Plain English with Derek Thompson - How to Watch Election Night Without Falling for Conspiracy Theories or False Hope

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Today’s guest (our final preelection guest) is David Wasserman, political analyst with the Cook Political Report, who also helps out with the NBC decision desk. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people whose job on election night is to help Americans understand when we can safely call specific districts and states for Congress, Senate, or the presidency. However, I truly don’t think I know anybody whose calls I trust more than David's. And the even deeper compliment is that David is perhaps the most trusted election night consigliere among all the other people I trust. So, when I wanted to put together a show on how to watch election night like a pro, I’m grateful that the pro of pros said yes. With a week to go, this election has attracted several theories about which trends will determine the outcome. We’ve done shows on the rightward shift among men, especially young men; the politics of working class decline; the possibility that we’ll see non-white voters move into the Trump column while college-educated white voters move into the Harris column. But these are all theories. It’s going to take a while to know if they’re actually true. When polls close at 7 p.m., you’re going to see some people dive into exit polls and incomplete county-by-county returns, claiming that they can see trends and predict the outcome. But as Wasserman tells us, this is not wise. Exit polls aren’t special. They’re just another poll. And their non-specialness is important to note in an age when so many people are voting early and therefore aren’t counted among surveys of election-day voters. Meanwhile, different states have different rules for when they can start counting early and mailed ballots. These rules dramatically and sometimes confusingly shift our understanding of election night. Pennsylvania cannot start counting mail-in or early votes until Election Day morning. This often leads to slower reporting of mail-in results, while Election Day votes are usually counted and reported first. Last election Republicans were more likely to vote on Election Day while Democrats were more likely to vote by mail. If the same thing happens in 2024, what we should expect to see is a red mirage followed by a blue wave—as right-leaning ballots are counted first and left-leaning ballots are counted second. This is not a conspiracy. It’s just state law. In the state of Georgia, it’s the opposite. Georgia and other Sunbelt states can begin processing and counting mail-in and early votes before Election Day, which means what you might see a blue mirage followed by a red wave. One conspiracy theory that’s already starting to attract attention is that any state that looks like it’s voting for Trump that sees a blue wave is a sign of voter fraud. But there’s nothing fraudulent about the state laws that determine the orders in which votes are counted. For this reason, Wasserman says, it’s tantalizing but misleading to draw strong conclusions about the election from incomplete county results. If you want to understand where the election is going, if you want to watch the returns, like a good faith pro, the better solution is to wait for full county results in key bellwether counties like Nash County, North Carolina. Understanding what those key, predictive, canary-in-a-coalmine counties are is the focus of this show. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: David Wasserman Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that scientific studies have found most people lie once every 10 minutes? In my new podcast, Truthless, I'm talking to people about the lies, they tell, from faking illnesses in high-pressure moments to making up stories on national TV. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Phillips. Listen to Truthless on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, we made it, sort of. Tuesday is election day. And if you're tired of this election or excited for this particular podcast to move on from politics

to explore the sunnier and more feckoned terrains of tech, science, psychology, sociological mysteries, I want to assure you I feel the same way, times 10. I wish I had the capacity during the final weeks of election season to think deeply about topics outside of politics. I do not. I do not. And to the extent that this podcast is a manifestation of my inner monologue, there is just no way to make a non-political show in October of a presidential election year. So I am sorry for that, but today's guest is our final pre-election guest, David Wasserman, political analyst with the Cook Political Report, who also helps out with the NBC Decision Desk. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of people whose jobs on election night is to help Americans

understand when we can safely call specific districts and states for Congress or Senate or the presidency. But I don't think I know anybody whose calls I trust more than David. And perhaps even a deeper compliment here is David is, I think, the most trusted election night consigliere among all the other people that I trust. So when I wanted to put together a show on how to watch election night, like a smart person. I am very grateful that the pro of all pros said yes here. With days, hours to go, this election has attracted several theories about which trends will

determine the outcome. We've done shows on the right-word shift among men, especially young men, the politics of working class decline, the possibility that we'll see non-white voters move into the Trump column while educated white voters move into the Harris column. But these are all theories. They're just theories. It's going to take a while to know if they're actually true. When polls close at 7 p.m., you're going to see and read people dive into exit polls and incomplete county-by-county returns, and they're going to claim that they can see trends and that they've predicted the outcome. But as Washington tells us, this is not wise, and you should ignore them. Exit polls, for example, are not special.

