The Daily - A Guide to Election Night 2024

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

After two years of campaigning, more than a billion of dollars of advertising and a last-minute change to one of the nominees, the 2024 race for president is now in the hands of the American voters.Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The Times, gives a guide to understanding tonight’s election results.Guest: Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times.Background reading: What you need to know about election night results and The New York Times Needle.Despite some late shifts, polls remain closest they’ve ever been.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Who did you vote for? Kamala Harris. 100%. I like it. I voted Kamala. I want to see Mr. Trump go way far away. For Trump. Donald Trump.

I had to vote for Trump. I felt more connected to that. Plus he was in my heart. Neither of them. Joe Stein. For president, I left it blank. I was indecisive and I wasn't really too keen on voting on who I was going to vote for. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily.

Can I ask you to describe how you're feeling in one word? Nervous. Anxious. Nervous. I just feel it's a lot of chaos. After two years of campaigning, more than a billion dollars of advertising, and a last-minute change to one of the nominees, the 2024 race for president is now in the hands of the American voters.

This is the most important election that I'm going to vote in in my adult life, I think. You know, walking up here made me emotional because I look at my daughter and I know that I'm voting for her future. No matter who wins, one side or the other is going to feel like they've been cheated. Everyone is going to be heartbroken on both sides. I guess we just have to wait and see. Today, as the ballot counting begins, my colleague Nate Cohn offers a guide for how to understand tonight's results. It's Tuesday, November 5th.

Nate. Michael. Thank you for coming in. Thanks for having me. Happy Election Day. Happy Election Day. Happy Election Day. Can you believe it? I can't.

I can't really either. So, Nate, we are here today to do something we started doing last election, which is offer our listeners a roadmap to election night. Because starting around 7 p.m. Eastern tonight, everyone's screens are going to be flooded with vote tallies and breaking news banners about projected state victories. And it's confusing. And so we want to give people a user's guide to the entire night with you as our guide. So guide away.

Guide us. Well, let's just start by observing there are three basic scenarios for what could happen and keep these in mind as we go through the chronology of the night. Because at different points, we may know different things depending on what is really going on. So our guide begins with scenarios. And one thing I want to note about these three scenarios is that I think they're all very plausible. Okay.

In fact, in each case, I think we could tell ourselves after the fact we should have seen it coming all along. One scenario is a decisive victory for Kamala Harris, a repudiation of Donald Trump. After all, he led an insurrection on January 6th, the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade, Democrats have been overperforming in special elections and midterm elections. And Kamala Harris has been gaining certainly over the longer stretch of this race back

to when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee. If in the end, the race broke her way, it would not be a great surprise. And she could win a decisive victory, clearly in the popular vote and in the battleground states. A second scenario is the total flip side of that, a decisive victory for Donald Trump, the culmination really of the populist realignment that he unleashed in 2016. In this scenario, the white working class voters who he won in 2016 stick by his side, but now he adds to it the black working class and Hispanic working class and young voters. That's a scenario where he wins the popular vote, the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004.

It's a Trump sweep of the seven battleground states in all likelihood. I just want to point out that for either of these two first scenarios to be true, the repudiation of Trump, big Harris victory, the Trump realignment, big Trump victory. The polling that you have been intimately involved in for a year would have to have been systematically off to a degree, either systematically underestimating her support or systematically underestimating his support. That's right. And it's worth noting that it doesn't take too much of a systematic error either way

for this election to quickly look like a pretty decisive victory. The polls are basically tied everywhere after all, right? Move that three points to the left or three points to the right, things feel really differently, really fast. Right. That said, if the polls are right and it is really close, then we have our third scenario, which is yet another really close election. All of these swing states are decided by one or two percentage points. We have to stay up all night to count the votes. Obviously, there

are a lot of different versions of this scenario. One where Trump wins narrowly, one where Harris wins narrowly. But either way, we have yet another election with Donald Trump on the ballot, yet another close election. Basically, this third scenario is a repeat of the grinding slog that was the 2020 presidential race. Yes. It's close as hell, and we don't have an outcome for quite some time. You've got it. Okay. These are going to be useful touchstones, I suspect, as we turn to the question of how all of this is going to unfold tonight, hour by hour.

