Anyone sitting down to watch the US presidential election coverage expecting to see a winner named on the night is bound to be disappointed.
The US presidential election in 2020 took a full sixteen days before Joe Biden was confirmed as the winner. The result had been called by most media organisations four days after election day but the recounts continued until November 19 when Biden was declared the winner in Georgia by a narrow margin.
Then as now, Pennsylvania was a key battleground state. It is almost certainly the state in which the election will turn. For example, Harris could lose Georgia, a state Biden turned blue for the first time since 1992 and Arizona which was a Democrat gain for the first time since 1996. Provided Michigan and Wisconsin stay blue, Harris will still win the 279 electoral college votes and the presidency, provided Pennsylvania with its 19 electoral college votes (it was a neat 20 in 2020) remains in the Democrats’ column.
Likewise, if Trump flips Pennsylvania he is in the driver’s seat to win the election.
Sadly for keen observers, the count in the Keystone State (Pennsylvania earned this moniker in the years preceding the Civil War as a crucial state in holding the Union together) will take time, perhaps as long as two weeks due to state rules which prohibit the counting of pre-poll votes until polling centres close at 7.00pm on November 5. The pre-poll votes will then need to be certified before they are counted.
In person, on the day voting will be counted first and this should show a strong lead for Trump on election night. As we saw in 2020, Trump was eight points in the lead but as the pre-polls began to be counted, the lead was reduced day by day until Biden led and ultimately won the state by less than 80,000 votes with almost seven million votes cast.
Pennsylvania has some odd voting regulations where the broad rules of voting are agreed to but vary slightly from county to county.
In 2020, 6.4 percent of mail-in or absentee votes were deemed informal. Americans use the more prurient title of ‘naked’ ballots. Voters can date their ballot papers but this is ignored. The date when each pre-poll voter voted needs to be certified in the Pennsylvania county it was cast and this won’t happen until polling booths close.
There are other issues around pre-poll voting in Pennsylvania. If a ballot is not enclosed in its “secrecy envelope” can it still be counted? The answer to that thorny question will be determined by the US Supreme Court in the days to come.
Unless there is a clear winner in Pennsylvania and the polls suggest otherwise, the count in the crucial state will take a minimum of four days and may take as long as a fortnight and possibly longer should other legal challenges arise.
A crucial mistake Trump made in 2020 was to instruct his supporters to vote in person on the day of the election. This time around he has been less doctrinaire, still pushing for on the day voting but his insistence has faded. What we can say is that registered Democrat voters who have cast pre-polls in Pennsylvania outnumber the GOP pre-polls by more than two to one. That’s not votes in the bank. Registered Democrat voters may vote for Trump and there may be a number of registered GOP voters who are never Trumpers. Registered independent voters in Pennsylvania make up almost 20 percent of pre-polls cast thus far. It is impossible to say if they favour Trump or Harris.
With in person on the day votes being counted first in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, will Trump declare himself the winner on or shortly after election day, as he did in the wee hours of November 4, 2020?
Followers of Trump on his Truth Socials and X account as well as that of his brother from another mother, Elon Musk on his own media platform may have noticed some jibbering of the electoral fraud type, claiming ballots in one Pennsylvania county have disappeared while others in blue counties have been beefed up. There is no evidence to support this but it shows the two men are establishing the means to challenge the result if Harris carries the state.
In 2020, total voter turnout across the US was at record highs with 158.4 million ballots cast. The 2020 election was held in the middle of a pandemic, people had little to do besides focus on the election and absentee voting was embraced. There are 186.5 million registered voters in the US. Oregon has the highest percentage of registered voters at 83 percent of the adult population and North Carolina is the lowest with just 61 percent.
Nate Silver’s modelling shows an 80 percent probability that the turnout will be slightly less than in 2020. There is a bit of guesswork involved but his modelling reckons on a figure of 155.3 million votes, nudging the huge turnout but falling just shy of the 158.4 million ballots cast in 2020.
Polling companies tend to make fractional adjustments based on perceptions of high voter turnouts. If the pollsters believe the turnout will be high, they add a point or two to Harris. If a low voter turnout is anticipated the same or similar adjustment is made to favour Trump.
It’s one of the reasons to be sceptical of polling. Polling in a complex electoral environment where voting is not mandatory is generally going to deliver some strange results. Moreso, polling companies tend to make other adjustments to their own raw data. Take a look at the 2020 election results and compare it to the polling which gravely understated both Trump’s and Biden’s vote and you’ll walk away with the impression that polling is an indicator of the result but not necessarily a good one.
What we can say with certainty is that this will not be a thumping win one way or another, á la Ronald Reagan over the hapless Walter Mondale in 1984 when the Gipper carried 49 states. The other certainty is that the result of this election will not be known on the night of November 5 and may not be known until Americans break bread on Thanksgiving Day on November 28. This does not take into account potential legal challenges and we can be fairly sure these will arise.
Keep your heads down, folks this is going to take a while.
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