Hello and welcome to this election night edition of the 538 Politics podcast, although maybe I should say the morning after edition of the 538 Politics podcast, it's already about two o'clock in the morning on the East Coast. It's been a late night and we still really don't have projections in most of the battleground states. As we sit down to record this, there's been no call in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. We don't even have a call in Arizona.

Although Fox News has projected that for Biden, our colleagues at ABC News have not projected that. We also still don't have a projection in Maine. So there's a lot of states still outstanding. The results are going to be coming in slowly over the coming hours and maybe even days. But we wanted to sit down and give folks an understanding of where the race is, what kinds of possibilities have been precluded at this point and what to expect in the days to come.

So here with me to do that, our senior politics writer, Claire Malone. Hey. Hi, Galen. Also with us is politics editor Sarah Frostiness. And hey, Sarah. Hey, Galen. And elections analyst Nathaniel Rachna. Daniel, good morning again. Good morning.

And we are going to try to keep this relatively short because we've already set our alarms for just several hours from now. We'll be back live blogging and have more updates for you all. But we wanted to get this out before we go to bed. So, Claire, kick us off. What's the story of the night so far?

Well, the story of the night so far is that it was not a landslide or mandate election, but also we don't know who who is going to win the election. So, you know, at two a.m. on East Coast time, things are looking. I would say the consensus generally seems to be a little bit better for Joe Biden. He still has, like, you know, three or four, three, I guess we may be we might discuss this paths to victory, but it's certainly tighter and a lot of places Democrats did not win in Florida or Texas, which they were certainly states under discussion, particularly Texas was sort of seen as this, you know, this great potentially blue hope for the Democrats.

And that didn't come to pass. They didn't win back Ohio from, you know, the Barack Obama era.

So I think a lot of Democrats probably went to bed tonight or still scrolling through Twitter tonight, being a little bit disappointed by the election already, even if Biden doesn't end up losing Nathaniel, can you give us some sense of when we might see results in these uncalled races?

Yeah, so I think, first of all, Wisconsin should be mostly, if not all in probably by the time people are listening to this. We're expecting Milwaukee to report its results around 6:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday morning, which is just a few hours from now. And Wisconsin there. And Milwaukee is expected to be among the last places in Wisconsin to report Michigan. We're hearing that those results will come in at some time tomorrow or tomorrow, being Wednesday might be today for you folks.

And then Pennsylvania is a state that we've long expected to take until Friday to report all of its results. That said, that are partial results in all these places where you can kind of start to read the tea leaves. It is a little bit tricky because of the the kind of the blue shift that the people have been warning about. For example, in Pennsylvania, there are tons of mail ballots have to be counted. Also in Georgia, actually, that's a state that we thought we were going to get pretty clear results on Tuesday night.

But there were a couple of issues in counties like Gwinnett and Fulton County where they haven't been able to count all the absentee ballots today. And it sounds like we won't get an answer there in terms of all those ballots until maybe noon on Wednesday.

So that's a rough timeline for those states where, Nathaniel, you can't mention tea leaves without actually reading them for us. You said we're starting to get to leaves in some of those upper Midwestern states. What information can they give us?

Also, I hesitate to go into this because as I mentioned, you know, anything I say about Wisconsin right now is going to be out of date. And probably I don't want to be proven wrong when people listen to this podcast in six hours. That said, right now, I believe that Trump is ahead by only three or four points in Wisconsin and there is a lot of absentee ballots left to count in Milwaukee. So Milwaukee is already pretty Democratic area, plus the fact that their mail ballots probably make them even better for Biden.

So I think there's probably room for him to make up that deficit and win Wisconsin, in addition, in a few, particularly urban and suburban counties in Pennsylvania. So I'm thinking about the county around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, also Scranton, where Joe Biden, of course, was born. Those places he's running, I believe, like five or six points ahead of Hillary Clinton, which if that were to happen and the rest of the state and it's actually not happening in the rest of the state, I should say.

There are some counties that have been a little bit more stubborn in terms of not moving. But but Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania by such a small margin that any kind of improvement like that for Joe Biden is a good sign. And that's even before getting into some of these counties like Philadelphia and the suburban counties around there where he is really expected to do well. So I think at this point, I would rather be Biden in both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and probably Michigan for that matter, although I haven't looked as closely into that state.

Sarah Claire mentioned that this is not a landslide election. This is a closer race than probably some Democrats wanted. What does that mean for the Senate? The Senate has not been good for Democrats this evening going into the election. We 538 gave them a three and four chance of winning a majority in the chamber. But with both the loss in Alabama and then Maine looking good at this point for Collins, Georgia, special is going to a runoff. Kelly is not that race has not been called in Arizona, but North Carolina overall is leading toward Trump.

Looks as if Tillis might be able to hold on to his seat there. Democrats have not had the opportunity this evening in the Senate that they had wanted to to get back to a majority. It's still too soon to say at this point, but it was not what they seem to have needed. Even if Biden wins the presidency moving forward, man, just Cao Cunningham regret sending those texts.

Indeed. And, of course, we should say the Senate race in Iowa has also been projected for Joni Ernst, the incumbent Republican senator. And I should say, while we're reporting the president has not yet spoken, although he's about to step on stage. And so he probably will have spoken by the time listeners are hearing this. He has already made false claims, false accusations about stealing an election or fraud that there is no evidence for. This is something that he's telegraphed for weeks that he would make these kinds of claims on election night.

Those kinds of falsehoods shouldn't necessarily be leading our coverage. We're focused on results and who will actually win this election, because obviously it's the American people who decide that.

