It’s the day after Election Day, but Americans across the nation are still nervously awaiting the results, wondering who will occupy the White House in January.
By 5 p.m. Wednesday, former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, had accumulated 237 electoral votes in 22 states* where he has been declared the winner by The New York Times. President Donald Trump and his running mate, Vice President Mike Pence, had amassed 214 electoral votes in 23 states. Biden was ahead in the popular vote, 69,945,063 to 66,974,176.
Vote tallies in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania remained unclear. Nationwide, more than 65 million mail-in ballots, dwarfing the amount in any previous election, were making counting much more time-consuming than usual. Election experts cautioned that it could be days, or even weeks, before a victor is declared.
“There are certain states where the vote counts take a long time,” says Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It’s not a . . . sign that anything is wrong.”
If the results remain close in key states, experts expect legal challenges demanding recounts in some places. The Trump and Biden campaigns have assembled huge legal teams in anticipation of post-election court fights.
But President Trump didn’t wait to declare victory. With millions of votes still untallied, the president said he intends to ask the Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes.
“We did win this election,” Trump said from the White House at about 2:30 a.m. “So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. . . . So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
Trump’s comments drew condemnation from both Democrats and Republicans.
“All these votes have to be counted that are in now. . . . Tonight was not the time to make this argument,” Chris Christie, a Republican former governor of New Jersey and ally of Trump’s, said on ABC News. “I disagree with what he did tonight.”
Biden expressed optimism that he will win and urged patience as all the ballots are counted.
“We believe we are on track to win this election,” Biden said in a brief speech after 12:30 a.m. “We’re going to have to be patient until the hard work of tallying the votes is finished,” he added. “And it ain’t over till every vote is counted.”
It’s already been an election for the history books: Turnout was expected to break the record of 139 million votes set in 2016, and the percentage of eligible Americans who voted might be the highest in more than a century. More than 100 million people voted before Election Day—more than 70 percent of the entire 2016 voter turnout. Never before have Americans in a presidential election had to cast their ballots amid a deadly pandemic, fearing that going to the polls might expose them to Covid-19. Many states rushed to change voting procedures to keep voters safe and allow many more people to cast their ballots by mail than ever before.
Even more so than usual, the race between Trump and Biden presented a stark contrast for voters—not just different philosophies of governance but a fundamental disagreement about what America is and what it should be. With many Americans believing that the fate of the nation is hanging in the balance, the wait for final results is that much more difficult, experts say.
However, this isn’t the first presidential election in which a winner did not emerge immediately.
The most recent example was the 2000 race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, which was so close that it ultimately came down to 537 votes in Florida. The results remained in limbo for more than a month amid legal challenges and recounts in that state. On December 12, 2000, the Supreme Court stopped the recounts, effectively making Bush the winner.
In the 19th century, cliff-hanger presidential elections happened twice. In the 1824 election, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and the most Electoral College votes. But there were four major candidates that year, and none of them got the required Electoral College majority. That threw the election to the House of Representatives, which chose the second-place finisher, John Quincy Adams, in February 1825. In 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but Republican Rutherford B. Hayes eked out an Electoral College victory to win the White House. The final electoral votes Hayes needed for victory didn’t arrive until March 1877, after Congress appointed an Electoral Commission to decide how to award 20 disputed electoral votes.
This year, whichever candidate ends up taking the oath of office on January 20 will face enormous challenges. Tackling the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 230,000 people in the United States and changed life as we know it over the past seven months, will be a top priority. The pandemic has also prompted a nationwide economic meltdown in which more than 100,000 businesses have closed and millions of people have lost their jobs. In addition, the nation is facing deep social divisions and a reckoning over racial injustice. And as the past few months of hurricanes and wildfires have made clear, the U.S. is beginning to come face-to-face with the effects of climate change.
With so much critical work to do, Americans are understandably eager to have the outcome of the election settled. But experts urge everyone to let the system do its work.
“This isn’t the first time in our history that we don’t have results right away,” says Ray La Raja, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Americans are going to have to be patient, and we need leaders in both parties to remind people to stay calm.”
*Biden had also won one electoral vote from Nebraska, which allocates its electoral college votes by congressional district.