So walk us through that as best you can. Where do you want to start? We start in the South. That's where the polls will close first in North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Georgia. What time is it in our clock? 7 p.m. in Virginia and most of Florida and Georgia and 730 in North Carolina. Polls closed there. And while you might think after the way the vote count went in 2020 that it could be a

week before we know anything there, in these states, we're going to know a lot fast. We could even have race calls in all of these states, even in a fairly close election by midnight. Huh. Some of that's because the number of mail ballots have plummeted. Some of it is because the states have improved their procedures. In all of them, the early vote will tilt a little bit democratic. The early vote is usually counted first. So Harris could come out to an early lead in North Carolina, for instance. Trump would hope to counter

on election day. Aaron Powell You're hinting at something that I think we all remember really well from 2020, which is this concept of the mirages, which is to say that the minute the polls close and the tallies begin to appear on our screens, they start to misrepresent a total outcome based on democratic early voting numbers, which tend to be high, versus election day voting numbers, which tend to be high versus election day voting numbers, which tend to tilt towards Republicans. So you're saying we're going to immediately start to see either red or blue mirages of some kind. Yes. That said, I do want to note that there will be a lot less mirage-y than four years

ago. The gap between the early vote and the election day vote is poised to be significantly reduced. There are both fewer Democrats participating by mail and more Republicans decided to turn out early in person. And the combination of those two things has significantly reduced the Democratic advantage in the early vote. Got it. And thus made the mirages a little less miragey. Much less miragey.

Okay. What should we be looking for in terms of wins, losses, calls for Trump or Harris in these key southern swing states that will start to give us a feel for whether we're looking at scenarios one, two, or three. So in the repudiation scenario, Harris is probably leading in North Carolina and Georgia from the start. And by the time 9 p.m., 10 p.m. rolls around and that election day vote is coming in, she's still holding. Maybe she's a little more competitive in Florida than people assumed, and Virginia is a comfortable victory for her. Got it.

In the Trump realignment scenario, these states may not be close, and we could have relatively early calls in Georgia and North Carolina in favor of Trump. He could win them by multiple percentage points. Virginia looks much closer than Democrats hoped. And Florida's a landslide. In the toss-up scenario, we may still find that those states are toss-ups by 9 or 10 PM. And we have to wait to see the exact election day turn out county by county before we're able to make a call in those states. All right.

Which of the southern states should we be watching most closely during this first wave? Georgia and North Carolina, they're really close and they make a huge difference in the electoral college math. Reminder, you need 270 electoral votes to win. If Kamala Harris cannot win either of those two states, then her road to 270 gets very narrow very quickly. She would need to sweep Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in all likelihood to prevail or pull off an upset in Arizona. Which we will get to. Which we will get to. But that would greatly narrow her path to victory.

Conversely, if Donald Trump loses North Carolina and Georgia, his path to 270 looks really challenging at that point. Because he would have to sweep all the northern states. And worse for him, those have been the states where he's tended to pull worse this cycle. So the outcome of these two states will not only tell us a lot about the overall picture of what's happening in the country, it will begin to greatly narrow the range of paths to victory for the two candidates. Okay, let's talk about the next regional wave that will come after the South. And as a reminder, keep us on a kind of evening clock here.

So around 9 or 10 p.m., right around the time when it's becoming quite clear what's happened in Georgia and North Carolina, we'll start to get our first clues about what's happening in the northern battleground states, that so-called blue wall of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The states that Biden won in 2020. States that Biden won in 2020, that Trump won in 2016. Unlike the southern states, those states are not going to count their votes, especially fast. We're going to be watching the count there in all likelihood all night.

Let me just ask you why. Why is it going to take Midwestern states longer to be watching the count there in all likelihood all night. Let me just ask you why. Why is it going to take Midwestern states longer to count than the South? Presumably, they all have the same technology. Well, they're not necessarily using the same technology, oddly enough, but there are two broad reasons why the North will take longer. One is the different laws about mail ballots. In some northern states like Pennsylvania, they can't begin to even open the mail ballots until the morning of the election.

Huh. In the southern states, they can begin processing those ballots well before Election Day. As a result, Florida can have all of its mail ballots processed and ready to go when the polls close. Pennsylvania will not. So it's as simple as in some of these southern states, the minute that the voting ends in the evening, those mail-in ballots, they're in the count. And in a place like Pennsylvania, they may still be opening the mail. That's right.

And this is where the technology oddly winds up being relevant because there are actually huge differences in the technology available to different counties. And the way they open envelopes, for instance, that's done with a machine. Some machines can open 100,000 ballots an hour, some open 20,000. What a country. Each county is doing it differently. That can create very different rates of counting mail ballots, not only by state, but even within different parts of the state.

How should we be thinking about who wins, which of these northern states, and what it's going to mean to our? 272 win math as I just mentioned if Trump wins, North Carolina and Georgia Then Harris probably needs to sweep all three of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to prevail with a very narrow electoral college majority in that same scenario I'm guessing she's not winning these states and blowouts either so it could take a very long time to have an outcome if Harris has won North Carolina, then Harris can afford to lose in Michigan or Wisconsin. But not Pennsylvania. Unless she makes up for it with Nevada later on. But then we have a lot of complicated scenarios where a lot of different doors are open.

