The press is preemptively starting to set expectations for a long wait for some key races are decided.
Axios’ Hans Nichols provides an “election night cheat sheet” to help you follow the returns. He puts the bottom line, as journalists so rarely do, up front:
You won’t need to stay up all night Tuesday to spot a big Democratic wave in the 2026 midterm elections. But it could take days — or even weeks — to know whether Republicans have survived a smaller one and held on to the House or Senate.
He highlights some key East Coast contests that will serve as indicators:
At 8:01pm, refresh your browser and watch FL-14. The great mid-cycle redistricting wars transformed this Tampa-based district from Harris +8 to Trump +11. If Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor survives, Republicans can all but kiss their majority goodbye, according to party strategists. Next up is FL-25. The country’s most expensive general election race is playing out in a district that went from Harris +4 to Trump +9. If Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz’s race is close — or too close to call early in the night — House Republicans can keep hope alive.
While you’re at it, this is a good time to check on South Carolina’s Senate race, where polls close at 7pm and the state counts relatively fast. If Sen. Darline Graham loses to Annie Andrews in the Trump +18 state, Senate Republicans can say goodbye to their majority. (And they’ll be sweating if it’s close.)“Underperformance is rarely isolated,” said Jason Thielman, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2024. “If you see the GOP underperforming early in the East, it is likely going to continue as you move further West.”
A little later in the evening . . .
Polls close in Ohio at 7:30pm and Texas at 8pm ET, but Texas counts faster. If Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton holds on, Republicans still have a path to keeping their Senate majority. Iowa polls close at 9pm ET. If Hinson is looking good, the night might not be as bad as many Republicans feared.
Alas, he has some bad news for the impatient among us:
Don’t stay up for the Senate results in either Maine or Alaska. Even a clear win (or defeat) for Collins may not be obvious until Wednesday. In 2020, when she won by nearly 9 percentage points, the AP didn’t call the race until lunchtime Wednesday. In Alaska, with its ranked-choice voting, results could take weeks.
Frustrating as that may be—and I find it very much so—PolitiFact’s Amy Sherman reminds us this is perfectly normal.
If you go to bed on election night and don’t know who won a midterm congressional race, that’s normal. And if you wake up the next morning and find that a candidate who was behind hours earlier has since pulled ahead, that’s normal, too.
[…]
Some states such as Florida often complete the majority of their unofficial counts in fewer hours or days than elsewhere. But it is not a sign of fraud if other places need more time.
“States are neither fast or slow, they all count and certify the results in accordance with the laws passed by their state legislature,” said Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert. “What is fast or slow is how quickly the media can collect sufficient evidence to confidently predict the winner, which is typically based on the margin of victory.”
I would quibble and say that states that can get the vote count quickly are indeed fast, and those who take days or even weeks to do so are indeed slow. And it’s only human nature to presume something shady is going on when the vote count changes radically in a direction you don’t like. But, yes, slowness is entirely a function of different election rules and contest dynamics. (Since most races are uncompetitive, they’re easy to project. Conversely, if a race is exceedingly close, election officials have to wait for mail-in ballots to arrive.)
Polls and nonpartisan analysis show many U.S. Senate races are competitive, including in Michigan, Maine, Iowa, Alaska, Kansas and Texas. If the counts are close in the first few hours or even days after polls close, media outlets may have to wait for officials to count more ballots until journalists can project a winner. Some close races could end in a recount completed days or weeks later. In 2018, three Florida statewide races were settled in recounts.
Candidates who lead early in the vote count may not ultimately win. In 2020, Donald Trump was up by more than 100,000 votes in Wisconsin early in the night, but the picture quickly shifted after Milwaukee’s central count finished processing mail-in votes around 3:30 a.m local time. The late boost for Joe Biden from Milwaukee was expected, especially because Wisconsin’s mail-in ballots tend to skew Democratic.
The pattern of when votes are counted — and what political leanings those jurisdictions’ voters tend to have — varies by state.
And, again, experts are well aware of these dynamics. Portraying them as evidence of fraud to rile up voters is cynical and dangerous.
That said, I would very much like Congress to standardize some of these procedures. Americans need to have confidence that our elections are free and fair. There’s just no good reason, for example, for some states to count absentee ballots as they come in and others to wait until the deadline to start counting. Similarly, there should be a common deadline for receipt of absentee ballots.