They're just another poll. And, in fact, their non-specialness is important to note in an age when so many people are voting early, and therefore aren't counted among surveys of election day voters. Meanwhile, different states have different rules for when they can start counting early and mail ballots. And these rules dramatically and sometimes confusingly and sometimes emotionally shift our understanding of election night. A quick example, Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania cannot start counting mail-in or early votes until election day morning. And this often leads to slower reporting. of mail-in results, while the Election Day votes are usually counted and reported first. Last election, in 2020, Republicans are more likely to vote on Election Day, while Democrats are more likely to vote by mail. If the same thing happens this year, what we should expect to see on Tuesday night is a red mirage in Pennsylvania, followed by a blue wave, as the right-leaning ballots are counted first and the left-leaning ballots are counted second. This is not a conspiracy. see, this is not spooky weirdness.

This is just state law. And in fact, in the state of Georgia, it's the opposite. Georgia and some other Sunbelt states can begin processing and counting the mail-in and early ballots before election day, which means you might see, in places like Georgia, a blue mirage followed by a red wave, the opposite of Pennsylvania.

Now, one conspiracy theory that's already starting to attract attention is that any state that looks like it's voting for Trump but sees a blue wave that starts to build and crest in the wee hours of Tuesday night is a sign of voter fraud. But there's nothing fraudulent about state laws determining the order in which votes are counted. For this reason, Wasserman says, it's tantalizing but misleading to draw strong conclusions about elections

from incomplete county results. If you want to understand where this election, is going, if you want to watch the returns like a good faith pro, the better solution is to wait for full county results in key bellwether counties, like, say, Nash County, North Carolina. Understanding what these key, predictive, canary in a coal mine counties are is the focus of this show. Now, I can imagine two objections to a show like this. One objection is, Derek, I thought this was a show about big issues, not a show about how to watch a few hours of television on election night, when we're just going to know the results in a few days anyway. Fair, I guess. But a few things.

One, more than 100 million people are going to watch election night at once, and helping them watch it more sensibly, I think, is actually an important piece of public service. Second, the way election night is processed by Americans has a profound. effect on the future of the country. For example, the impression that blue waves represented a conspiracy theory, I think contributed in part the popular delusion on the right in 2020 that Donald Trump had the election stolen from him. The way we watched the election influenced the way the right interpreted the outcome of

the election. Understanding how vote counts work is important to understanding how democracy works. and why some conspiracy theories don't work at all. Second, I think the narrow issue of how to watch Election Night connects with a deeper theme of this show, a theme that I've tried to explore in a ton of different ways of the last few years. That theme is how to see reality clearly. Election Nights offer lurid opportunities for Americans to fall in love

with ideologically convenient fairy tales. Ooh, this exit poll is good for Harris. That line length in Maricopa County is good for Trump. Georgia's looking blue, Pennsylvania is looking red. People care so much about the outcome of this election, and when we care about something deeply, we often override reasonableness to make unreasonable predictions about what's going to happen.

But predicting the future on a consistent basis is impossible. Seeing the present clearly on a consistent basis is possible. It's just really damn hard. election night will feature a contest within a contest, a showdown between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and nested within it, a showdown between our ability to see reality clearly versus our tendency to fall for nonsense. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English.

