Semafor Bellwethers: Our hour-by-hour guide on how to watch the 2024 election like an expert

The major news networks called the 2008 election at 11 p.m. eastern time, as soon as polls closed on the west coast. They didn’t call the 2020 election until the Saturday after the vote, when Pennsylvania’s slow count of mail ballots reached the point when a Donald Trump victory was impossible. Two years ago, it took almost two weeks for Republicans to learn that they’d won enough votes to make Kevin McCarthy the speaker of the House. For a little while.

Each of those years, however, it was safe to make a guess about how the election was going to turn out within a few hours of the east coast poll closing times. Barack Obama’s quick 2008 victory in Pennsylvania meant that there was no serious Democratic problem with its old white working class base — yet. Donald Trump’s attorneys insisted they’d win the slow 2020 Pennsylvania count, but everyone who saw how many mail ballots were left in suburban Philadelphia knew they wouldn’t. As in 2022, we may get a false picture of how the election is breaking in a non-competitive state (Florida that year) before a clearer picture emerges in a targeted state (once again, Pennsylvania).

Here’s our guide on how to watch the election, hour by hour. You can also check out the Semafor Bellwethers Map, a list of 20 counties that we’ll be tracking in our election night coverage to see how the parties’ performance compares to 2020.

6 p.m. Polls close in Indiana and most of Kentucky. Neither presidential campaign has spent a cent here; both have near-total abortion bans, in place for the first time in a general election, implemented by Republican legislative supermajorities.

If Harris is making any gains with the suburban voters and frustrated Republican moderates she’s targeted, that could show up in Hamilton County, north of Indianapolis. Nikki Haley won 34% of the Republican primary vote there, months after suspending her presidential campaign. Trump won just 52% here against Biden in 2020, while carrying the state by a landslide. Democrat-turned-Republican gubernatorial candidate Jennifer McCormick also closed out her campaign here, as she tries to over-perform in suburbs that might be uncomfortable with the GOP ticket. In Kentucky, any suburban gains for Harris would be visible in Kenton County, outside Cincinnati; Trump won it by just 20 points in 2020, and Gov. Andy Beshear carried it in his 2023 re-election.

What’s happening with the white non-college voters who rushed toward Trump in 2016, inched back toward Biden in 2020, and were overwhelmingly unhappy with his presidency? Watch Vigo County, which became a minor Trump obsession after the Biden loss; it was a reliable bellwether for generations, and he suggested that his victory there, in Terre Haute, proved that the national election was stolen. Trump got 55% of the vote there in 2016 and 56% in 2020.

7 p.m. Polls close in South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, most of Florida, most of New Hampshire, and the first targeted swing state of the night: Georgia. If Trump has made any inroads with Black voters, four years after trying to overturn the election here, that would show up not just in Fulton County but DeKalb County — less wealthy, more African-American. Biden got 83% of the vote there, and two years later, Sen. Raphael Warnock won it with 87%. Even as she lost a rematch to Gov. Brian Kemp, Stacey Abrams pulled 81% of the DeKalb vote. Any softness here would point to trouble for Harris, and suggest that the weaker urban turnout in early voting, relative to some rural counties, broke their strategy.

Watch two places that saw late plays by the Trump campaign outside the typical top seven swing states. In New Hampshire, they sent JD Vance over the weekend for a map-expanding rally in Derry, a Rockingham County city that Trump won by just 7 points in 2020, after carrying it by 14 points in 2020. Haley got 34% of the Derry vote in the primary, worse than she did statewide. Watch the delta between Trump’s performance and former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, the party’s candidate for governor, who has been building a slightly different, less conservative coalition.

In Virginia, keep an eye on Roanoke County, where both Trump and Vance made campaign stops; Trump won it by 22 points in 2020, and Glenn Youngkin ran 10 points ahead of that a year later. Networks called Virginia four years ago when just 75% of the vote had been counted, so a closer race would be bad news for Harris. Watch Stafford County in the northeast — Biden won it by 3 points, Youngkin won it by 11, and Democrats are trying to hold the 7th Congressional District, where they tied here in 2022.

This was the first cycle since 1988 with no serious competition for Florida, and its shift right in 2020 and 2022 made it almost useless as a bellwether. Both Trump and Ron DeSantis had sliced into the Democratic advantage in Orlando’s Osceola County — DeSantis actually won it in his re-election— thanks to their strength with Puerto Rican voters and recently arrived Hispanic immigrants. If Trump is outrunning his 43% number from four years ago, the damage of a roast comic mocking Puerto Rico at the Madison Square Garden rally might be limited.

7:30 p.m. Polls close in Ohio, West Virginia, and North Carolina.

Democrats lost Appalachian Ohio during the Obama years; they finally lost northeast Ohio under Biden. Trump was the first Republican nominee for president since Richard Nixon to carry Mahoning, which had been deep blue even outside the city of Youngstown. In 2022, when Youngstown’s own Tim Ryan ran for Senate, he lost the county for the first time in his career, to Republican JD Vance. It didn’t matter that the county’s Chevy plant closed under Trump, or that it saw its lowest unemployment rate in decades under Biden. The new Senate will be coming into view, too; Sherrod Brown won the county by 21 points to win his current term, and if he’s not holding on to most of northeast Ohio against Republican Bernie Moreno, Republicans have probably succeeded in closing the gap between Trump and their less well-known Senate candidates. That’ll matter for the rest of the night.

