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Following the results of a US election in real time is confusing. This guide sets out what you need to look for to get a sense of how each candidate is doing. What should you be watching, reading and listening to, and how should you understand the results as they trickle in?

By now, you’ve probably heard that the election is incredibly close. Just seven states will likely decide the next president of the United States: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in the Midwest; Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina in the Sunbelt. The winner of every other state is largely a forgone conclusion, which means only these seven should matter on election day.[1]

Joe Biden won six of the seven battleground states in 2020, losing only North Carolina. Hilary Clinton lost all seven. Kamala Harris’s easiest path to 270 electoral college votes is by sweeping the three in the Rustbelt.

Added to the electoral college votes coming her way from the solidly Democratic states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania would give Harris exactly 270 electoral college votes. If she loses Pennsylvania (her least favoured of the three), then things become more complicated, and she’ll need at least two of the four Sunbelt states.

Trump’s path is slightly clearer. If he sweeps the Sunbelt, where he’s narrowly favoured in all four swing states, he only needs to win one of the Rustbelt states to win the election.

The result might not be quite as close as everyone expects (more on that later), but it remains totally unclear who’s going to win. Anyone who tells you they’re positive that it’s Trump or Harris is going off vibes, not evidence.

Where to watch

If you just want to have it on in the background and let the experts tell you how it’s shaping up, we recommend watching CNN or NBC’s coverage.

On CNN, John King and his magic wall will guide you through the results in the most important counties, Wolf Blitzer will provide state predictions and ‘key race alerts’, and a panel of talking heads will tell you what it all means.

On NBC, election wunderkind Steve Kornacki will do the same as John King but with a little more detail and (in my humble opinion) a little better.

You can find these networks’ live coverage on Foxtel or an equivalent streaming platform like Binge, on their websites (potentially with a small fee and a VPN), or maybe on YouTube.

If you want to receive and understand the results as soon as they come in, however, the TV networks are limited. They tend to report county vote tallies only after they become available online, and they can be somewhat misleading: they usually show who’s winning a particular state and by how much, but they’re not that good at explaining who is likely to win the rest of the state’s vote.

For more meaningful and real time results, we recommend complementing your TV experience by following Five Thirty Eight’s free election blog or the also free New York Times election page, including the Needle, which moves in real time towards the favoured candidate based on a combination of results as they come in and a granular estimate of who’s likely to win more of the outstanding vote.

These accounts on X are helpful too: @Taniel | @umichvoter | @Nate_Cohn | @NateSilver538 | @VoteHubUS | @Redistrict  | @DecisionDeskHQ.

All of that should get you through election day, but if you want to know more about how to interpret what you’re seeing on the day itself, read on.

And if you just want to know what the polls suggest about how the race could shape up, go straight to the last paragraph.

What to watch for

The first states to close their polls are Indiana and Kentucky at 10:00am AEDT (6:00pm EST). The moment this happens, you can expect CNN and the other networks to call these states for Trump. Both states are extremely Republican, and the early calls will create the impression that Trump has a strong lead — don’t be fooled.

The time to start paying attention is a little after 11:00am (7:00pm EST), when polls in Georgia close. Every county in Georgia is required to report the results of its early vote within one hour after polls close. The early vote is a massive proportion of the total vote in Georgia this year, which means we should have a good idea of which way this key swing state is leaning by noon.

Next to close is North Carolina at 11:30am (7:30pm EST). This is another battleground state that counts its votes quickly and, like Georgia, a vital state for Trump. Most of the talk has been that it might take days to know who the next President is. That’s true, but if it looks early on like Harris is leading in these two states, the election will likely be over much earlier than we thought.

Say that’s not the case and both Georgia and North Carolina are too close to call for a few hours longer, we’ll then need to turn our attention to the Midwest.

Pennsylvania is the most important state in this election. Experts call it the “tipping point state”: the state most likely to tip the election one way or another. Its 19 electoral college votes is the biggest prize among the battlegrounds, so it’s no surprise the candidates have visited this state more than any other. Polls close in Pennsylvania, as they do in Michigan, at midday (8 pm EST) but unlike in Michigan, election officials in Pennsylvania are not allowed to process mail in ballots until the day of. This means the more comprehensive results will first come in Michigan, and if it all comes down to Pennsylvania, we’ll probably be waiting until at least the next day.

Finally, Wisconsin. Unlike its neighbours, Wisconsin does process early votes before election day, which means shortly after polls close at 1:00pm (9:00pm EST), we should have significant numbers, and a few hours later, a prediction for the state.

We won’t trouble you with Arizona and Nevada, whose results take a very long time to report.

