Election night is upon us, with all its nagging anxiety, cortisol-induced fear and, for about half the country, the possibility of ecstatic relief after another surreal presidential campaign.

Results could take days or even weeks to show. But the state of the race could also reveal itself surprisingly quickly. Tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern, voting will end in the battleground state of Georgia. At 7:30 p.m., polls will close in North Carolina, another crucial game. Both swing states are known for counting their ballots quickly, due to state laws that allow them to count early and absentee ballots before Election Day.

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So, when will we know the results, how can we wisely extrapolate early returns and, perhaps most importantly, what information and analysis should we ignore? David Wasserman, political analyst at the Cook Political Report, joined my podcast, Simple Englishto explain how to follow the elections like a pro, without falling into the trap of false hopes or conspiracy theories. Here are three tips for following election night without losing your mind.

1. It may sound weird, but don’t do it to wait for this election be as close as in 2016 or 2020.

Wait, what? Aren’t Kamala Harris and Donald Trump essentially tied in national polling averages and in swing states? I don’t have Nate Silver put the odds of Harris winning this election by an exquisite decimal number between 50.00 and 50.99 percent? Isn’t there a non-zero chance that both candidates will win 269 electoral votes?

Yes, yes and yes. “This is the closest election I’ve covered in my 17-year career, but that doesn’t mean it will produce the closest outcome,” Wasserman told me. The 2016 and 2020 elections were absurdly close, both decided by around 78,000 votes. But, he added, “even elections as balanced as those in 2024 are unlikely to depend on 80,000 votes spread across a handful of states.” A close vote does not predict historically close elections.

To understand what Wasserman means, perhaps a sports analogy is helpful. Sports betting and political polling attempt to express uncertain future events in the language of probability. The 2016 and 2020 elections were a bit like Super Bowls that went into overtime, which has only happened twice in the game’s six-decade history. Let’s say the next Super Bowl, in 2025 , looks like a statistical stalemate, with two 13-4 teams with the exact same point differential. Let’s further say that the Vegas bookmakers raise their hands and declare the game a “pick-’em,” meaning neither team is favored to win. Even with all this balance, it’s still very The game is unlikely to go to overtime, as so few games go to overtime. It’s the same thing with this election. We still face a normal polling error: Trump or Harris winning the seven closest swing states, which would be a decisive victory.

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We don’t know how to predict future events in any language outside of probability, and it’s difficult to make peace with a world of probability. If you flip a coin 10 times, the median outcome is five heads and five tails. But you shouldn’t expect 10 tosses to result in five heads, because that outcome has less than a 25 percent chance of happening. You are actually three times more likely to get a number of heads other than five. So don’t get too invested in any particular electoral map. Your very specific prediction is very unlikely to come true, and that includes an election decided by 80,000 votes.

2. Ignore exit polls.

Exit polls are exciting because they provide a piece of data on a very anxious evening when the public and news organizations are hungry to know what will happen in the next four hours or four days . But there’s nothing particularly special about an exit poll. In many ways, it’s just another poll, but with a larger – and perhaps misleading – sample. Exit polls may actually be less useful than other public opinion polls, Wasserman said, because the majority of voters have now cast their ballots before Election Day.

If you watch a TV news show that makes a big deal about exit polls, maybe it has more to do with the need to fill time before you get the actual election results. Rather, if you want to get an early idea of ​​how things will play out on election night, the best thing to do is to focus on the county-level results that report the full vote count. This means you should also avoid being overconfident about incomplete election results.

3. For early indicator counties, watch Nash, Cobb, Baldwin and Saginaw.

By the end of the night, we will likely have almost complete results from counties in Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan. Here are a few to watch out for:

Nash County, North Carolina

If you’re looking for a coin toss county in a coin toss election, it’s hard to find one better than Nash, just outside of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. According to Wasserman, the county has been elected by fewer than 1,000 votes in every presidential race since 2004. In 2016, of about 47,000 votes counted, Trump won by fewer than 100 votes. In 2020, out of approximately 52,000 votes counted, Joe Biden won by less than 200 votes. If Harris keeps Nash in the Democratic column, that would suggest she can battle Trump to a tie in poorer areas while still racking up votes in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.

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Cobb County, Georgia

The Atlanta metro area accounts for the bulk of the vote in Georgia, and Cobb County is full of highly educated suburban residents who have shifted to the left during the Trump years. In 2012, Mitt Romney won Cobb by more than 12 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won the county by 14 points. For Harris to win the election, she will need double-digit margins in highly educated counties like Cobb in other swing states.

Baldwin County, Georgia

Although most eyes are on Fulton County in Atlanta, Wasserman told me he will also look at smaller and mid-sized Georgia counties, such as Baldwin County. Just outside Macon in the middle of the state, Baldwin County is about 40 percent black, and as a college town, it has a lot of young people. In 2016, Baldwin voted for Hillary Clinton by 1.7 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won it by 1.3 points. If Trump breaks through in Baldwin, Wasserman said, “that would be a sign that Harris may be underperforming both in turnout and vote preference among young black voters and young voters” across the country. .

Saginaw County, Michigan

How will we know if polls have once again underestimated support for Trump among white men without college degrees? Looking at working-class counties like Saginaw, where Democrats won cycle after cycle before 2016. No Republican presidential candidate had won a plurality of votes in Saginaw since 1984, until Trump won the county by a little more than a percentage point against Clinton, only for Biden to move Saginaw back into the Democratic column by just 0.3 percentage points in 2020. “This is a place where organized labor has propelled Democrats to victory for many years,” Wasserman said. “If Trump wins Saginaw by five points, it will be very difficult for Harris to overcome that.”