Hey, David Wasserman, welcome with the show. Hey, thanks so much, Derek. Great to be with you. So what I wanted to do here is to have an episode that teaches me, and by extension, teaches listeners, how to follow election night like a pro. And the truth is, to pay you the most technical of all compliments, of all the people I could follow on election night, the only person for whom I click that little bell feature on Twitter so that it automatically pinks my phone every single time they post is you. So what I thought we'd do is have you on to provide a kind of roadmap for election night. What are the Bellwether counties? What should we be watching in the 7 o'clock hour, in the 8 o'clock hour, in the 9 o'clock hour?

When will we have an inkling that Trump or Harris are outperforming among key demographics or in areas that suggest a meaningful shift versus 2020? Or frankly, just importantly, the absence of a shift. How will we know if we're just essentially just watching? 2020 Redux all over again. Before we dive into this, I hope, truly nerdy exercise, can you tell me literally how you watch election returns? I mean, there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people that are watching you watch election returns. How do you do it? Do you have five screens going? Do you have an IV drip with electrolytes? Are you like alone in a

dark room, a couple TVs, like a monk? What is your setup? Well, it's such a good question. And I discovered early on when I was a teenager that I had a knack for this. And I'll be even handed here. I think there are a ton of people on Twitter, including a lot of young people who have basically the same skill set that I do. I just probably started from a perch at the Cook Political Report that people listen to. But basically, the manna from heaven for every election analyst that's trying to figure out what's going on on election night is completed counties or precincts. And the ability to calibrate how counties vote in relation to each other, what demographic components there are within a certain state or a district, because it's almost always true

that the patterns across those demographics are similar. And so if we have a pre-conceived idea of how a state or district has behaved in a past election, We have exact election results from those counties, those precincts. And we have a precinct or a county that is done counting on election night. And the total votes cast are nearly equal or above what they were in 2020. We have a pretty good idea how that place has trended. And then it becomes a question of, is turnout higher or lower in other parts of the state? Are we seeing one candidate specifically underperforming?

with Hispanic voters, for example. Are they overperforming with whites with college degrees? Are we seeing an unusually high or low turnout among whites without college degrees? And knowing what's in and knowing what's left can allow you to be ahead of the networks who are understandably cautious about calling these races. And in full disclosure, I'm going to be working for a major network on election night. And on the very big election nights, I'm off of social media because there's so much data coming at you so fast that you need a big team if you're going to do it right. And I know my limits. Can you tell us what networks you're going to be reporting for? Yeah, I'll be at the decision desk at NBC News in Philadelphia. And so 100,000 foot picture,

where do you see this race right now before the votes are being officially counted? Like, obviously it's close. 2016 was decided by about 80,000 votes among key states. 2020 was decided. by about 80,000 votes among key states. It's hard to imagine that any election could be closer than that, and yet by some measures, it seems to me, like polls show this election is even closer. Why do you think that is? How do you explain in the biggest picture what makes this election so historically close? Well, it's the closest election in the polling that I've covered in my 17 years doing this for the Cook Report. That doesn't mean it's going to produce the closest result. we've had two elections in a row that have come down to less than 80,000 votes across three states.

Now, statistically, it's unlikely it's going to come down to a margin that small this time, even given that the polls are very close. But look, the polls lack the precision to tell us exactly where these states stand or where they stand in relation to each other. It could be that Harris overperforms in the Sun Belt, as Democrats have done in the past, and that Trump overperforms by more in the Great Lake States, where we've clearly seen polling errors that have underestimated him. And yet we don't know. What we do have a good handle on, though, is how the coalitions have changed since 2020, because we have a large set of data that suggests that Harris is performing better with professional college degree holding white voters than Biden performed in 2020,

and that Trump has gained ground among Hispanic and to some extent black voters, particularly among young voters in those demographics and young men who identify as independence, the extent to which those trends materialize on election night is still up in the air. With the understanding that it's going to take us a while to unpack exit poll data, much less get an official call on who won the election, I want to dig into county-by-county results that we should have our eye on. what counties are the Bellwether counties? What's the canary in the coal mine, right?

