How long will it take for this hurricane of an election to pass? We can only wait and see. It’s Election Day, and this is your politics tip sheet. |
- Major department stores across Manhattan were boarding up their windows yesterday, preparing for what some feared could be a chaotic aftermath to the election today.
- The harried preparations — turning much of the city into a “sea of plywood,” as our Metro reporters Michael Gold and Ali Watkins described it — evoked an entire nation preparing for a hurricane, unsure of the destruction it might wreak.
- Although Joe Biden holds a sizable lead in most polls, and a last batch of quality surveys released yesterday largely affirmed that picture, it’s clear that no matter who wins, large parts of the country will see an apocalyptic storm cloud rising from the election results.
- President Trump has done his best to seed the ground for a wave of outrage and disbelief if he loses. He called Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama “criminals” during a rally yesterday in North Carolina. Speaking in Pennsylvania later in the day, he cryptically implied that the state’s decision to count absentee ballots received after Election Day could be “physically dangerous” to Pennsylvanians, without explaining what he meant.
- To a large extent, as Maggie Haberman, Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin report, he’s being egged on by staff members who have repeatedly placated the president by telling him that an Electoral College is all but guaranteed.
- He even dared to dream of making an 11th-hour play for Democratic strongholds like New Mexico — an idea that some aides had to gently walk him away from.
- The Biden campaign is trying to get ahead of any attempts by Trump’s team to control the message tonight. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, said that with so many ballots to be counted in so many different ways all over the country, “under no scenario” would Biden accept a Trump declaration of victory on election night.
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- “When Donald Trump says that ballots counted after midnight should be invalidated, he’s just making that up,” she added, speaking on a call with reporters. “There is no historical precedent that any of our elections have ever run and been counted and completely verified on election night. We do not expect that to happen in 2020.”
- With both campaigns steeling themselves for what could be a drawn-out series of legal fights over ballot counting in battleground states, a federal judge yesterday shut down a Republican effort to throw out more than 100,000 ballots in Harris County, Texas, a heavily contested area. It probably put a nail in the coffin of that effort — which had also been shot down in a state-level court — but many more are sure to come down in the days ahead.
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- A final batch of polls from Quinnipiac University bore good news for Biden in Florida, Ohio and nationwide. Quinnipiac’s surveys have been among the more favorable to Biden throughout this campaign season, and he’ll certainly be satisfied if these results are borne out: He was up by four among likely voters in Ohio, five in Florida and 11 nationwide.
- A victory in Florida would be particularly meaningful for either candidate — not only because of its crucial 29 electoral votes but also because its elections officials have gotten a head start on counting mail-in ballots, meaning Florida is among the more likely battlegrounds to be able to declare a winner fairly swiftly.
- Looking out across the landscape of pre-election polls, with little evidence to suggest any meaningful slide in Biden’s support as Election Day has arrived, it appears hard for Trump to pull off a victory unless polls fail even more stupendously than they did in 2016. There’s just one pollster who called the election’s surprise results in 2016, and who thinks Trump is going to win again.
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 | | Calla Kessler for The New York Times |
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Granville Vitamvas, 4, helped his mother, Golda Vitamvas, cast a ballot in Omaha on Monday. |
How to watch the results with us tonight. |
Our correspondents are fanned out across the country to cover the action at voting places today and the candidates’ last-minute campaign stops. Then, as polls begin to close in battleground states as early as 7 p.m. Eastern tonight, you can follow along with us at nytimes.com as our team brings you complete results and live analysis. |
To see when polls are closing across the country, you can use this handy, state-by-state guide, which also tells you how likely we are to have a winner called tonight in each state. |
Georgia will be one of the first states to wrap things up, with voting officially coming to an end at 7 p.m. across the state — although long lines there have been known to keep some locations open late, particularly in Democratic areas. It’s safe to assume you’ll have to wait awhile for all of the votes to be counted in Georgia, where both Senate seats are open this year and the presidential race is neck-and-neck. Officials there have said to expect calls by the next day. |
North Carolina will be close behind, closing its final polling places at 7:30. Officials there have said they expect 98 percent of all ballots to be counted by the end of the night. |
On the other side of the Sun Belt, in the hotly contested state of Arizona, polls won’t close until 9 p.m. Eastern. But considering its long history of no-excuse absentee balloting and its relative lack of voting-related legal drama this year, there’s a strong chance we will have a winner there tonight. |
As the results roll in, you’ll probably have a hard time keeping your eyes off The Upshot’s hypnotic forecasting “needles.” We promise, they’re there to inform you — not to fray your last nerve. Because of the complications of voting amid the coronavirus pandemic, and the way it has affected vote reporting, we’re able to provide needles tracking the likelihood of a Trump and Biden victory in only three swing states: Florida, North Carolina and Georgia. You can read here about the complex work that goes into preparing the needles for prime time, and why they’ll prove informative as the night wears on. |
“The Daily” goes live on Election Day. |
Tune in to the first-ever live broadcast of “The Daily” on Election Day! Michael Barbaro, the show’s host, and Carolyn Ryan, a Times deputy managing editor, will call correspondents and voters across the country to make sense of a history-making day. |
Over the four-hour broadcast, you can expect to hear from dozens of Times reporters, including Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman, Astead W. Herndon and Jennifer Medina. Our correspondents will be on the ground in key battleground states, speaking to voters as they head to the polls. Our technology reporters will keep an eye on social media and potential disinformation, while our polling experts will break down the latest on the state of the race. |
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| Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. |
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