Republicans re-gerrymandered North Carolina for this cycle, and the 1st District is now the only competitive House district in the state. If Democratic Rep. Don Davis struggles against Republican nominee Laurie Buckhout, it would mean that the rural Black vote has softened for a Black incumbent, which would be a problem for Harris.

8 p.m. Polls in about half the country will close, including Pennsylvania and all but four small counties in Michigan. They’ll also close in safe states where any dramatic shifts since 2020 should be obvious: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Washington, D.C., and the panhandle of Florida. And they’ll start to close in Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Texas.Biden won Pennsylvania by out-performing Clinton in the eastern half of the state — except for Philadelphia, where Democrats have been losing a little ground every two years. He carried Lackawanna County, his birthplace, by 9 points, after Clinton nearly lost it. She netted just 3600 votes there; he netted 9600. If Trump improves there, he’ll be cutting off one of Harris’s paths to victory; if she is improving with the suburban moderates and women who Democrats say they’re winning now, that would show up in Montgomery County, where Haley got 25% of the primary vote, and Biden got 62% against Trump.

Michigan’s Wayne County will stay Democratic, but the margins there will be telling. Biden got 68% of the vote there, underperforming the Clinton margin in Detroit but crushing Trump in most suburbs. He got 69% of the vote in Detroit and 85% in Hamtramck, two majority-Arab cities where local politicians have turned on the Democrats over LGBTQ rights and Gaza. If Harris is making up for those losses, it might happen in Kent County, which Biden won by 22,000 votes, powered by a landslide in Grand Rapids.

Maine’s rural 2nd Congressional District has gone for Trump in every presidential election, netting him one electoral vote. Democrats are trying to save Rep. Jared Golden while expecting to lose the district. That’ll show if any Democrat is able to pull ahead of Harris in a region that supports Trump.

8:30 p.m. Polls close in Arkansas. If you must have a bellwether, look at Benton County, the home of Wal-Mart and one of the only parts of the state that’s shifted toward Democrats as the party’s improved with college-educated white voters. Biden spent no money and got 35% of the vote there — the best performance by any Democratic nominee since Arkansas’ own Bill Clinton in 1996.

9 p.m. Polls will be closed across most of the country, including Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. (The final precincts will close in Kansas, Michigan, and the Dakotas.)

In Wisconsin, Madison’s Dane County regularly produces a Democratic landslide that Republicans either narrowly overcome (Trump in 2016) or can’t overcome (Biden 2020, Gov. Tony Evers twice). Republicans have gained ground in most of the state, but lost it in the suburban WOW counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington) around Milwaukee: In 2020, Trump became the first Republican nominee since Bob Dole to dip below 60% in Waukesha. Watch Door County, too — just 20,000 votes were cast there in 2020, but Biden flipped it.

In Nebraska, Omaha’s Douglas County will decide who wins the state’s stray urban electoral vote — this time with a Nebraska-born Democrat on the ticket in Tim Walz. Biden got 54% of the vote there in 2020, and Harris should beat that. If the weekend’s blockbuster Selzer poll is accurate, she should also be running ahead of Biden in suburban Des Moines (Polk and Dallas counties in Iowa) and the Minneapolis suburbs.

Neither party thinks that polling captured what’s happening in the Sun Belt. Biden won Arizona’s Maricopa County four years ago by taking a landslide Latino vote in Phoenix, winning non-Democrats in Mesa and Scottsdale, and trimming the GOP margin in more conservative cities and suburbs. Republicans believe they’ve corrected that with their ballot chase. New Mexico’s Valencia County, a majority-Hispanic area that Obama won twice but Trump won by 10 points in 2020, is another place to see whether the Republican hype about the Latino vote holds up.

10 p.m. Polls close in the last swing state, Nevada, plus Montana and Utah and parts of Oregon and Idaho. When Democrats take Nevada, they win Las Vegas’s Clark County by at least 10 points, and they win Reno’s Washoe County, thanks to Democratic strength in Reno, its suburbs, and the Indian reservations. The potential Nevada electorate is bigger than 2020’s, after three years of automatic voter registration, and only half of its mail-heavy ballot load is typically counted by midnight on the east coast. We’ll be more closely watching the count in the Midwest at this hour — the close House and Senate races in Oregon and Montana won’t be mostly counted until Wednesday morning. But by this time of night, unless the races in Michigan and North Carolina are

11 p.m. Polls close in California, Washington, and the remainder of Oregon and Idaho. Most of what’s coming will be mail, and it could take a week for clarity in the closest House races, a pattern that started before the 2020 pandemic. If we’re headed for another evenly divided House, like the one we got in 2022, we won’t know how it’s divided for a week or so. (Mail ballots that are dated on Election Day but arrive within one week of the vote still get counted.)

12 p.m. Polls close across Hawaii and most of Alaska, for all but a few hundred voters in the Aleutian Islands. It may take more than a week, if it’s close, for the results and final ballots to come in for the race for Alaska’s sole House seat.