It has been a very, very long election season. But we will soon know the result.
Hillary Clinton enters Election Day with a clear if not insurmountable advantage over Donald J. Trump. If the polls and conventional wisdom are correct, we might know the result fairly quickly.
If not, it could be a long night.
The final national polls give Mrs. Clinton a four-point lead, and her path to the presidency is straightforward: win the states carried by John Kerry in 2004, in addition to New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia.
Clinton’s Path of Least Resistance
Even if Donald Trump wins Arizona, Utah, New Hampshire, Iowa, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, he’ll still need to win one of these blue states to win the presidency.
She has led in nearly every live interview survey of those states so far this year, though the large number of white working-class voters in many of these states gives Mr. Trump a shot at an upset.
Mrs. Clinton is also competitive in North Carolina, Florida, Ohio and Arizona. If she won all four, she would have a sizable victory in the Electoral College.
The Upshot’s model gives Mr. Trump a 16 percent chance of winning the presidency. It would certainly be a big upset, but it would not even be the most stunning electoral surprise of the last few cycles when you consider non-presidential races, from the standpoint of the data.
Continue reading the main storyAnything from a narrow victory for Mr. Trump to a decisive victory for Mrs. Clinton seems fairly easy to imagine.
We’ll be tracking the results live after the polls close, using early returns to try to infer how the rest of the country might vote. There are two basic paths for how the evening might proceed. Here’s what we’ll know, and when.
Sun Belt Knockout?
Mrs. Clinton will probably win the presidency if she can win Florida or North Carolina, states worth 29 and 15 votes in the Electoral College. (The magic number is 270.)
A win in Florida would probably allow Mrs. Clinton to survive losses in both Michigan and Pennsylvania, where she’s favored but vulnerable enough to merit late campaign stops. A North Carolina win would let Mrs. Clinton survive the loss of one but probably not both.
The polls show a tight race in Florida and North Carolina, as they have for most of the year. The two states are deeply polarized along racial lines, and the result will hinge as much on turnout as on anything else.
Florida and North Carolina Will Count Fast
We’ll know pretty quickly whether Hillary Clinton is poised to win in a knockout.
The early vote has given Democrats a lot of hope in Florida, where Hispanic turnout has shattered previous baselines. North Carolina’s early voting has been more mixed for Democrats.
We will know very quickly whether Mrs. Clinton is poised to deliver a knockout blow in either state.
The polls close in most of Florida at 7 p.m., and early vote results — which could represent 65 percent of the final vote — will come in fast. In 2012, half of the vote was counted by 8 p.m.
The early vote will be fairly representative of the eventual outcome: If Mrs. Clinton holds a comfortable lead, it will be hard for Mr. Trump to mount a comeback.
North Carolina polls close at 7:30 p.m., and the vote is counted quickly there as well.
It’s a little less clear whether the early North Carolina results will be representative of the outcome. In the 2014 midterm, the early vote dropped first, and the Democratic senator Kay Hagan had a big early lead that slowly eroded as the Election Day vote came in.
The 2012 election was different in North Carolina: Democrats had a big advantage in the early vote, and yet President Obama didn’t take an early lead, suggesting that the early votes were not counted first, or that Election Day votes from the rural part of the state were counted fast enough to cancel it out.
Either way, we’ll have a good sense by 9 p.m of whether Mrs. Clinton is poised for a clear win.
Blue Firewall
If Mr. Trump can avoid a knockout blow in the Southeast, his chances will then come down to whether he can break through Mrs. Clinton’s so-called firewall: states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and New Hampshire.
If these states are close and end up deciding the election, it might take a while. Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota — three states that lean blue, but perhaps not so overwhelmingly as to allow an early call — can take a very long time to count their votes.
The Firewall Could Take a While
There isn’t much of an early vote in the big Midwestern and Northeastern battlegrounds. Nevada counts fast, but closes late.
In 2004, it was well after midnight Eastern before the networks projected that Mr. Kerry would win Minnesota and Michigan. The big Democratic cities in Wisconsin and Michigan usually take a long time to report.
Obviously, a more comfortable victory for Mrs. Clinton could permit an earlier call. Michigan, for instance, was called when the polls closed in 2012.
Mrs. Clinton’s chances in the “firewall” will depend on how much she improves among well-educated white voters compared with how much she loses among less educated white voters.
The situation is different in these states than the brute turnout contests of the racially polarized Southeast, which raises the possibility that these states could go in a different direction: A weak black turnout, for instance, may doom Mrs. Clinton in North Carolina, but she might still win Michigan if she holds up a little better than expected among white working-class Democrats. Similarly, it’s imaginable that Mr. Trump could stay in striking distance in these states with a surge among white working-class Democrats, without being able to hold off a big Hispanic vote in Florida.
Pennsylvania, where polls close at 8 p.m. Eastern, could be a somewhat faster call. The state counts its vote pretty quickly. And the most Democratic parts of the state tend to report first, in contrast with many states.
If Mrs. Clinton wins Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump’s path to victory starts getting very narrow.
A Long Wait for the Popular Vote
If Mrs. Clinton wins the presidency, she might not take the lead in the national popular vote for hours. If she barely wins the popular vote, it could be weeks before she retakes the lead.
The vote count in the West Coast and the big urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest usually proceeds far more slowly than the vote count in the rural East and South.
Clinton Will Lag In Popular Vote
Hillary Clinton will trail in the popular vote for much of the night because the West Coast and the urban East will take longer to count votes.
In 2012, President Obama didn’t take the popular vote lead until long after he had won the Electoral College.
It led Mr. Trump to tweet that Mr. Obama had won while losing the popular vote, and say that “we should have a revolution in this country.”
A little while after that tweet, Mr. Obama took the lead, for good. He would ultimately win by almost four percentage points.
A similar pattern could unfold this year, especially with the huge Democratic margin expected in California.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: if Mrs. Clinton is even within four or five points in the popular vote between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., she’s probably going to win it.
If Mrs. Clinton has carried her firewall states, or either Florida or North Carolina, she could win the presidency around 11 p.m. in the East, when polls close on the West Coast.
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