These little clues that are going to tell us how the rest of the night or the rest of the week will unfold. So I want to start at 7 p.m. on election night. 7 p.m. is when polls close in the state of Georgia. And I want to look at Baldwin County, Georgia. Baldwin County is near Macon. It's just about smack dab in the middle of the state. The county seat is Millageville. that was Georgia's capital during the Civil War. Today the population is about 40% black.

Why do we care about Baldwin? You know, every year, most analysts are focused on Metro Atlanta at the margin that Democrats are going to generate out of Gwynette and Cobb and Fulton and DeKalb. And yet Democrats' resurgence in Georgia has only been possible because they've held their ground in South Georgia, in Middle Georgia, in places where we've seen a declining black population, especially in really rural counties, but Democrats' voter registration efforts across these smaller and mid-sized towns has allowed them to maintain close margins with Republicans and allowed Atlanta to overpower Republicans in the rest of the state. And so Baldwin County is one of those places where I'll be watching to see whether Harris holds her own.

This has been a stagnant Democratic vote share for the last few elections, both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden won it by about a point. It's, as you mentioned, a college town. And so if Trump breaks through in Baldwin County, it would be a sign that Harris is perhaps underperforming in both turnout and vote preference among younger black voters and young voters. And so if she holds it, that would be a good sign that Georgia is still very much in play. So we're looking at a bellwether for black voters, for rural voters, for young voters. it brings in this question of the purported shift among Gen Z and millennial voters, where several polls and surveys seem to suggest, although there's diversity here, that women seem to be racing left and becoming more progressive, while men seem to be, young men seem to be embracing Trump and the Republican Party more than young men typically have in the last few decades. What do you see in that polling? You know, you've mention that we're looking not only at vote counts, but also coalitional shifts, do you expect that this election is going to reify polls suggesting a gender gap among young voters?

So there's no doubt that gender gap is much wider among Gen Z than it was among millennials, and young voters are driving a larger gender gap overall than we saw in recent elections. the Dobbs decision has no doubt played a role in that, as has Trump's appeals by showing up in places where he wouldn't ordinarily expect to find politicians, whether it's sneaker con or a UFC fight or an F1 race, that appeal to young men. But I don't know that it'll be apparent from the county by county or state-by-state election results, whether women and their support for Harris will be particularly decisive. In other words, even if the gender gap is larger than it used to be, it's not clear which candidate that's advantaging. And the gender breakdown doesn't vary a lot from state to state.

So it's not as if her performance with young women is necessarily going to bring a state like Michigan or Georgia into her column specifically. Okay, so that's a 7 p.m. hour. We're looking at Georgia. At 7.30, polls closed in North Carolina, my home state. There's been a lot of attention paid. to the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan. North Carolina is ludicrously close, and it has one more electoral vote than Michigan. So what happens in North Carolina could be dispositive for who ends up winning this election.

I want you to tell me about two counties that you're looking at very closely. Cabarris County, which is near Charlotte, and Nash County, closer to my neck of the woods, just east of Raleigh. What are you watching in Cabarras, and what are you watching in Nash County? Yeah, you know, Cabarris is kind of the new walk-a-shaw for election nerds and people who have followed Wisconsin. We'll get that joke. But Cabarris is a really rapidly diversifying suburb of Charlotte. You've got Canapolis, you've got Concord. And these are places that used to vote heavily Republican. You've got the Charlotte Motor Speedway, obviously. But as it's grown more diverse, we've seen Republican margins shrink. And this county voted for Donald Trump. I

20 points in 2016. It only voted for him by nine in 2020. It would be a really good sign for Kamala Harris if the margin were five points or less, because this is exactly the type of place where she needs big vote growth to overcome the narrow margin that Republicans had last time around. And then in Nash County, which is outside the research triangle, but socioeconomically a bit lower on the latter, this is a place where we have seen some rural black depopulation as black residents have moved to major metros for more economic opportunities. And yet it's a place that has been within a thousand votes in every presidential election since 2004.

