“If things are actually as close as they seem right now,” reported Axios on Tuesday evening at seven o’clock on the day of the election, “it could take ‘up to at least a week’ for TV networks’ decision desks to call key states.”
At that early time, Donald Trump was already credited with 19 electoral votes – from Indiana and Kentucky – while Kamala Harris had three from Vermont.
Game on.
The New York State polls wouldn’t close until nine o’clock.
The numbers started coming in faster. Given the low percentage of votes being cast, the numbers on the crawl at the bottom of the C-Span screen were almost meaningless without additional information.
Of the seven battleground states whose votes would be decisive in the presidential election, the two Southern ones, North Carolina and Georgia, reported first. Harris’ initial 30,000 edge in North Carolina and Trump’s 115,000 were virtually meaningless, as later events would confirm.
Was the Atlanta vote in? The Piedmont region? What did the high rural vote portend? Voting had been heavy almost everywhere, with long lines at the polls. Trump had 101 electoral votes on the South and the Midwest, Harris 51 on the Eastern Seaboard. The surprise, if it could be called that, was the lack of surprise. The presidential election was running according tp the prognosticators’ playbook.
Nine o’clock. The polls closed in many states, including New York.
Uh, oh. The Ulster County and New York State election websites say the results will be posted at nine o’clock. They’re not. A bad omen.
A few minutes later, some of the state numbers miraculously appear. Kamala Harris is ahead by two to one in the state with very little of the Democratic downstate vote in. State senator Michelle Hinchey is ahead of Pat Sheehan in all counties of the district, with a more than two-to-one margin, Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha is ahead of Jack Hayes by even more.
Attention switches to the three tightly contested mid-Hudson congressional districts. In the 17th CD, Republican Mike Lawler remains ahead of Mondaire Jones, with the all-important Rockland County numbers still to come. Pat Ryan got a big 14,000-vote plurality in his home Ulster County and is well postioned to defeat Alison Esposito in the 18th CD race. And until the state website crashed about ten o’clock, Democrat Josh Riley was ahead in his return engagement against Marc Molinaro, reportedly the most expensive House race in the nation. Riley came out of Ulster County with a 5000-vote edge.
At 10:40, CNN retained the statement that all seven of the battleground states remained too close to call, with several having large numbers of votes still to count. So there we shall leave it this election night, with a single additional comment: A very large number of things will have to break her way for Kamala Harris to win the presidency in 2024.
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