Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

We probably won’t know all the election results tonight because so many people this year are casting mail ballots, which can take longer to count. So when can we expect results? Elena Mejía and I put together a comprehensive guide that attempts to answer that question. Here’s a general idea of how much of the vote we expect to be counted tonight in each state:

If you scroll through our guide, you can see even more details for every state, including when vote counting might be completed, when results might be released and whether there might be a “blue shift” or “red shift” in the results — which can happen if predominantly Republican Election Day votes are counted before predominantly Democratic mail ballots, or vice versa.

I’m settling in here for the night, and during this dinnertime (on the East Coast) lull, before we start to get a bunch of results coming in, I’ve been thinking about what a strange campaign this has been. Back in the winter, during the primaries, there was a point in time when a lot of people didn’t think Biden was even going to be the Democratic nominee! (And while we’re being nostalgic, remember the Iowa caucuses??) And the pandemic has changed the contours of the race more than anyone could have imagined.

A Trump vs. Biden campaign was always going to be different than 2016’s Trump vs. Clinton: Sexism hasn’t been talked about a ton during this race, despite the fact that the Democrats have a woman vice presidential nominee; Trump is now president, and it’s more difficult to run as an outsider/disrupter when you’re in the highest echelons of power. I think the Trump campaign had planned to run more on the economy and had planned to focus more on Hunter Biden and charges of nepotism. COVID-19 changed a lot of that. The economy is no longer in the optimistic place it was, and 230,000 Americans have died during this pandemic, which means even if voters don’t like the perception of nepotistic tendencies in the Biden family, they might not care as much about that storyline now.

The very nature of the way we vote has become the biggest storyline of this election. It’s very meta, but also very fundamental to democracy. Anyhow, this is just my way of saying: This is not the campaign I thought I’d be covering. But here we are. Onward.

Most states improved their wait times between 2012 and 2016, with no state averaging more than 20 minutes. The large increase in early voting this year may reduce voting waits even further.