What to expect on Election Day: history could be made, or we’re in for a long wait (and plenty of conspiracies)

As Americans vote in one of the most important presidential elections in generations, the country teeters on a knife edge. In the battleground states that will likely decide the result, the polling margins between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are razor thin.

These tiny margins, and the general confusion around American politics today, make it impossible to predict the outcome.

The polls might well be wrong: the electorate may have shifted dramatically since 2020 in ways that will only reveal themselves after the election. The reality is we do not know much of anything for sure, and we may never be able to untangle all of the threads that make up the knot of American politics.

After two assassination attempts on Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden’s dramatic decision to leave the race in August, it is entirely possible this election will throw up more big surprises. But as things stand, there are three broad possibilities for what will happen on Election Day.

All of them throw up their own challenges – for the United States, and for the world.

Possibility 1: the return of Trump

Trump may make history and win back the White House. Only Grover Cleveland has managed to get elected a second time as president (in 1892) after suffering a defeat four years earlier.

If Trump does win, it could be via a similar path to the one he took in 2016 – by once again sundering the “blue wall” and winning the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

This feat will likely mean his campaign tactic of mobilising men has worked.

A Trump victory would represent the culmination of a generational project of the American right. A second Trump administration would be very different from the first – the movement behind Trump is more organised, focused and cognisant of the mistakes of the first Trump White House. It would also face considerably weakened democratic guardrails.

The implementation of Trump’s radical agenda, alongside some or all of the broader far-right agenda detailed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, would radically reshape American life and create political and economic chaos.

The rest of the world would have to reorient itself, once again, around Trump.

Possibility 2: Harris makes history

It is entirely possible Harris makes history – not only by beating Trump, but by becoming the first woman and woman of colour to win the US presidency.

Like Trump, if Harris does win, it will likely be through one or more of the battleground states – in particular, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

For Harris, victory will likely come via high turnout by women and voters of colour, particularly African-Americans, or through a combination of turnout by this core Democratic base and swing voters in key states like Pennsylvania.

How Harris wins – and by how much – will be crucial, both to the immediate aftermath of the election and to the shape of a future Harris administration.

A big question: can she win by enough to head off resistance by Trump and the movement behind him? As Australian writer Don Watson has noted, a Harris victory would likely be taken as an existential defeat by the MAGA movement.

How Trump’s supporters react to such a defeat – and how US institutions react to their reaction – will be a critical test for American democracy.

Possibility 3: too close to call

This brings us to the third possibility: the polls are correct, and it’s such a tight race that the margins in the battleground states are in the thousands of votes, or even less.

If it is that close, counting could take days. And there could be recounts after that.

While conspiracies abound, a delay in the result like this would be an entirely predictable and normal outcome. In the United States, there isn’t one system for counting the votes; elections are run by the states on a county-by-county basis, and each state does it differently.

Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, legally can’t start counting mail-in votes until the polls open on Election Day.

Then there is the supposed “blue shift” or “red mirage” that sometimes occurs on election night.

There are now many ways to vote in the US – in person on Election Day, early voting before Election Day or by mail-in ballot. And the time it takes to count these different ballots can vary. So, it may appear as if one candidate is winning early in the night (say, when in-person votes are counted) only for their opponent to slowly turn the tide (when mail-in ballots are counted).

In the 2020 election, this meant early Trump (“red”) leads were gradually lost to the Biden (“blue”) votes. Researchers found that counties won by Biden counted more slowly, on average, than those won by Trump – hence the so-called “blue shift”.

This is an entirely normal – and legal – phenomenon. In Nevada, for instance, state law permits mail-in ballots to be counted four days after Election Day, so long as they were postmarked by Election Day.

Trump and his surrogates like Steve Bannon, however, have exploited the differing times it takes to count votes to peddle baseless conspiracy theories, undermining Americans’ faith in their own democracy, and to incite unrest.

By baselessly declaring victory in 2020 on the early “red mirage” tallies in key states before all the votes were counted, Trump was able to create what Bannon described as a “firestorm” – one that eventually led to the insurrection of January 6 2021.

This could very well happen again. Bannon, in fact, has just been released from prison after serving four months for contempt of Congress, and could once again be a driving force in any post-election challenges by the Trump campaign.

Trump, meanwhile, lied again this week when he said “these elections have to be, they have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night” – laying the groundwork for further election conspiracies.

Delays are normal – but fraught

Trump has made it very clear he will not accept another election loss. If he does lose, he or his surrogates will attempt to weaponise similar conspiracy theories again. They may also use legal challenges to vote counts as they did in 2020 – both to contest the result and to once again mobilise the MAGA movement.

In the event of close margins, it’s also possible some states will go to a recount.

There are different rules for this in different states. To take one example, if the margin is within 0.5% in Georgia, a candidate can request a recount.

In the 2020 presidential election, Biden narrowly defeated Trump in Georgia by 0.25%, which triggered a full hand recount of the votes. The Associated Press declared Biden the winner of the state more than two weeks after Election Day. A second recount was later reconfirmed by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Again, this is a normal part of the process. It ensures all votes are counted accurately and the result reflects the democratic will of the American people as best as the (admittedly, deeply flawed) system allows.

Such a delay, legitimate as it would be, would elevate the already very real risk of further political violence and instability in the United States.

None of these outcomes is inevitable. 2024 is not 2020; nor is it 2016. What happens next in America depends on the movement and interplay of so many tangled threads, it is impossible to see where old ones end and new ones might begin.

In all of this, only one thing is certain. Whatever the result – and however long it takes to come through – the divisions and conspiracy theories that have destabilised American politics for so long will not be easily or quickly resolved. That knot may well prove impossible to untangle.

Emma Shortis is Director of the International and Security Affairs program at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.