The FLIPR 🐬 guide to Election Night

Politics

The FLIPR 🐬 guide to Election Night

When the polls close, how quickly the votes will be counted, and what FLIPR projects in the most important races of 2026.

Eli McKown-Dawson

and

Nate Silver

Nov 03, 2026

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Early this morning — or late last night, depending on your definition — we

ran our final FLIPR update of the 2026 election cycle

. Nate also published an in-depth Model Talk on the

state of the race

. I’d encourage you to read the piece in full, but here’s the topline takeaway from FLIPR:

Our forecasts show good numbers for Democrats — the last round of polling

resolved any doubt about that

. They are reasonably clear favorites to flip the Senate, and very likely to flip the House. The Senate is by no means certain, but at the same time, the bottom could fall out for Republicans if Democrats meet or exceed their forecasts on a race-by-race basis.

Now that the forecast is frozen and

FLIPR 🐬 has returned to the depths of the East River

, Election Day itself can feel low-key at Silver Bulletin HQ. This will be the first day in many months where we don’t have to think about updating the model. But our reprieve is a brief one, because tonight starting at 6:00 PM Eastern, we’ll have actual election results to

obsess over

carefully analyze. So beforehand, we’re bringing you a quick guide on what to watch as the polls close, hour-by-hour,

according to FLIPR

.

We know there are plenty of other election guides out there, but this is the only one with special FLIPR content. For races for Congress, we’ll show you our hour-by-hour projections in every race that FLIPR rates as between “Lean D” and “Lean R”

or

that has at least a 1 percent chance of being the tipping-point race for chamber control. For gubernatorial races, we don’t calculate a tipping-point percentage, so we’ll also show you “Likely R” and “Likely D” races. Note that these are based entirely on our

pre-election forecasts of this morning

. We’re not trying to run an Election Night model, but we hope this will be useful for helping to detect which candidates are over- or underperforming.

5:30 PM

No poll closings here, but our

Election Night livestream

will begin! We’ll be breaking down the results in real time with The Argument, GD Politics, Slow Boring, and a bunch of other excellent guests. The stream is open to everyone, but

paid subscribers

will also get access to our live blog

. The blog will include our more detailed analyses — and perhaps some of Nate’s hot takes. We’ll also be answering subscriber questions. Once we launch, you’ll be able to find the video and blog at:

https://www.natesilver.net/liveblog

Nate and I will be writing on the live blog all night, in addition to popping in and out of the stream. We hope to see you there!

6:00 PM

Most, but not all

, polling places in Indiana and Kentucky close at 6:00 p.m. Both states are solidly red, and only have one statewide contest FLIPR forecasts — the Kentucky Senate race to replace Mitch McConnell — between them.

Republicans are almost certain

to win that election.

However, there’s one highly competitive House race in this group: Kentucky 6. It’s an open seat (its current holder Andy Barr is running in the aforementioned Senate contest) that

voted for Trump by 15 points in 2024

. But FLIPR has the race as a pure toss-up, and its projected D +0.1 margin makes it the

closest House race in our Deluxe forecast

. Kentucky tends to count results quickly, so we shouldn’t have to wait too long to know which way this potential bellwether breaks.

7:00 PM

Note: polls in most of Florida will close at 7, but not in the Panhandle, which is on Central Time. There will likely be a fair amount of speculation and tea-leaf-reading about it, but you can find Florida’s statewide races in our 8 p.m. block.

Still, things really start to pick up at 7. We’ll start to get results from Georgia, and while the Senate race is close to a foregone conclusion, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms is running in one of the most competitive gubernatorial contests in the country, and her

performance could have serious implications for Jon Ossoff’s 2028 aspirations

. Luckily,

Georgia is required to report early and mail votes by 8

and most of the Election Day votes should come in not too long after.

There’s also South Carolina, where Democrats have an

outside shot at Lindsey Graham’s former Senate seat

. A win there would likely indicate a

mega blue tsunami

. And in Vermont, incumbent Republican governor Phil Scott will try to beat back the blue wave, despite a

slight deficit in the polls

. Luckily for us, both states are expected to have nearly all of their results in by midnight.

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