It’s been a dramatic, high-stakes presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
The polls are neck-and-neck and analysts are reluctant to make a solid prediction for which candidate will win.
Now, the question many are asking is: When will the race be called?
The result is called by the media in the days or week(s) after November 5 but this is only ever a projection, with the election officially certified on January 6 by Congress.
Experts said that the timeline for calling the race largely depends on two things: how close the election is in individual states and the specific laws of those states regarding counting votes and potential recounts, which all vary.
“It is possible it could be really quick,” Dr Hans Noel, associate professor of government at Georgetown, told The Independent.
But he added: “I think we should be prepared to sit tight.”
Josh Tucker, a professor of politics at NYU and senior geopolitical risk adviser at financial firm Kroll, echoed this.
“The way to think about this is a razor’s edge coin flip with a wide margin of error which could lead to either candidate winning,” he told The Independent.
“But it could also lead to these scenarios where we could not know for days or weeks.”
While Tucker said we are likely to know “very quickly” who has won 43 states and the District of Columbia, “the margins in [the swing states] are razor thin, and so there are a number of different options for election night.”
The two experts, who stressed no one can know for sure what will unfold, walked The Independent through those possible scenarios:
Scenario 1: The race is called on election night
If the polls turn out to be wrong and the race is not that close after all, we could know the projected result as early as election night.
The indicator, as ever, would be how well each candidate does in the swing states.
“The issue is, with these razor-thin poll numbers, that if they’re off just a little bit in either direction, either one of these candidates could win all seven of the swing states. It’s not likely, but it’s possible,” Tucker said.
“One option for election night is that the polling has been off in a way that favors Donald Trump and it becomes apparent that he wins enough of these states that, even on election night, we’re able to see he’s probably going to win.”
On the flip side, Tucker hypothesized that if pollsters have underestimated the “strength of the Democratic ground game” in the swing states, a result for Harris could also, in theory, be called on election night.
“[If] it becomes apparent that pollsters have overestimated based on 2016 and 2020 where they missed too many Trump voters, they’ve underestimated the strength of the Democratic ground game, this rally in Madison Square Garden seems to have [had] a disproportionate effect in Pennsylvania, and all of a sudden it looks like Harris is coming in with comfortable leads in enough of these swing states that she’s won…. In that case, they could end up calling it that night.”
While not ruling out a scenario where the race is called imminently, Noel stressed two key sources that would still cause a possible delay: How long a state takes to count votes, and any litigation that could arise.
“I think it’s entirely possible that we could know on election night or sometime in the next morning, but both of those factors are likely going to drag things out,” he said.
Scenario 2: The race is called in a matter of days
How each state counts its ballots is at the crux of how long we can expect to wait for a projected result.
Generally, states have improved the speed at which they count votes, Noel said, but states have different rules.
For example, in Pennsylvania, counting of mail-in ballots cannot begin until the morning of Election Day.
“There’s a handful of states that are likely to be close. Some of those states have ways of counting votes pretty quickly, some don’t,” Noel explained. “So it could be if it comes down to Pennsylvania, and they can’t start counting until the mail-in ballots until that morning. On that front, we’ve gotten better at it, so it could be a matter of maybe a couple of days.”
Elections analysts at NBC, meanwhile, say the Pennsylvania count could conclude much earlier this year. According to the news outlet’s experts, 98 - 99 percent of the vote in the key swing state will likely be counted by Wednesday morning.
They added that if 99 percent of the vote is counted quickly in the state, we could see a projection for the state by Wednesday. However, this won’t be the case if the result is on a knife-edge, as the polls currently predict.
Tucker said if the polls are correct and the race is “a toss-up,” we could have a winner on a similar timeline to the 2020 election, which was called for Biden four days after Election Day on November 7.
“It was Saturday after the [2020] election that we knew the winner,” Tucker said, adding if things play out similarly this year, “it will be days” before we see a projected result.
Noel agreed it’s possible the projected result could come “in a couple of days,” but if legal issues arise with counts where races are tight, things could go on much longer.
Scenario 3: The race takes weeks to call
Noel postulates that this election could be similar to 2000 between George W Bush and Al Gore, where it came down to just 537 votes in Florida. Recounts slowed the process down further and the result was decided effectively by the Supreme Court over a month after Election Day on December 12.
“It’s quite possible that we’re going to be in a situation like in 2000 where there’s a state that’s very, very close,” Noel added. “That could take weeks if that’s what it comes to.”
He added that it is possible, as seen previously, that legal issues are not resolved until early December.
“I think that Pennsylvania and Georgia are two states in particular that might take a long time counting,” Noel said. “It’s most likely to come down to Pennsylvania as the deciding state, and I think that’s also likely to be one that’s going to take a long time.”
We could also be in for a long wait for battleground states Arizona and Nevada. “Nevada historically takes some of their counties a long time to count,” Tucker said. Nearly a quarter of the vote in Nevada is still not counted by the Wednesday morning after Election Day, NBC said.
If the race comes down to the results of these two states, “forget about” a projected winner by Wednesday, NBC’s analysts said. In 2020 the NBC election desk did not call a projected winner for Arizona until nine days after Election Day and as much as 20 percent of the Grand Canyon state’s votes were yet to be counted after election night, according to the network.
Any litigation that follows will also slow things down. Trump has already shared false and exaggerated claims about the integrity of the vote in Pennsylvania, while local officials call on the public not to rush to conclusions.
Noel said it’s important for voters to remember that it doesn’t necessarily mean something has gone wrong if there are legal challenges in states where it’s incredibly close.
“It doesn’t mean that something’s going wrong or that there’s some kind of fraud,” Noel said, suggesting voters try to block out unfounded accusations before there are any concrete answers.
“That’s a hard thing to be on guard for,” he said. “We all want the answer.”
