The wait is over, folks.
Or is it?
Yes, today is Election Day, when millions of Americans across the country will cast ballots in national, state and local elections. Tens of millions of Americans have already voted early or by mail. But we may not know the results of some of those races — particularly the presidential election — for days, depending on how close they are.
Consider this your guide to how and when we’ll know who the next president of the United States is.
The timeline: Georgia will be the first of the swing states to close its polls, at 5 p.m. MT (7 p.m. ET). North Carolina follows at 5:30 p.m. MT, Pennsylvania at 6 p.m. MT and Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin at 7 p.m. MT. Our Pacific time zone neighbors in Nevada won’t close their polls until 8 p.m. MT.
The stage: Vice President Kamala Harris’ watch party will be in Washington, D.C., at Howard University, her alma mater. I’ll be there, reporting as returns come in. My colleague Dennis Romboy will be at the watch party of former President Donald Trump’s campaign in West Palm Beach, Florida. Both candidates are expected to speak at some point Tuesday night, though acceptance or concession speeches may not come tonight, based on how close the race is. (In 2020, Trump declared victory on election night, though the race was still too close to call. He went on to lose the election.)
The predictions: Anyone who says they know how this will end is lying. Polls show razor-thin margins, and any of the battleground states could swing either way. Nate Silver’s election forecast shows a “toss-up.” The so-called “world’s most accurate economist” predicts Trump will win. The so-called “election Nostradamus” predicts Harris. FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregator shows Trump ahead in three swing states, Harris ahead in two and a tie in two — and the margin is not larger than 2 percentage points in any of them.
At least one on-the-ground oracle is willing to make a last-minute forecast: Nevada Independent founder and editor Jon Ralston — who’s never incorrectly predicted a presidential winner in his state — thinks Harris will take Nevada, 48.5% to 48.2%.
Could any states beyond the battlegrounds matter? Trump spent the weekend campaigning in New Mexico and Virginia and claimed he would turn both blue states red. Polling shows Harris leading comfortably in both. Meanwhile, in Iowa, the gold-standard Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll shows Harris up by 3 percentage points — a shocking reversal that the Trump campaign quickly denounced as a fluke.
The methodology: How will we know when there is a winner? Teams from news outlets, from The Associated Press to Fox News, will be poring over election returns and exit polls from each state. When it is clear there is no path for a candidate to win, these outlets will call the race for the winner.
That process looks something like this: In the months leading up to the election, “race callers” for major news outlets familiarize themselves with each state’s procedures for counting votes and the laws regulating the electoral system. Members of AP’s “Decision Team,” for example, “know before polls close how each county and congressional district in their state has voted in past elections, the state’s past results for voting by mail and early in-person voting, and the state’s history of counting votes — how many are counted after polls close and how many are counted in the days after.”
Some outlets utilize exit polls or other survey resources to call the race. During the 2024 Republican presidential primary, AP called several states within minutes of polls closing, thanks to its AP VoteCast system, which uses a probability-based survey to gauge election returns — often faster than the states report them.
As the election results pour in, the outlets do not project or forecast the winner — they declare a victor when it is clear there is no path to victory for other candidates. Fox News, whose 2020 show was the most-watched election night coverage in cable news history, angered Trump by becoming the first network to call Arizona for Biden that cycle; this year, the outlet has tweaked its models “to take into account votes by type, such as mail-in votes versus in-person votes,” Axios reported. It’s the race callers, not the anchors or reporters, who make the calls — and Fox plans to make that clear to viewers this time around. “I think that we will have a much clearer way of demonstrating why they were able to make that call this time around,” said Martha MacCallum, a co-anchor on Tuesday’s Fox broadcast.