So Democrats won it by just a whisker in 2020. And if Harris keeps this county in her column, that would be a good sign similar to Baldwin County, Georgia, that maybe she can hold her own there to allow the more urban parts of the state to outperform and turn that state blue. The other thing I note about Nash is that it's in a congressional district, the first district, that is one of the pure toss-ups in the country. This is seat Republicans redrew and redistricting to try and target the Democratic freshman there, a very moderate to conservative black Democrat named Don Davis. And this is going to be one of our earliest indicators on election night of how the House is shaping up. So it's sort of like if this election, at least according to the polling averages, is essentially a 50-50 split. What one should want to look at, if you want to be a little bit predictive of how this election's going to turn out is what are counties that are similarly 50-50, such that where those counties

tip that might be marginally suggestive of how the country will tip, or more specifically, how other counties just like that will tip. So you're looking at Baldwin County, Georgia, Democrats have historically edged out a victory there by just one point. It'll be really interesting to see. Do they hold that one point margin, or does Trump take it? Nash County has basically been decided by like a handful of votes in the last, you know, five cycles, who wins Nash County might be dispositive for who wins North Carolina and who wins other 50-50 toss-up counties. And then with Cabarris, which interesting is right, there's going to be a lot of counties to look at where they've been trending toward Democrats over the last few cycles.

But the reason to look at Cabarris is to say, can Democrats keep up the momentum they built in 2020, winning more college-educated voters in order to win an election? that very well might depend on their ability to keep up that momentum. So that's 7.30 p.m. Now it's 8 p.m. And polls have closed in the all-important state of Michigan. There's a couple of things to watch here. We're looking at the shift of working-class voters in Michigan toward the GOP.

We're looking potentially at signs of a Muslim backlash to Biden's foreign policy, especially in Israel. So that's a long-term story, working-class voters shifts, and a short-term story of Muslim backlash. Let's take the long-term story first. Tell me about Saginaw County, which is right near the thumb crease of the state of Michigan. What are you going to be looking at in Saginaw County, Michigan? Yeah, you know, this is another place where there's a toss-up congressional race as well. But Saginaw is a more blue-collar city where you've had an auto industry that was in decline for many years.

You have a resurgence of plants that now make steering columns. but this is a place where organized labor-powered Democrats' victories for many years. Donald Trump narrowly carried the county in 2016, and that was a big flip from when Obama won it by double digits twice in a row. And then Joe Biden brought it back to the Democratic column in 2020. So if Trump breaks through here, it depends by how much. If it's only a point, then maybe Democrats can rely on their gains in West Michigan, where we've actually seen a lot of vote growth as places like Grand Rapids and Traverse City have attracted more professionals. But if Trump wins Saginaw by five points, it's going to be very difficult

for Harris to overcome that. And what do you think are the best ways to tease out the implications of the Muslim vote? I don't want to discount the Muslim vote. I don't want to overrate it either, but I have just followed it in the news cycle. Are you looking essentially at counties in and around Detroit or other other ways to tease that out? Yeah, it's going to be hard to tease that out early on on election night because it could take a while to get local level results from Dearborn, from Dearborn Heights. Wayne County as a whole, Democrats need a massive margin out of Wayne in order to win the state, but there are also Arab American communities in McComb County and Oakland County.

And there is a Lebanese Christian population electorate that is up for grabs somewhat as well. Overall, though, it's a fairly small component of the state's vote, only about 2%. And so I think the larger trends that we'll be watching outside of Detroit will weigh a little bit more heavily on which way the state votes. Great. And I also appreciate that you broadened it out, that it's really the Arab American vote that we're looking at in terms of reacting to. to Biden's foreign policy that I should have said. Finally, we have Pennsylvania. Also, polls closing here at 8 p.m. This is the biggest prize among the real swing states.

