What We’ll Know on Every Hour of Election Night
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Minnesota: Reasonable. Minnesota allows advance processing of Election Day ballots, so it should be able to tally those ballots fairly quickly. It’s not clear whether they’re going to count them in any particular order. I’d guess that means we get an unskewed count, but we’ll want to be cautious and wait for counties to wrap up before we make too many proclamations.
Election 2020 ›
How to Follow the Election Results
Here’s a guide to The Times’s election night coverage, no matter when, how or how often you want to consume it.
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- If you just want results… There will be a results map on The Times’s home page, and yes, the infamous needle will be back — but only for Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, the only states providing granular enough information for our experts to make educated projections of uncounted votes.
- If you want constant updates… Times reporters are live-blogging all day and night. This will be your one-stop shop for minute-by-minute updates: race calls, on-the-ground reporting from swing states, news about any voting issues or disruptions, and more.
- If you want to check in every so often… Times journalists are also producing a live briefing from roughly 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. ET, with an overview of what’s happening in the presidential race, the Senate and House races, and the voting process itself.
10 p.m. Eastern
Major poll closings: Iowa, Nevada
What to watch: The Arizona early vote dump, and then we keep scouring the Midwest for the counties that appear to have concluded their count.
Signs of a Biden win: Let’s suppose that Mr. Biden didn’t win Florida and North Carolina, which we more or less ought to know by 10 p.m. First, we’re going to want to see if he has a big lead in the Arizona early vote. He ought to have one. Then all eyes on the Midwest — and especially Wisconsin and Ohio. Here, we’re looking for early signs of strength for Mr. Biden. In Ohio, we’re focused on the completed counties; in Wisconsin, we’re trying to take a broad, aggregate view of all the counties without centralized absentee precincts. If Mr. Biden’s doing far better than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 in mostly white rural areas, that might be all we need to know. We’ll also have to keep a special eye on the counties in Appalachian eastern Ohio, for some hints on Pennsylvania.
Signs of a Trump win: First, did Mr. Trump keep it close in the Arizona early vote? That would be a good sign for him. Then all eyes are on these mostly white Midwestern counties, especially those that have counted all of their vote. The president needs to match his 2016 tallies — or more. If the polls are right, he’ll fare far worse. If they’re wrong, we’ll know — even if we’re not yet sure whether he’ll squeak it out again.
Tips on these states:
Iowa: Iowa is usually fairly straightforward. Officials count most votes quickly, and they usually count the early votes first — so Mr. Biden might get out to an early lead. Either way, we shouldn’t have to wait too long before receiving a clear picture. A close race would be a bad sign for Mr. Trump.
Nevada: It used to be straightforward, but mail voting will complicate this one a bit, too. We should get basically all of the early votes and at least the Clark County (Las Vegas) absentee vote pretty quickly. Then we’ll wait for them to count the rest — which could take well into the early-morning hours in the East. And even when that’s done, there will still be late mail ballots to count: The state accepts ballots that arrive through Nov. 10.
11 p.m. Eastern
No battleground poll closings.
What to watch. In 2016, this was around the time that Mr. Trump was the projected winner in Ohio and Iowa. If he has any shot of a breakthrough in the more competitive Midwestern battlegrounds, he ought to be in a similar spot.