Forget the Exit Polls, Watch Florida, Ignore Pennsylvania
Updated at 6:13 p.m. ET on November 3, 2020.
The election will be weird, no matter what. If the polls are right, and Joe Biden wins the states where he’s favored, tonight could bring the most resounding defeat of an incumbent president since Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. If the polls are wrong, and Biden concedes to President Donald Trump early tomorrow morning, it would mark the most catastrophic polling disaster in modern history. If the race is close, and no clear winner emerges by midday tomorrow, it might trigger a protracted legal battle and constitutional crisis that could send the national election to the Supreme Court for the second time in as many decades.
Hovering above these probabilistic outcomes are the wraith of a once-in-a-century pandemic and the miasmic threat that Trump will go full American Tito by prematurely crowning himself the winner and announcing the mass invalidation of votes. (Which, to be clear, is something he does not have the legal authority to do.)
To navigate the evening, people need to be prepared for some normal confusion and some unique pandemic-year oddness. As always, we should be reflexively skeptical of surprising exit polls. This year in particular, we should be cautious about drawing overconfident conclusions from early results.
[Read: A game plan for watching the election results]
The more educated voters are about the mechanics of this election, the harder it will be for bad actors to poison the democratic process with conspiracy theories and disinformation. (For more, please see the excellent state-by-state election guides at and .) With that in mind, here’s a road map for the evening:
