black-and-white image of top of building with red and blue question marks around it

Seattle Party Bus Rentals

When will we know the result of the US presidential election?

Calling the Harris-Trump race could take days – here’s what to know about the presidential and congressional results

Tue 5 Nov 2024 06.00 EST

Over the last 25 years, Americans have regularly found themselves up into the early morning hours waiting for news organizations to make the decisive call of the last state needed to put a presidential candidate in the White House, and to learn who controls Congress.A moment like this on election night in 2000 led to our common language of Republican states as red states and Democratic states as blue states, as the US watched the Meet the Press host Tim Russert on NBC talk late through the night about what was happening in Florida.It’s extremely unlikely that we’ll know the winner of the presidential contest on election night, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are virtually tied in the polls, and the odds that the race comes down to a small number of swing states is high.https://api.nextgen.guardianapps.co.uk/embed/atom/interactive/interactives%2F2024%2F11%2Fus-election-2024%2Fpresident-bar-article#amp=1

So when will we know who won the US election?Well, that depends on how close things turn out to be. Four swing states – Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – have absentee ballot procedures that can require days to conclude. But if Harris has decisively won the other swing states, it is enough to declare her the victor. Any other result will take time.Why do US news organizations make the call?News organizations call a winner. They do not determine a winner. Officials in elections offices who count votes and certify election results determine the winner. That certification happens days or even weeks after an election.News organizations convey the moment it has become plain from what those elections offices have said that the mathematical results of the vote count show a winner.Everything you need to know about the 2024 US presidential election

“Our standard is absolute certainty,” said David Scott, head of news strategy and operations at the Associated Press. “We don’t declare a winner until we are 100% confident that the trailing candidates can’t catch up.”The Guardian follows the Associated Press in calling an election.How do news organizations make their calls?The AP and other election night news organizations such as CNN, NBC, ABC and Fox News maintain a “decision desk” and use a model to project how the vote count will unfold, state by state. Some are now relying on Decision Desk HQ, an independent organization set up specifically for this task.null

“News organizations have gotten a lot more nervous about making early calls because they don’t want to have to take a call back like they did in 2000,” said Mike Wagner, a professor studying elections at the University of Wisconsin.The decisions about when to call are made by statisticians, not news anchors. Don’t miss important US election coverage. Get our free app and sign up for election alerts“It’s not Sean Hannity making that determination,” Wagner said. “It’s not Rupert Murdoch making that determination early. It’s the people in the room doing the analysis, making that determination about whether, whether the election can be called.”The calls of different networks may differ in timing because each uses a model that is independent of others. Different analysts may make conclusions at different times.When did we know the results in 2020?Joe Biden was declared the winner on Saturday 7 November – four days after the election. The president crossed the electoral vote threshold that day when media outlets called Pennsylvania and Nevada. Michigan and Wisconsin were both called the day after the election, but Arizona wasn’t called until 12 November, North Carolina until 13 November, and Georgia on 19 November, after a recount.https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2024/11/archive-2-zip/giv-4559cgBkB108BXBT#amp=1

Will results be faster or slower than 2020?That depends on the margins in each state. According to Protect Democracy, a non-partisan group, we’ll generally see results faster than in 2020 if the margin in a state is greater than 0.5%. They draw this conclusion because there will be significantly fewer mail ballots than in 2020, and states will be able to count them faster. Three states also expanded the pre-canvassing of mail ballots before election day that didn’t in 2020 (Arizona, Georgia and Michigan) and three states have an earlier deadline for when mail ballots must arrive than they did in 2020 (North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania).Protect Democracy said in a recent report that its best guess was that results will be called in Michigan and Wisconsin one full day after polls closed – the same speed as 2020. It also guesses that Pennsylvania will be called faster than in 2020, when it took four days; Nevada will be called in the same amount of time or faster than 2020, when it took four days and Arizona will also be called in the same amount of time or faster than 2020, when it took nine days. North Carolina and Georgia will both be called faster than 2020, the organization guesses.What could prolong results?If the margin in states is smaller than 0.5% or if any states require recounts, results could be prolonged. News outlets will generally not call states until the results of a recount.For Arizona and Nevada in particular, “it’s very unlikely anybody’s going to call those races on election night,” McCoy said. “That’s the way those states have worked for a very long time, and so that’s very much expected.” If another swing state is as close as Georgia was in 2020, “you’re just waiting. That’s not something you’re going to get ahead of and make a projection that’s just too close to call. And so you’re just waiting for the votes to come.”null

Pennsylvania is particularly challenging because by law, local elections offices can’t begin opening envelopes and tallying mail-in ballots until the day of the election. Wisconsin, another swing state, has a similar restriction and may not report complete results until early Wednesday morning.Some states permit absentee ballots to be counted as much as 10 days after election day. Of the swing states, only Nevada has a meaningful delay; it can accept mail-in ballots up to the Saturday after election day, as long as they are postmarked by 5 November.If there are legal battles over which ballots to count, that could also delay results. There are currently numerous pending lawsuits in a number of swing states concerning the canvassing of certain ballots, including late-arriving ballots and overseas ballots.If a state has results like Florida in 2000, where a three-digit number separates two candidates, the result may come down to military absentee ballots and possibly provisional ballots. Typically, only about half of provisional ballots count, but in a close race we’ll see a mad scramble by political teams to find the people who cast those ballots to “cure” them, which usually involves bringing proof of identification and registration to an elections office.What states will provide results first this year?It’s likely that news organizations will call several east coast states first where one candidate has a clear advantage over the other.“Obviously, there are some states that are going to be basically called at full closing,” said Drew McCoy, president of Decision Desk HQ. “There’ll be some that are called, you know, once you sort of start to see the first votes come in and that it tracks with historical precedents.”Factchecking the most pervasive myths and lies about US elections