What I think of is the real swing states. That is Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, I suppose you could say, 19 electoral votes in Pennsylvania. You list in a recent column several counties that you've been tracking or that you're prepared to track an election night. What county do you think is going to... be most predictive, most informative of the final Pennsylvania count. If I had to narrow it to one, it would be Northampton County, which is the more blue-collar

county in the Lehigh Valley. You've got Bethlehem, you've got Easton, but overall, Northampton County has predicted the winner of the state in every election since 1972. No other county can say that. And this is where you could see a backlash. to the Madison Square Garden rally show up if there is late movement among Puerto Rican voters. 30% of the city of Bethlehem is Hispanic or Latino. Next door in Allentown, which is in Lehigh County, that's a majority Hispanic city with a large Puerto Rican population. So this has really been a focus for both campaigns. And then we'll also be watching Bucks County just to the south. and everyone has been obsessed with bucks of late.

It's no accident. This is where Donald Trump decided to sling French fries at McDonald's. But lower bucks is the type of place where even if Democrats are counting on bigger margins from Philly's suburbs, they might not be able to get that here because it's the more blue-collar pocket of Philly's suburbs. And this is where Harris's inability to discuss. secure the endorsement of unions, whether it's the Teamsters or the firefighters, could have an impact on blue-collar men and their willingness to stick with the Democratic ticket. And she lacks some of the familial ties to the state that Joe Biden had. Obviously, he grew up in Scranton. He was

practically a senator from the Delaware, or from the Philly suburbs for close to four decades. And so she starts out from a more precarious place. You know, going back to Bucks County, Trump has put so much attention there. This is a place where, you know, the Teamsters and International Association of Firefighters declines to indoors Harris might really cost her. Let's assume that Democrats lose Bucks County by a narrow but significant margin. Where else could Democrats make up ground in the state of Pennsylvania? Well, it's, a realistic scenario because Republicans just did take the voter registration advantage in Bucks County for the first time in generations. So where could Harris make up for that? Well, we'll be watching

Montgomery and Chester counties, which are the more prosperous suburbs of Philadelphia. We'll be watching suburban Allegheny County outside Pittsburgh to see whether Harris can outperform Biden there. But the other region where Democrats are really hopeful is central Pennsylvania. especially Harrisburg, Lancaster, the area around York. We've really seen growth in white-collar jobs outside Harrisburg and also a little bit more diversity as Amazon warehouses and the logistics and shipping industries find a hub for jobs in this part of the state. So if you see Harris performing better than Biden in Cumberland County,

which is the West Shore Harrisburg suburbs, or Dauphin County, which is Harrisburg and Hershey, or Lancaster, that would be a place where she might be able to offset some ebb in Scranton or Bucks or in the Lehigh Valley. Just to summarize for myself where we are, you've got some toss-up counties here, like Baldwin County in Georgia, Nash County and North Carolina. There's some counties that have been trending toward Democrats where we want to follow the momentum, like Cabarras County also in North Carolina. In Pennsylvania, it seems like we want to pay attention to this tradeoff

between possible Republican gains in Bucks County, just north of Philadelphia and possible Democratic gains in the middle of that state. Let's close in Wisconsin, which for some reason has been either cursed or blessed with just always being like a 47-47 state. It just feels like the state has always decided by about 17 votes. You mentioned in your column that saw, County, Wisconsin, which is just northwest of Madison, and Ozaki County, just north of Milwaukee,

are two that you want to look at most closely. Let's talk about Ozaki County, which is a suburb of Milwaukee, that in 2016 voted for Trump by 19 points, in 2020 voted for Trump by just 12 points. Two cycles before that, for Romney went to Romney by 30 points. So this seems like a Cabera situation, where we're watching a county slowly move toward the Democratic column, and the reason to watch this is to see whether or not that momentum keeps up. Tell me a little bit about what you're looking at with Azaki County. Yeah. What a lot of people don't realize fully is that even as Joe Biden flipped Wisconsin back from Trump in 2020,

