Trump’s victory over Harris: How was the race called so fast?

In the end, it didn’t take all that long to declare that Donald Trump was returning to the White House.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic and an unusual number of mail ballots complicated the counting process, Joe Biden was declared the winner by The Associated Press and other media outlets just before noon Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020, four days after Election Day.

This year, the call came around 5:39 a.m. Nov. 6, about 12 hours after the first polls closed. 

That was about three hours later than the AP call in 2016, and about six hours after the calls in 2008 and 2012, which were made before midnight on election night. The 2000 race was called much later, on Dec. 13, after a lengthy recount in Florida and intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump’s margins of victory helped speed along the call.

This year’s margin of victory, as of the afternoon of Nov. 6, was about 117,000 votes in Georgia, 191,000 in North Carolina, 133,000 in Pennsylvania, 29,000 in Wisconsin and 81,324 in Michigan.

"It was a matter of not being close," Ned Foley, an Ohio State University law professor who specializes in elections, said. "The closer it is, the harder to ‘call’ and thus the longer it takes to get a media call, which of course is not an official result." 

Media calls are based on modeling the ballots counted and those uncounted to make sure that there’s no room for a surprise change in the results after the call is made.

A related reason for the earlier call this year compared with 2020 is "the fact that this was a ‘uniform swing’ election," said Charles Stewart III, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab.

Trump "performed around 2.5 to 3 points better in 2024 than in 2020 just about everywhere at the state and local levels," Stewart said. "This means two things. First, all the battleground states, which were within this margin or close to it, easily flipped. Second, the fact that the networks and the data providers knew it was a uniform swing election probably emboldened them to declare states for Trump earlier than if there was more variability in changes from 2020."

Officially, the first Associated Press call for a battleground state came for North Carolina at 11:19 p.m. on Election Day. After midnight Nov. 6, Georgia followed at 1:02 a.m., Pennsylvania at  2:25 a.m., Wisconsin at 5:35 a.m., and Michigan at 12:55 p.m.

Arizona and Nevada were the battleground states not called by 3:30 p.m. Nov. 6.

Amy Walter, the publisher and editor in chief of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, said she began noticing that something was off for Harris well before these calls were made, when some of the early returns from New Hampshire and Virginia came in. 

One particular early result in Virginia provided a flashing red light for both Walter and Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

"Harris doing so poorly in Loudoun County, Virginia — the kind of high-income, high-education place that has been moving toward Democrats in recent years — was a huge red flag early in the night," Kondik said. "It was the equivalent of Miami-Dade County, Florida, coming in so weakly for Biden in 2020 that it clearly signaled that his win wouldn't be as big as it might have seemed going into the election."

This year, Harris ended up winning Loudoun County by 16 points, compared with Biden winning it by 25 points in 2020.

Shortly after 10 p.m., it also became clear that Trump was holding his own with affluent suburban areas such as Waukesha County, Wisconsin, and that Harris was running behind Biden’s 2020 performance in major Democratic vote engines, including the college towns of Dane County, Wisconsin, and Washtenaw County, Michigan.

Beyond the nature of the results, Stewart said election officials had improved some administrative challenges from 2020.

"There were spotty glitches reported, but nothing out of the ordinary," Stewart said. 

More worrisome, he said, were "many more reports of bomb scares than I’ve seen in the past," though he added that he’s unsure of whether there were actual bomb threats or if they were reported more widely this year.