So just to close out the North, when, as best you can guess, will we have calls in these Northern states? So the answer varies a lot by state. They each have different procedures for how they count their votes. I will say, Michigan and Wisconsin are better. Those states, I think, a call in the early morning hours or early the next day, very realistic. The one with the most uncertainty is Pennsylvania.

As I mentioned, this is the state where they can't start opening their ballots until the morning of the election. So all of this comes down to just how many of these envelopes they can open and how many of these ballots they can process. In 2020, they didn't get even close to counting all of them on election day and it took us a week before we had a call. I think there's a lot of reason to think it's going to be much better than 2020. I don't know, however, if that means they count 75% of the mail vote or 95% of the mail vote. And that will make a huge difference in terms of whether we will know the outcome in Pennsylvania on election night.

Right. And of course, Pennsylvania is potentially the state we will be waiting on for an overall call in the race, especially if, as you previously told us, Donald Trump sweeps the South. Yeah. And it's worth remembering that Harris is the candidate who leads the mail vote. So all the mail- Mail, not as in men, women, but- As an absentee, mail ballots.

As a result, if they can't tabulate all the mail ballots on election night, then Trump will have more and more of a lead on election night and the result gets more miragey. The more of those ballots they get through, the less miragey it gets and the likelier we are to know the outcome. Got it. All to say, compared with the South, the North is likely to be, in many scenarios, a bit messier and a lot longer. That's right. I think that if someone's winning comfortably, we could know by the next morning.

But if it's really close, then it could take days. We'll be right back. Okay, Nate, we're back and we need to cover the next and I suspect final phase of swing states tonight and when we're going to know things. Yep. The final phase is the West, which we will be watching for weeks and weeks to come. Weeks? Weeks. Unlike the northern states and the southern states, I think the count in Arizona, Nevada,

California and so on is going to be just as slow as it was four years ago. Hmm. I don't remember how slow it was for years ago. Well, it took a week to call Arizona. Nevada, Biden won pretty decisively and they still couldn't call it until Saturday. And you may recall in the 2022 midterm is that the House was not called for nine days as we waited on California.

I think all of those timelines are still plausible in 2024. And I'm going to guess that has to do with some combination of the time difference there as well as mail-in ballot counting rules. It's all about the procedures for counting these mail ballots. How many mail ballots will arrive after election day is one huge variable in Nevada and California. Whether they count any mail ballots that were returned at drop boxes on election day, also a big variable. That's one thing that keeps Arizona going. So the bottom line is, while we can imagine scenarios where states like Pennsylvania count all their mail ballots by poll closing,

it's not going to happen in Arizona. And almost all of the vote in Arizona is by mail. So we're just not going to have the full count. It's not going to happen. Okay. Well, walk us through how the Western states fit into our 270 math, as well as our three scenarios based on what we've already established in the South and in the North.

So there is some good news here. If you could choose two battleground states not to know the result of on election night, you would choose Nevada and Arizona. Why? Nevada is the smallest. It only fits into the electoral math under a pretty narrow set of circumstances. Such as? In particular, a scenario where Harris loses Pennsylvania, but has made up for it partly,

but not completely, by winning either North Carolina and Georgia. Then she needs Nevada to make up for the three electoral vote gap between Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Georgia. Fascinating. So that's a narrow scenario, but it's one where it really matters. Arizona is a larger battleground state, but it's not a very large battleground state. And of the seven battlegrounds, Arizona is the one state where a candidate seems to have a modestly clear lead,

and that's Donald Trump who's led the polls by three points. As a result, it doesn't loom as heavily in our thinking of either candidate's clearest path, 270 electoral votes in a close election. Right. But there are two other reasons why it's important that the West will take a long time to count its votes. One reason is the House.

The House promises to be very closely fought and there are a lot of contested congressional races in Washington, Oregon, Alaska, California. Non-swing states. Non-swing states, but with lots of swing districts. So if the House is relatively close, we're not even going to be close to making a projection for overall House control until the mail ballots at West get counted. And again, that can be days or weeks. The second reason that it matters that the West takes so long to count is the national

popular vote. California is going to be Harris's largest prize in the electoral college and she'll win the popular vote there by millions of votes. Those votes are not going to be counted on election night. And so if the national vote is relatively close, let's say Harris is only going to win in the end by one point, Trump is going to lead in the national popular vote on election night because those Western mail-in ballots haven't been counted yet and that of course would have real implications for his growing and

