It’s here. It’s time. The first battleground state polls are going to close in an hour.
And while I don’t know what is going to happen, I do know this: We are all going to figure it out together.
I’m writing from the New York Times newsroom, where my colleagues have been working around the clock to bring you timely and accurate information about the election results. This morning, I explained what I’ll be watching for. And now, I want to guide you through what you’ll be seeing from us.
We’ll have a results map that will tell you when a state is called for former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. And if you want to go deeper, we’ll have a live coverage page where you can turn for real-time updates and analysis.
Tonight, we’ll have journalists on the ground in about 20 states. They’ll be covering presidential battlegrounds and key down-ballot contests, and watching for complications or disruptions at the polls. We’ll also have a team of nearly 100 journalists, engineers, statisticians, data experts and researchers working to deliver up-to-the-minute coverage of the results. That’s where my colleague Wilson Andrews, the Times editor who oversees our presentation of election results, comes in.
This morning, I called Wilson to ask him what to expect after polls close. Below are three key takeaways from our conversation.
We’ll bring you the early results — and the context you need to know.
We’ll start getting information from key battleground states early in the night. Polls close at 7 p.m. in Georgia and 7:30 p.m. in North Carolina. And we’ll be reporting those results, and those from each and every state, as soon as we have them.
But we want to do more than simply report the results, because a tranche of ballots from a deeply red or blue county might make one candidate momentarily appear way more likely to win a state than they actually are. We’ll provide context, too, about what votes are still outstanding, where the candidates are under- or over-performing expectations and how that could change the picture.
“The reported vote count has always been only a partial picture of what’s happening in an election,” Wilson told me.
Will there be a Needle?
If you are reading this, you’re probably familiar with the Needle, a statistical model and visual display that analyzes both what we know about reported results and what’s left to count, and offers a sense of what might be coming.
We’re planning to publish the Needle tonight. But the Needle relies on data from an array of local jurisdictions, as well as computer systems maintained by engineers across the company who are currently on strike. So, we’ll publish when we know the data is flowing smoothly and our technical systems are stable.
And whether the Needle is live on the home screen or not, Times journalists will be looking at the data we collect and using the statistical model to publish frequent updates about what we learn.
We’ll tell you what we know, when we know it.
A national election is an enormous undertaking, one that unfolds across several time zones and thousands of jurisdictions. It can be very confusing, and all sorts of actors — from domestic partisans to foreign adversaries — want to stoke confusion.
That’s why we believe in putting out as much information as possible, as quickly as we can. Our live results page is a reflection of what we know in real time. “It’s really important to us that our readers can also learn that with us,” Wilson told me.
So join us tonight, where my colleagues and I will bring you coverage of every twist and turn as this unpredictable election draws to a close.
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