Democrats lost a decent amount of ground in western Wisconsin and in rural Wisconsin. And so the way that Biden was able to overcome that was performing a bit better in the Milwaukee suburbs and in and around Madison. We also saw that Biden's margin was flat relative to Clinton in the city of Milwaukee. And that's another place where Democrats have fears that turnout will drop again. And that really puts the onus on Harris performing better in what's called the Wow counties, Washington, Ozoc. and Waukesha. Waukesha being the biggest, but the most white-collar county in Wisconsin outside of Madison, Dane County, is Ozaki. And this is north of Milwaukee. You've got a suburban, professional, very white electorate that has kind of soured on Trump-era republicanism. And you used to routinely

see two-to-one margins here for Republican candidates. But the fact that Biden came within, you know, earshot of Trump in 2020 and that Harris could narrow that margin further, she probably needs to if she's going to win the state as a whole. So we're talking about how to deal with the information that's, you know, going to be flooding our ears and eyeballs Tuesday night. Some of that we want to pay really close attention to, some of that we might not necessarily want to pay close attention to.

And, you know, being a careful and intelligent view, viewer of election night results probably involves understanding what to pay attention to and what to ignore, which brings us to the quadrenially beloved topic of exit polls. How do you think about exit polls? On the one hand, this is data, and people are going to react to it. On the other hand, I can remember several cycles where the exit polls seem to suggest that candidate A would win and candidate B won sometimes easily. How do you deal with the exit polls that people are going to probably be looking at watching, seeing analyzed in primetime on Tuesday? Yeah, Derek, you know, for casual viewers, there are a lot of pitfalls and potential red herrings on election night that you have to be careful of. Because

exit polls used to be metrics that networks, news organizations relied upon to make judgments about how the election was shaping up because they were a large-scale scientific sample of people who were leaving their precincts, filling out essentially another ballot except to tell the media who they were voting for. The problem now is that the vast majority of voters are casting their ballots in advance of election day. And although the advance vote will be a little less than it was in 2020 during COVID, it means that the exit poll, which is conducted, in two ways, there's the AP vote cast, there's also the national election pool that provides data to most networks done by Edison Research. They have to conduct essentially just a poll of people, both online and via telephone,

who have voted early to try and supplement their election day measurement of people. leaving polling places. And so the best way to think about exit polls is it's just another poll. It's just with a larger sample size. And the reason we still have them is that networks need to fill time while we're awaiting election results. And so although they're not reporting what the exit polls say about who's winning, which I think would be hazardous, they are telling their viewers, here's what voters care about, and how are they thinking about the economy, immigration, abortion, and so forth until we actually have hard results. Now, once we start getting hard results, there are also pitfalls. And keep in mind that a lot of the initial results that will be reported,

depending on the order that states report them in, will be from the early in-person vote or from the mail-in absentee vote, and those are going to have partisan skews to them. It's only until we get complete counties reporting that we can begin to draw inferences about what's happening. And I just want to close again by researching this issue of complete county results, because I remember in 2020, which was different year, health emergency, pandemic, a ton of absentee ballots, a ton of mail-in ballots. And you saw, saw this famous and famously named Blue Wave, where there were a lot of counties that looked like they were being dramatically won by Republicans.

And then in a handful of hours, they suddenly swung toward Democrats because the mail-in ballots were overwhelmingly Democratic. And this seemed sketchy to some people. It seemed weird to some people. I think it was the source of some conspiracies. It was just about the sequence by which people decided to count votes. They could have decided to count all the blue votes first, and it would have been a red wave if they counted the in-person vote second, but this is just how they happen to do it. And what you're saying is now that we vote in so many different ways, there's more, I voted early, there's early voting, there's on-day voting, there's absentee, there's mail-in.