False claims of election fraud they would very likely feed into him Potentially even claiming victory prematurely. Absolutely, it would be used to cast doubt on the results in the battleground states if hypothetically Harris had actually won the battlegrounds while still trailing in the national popular vote. And then if Harris does ultimately take the lead in the popular vote, whether that's hours, days

or weeks later, that will also be used as a sign that the Democrats were trying to shift it at the end in the same way that in 2020 the slow count was used to sow doubts about the results in states like Pennsylvania. Right. In all these scenarios, there will be a kind of red mirage that would eventually turn slightly blue, and that could create an opportunity for some serious confusion That's right national popular vote. You should expect a modest red mirage

I do have to say and I say this from a comfortable position here on the East Coast. I Don't hear any talk of a mirage here. I don't hear any talk of big delays Well, I'm not saying we're better or worse than any other region of the country. I'm just saying. You know, I have to tell you that New York City did a terrible job counting the vote in 2020. We kind of always do. Yeah, it's been pretty bad here. I don't know if that's the insult I would be throwing at our friends out west.

Fine. I want to ask a different question about the chronology of the night. Let's assume for just a minute that there has been some level of systemic polling error, and it is going to be a decisive win for either Trump or Harris. Perhaps some of these delays we're talking about then don't matter as much, and when do we expect to get a full race call if it's decisive? Are we talking before, just to use an example, the next day's daily comes out at 6 a.m. Wednesday morning?

Yeah. In that scenario, I think that the count is fast enough for a clear victory to be called on election night. Like an Obama 2012 style victory, where you win the key states by four or five points. If it's closer than that, of course, that could take a long time, obviously. Okay. But if there's a clear victory in the southern states or in the northern states, that we should know on election night.

On behalf of people at home wondering, at what point in the actually it's gonna be really close scenario, do you say to yourself, go to bed, there's no call? I mean, I remember walking around zombie-like in 2020 because there wasn't a call on Tuesday. There wasn't a call on Wednesday. There wasn't a call on Thursday. There wasn't a call on Friday. It came Saturday morning. I was in a car driving on the highway. I had luckily had my microphone with me. But like, you know, we waited, we waited and it was genuinely a ride.

Pennsylvania is the key variable here. And it just comes down to how many of these mail ballots they successfully process on election day. If they process all of them, we'll know that I think on election night, and there may not be much of a wait and you should stay up. If they don't, and it comes down to Pennsylvania, which it probably will, go to bed. Go to bed. Okay.

You are about to go off. You're going to walk out the studio. You're going to set up systems and processes to count. You're going to be consumed by this for the next, I don't know, 20 hours. More than that. And my true final question to you is, are you going to make time for us tonight if we need you? Because the country, you know, the country needs the guide to guide when we get a result

or don't get a result. How early do you need me? I don't know, like, I suppose we're going to try to tape around 3 a.m. I think 3, 3.30 is probably the last minute we can record. There should be a window in that range where we've gotten most of what we're going to get on election night. And I can come away from my computer to talk to you. Please come. I'll do my best. Your country needs you. The listeners need you.

Meanwhile, thank you very much, Nate. As always, we really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Michael. Speaking of the election, we want to hear from you. Once the election is called and a winner is declared, record a voice memo on your phone and tell us a few things. Your name, where you live, and how you feel about the outcome. Your immediate reaction, your hopes and fears for President-elect Trump or Harris, and how your life could change as a result of their victory. Keep it relatively short, less than two minutes, and send the file to thedailyatnytimes.com, We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On the final day of the campaign, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump barnstormed across Pennsylvania. From the very start of our campaign, this has not been about a fight that is against something. This is about a fight that is for something. During a series of rallies, Harris framed her campaign against Trump as a battle between unity and division, and between tyranny and freedom. Which is why I say that I am not going to be a leader who thinks that people who disagree with me should be put in jail, that they are the enemy.

I'll give them a seat at the table, because that's what real leaders do, and that's what strong leaders do, and that's what strong leaders do. During a set of competing rallies, Trump described the stakes of today's election very differently. Over the past four years, Kamala has orchestrated the most egregious betrayal that any leader in American history has ever inflicted upon our people." He portrayed it as a choice between patriotism and radicalism, and between unchecked immigration and a secure border.

We will not be invaded. We will not be occupied. We will not be overrun. We are an occupied country. Today's episode was produced by Olivia Matt, Eric Krupke, and Jessica Chung. With help from Carlos Prieto, Alex Stern, Mary Wilson, and Astha Chaturvedi. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn, contains original music by Alisha B. Etube and Rowan Emisto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderlay. That's it for the day of me. I'm Michael O'Bara. See you tomorrow.