There’s no guarantee of any election result until it’s been officially called but never stops anyone from trying to work out who is ahead (and who isn’t).
For the US election, the polls – which you can stay on top of using the Standard’s poll tracker – suggest that Vice President Kamala Harris is polling ahead of former president Donald Trump nationally.
However, it’s expected to be a close run, with a total of 47.9 per cent of Americans indicating they would vote for Ms Harris as of November 3, compared to 47 per cent for Mr Trump.
That’s echoed by the results in one of the first US towns to announce its results, where there was a straight tie between the two candidates.
What’s more, typical voting patterns between Democratic and Republican voters can mean that trends shift throughout election day.
That phenomenon is referred to as the red mirage and the blue shift, terms coined by a 2020 study by the data firm Hawkfish and by Ohio State University election law expert Edward Foley in 2019, respectively.
Here’s a closer look at the two terms and what exactly they mean.
What does the red mirage and blue shift refer to?
The red mirage refers to how early vote totals tend to favour Republicans, as their voters tend to cast their ballots in-person on election day.
That is then often followed by a blue shift, which is when absentee and provisional ballots are totalled and added to the count, as Democrats typically vote by mail more often than Republicans.
To add extra mirages and shifts to the mix, some states count their mail ballots first. That has the opposite effect in states like Georgia, where there was a blue mirage with Democratic postal votes and a red shift when in-person Republican ballots were counted.
When the Hawkfish study first identified the red mirage in 2020, it helped to correctly predict that Mr Trump would appear to be winning before Joe Biden would ultimately pull ahead.
The term blue shift was coined by Foley in a 2019 paper written in the wake of the 2012 election. He noted that the previous four presidential elections picked up at least 22,000 votes after election day, adding more Democratic votes to the count than originally thought.
Another element that contributes to the blue shift is that counting votes can take longer in more densely populated cities, which often skew Democrat, than in smaller rural communities, which often lean Republican.
As the world waits for the results of the US 2024 election, it’s worth remembering that these voting patterns exist and that an early lead for either candidate may not be as significant as it seems.
