Recent elections have been so close that between the inability to call states and the large number of electoral votes on the West Coast, the news media has been unable to call the presidential election before 11 PM EST.
Before going into the states that will be closing at 11 p.m. or later, some words about the process of projecting a winner. Each network has a team that makes the decision on when to project. For all intents and purposes, this team is in a sealed room with no knowledge about what the talking heads or saying or whether other networks have made a projection. There are lots of data that these teams look at: 1) election day exit polls; 2) early vote exit polls; 3) polls of those who voted by mail; 4) the reported early vote; 4) how many mail-in ballots remain to be counted; 5) “key” precincts (key in the sense that the team knows the typical vote in those precincts and can judge the swing in those precincts); 6) which precincts (and counties) have not yet reported. Basically, while the margin of error in exit polls makes it difficult to call a close (52-48) race based on exit polls, you can call a landslide (60-40) based on exit polls. For those in which exit polls show a close race, you need enough votes to make a call. And if the early results are consistent with a close race, you can’t make a call into the outstanding vote is too small to realistically swing the race (i.e. the remaining precincts are in areas that favor candidate X who is ahead or candidate Y would need 95% of the remaining vote and has been getting 80% of the vote in similar precincts). One fact that could hinder making projections and lead to a state being uncalled on election night is a large number of uncounted absentee ballots (due to a state not being able to count before election day) or a large number of absentee ballots not yet returned in states that have a post-election day deadline for receipt of absentee ballots if postmarked by election day.
At 11 p.m., we will have partial closings in the remaining parts of Idaho, North Dakota, and Oregon. Of these three states, most of the voters Idaho and North Dakota are in the part that closed at 10 p.m. EST. However, in Oregon, most of the voters live in the Pacific time zone which will close at 11 p.m. The entirety of the state also closes for California and Washington, At midnight, the polls close in part of Alaska and in all of Hawaii. Finally at 1:00 a.m., polls close in the remainder of Alaska.
There are no races of interest in Hawaii. In California, Washington, and Oregon, the Democrats should carry the state-wide races, but there are some House seats worth looking at.
In California, just because of its sheer size, there are a slew of races that could become interesting if there is a wave in favor of either party. Among the seats currently held by Republicans, the Democrats have a fighting chance in the First District, the Fourth District, the Eighth District, the Twenty-Second District (Devin Nunes) and the Fiftieth District. If I had to bet on one of them, I would rank the Fiftieth as the most likely to flip. The fact that these are long shots reflects that we won most of the winnable districts in California in 2018. The only Republican seat that is a toss-up is the Twenty-fifth District which Democrats won in 2018 but lost in a special election. The question is whether the increased turnout of a general election will flip the seat back. Besides hoping to regain the Twenty-Fifth, the Democrats have to defend two seats that were very close in 2018 — the Twenty-First District and the Thirty-Ninth District. The Republicans also have some hopes in the Seventh District, the Tenth District, the Forty-Fifth District, and the Forty-Eighth District, but those districts were not that close in 2018 and Republican hopes depend on some swing back after the crushing defeat of 2018.
In Oregon, the only potentially competitive race is the Fourth District. On paper this is a swing district, and the incumbent Democrat has been there a very long time. In Washington, there are two seats that might flip — the Third District (currently held by a Republican) and the Eighth District (currently held by a Democrat). Neither of these seats are near the top of the might flip list, but, if either do, it would probably be part of a very good evening for that party.
Finally, there is Alaska. While Alaska is a lean Republican state, Donald Trump is not your ordinary Republican and he has damaged the Republican brand pretty much everywhere. In Alaska, while Republicans are still favored to sweep, Democrats have a fighting chance in all three contests (President, Senator, and House).
By the time the last polls close at 2 a.m., EST states (and individual house races within the states) should fall into two categories. In a good chunk of the states, all mail-in ballots are due by election day and most of them are counted on election day. In those states, we should have projections before people wake up in the morning. In other states, it is going to depend on how close the race is and how many mail-in ballots remain to be counted. If the race is close and only half of the absentee ballots have been counted (or a substantial amount more could still arrive over the next week), we will not know the winner. We have seen this in states like California and Arizona in the past where close races flip in the four or five days after the election as the count continues. But in 2020, with the extreme growth in reliance on mail-in ballots we could have several states that could go into overtime.
If things go well in states like North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Colorado, Maine, Arizona, and Iowa. it will be clear by sunrise on November 4 that Joe Biden is president-elect, Chuck Schumer is the new majority leader of the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi will be presiding over a bigger Democratic majority in the House. If the results are mixed, we may be headed toward overtime.