But how does this affect this election in some sense, Claire?

Yeah, it's troubling that that we have to have this conversation, that we had plans in in the offing to deal with the president's very predictable falsehood that, you know, there were that the election was going to be stolen from him.

I think it makes things really muddy for the American people when they wake up tomorrow morning, unfortunately, again, going back to the fact that this isn't going to be a mandate election, this is going to be a divided country. This is potentially and perhaps probably going to be a divided government. It's a really unhealthy thing to do to our democracy.

We've talked a lot in the past four years about stress tests of democracy. This is another one, right?

Whether or not the president is responsible enough to the oath that he took to to be a conscientious leader and to preserve the peace. Right. And I think that we all take this really seriously and we're going to spend the next couple of days telling people facts. And so, as Galen said, we're going to dwell too much right now on the president's false narrative, where to report the facts to you over the next couple of days. And you should you should tune in to us.

But just because the president says it, as we've learned over the past four years, does not mean it is true. Absolutely.

And real quick, I want to jump in here. I think we want to be a little careful in how we characterize the vote that's still outstanding. I mean, something that we're all touching on, right, is like the uptick in mail in ballots has mean it is really hard to understand where the outstanding vote is, particularly because every state reports it differently. Like one thing we know to be looking for in Pennsylvania is an expected blue shift. Right, because they don't release the absentee mail in ballots, which this year have had a huge partisan skew at the same time they do the Election Day vote.

So while Claire is right that this isn't a mandate election, that is not the headline you will see tomorrow. We still don't know Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, the margin there matters in even though Texas has been projected for Trump, more votes are going to be counted. That margin could shrink. So I just I want to set expectations a little bit lower in the sense of there's still just a lot we don't know at this stage. Yeah.

As we're saying, even for people who were following The New York Times as infamous needles this evening, that there's been a lot of movement there. And as we're sitting down and recording right now, Georgia went from very likely Trump to basically toss up tilting Biden now at this point. And so because of the way the vote in this election has been bifurcated and is coming in and counted at different times, we have to be really careful with all of the partial results that we're looking at.

So before we go this evening, I think one thing that we're going to be unpacking here at 538 over the coming weeks is. What the polling told us about this election versus what ended up happening, so maybe, Nathaniel, you can weigh in here a little bit. As I mentioned, we don't have full results. So there's there's no real summing this up.

But is there anything we can say about maybe even Florida or some of the areas where polling has not done a good job of reflecting the outcome? Yes, I want to be really cautious here, because, as Sarah said, the margins are not final and they could shift a lot and the polls could turn out to be very accurate or they could turn out to be not very accurate. But I do think that perceptions of the evening were colored by Florida very early on and actually specifically Miami-Dade County, where it looks like the Cuban-American community really swung toward Trump in a big way and maybe that wasn't picked up by the polls.

But other than that, you know, it looks like a fairly standard polling error. You know, we said this after 2016, but, you know, maybe a two or three point polling error in some other states that weren't Florida, which really would not be abnormal, as we've discussed many times on this podcast and on the website. So I think I would just you know, I would I would also point out that Florida, I think, is the only state so far that has gone kind of the opposite way that we expected you.

We had states like Iowa and Ohio that we had basically as tossups Texas as well, that did go for President Trump. So he's maybe winning the toss ups. But, you know, that that would not have been if you had told us before the election, that would not have been surprising to us. So I think Florida is really the only surprise of the night so far. So I do want to pump the brakes a little bit on the polls.

Got it wrong. Again, narrative, especially considering we don't know the final margins.

You can pump those brakes, but I'm not sure you can stop that train. Twitter has gone crazy. I will say people have really jumped the gun on a lot of conclusions. And honestly, I don't think the media has necessarily helped them. I've been watching cable news the whole evening when I haven't been talking to you all and trying to portray some sense of where the race is going. And they have thrown caution absolutely to the wind and just been showing partial results all over the place, making claims about, you know, narrative, etc.

, two hours into counting results. And so, yes, Twitter has been crazy, but also the people who are responsible for portraying the information have not done the best job tonight either. So, yeah, you know, I'll give Sarah and Claire you the opportunity to also weigh in on what the experience of covering this election tonight has been like vis a vis the data or anything else before we go.

We knew going in that there was a high probability that no one was going to reach the 270 electoral votes to win tonight. Right. We had for the past month been telling readers it could be a week, it could be multiple weeks. It does seem as if we'll get more clarity by Friday in terms of the presidential election. But to your point, Galen, like what's been so interesting is the media coverage that has leaned into, well, it's election day.

It's election night. Here's where things stand drumming, you know, enthusiasm for like, OK, we're going to have a call this evening. And, you know, polls going in showed that most Americans didn't expect a result this evening. And that is where we are headed. And again, I think given the huge surge in mail, in ballots, it's made it really hard to understand what part of the vote is still outstanding, where and that's come down to battleground states, which makes it all the more harder.

All right. Well, that is a good note to end on. And, of course, as I mentioned, we're keeping this short because we're going to be back with you soon enough. And, you know, if you don't see another podcast in your fields within a couple hours, always check the live blog. You can check our YouTube channel. We have lots of coverage still ongoing, but yes, we will be back soon once we have more results.

So thank you for tuning in and thank you for joining me tonight. Claire, Sarah and Nathaniel playing scales tune things. Gaylan My name is Galen Droog. Tony Chow is in the virtual control room. You can get in touch by e-mailing us at podcasts at five thirty eight dotcom. You can also of course, tweeted us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us.

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