Those are the states to look out for on election day. Read on to learn about the key county in each state, where any swing from 2020 could predict the entire election.

Key counties to watch

Georgia: Look out for the results in Baldwin County, located in the middle of the state, with high numbers of Black and young voters. Clinton won in 2016 by 1.7 per cent and Biden in 2020 by 1.3 per cent. If it looks like Trump will win Baldwin County for the first time, it could be a sign that he’s cutting into Harris’s numbers with Black and young voters around the country.

North Carolina: Once a white enclave, home to double-digit Trump margins, the fast growing, increasingly diverse Cabarrus County is a bellwether this election. If Harris gets within five points, there’s every chance she’ll win the state.

Pennsylvania: Bucks County has been the most talked about county of any state this election. Of the many counties in Philadelphia suburbs, Bucks has the highest proportion of non-college educated whites. Clinton won narrowly here, and Biden increased that margin. If Trump wins it for the first time, that bodes well for his numbers among the working class countrywide.

Michigan: One of the least diverse and most working-class counties is Muskegon.  Obama won here by 18 per cent in 2008, but Trump has since reduced that margin to 0.6 per cent. If Harris can recover some Democratic strength in Muskegon County, it’s a sign that white working-class women are rejecting Donald Trump.

Wisconsin: Sauk County is one of those bellwether counties with a great track record of aligning with the winner’s margin across the entire state. One to watch on election day.

So who’s going to win?

107 days ago the race was a foregone conclusion. Donald Trump led Joe Biden by anywhere from five to eight per cent in each of the seven battlegrounds; he was even gaining ground in solidly blue states.

And then it all changed. Kamala Harris is far from a perfect candidate, but she and her team have run a near flawless, gaffe-free campaign, transforming the race from a likely Trump landslide to a toss-up. This is no mean feat in a political environment strongly biased against incumbency.

The pandemic and several wars in recent years led to massive stimulus packages and global supply chain disruption. These shocks to the economy caused inflation to surge worldwide, contributing to low approval ratings for many world leaders and electoral defeats for the incumbent leaders of Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and the UK, with Canada likely to join them, and surprising results in France and India.

Harris has two advantages that those fallen incumbents lacked.

For one thing, she’s not really the incumbent, portraying herself as the change candidate — a move away from the chaotic days of Trump. And Trump remains a uniquely unpopular and polarising candidate, dissuading previously reliable Republican voters. That’s been enough to give Harris about a 50 per cent chance of winning the election, but if you believe the polls, her numbers peak there.

Should we believe the polls? Somewhat.

Most of the swing state polls in this election have been implausibly close. They continue to show Trump or Harris leading each state by less than one per cent. According to forecasting guru Nate Silver, if each polling sample is independent from each other (as they should be), the odds of the polls producing the numbers the pollsters say they are producing are 1 in 9.5 trillion.

The better explanation for the lack of any polling variation or outliers is that the pollsters are ‘herding’ the results — manipulating the weighting of various demographics to produce close results in order to avoid making the same errors they made in 2016 and in 2020 when they significantly underestimated Trump’s support.

There are several theories explaining those polling misses. One is non-response bias: the idea that Trump supporters are less likely to answer the phone and talk to a pollster, in which case the pollsters might be right to adjust their results and we could be on for an absolute nailbiter.

Another theory is that in 2016 pollsters failed to weight by education (which most of them now do) and in 2020 the pandemic skewed results based on who was home and who was not. If this latter theory is the more correct one, then past errors should theoretically be fixed, and the herding is actually causing Trump’s numbers to be inflated.

There’s almost no way to know which theory is correct until after the election. However, if I had to predict, for three reasons, I would prefer to be Team Harris right now:

  1. The country’s two most accurate pollsters have recently released polls that look promising for Harris.
  2. Unlike in 2016 and 2020, it is Trump’s opponent who has the momentum after a series of high-profile negative stories for Trump and his supporters in these final days.
  3. By all reports, the Harris campaign has a much stronger ground game, knocking on literally millions of doors in the swing states in the last days compared to a minimal presence for Team Trump.

Caveat alert: this could really go either way.  A small and consistent polling error in Trump’s favour means he will sweep all seven swing states — a highly plausible outcome.

Trump may very well declare himself the winner on election day. His supporters will likely follow suit — many of them believe the only two outcomes this election are a Trump victory or election fraud. In times like these, following the data and the experts is vital. And most experts don’t expect there to be a result on election day.

So buckle up, strap in and endure the ride.

[1] A recent high quality poll of Iowa voters has Harris leading Trump by 3%.  Iowa is a safe Republican state and this poll is an outlier. If true it could upend the common wisdom about the election.