Because the vote is so diverse in this way, you want to wait until you have 98, 99, 100% of the county fully in to start, making the kind of inferences that we're talking about here. That's right? That's so right. And here's what people need to know. In some states that allow for counties to tabulate their advanced ballots in order to release the totals by the time the polls close, you're going to have a blue mirage where the initial votes are favorable to Harris.

and I put Georgia, I would put North Carolina in this category. We don't know how favorable to Harris they'll be. And then when election day votes are added to those totals, then Trump will begin to do better. And you'll start getting the eventual result when the map fills in. But in other states, especially Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, you might end up with overwhelming numbers for Trump. Trump early on because you're looking at election day precincts where Republicans have the advantage. And then it's only when mail-in votes are counted that Democrats could be catching up. So the patterns vary from state to state, and you have to be very cautious about interpreting the

initial results because we are going to have blue and red mirages depending on which states we're talking about. And on top of that, putting it all together, it seems like the the red mirage is more likely to be in the Great Lake States, while the blue mirage is more likely to be in the so-called Sunbelt, which is also, as various political commentators are starting to spin out their theories of what this election means, they're going to be drawing wrong conclusions potentially because they're going to be overrating the degree to which the Democratic vote is reconstituting itself in the South while Republicans are sweeping the North. You're saying, maybe that's true, maybe it's not true, but it's certainly likely to be overrated

if you decide to make all of your conclusions at 8.15 p.m. when that first mirage, miragy wave of votes is counted. That seems like a really, really good piece of advice to keep people's head on straight on Tuesday night. For sure. And the other component here is this was by design. And in 2020, Trump's campaign and Republicans in legislatures in Pennsylvania and other Great Lake states, they objected to changes that would have allowed for counties to pre-tabulate their ballots so that we would have quicker results on election night. Trump's campaign liked the idea of an initial red mirage in those states to be able to later claim that something nefarious was happening in the middle of the night when Democrats caught up. And Pennsylvania

could have changed its rules this cycle to allow for a quicker count, much like states in the south, like Florida and Texas and North Carolina do, but it did not pass in Harrisburg. And Republicans were asking for other changes to election laws as well that Democrats objected to, so it was a stalemate. And as a result, we are going to have a similar pattern this time. Has anybody ever thought about just announcing the results once they're at 100? I mean, obviously, no state, does that, but theoretically there's nothing stopping any particular state from saying, you know what, the pace at which and sequence whereby we count votes is causing a lot of

conspiracy theories to swirl around. And we wouldn't have those narratives in the ether if we just made one announcement, right? When you count the votes one by one, you get those little like tickers on CNN or NBC, it's like, you know, it's 43%, 44%, 45% of the vote in North Carolina has been counted. Well, then narratives can be written depending on the sequence by which the votes are counted. But it seems to be like the legislature of North Carolina could just say, hey, guess what? Those narratives are annoying and they're often wrong. And here's what we're going to do. We're going to give you nothing. Sorry, news network. Sorry, NBC. Sorry, CNN. We're going to give you nothing until all the votes are counted and there's some certification process by which they might happen

at the end of that count. And then we're going to say, guess what? It's Trump. 51 Harris 49 or Harris 51, Trump, 49. Is there anything stopping a stage from doing that? If we had a system like that, we'd be a lot more like the UK. But the reality is that there are multiple layers of uncertainty after election night. In every jurisdiction, you have a number of provisional votes that were cast by voters who may have recently moved, and their ballots have to be adjudicated by county courts. you have situations where there are human errors in election administration that transpose the results from a precinct, for example, and those are always caught or almost always caught during the canvassing period in the days after election day.

And so it takes time for counties to be able to say, here are our final results and certify them. And it's going to take several weeks to know in some of the closest house races. I hope we're not in a Florida 2000 situation where the presidential race hinges on less than a thousand votes in any one state. But there is no such thing as a 100% complete certifiable count on election night itself. Well, damn. That's too bad because it would have been incredibly convenient. Your answer was, yes, this is entirely possible,

and it's a low-hanging piece of fruit that we can pluck. But understood that, of course, you want to get the vote right rather than make the vote expedient for Tuesday night television networks. Dave Washman, thank you very, very much. This is great. Thanks so much, Derek.