TV networks call elections carefully. You will need to head online tonight if you want to get a sense of the result before the nation’s election desks feel comfortable calling what they are seeing.
Here are some names to follow to find out the result first.
Nate Cohn.election watchers’ election point man may or may not be running the outlet’s famed Needle: a predictive guide to who will each swing state.
It was The Needle which, in one of the great moments of the 2020 election, suddenly showed Biden ahead in Georgia after having temporarily gone offline. That moment, tweeted out by Cohn with a Twin Peaks reference, heralded Trump’s defeat.
A strike by the company’s Tech Guild has imperiled The Needle—to the dismay of twittering election watchersan. The best way to follow Cohn, who will be running the model on his own computer if not for public consumption, will be via The New York Times.
Nate Silver. The nationally recognized election analyst, whose model has declared the race a coin flip, will be running an election night model of his own on the Silver Bulletin, his Substack. You can find him on Twitter too, where he is sure to be a prominent presence tonight.
Dave Wasserman. Wasserman, who works for Cook Political Report, is famed for calling elections after declaring that he’s “seen enough.” Trust his read on the data, although you will have to find it via NBC News as he is working for their decision desk tonight.
G. Elliott Morris. Morris replaced Silver at FiveThirtyEight, his old election site. Follow him on Twitter.
And Pfeiffer. We will get results from Florida early on. Here’s what Pfeiffer, the former Obama staffer, will be watching there: “Osceola County, which is near Orlando, is more than half Latino and a third of the population is Puerto Rican. If Harris is over-performing in Osceola it might be the first evidence of backlash to the offensive joke told at the Trump rally. Such backlash would be a big deal in Pennsylvania where there are more than 300,000 voting-age Puerto Ricans.”
Jon Ralston. Ralston is your guide to Nevada’s 6 electoral votes. He has predicted a narrow Harris victory here. Following him in 2020 gave you confidence Biden had enough to beat Trump.
Conor Sen. Sen served as a great guide to why Biden was ahead in 2020 despite discouraging early data. He has outlined the counties to watch in Georgia to see how margins are changing versus 2020.
Adam Carlson. Carlson has aggregated the subgroups in national polls. He is skeptical they are accurate. If they are, Trump has probably won.