What is the ‘red mirage’ and the ‘blue shift’?The phrases “red mirage” and “blue shift” refer to the same phenomenon in which a Republican candidate appears to have a lead early in the evening, only for that edge to disappear as more votes are counted.https://0572662de1bf43dabc9a38ee57002309.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.html?n=0

In 2020, mail-in ballots heavily favored Democrats, while Republicans were far more likely to vote in-person. On Wednesday at noon on the day after the election, Donald Trump had an 11% lead, which Joe Biden overcame over the next two days as elections workers counted 2.7 million voters’ mail-in ballots. The AP and other news organizations knew how many absentee ballots voters had returned, and knew how many had been requested by registered Democrats, and refrained from calling the race for Biden until those ballots were counted.On the Friday before election day, Wisconsin had received more than 1m absentee ballots, with more on the way.“In the two most populous counties, they don’t finish counting until 1am or 2am,” Wagner said. “And so several hundred thousand votes come in, you know, under the cover of darkness, and they happen in the two most liberal counties in the state. The Democrat always picks up a ton of votes in the middle of the night in Wisconsin, because, by law, they can’t start counting until then. It’s a petri dish for conspiracy theories, even though they’re doing things exactly the way they’re required to do them.”The opposite phenomenon occurs in Arizona, where mail-in ballots received before election day are counted – and reported – first. In 2022, the Democratic senator Mark Kelly had a 20-point lead over Republican Blake Masters at the start of the night. Kelly ultimately won with a five-point margin.But mail-in ballots received on election day cannot be processed until after the polls close. In 2020, that was a significant number – about 320,000 ballots in Maricopa county alone.Why is this so complicated? Why doesn’t the country just add up all the votes and see who has more?A reminder: in the presidential election contest, the popular vote nationally does not determine the result. Each state counts its votes separately. With two exceptions – Nebraska and Maine – the winner of a state gets all of its electoral votes, regardless of whether the state was won by 537 votes out of about 6m cast, as in the presidential contest in Florida in 2000, or the 1.5m-vote margin Reagan won California by in 1984.How can the candidate with most votes lose? The US electoral college explained

Each state has a number of electors based on the number of congressional districts it has, plus two additional votes representing the state’s Senate seats. Washington DC has three electoral votes, despite having no voting representation in Congress.It takes 270 electors to win.Biden won by a 51-47 percentage in 2020, a margin of about 7m votes. The electoral count was 306-232, winning about 57% of the electors.When will we know who controls Congress?Individual congressional races will be called as votes come in, but with 435 races across the country, some are bound to be too close to call on election night. Depending on how many, it may not be obvious for some time which party controls Congress, McCoy said.https://0572662de1bf43dabc9a38ee57002309.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.html?n=0

“There’s always kind of like one or two races that are just, you know, ridiculously close, and it just goes to a recount, or whatever the process may be,” McCoy said. “It’s very much about waiting for the data and seeing what it tells you, not getting in front of that. That’s our biggest rule, is never getting in front of the data.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage When do polls close? Where is abortion on the ballot? How to watch the US election like a pro Everything you need to know

$1,276,203

contributions

$2,000,000

our goal

A message from Betsy Reed, editor of the Guardian US

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask if you would consider supporting the Guardian’s journalism during one of the most consequential news cycles of our lifetimes. As a reader-funded organization, we need your help to hit our annual fundraising goal.

It has never been clearer that media ownership matters to democracy. In the heat of a tumultuous election, with the outcome unclear, there is an urgent need for free, trustworthy journalism. Without it, bad actors can take advantage and disinformation can take hold.

Yet from Elon Musk to the Murdochs, a small number of billionaire owners have a powerful hold on so much of the information that reaches the public. And in this most critical contest, two of America’s largest newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, broke with tradition and chose not to issue endorsements for president. Something those two publications have in common? They are both owned by billionaires who could face retaliation in a Trump presidency.

The Guardian is not owned by a billionaire; nor do we have shareholders. Nobody influences our journalism. We are fiercely independent and accountable only to you, our readers. Our journalism is produced to serve the public interest – not profit motives.

Largely because of this independence, we are able to avoid the trap that befalls much US media: the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality. The way we see it, our job is to be truly fair, which means listening to different points of view, but also calling out the lies of powerful people and institutions – and making clear how misinformation and demagoguery can damage democracy.

From threats to election integrity, to the spiraling climate crisis, to complex foreign conflicts, our journalists contextualize, investigate and illuminate the critical stories of our time. As a global news organization with a robust US reporting staff, we’re able to provide a fresh, outsider perspective – one so often missing in the American media bubble.

Around the world, readers can access the Guardian’s paywall-free journalism because of our unique reader-supported model. That’s because of people like you. Our readers keep us independent, beholden to no outside influence and accessible to everyone – whether they can afford to pay for news, or not.

If you can, would you support us today? We appreciate all gifts, but a monthly contribution – even a small one – enables us to invest in our most significant public-interest reporting. Thank you.
One-timeMonthlyAnnual$5 per month$15 per monthOther

Continuenull

Topics

US elections 2024

View on theguardian.com

US election 2024 live: Trump and Harris pick up early wins as polls closed in swing states including Georgia and Pennsylvania

US election results and map 2024: Donald Trump and Kamala Harris vie to be president

US election guide: how to watch like an expert

US Senate, House and governor elections 2024: results from all 50 states

Everything you need to know about the 2024 US presidential election

When do polls close today? An hour-by-hour election guide

US Elections 2024

Trump and Harris pick up early wins as polls closed in swing states including Georgia and Pennsylvania

Trump v Harris: see full results of the US presidential election

US Senate, House and governor elections 2024: results from all 50 states