The COVID-19 pandemic and former President Donald Trump's attacks on voting by mail completely upended the way people vote in elections.
Democrats are now more likely to vote early in-person or by mail, while most Republicans wait until Election Day to cast ballots. And those voting patterns can make election nights confusing to onlookers, as the results can look very different depending on the order in which those ballots are tabulated.
In states where ballots cast on Election Day are counted first, it can lead to a phenomenon known as a Red Mirage, where Trump looks to be ahead but his lead diminishes as early and mail-in ballots then get counted, leading to a so-called Blue Shift.
Political analyst and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich describes the phenomenon in this helpful explainer—and predicts that Trump will try to exploit it.
In 2020, Trump used those Red Mirages to try to allege fraud and sow distrust about his eventual loss to President Joe Biden.
“Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted,” Trump tweeted in 2020, as his leads evaporated and it became clear Biden was going to win.
This year, Trump’s allies expect he will try to do something similar and declare victory before enough ballots are counted to know who actually won.
“Duh! Is the pope Catholic? There are few things in politics I would ever say you could make a firm bet on. That is one of those,” one former Trump adviser told NBC News of the belief that Trump will say he won and maybe even demand to “STOP THE COUNT!”—just as he did in 2020.
Wisconsin, for example, is expected to have a Red Mirage, as sparsely populated rural areas that back Trump are expected to report their results first, while Democratic strongholds like Milwaukee tabulate their votes more slowly, NBC News reported. That will make Wisconsin look better for Trump at the start of the evening.
NBC News also reported that a number of swing states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, are expected to report mail-in ballots and early votes first, which will make it look like Harris has a large lead. Those leads are likely to come back to earth as Election Day ballots are tabulated.
And Michigan is trying to avoid a Red Mirage by allowing mail-in ballots to be preprocessed, making it faster for officials to count ballots that are likely to favor Harris and avoid a prolonged Red Mirage.
No matter how votes are tabulated, if the race is as close as polls suggest, it could be a while before we know the outcome of the election, as late-arriving mail-in ballots could become the deciding factor that determines who wins the Electoral College.
In a call with reporters on Monday afternoon, Harris’ campaign said that while they expect states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan to have near-complete results by the end of Tuesday night, they think results from other states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada could take much longer to come in.
“We may not know the results of this election for several days, but we are very focused on staying calm and confident throughout this period as the process goes through," Harris campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon told Reuters.
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