as the typical presidential battlegrounds.

The final prediction from Sabato’s Crystal Ball was 218 seats going blue and 217 going red — literally as close as control of the chamber could get.⁷ This one will go down to the wire.

Governors. Not much to report here. The only tossup, per the Cook Political Report, is New Hampshire, where Republican Kelly Ayotte and Democrat Joyce Craig are battling to succeed GOP Gov. Chris Sununu.

State legislative chambers. Republicans currently control 28 state legislatures. Democrats control 20. (Pennsylvania’s state House is blue and its state Senate is red. Alaska’s legislature is controlled by a bipartisan coalition.) Democrats are vying to flip the Arizona, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire legislatures tonight, while Republicans are eying Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania.

Ballot measures. The biggest ones here are the ten states that will vote on abortion ballot measures today: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota. Since Dobbs, the pro-choice side has won in every state referendum that’s been on the ballot — we’ll see if that streak will continue.

Other interesting ones to watch: Florida, North Dakota, and South Dakota will vote on legalizing recreational marijuana. Alaska, Arizona, and Missouri will vote on banning ranked-choice voting; Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. will vote on adopting it. Alaska, California, and Missouri will vote on increasing the minimum wage.

5. Tea leaves to watch 🔮

OK, I know that’s a lot of information. But you don’t have to watch all 469 congressional races to get an idea of where the night is headed. (In fact, if you watch most of them, you probably won’t learn much about the topline race.)

Here are some shortcuts for the night — races to keep a tab on, or just to perk your head up when they’re mentioned on TV. In the interregnum between polls closing and a president-elect being named, these key races will help tell you if Trump or Harris has an advantage. When these races are called, pay attention:

• Virginia’s 7th district: This one is good to watch because Virginia’s polls close early, at 7 p.m. ET. Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger has vacated the seat to run for governor next year; Democrat Eugene Vindman (who you may remember from the first Trump impeachment) and Republican Derrick Anderson are vying to replace her. The seat has a slight blue tint — but if Anderson is doing well here early, it could be a sign of Republican gains nationwide.

• North Carolina’s 1st district: Democratic Rep. Don Davis faces Republican challenger Laurie Buckhout in a seat that was long a Democratic stronghold but has been made more competitive by redistricting. The seat is anchored in Nash County, a key bellwether in the presidential race (it went Obama-Trump-Biden in the last three elections); the district has a large Black population, so it will be a good indicator of whether Republicans are gaining ground with Black voters.

• Pennsylvania’s 7th district: This seat covers one of the areas in Pennsylvania with a significant Puerto Rican population — which means Democrat Susan Wild’s competitive re-election race against Republican Ryan Mackenzie could offer signs of whether comedian Tony Hinchliffe’s Trump-rally joke about Puerto Rico offered any help to Democrats.

• Maine 2nd district and Nebraska’s 2nd district: These are the two districts that, because of the unique Electoral College allocations in their states, are likely to glue blue (in the Nebraska case) or red (in the Maine case) while the rest of their state go the other way. But, in each district, a lawmaker from the party of the likely presidential loser is seeking re-election: Republic Don Bacon in NE-2 and Democrat Jared Golden in ME-2. Each party likely needs to keep these seats if they are going to win a House majority; NE-2 will also give us clues of whether Democrats are turning out suburban, college-educated voters like they need to, and ME-2 will do the same for Republicans and working-class white voters.

6. Zooming in on the youth vote 🔍

One final word before we go. As I wrote in my “pre-mortems” a few weeks ago, there are a lot of electoral shifts I’ll be tracking tonight as well: will Trump make gains among voters of color? Will Harris win white women? Do working-class voters move more towards the Republican camp, and highly educated voters more towards the Democrats?

But the biggest movements could come in the youth vote, where Trump is counting on big gains with young men in order to return the White House, while Harris is aiming to juice turnout among young women. I’ve been tracking the youth vote all cycle, so I wanted to check in with experts from both parties for one final look.

Operatives from both sides underlined to me how difficult it’s become to reach young voters. “Print media is dying. Radio is dying. Cable’s next… I can’t tell you a single college student that pays a cable subscription for their dorm room or apartment,” Brilyn Hollyhand, the 18-year-old chair of the Republican Party’s Youth Advisory Council, told me.

