In exactly 24 hours from right now (6 pm EST), the polls will close in the easter-most parts of Indiana and Kentucky, followed at 7 pm EST by the rest of those states plus Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia. That means we are one day away from the beginning of the end of this long national nightmare that is the 2024 presidential election.
Yes, it may take days, weeks—months?—for the world to know the outcome. But we’re entering the final stretch, whatever that may look like.
The 7 pm EST hour will give us our first real glimpse of how the election is shaking out, with a particular focus on Virginia, where Kamala Harris has held a steady lead in the polls to win the state’s 13 electoral votes. We’ll also see the earliest results come in from Georgia—the first of the real swing states. At 7:30 pm EST, we’ll get a second wave of poll closings in North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia, which have a combined 37 electoral votes.
Thirty minutes later, at 8 pm EST, the first big wave of poll closings will commence—a whopping 171 electoral votes from 14 states, Washington, DC, and parts of Florida and New Hampshire. The 8 pm hour includes Pennsylvania, the crowned jewel of the electoral map, with its gridlocked opinion polls and 19 electoral votes.
After Arkansas polls close at 8:30 pm EST, the next major hour of Election Night comes at 9 pm EST, when polls close or begin to close in 15 states, including the battlegrounds of Arizona, Wisconsin, parts of Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico. (Iowa, which is only considered a potential battleground based on a single, “gold standard” poll, also closes at 9 pm EST.)
If the polls are right about a tight race, it’s not until this point in the night that we’ll start to see the shape the race is taking. From 10 pm EST until 1 am EST (parts of Alaska), the remaining states will close their polls. But all the swing states will be closed by this hour, which means attention will focus on those earlier results.
Happy voting!
