Believe it or not, we could have some idea of who won the 2020 Presidential elections as early as 10 PM Tuesday.
American voters as well the rest of the planet are aware that this time around chances are we won’t know who is the next President of the United States on Tuesday, not even very late Tuesday night, and possibly not even on Wednesday. With so many US voters sending their votes in by mail and considering the fact that before Tuesday’s elections start as many as 100 million Americans will have voted already, half of them through the good services of the Post Office, we are all resigned to the unavoidable delays in announcing a winner – and that’s without the predicted court delays as countless attorneys will be fighting over local disputes in counting the votes or registering the voters.
Nevertheless, we know which states will announce their results as early as 10 PM EST when the polls on the West Coast close down. Those are the eight states whose laws permit the counting of early votes before the end of election day. Those eight states will tell us who won there, and, luckily, they include one major state which is crucial to President Donald trump’s reelection chances: Florida.
With its 29 electoral votes, Florida is one of the four big states in this year’s election, alongside California (55), Texas (38), and New York (29).
Trump must win Florida to win the 2020 vote. And so, should the networks announce after 10 PM that Joe Biden won Florida, it would be game over for the president – unless he somehow manages to win all the other battle states, where his overall advantage in the number of votes came to less than 100,000.
So, if you hear at 10 PM that Trump lost Florida, it would probably color the rest of your election night a deep shade of blue.
On the other hand, if Trump takes Florida, it doesn’t mean that he won his second term, but it means we have a ball game.
The other states that will probably provide timely reports all have provisions in their laws that allow them to count the mailed ballots early, and they are—divided into red and blue groups:
Trump: Idaho (4), Montana (3), Wyoming (3), Nebraska (4), Missouri (10), Arkansas (6), Tennessee (11), South Carolina (9), Oklahoma (7), and Alabama (9). That’s 66 electoral votes for the president by midnight – not including Florida.
Biden: Vermont (3), New Hampshire (4), Oregon (7), and Delaware (3). That’s 17 electoral votes for VP Biden by midnight.
Next will come the swing states whose vote counts could be ready before the crack of dawn on Wednesday. If Trump won Florida, he would need two of them, give or take, to reach 270 electoral votes. If he lost Florida, he would have to win all of them, practically.
Minnesota (10)
Michigan (16)
Ohio (18)
Nevada (6)
Arizona (11)
North Carolina (15)
Georgia (16)
Texas (38)
Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state worth 20 electoral votes, will probably not have its vote count ready before Friday unless the Trump campaign appeals to the Supreme Court a second time (it was a tie initially, but now there’s a fifth, conservative member on hand) and the vote count in the Keystone State is clipped short.
Finally, the most important state to watch this election, in my opinion, is not Florida nor Pennsylvania. It’s Texas. Since the 1990s, Texas has become a dark-red state, where liberals needn’t visit, not for political campaigns, anyway. But things have changed in the past decade in Texas, with non-whites increasing their numbers in the state that last voted for a Democratic president in 1976 (Jimmy Carter). And the most important county in Texas is Harris County, home to the great city of Houston.
Last Friday night, Harris County voters set a new all-time turnout record of 1,338,898. According to local media, on Thursday alone, Harris County tallied more than 69,000 in-person votes and a total of 5,460 mail-in ballots.
Harris County could just possibly snatch Texas’s 38 electoral votes from President Trump’s grasp and move them over to Biden, seeing as the 2018 U.S. Census Bureau projections the population of the county was 4,698,619 (out of 29 million Texans); of whom 62.84% are White, 19.02% Black, 8.41% other races, and 42.55% Hispanic.
Again, if Texas remains red, it means Trump is still in the game and with a combination of swing states including Florida, he has a path to 270 delegates. If Texas is lost, well, there’s always 2024.