“We’re actually seeing a more fragmented, more divided media environment than ever,” Kevin Munoz, the 28-year-old Harris campaign spokesman, agreed.

With those traditional sources of information disappearing, both campaigns quickly identified TikTok and podcasts as critical routes to spreading their message to Gen Z. Hollyhand recalled convincing Trump, early in the cycle, that the campaign needed to set up a TikTok account: “Sir, there’s a difference between Truth Social and Tiktok,” Hollyhand said he told the former president. “Truth Social is an echo chamber. You’re talking to your base and getting nowhere with Gen Z. I can’t tell you a single youth voter that is sitting on Truth Social seeing your post, but I can tell you hundreds of millions of youth voters who were scrolling through ‘For You’ pages aimlessly on TikTok, and you’re not even touching them.”

Munoz, for his part, described the Harris campaign’s granular efforts to identify medium-tier TikTok trends and jump on them. “What we do not do is, when there’s a completely viral thing already and everybody’s already seeing it, we don’t seize on that, because that’s already something that people are tired of,” he explained.

For both campaigns, podcasts were natural, longer-form extension of these efforts “And Trump loved it,” Hollyhand said. “He loves to talk. He loves to share stories. Sitting for two hours on a podcast talking was like his dream, and it worked out great. It was authentic. It was relatable.”

Munoz dismissed the idea that young men were slipping towards Trump — take the public polling “with a grain of salt,” he said — but acknowledged the challenge of reaching voters who have grown up knowing nothing besides Trump-infused politics. “They grew up among the chaos and division of Donald Trump,” Munoz said of Gen Z voters, “and so they actively tune out a lot of this. Our job, in these final days, is to make sure that we continue to lift up those stakes and really make them feel bought into the process.”

The Trump camp has essentially decided to outsource its get-out-the-vote operation to outside groups, a risky decision considering that Trump’s route to victory is premised on bringing young men — who are historically very low-propensity voters— to the polls. Hollyhand expressed confidence in the campaign’s ground game, but acknowledged that the GOP has had to race to set up an operation to reach young voters, after several cycles of essentially yielding the demographic to the Democrats. “It has been a game of catch-up,” he told me.

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I usually open with a countdown, but today I’ll close with one. 62 days from now, Vice President Kamala Harris will preside over a joint session of Congress to count the 2024 electoral votes.

There’s a lot we don’t know about what will happen between now and then — counts, and recounts, and likely lots of disinformation, and hopefully no violence. At the end of it, Harris will either declare herself the winner of this election, becoming the first Black female president in U.S. history, or announce that Donald Trump has pulled off the rare task of returning to the White House.

I’ll be with you every step of the way as we navigate these next few weeks. In the meantime: Go vote. Take deep breaths. Don’t drive yourself crazy. Focus on what you can control (very little!) Here’s the link to join tonight’s live chat if you want a calm place to watch results and hear in-the-moment analysis:

See you in the chat, and in your inbox tomorrow morning.

Happy Election Day!

1. About 155 million Americans voted in the 2020 election. Nate Silver’s model predicts turnout of 155.3 million this year, “with an 80 percent confidence interval between 148.2 million and 162.5 million.”

2. Plus Maine’s 2nd congressional district, which I’m slotting in the Trump column, and Nebraska’s 2nd, which I’m slotting in the Harris column. (Maine and Nebraska, you may recall, are the only two states to use the Congressional District Method to allocate electoral votes.)

3. Nate Silver’s model says there is a 0.3% chance of an Electoral College tie.

4. Call this the “2028 nominee Josh Shapiro” scenario.

5. To look at this another way, per the Silver model, Harris’ win probability is currently 50. Trump’s is 49.6%. But if Harris was polling just one percentage point better than she does currently, her win probability would shoot up to 61%. Do the same for Trump’s polls, and his win probability moves to 60.9%. In other words: if the race is just a little less close than the polls think it is, the current tossup race becomes, well, not a sure thing for either candidate — but a notably less competitive election.

6. Three away if they win the White House.

7. If Republicans win a slight House majority, Democrats are bracing for the possibility that the January 3rd speaker’s election won’t be decided by January 6th — which would throw the electoral certification session into chaos.