While it may be hard to predict the outcome of many races in North Carolina tonight, we have a pretty good idea of how the evening and subsequent days will progress. Here are three things to know about tonight’s election results in the Old North State.
1. It Will Be Election Night in North Carolina
While we can expect very long nights of ballot counting (and perhaps stretching into several days) in some states, that will not be the case in North Carolina for several reasons:
- Most absentee-by-mail ballots have already been processed. Under state law, county boards of elections can process ballots starting five weeks before election day. All absentee ballots already submitted will be reported almost as soon as polls close at 7:30. The only absentee ballots that will not be counted by tonight are those that come in today and a relative handful and overseas and military ballots that come in before the county canvas on November 15. Absentee ballots received on election day will be counted and reported the next day.
- Most early votes will be tabulated by 9:00. County boards of elections will start counting in-person early ballots as soon as polls close. Some counties will post results as soon as 8:00 and the rest within the next hour. Between that and the absentee count, we can expect a majority of North Carolina’s ballots to be reported by 9:30.
- Most election-day votes will be tabulated by 11:00. Election day results will start trickling in soon after polls close. By 8:30, that trickle will become a torrent, and we will start getting our first solid clues about how the night will go. Almost all precincts will have reported their results by 11:00
The State Board of Elections (SBE) expects that 98 percent of all North Carolina ballots will be counted by midnight. So, we will know who won in all but the closest of races by then.
2. The Election Night Winners Will Almost Certainly Be the Official Winners
We often hear the refrain, “Election night results are unofficial.” That is true; the official results are announced after county boards of elections hold their county canvasses on November 15. As the SBE notes, there are some ballots that will not be counted tonight:
- Absentee ballots received by county boards of elections on election day
- Military and overseas ballots received on or after election day
- Provisional ballots (a little less than half of which are usually counted)
- For this election only: ballots from people from counties hit by Hurricane Helene who turned in their absentee ballots to county board of elections offices or early voting sites outside their home counties.
That will be a small fraction of the total ballots (again, 98 percent of all ballots will be counted on election night).
While elections are sometimes overturned due to fraud and other irregularities, such cases are relatively rare, and the results we see on election night are very close to the results we see in the official count ten days later.
The closest we have come to election night and official totals going different ways in a recent statewide election was the 2020 race for North Carolina Supreme Court, where Paul Newby saw his roughly 3,000-vote election night advantage shrink to about 400 votes in the official count. However, that relatively large shift was fueled by large numbers of absentee ballots that came in the nine days after election day. There will be no such post-election surge of absentee ballots in 2024 due to a reform bill passed last year that made election day the deadline for absentee ballots.
The Results Will Be Less Shifty Than in 2020
North Carolina has been a “red shift” state over the past couple of decades, with Democrats ahead in early evening returns on election night and Republicans gaining as the evening progresses. That is evidenced by the 2020 presidential race in North Carolina, as reported in the John Locke Foundation’s report, “What Happened in 2020?”
As seen in the figure above, Joe Biden started the night with an over 350,000 vote advantage over Donald Trump since absentee ballots (which heavily favored Biden) were reported first, followed by early votes (mixed), and election day votes (which favored Trump) last. Trump pulled ahead around 10:00, and the results were largely settled by 11:00.
I expect the early Democratic advantage and subsequent redshift to be much smaller this year for several reasons:
- Fewer absentee ballots mean a smaller Democratic early advantage. In 2020, Democrats submitted 237,646 more absentee ballots than did Republicans, accounting for most of Biden’s early lead. So far in this election, the Democratic advantage is only 32,705.
- Early voting looks better for Republicans. Democrats had a 22,164 turnout advantage in early votes in 2020, but Trump beat Biden among early voters by 205,207. Republicans have an early voting advantage of 61,377 this year, meaning that Trump’s margin among early voters will be larger this year than in 2020.
- Republicans might have a smaller election day advantage this year. Their early voting gains may come at the expense of their traditional election day advantage. Roughly 150,000 Republicans who voted on election day in 2020 voted early this year, compared to only about 60,000 Democrats who did so. That could somewhat blunt the kind of late-evening gains Republicans enjoyed in 2020 unless Republicans have a better overall turnout than they did four years ago.
In aggregate, those changes mean that (1)Harris will start with a smaller advantage than Biden did in 2020, (2)if Trump pulls ahead, he will do it earlier in the evening, and (3)there will be less of a Republican advantage in late returns.
So, we will know the results of most races on election night, possibly earlier than we did in 2020, and can be reasonably confident that those outcomes will be confirmed in the official results.
