Presidential election results 2020

Early returns could suggest a strong night for either President Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden.  

But this year more than most, it's important to emphasize that these returns are early. And the mail-in votes, a larger portion of votes in this pandemic year, could prove decisive in each of these states. 

Election officials in some Pennsylvania counties won't even start processing mail-in ballots until Wednesday. Republican-controlled portions of the state legislature objected to changing the rules and processing the vote faster, compounding the problem.

But we’ve seen this in other races in recent years. In Florida in 2018, mail-in votes made the governor's race tighten substantially in the days after Election Day. In Arizona, another close battleground state, the 2018 Senate race saw a decisive lead change after Election Day and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, won the race.

This phenomenon, known as the "blue shift," is common in recent US elections and it's a big reason why Trump, despite election law and common decency to the contrary, has argued that whoever appears to have won on Election Night should be crowned the winner. That's not the way it works, of course. Ballots in North Carolina and Pennsylvania can arrive in the days after Election Day as long as they have a November 3 postmark.

See how all the states count ballots here.

In a call with reporters, the Trump campaign expressed confidence that Election Day turnout would boost their vote count despite a lead for Democrats among early voters, with campaign manager Bill Stepien pointing to Florida as an auspicious sign for the campaign. 

“We, very much are of, we don’t agree with the Biden campaign on very much, but we do agree with their assessment of the way the election, the pre-election day vote has broken down, most notably Florida at nearly a dead heat heading into election day,” Stepien told reporters.

“Where we, where we disagree with the Biden campaign is their view of what is happening on election day. They believe that election, and the makeup of voters who are voting today on Election Day, will resemble those who voted on election day in 2016. Where their theory breaks down, is that the Biden campaign cannibalized their votes, something you've heard a lot of over the course of the last week, something we've been saying and predicting quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. They simply moved those who traditionally vote on election day to vote early. Congratulations.”

The idea that Democrats are “cannibalizing” their own votes was one they hit hard, and one that they credited to their stronger ground game. “They very much were hoping to slam the door shut on Pennsylvania and Florida and Wisconsin and Arizona before elections, before Election Day even started, that simply hasn't happened,” Stepien said. “With the lack of a round game on the Biden campaign side, they left a ton of votes on the table. And we are driving turnout today, very much making up whatever advantages Democrats built up heading into Election Day.”

It looks like Maine set a record for turnout this year, Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap told CNN.

The previous turnout record was 72%. Before the polls opened on Tuesday morning, more than half of all registered voters in the state had cast mail ballots. The state will not get exact turnout totals for several days when the vote is certified, but Dunlap said everything he has seen suggest this will be a record.

“When I voted this morning in the city of Old Town the line was 50 deep, and at 7:30 in the morning that's not something I expected in the middle of a snowstorm,” said Dunlap, a Democrat. 

Despite concerns about trouble at polling places, there have been no disruptions during the day.  

“We were prepared to talk about public safety. We talked with Maine emergency management and the attorney general's office about how to deal with possible disruptions at the polling stations,” Dunlap said. “We just haven't seen it. And that's because we're a small town. And people know each other and they take care of each other and we don't see some of the threats to election disruption of election disruption that you've heard about in other states.”

Voters who back Joe Biden are much more likely to view US efforts to contain the coronavirus negatively, with around 4 in 5 saying it’s going badly, compared to around 1 in 5 who say it’s going well. 

Slightly less than 9 in 10 of Trump backers, however, say the efforts to contain the virus are going well.  

Around 5 in 6 Biden voters say wearing a face mask is more of a public health responsibility, while Trump voters are split, with around half who say it’s a public health responsibility and half who say it’s a personal choice. 

About this year's exit polls: To account for the large share of early in-person voters in critical states such as North Carolina, Florida and Texas, Edison Research has spent the past month conducting the same type of in-person interviewing that it does on Election Day at a random selection of early voting locations around eight states.  

Read more about exit polls during a pandemic here

In Outagamie County, Wisconsin, poll workers are working today to transfer votes from around 13,500 misprinted absentee ballots to clean ballots that won’t jam the electronic tabulating machine, the county clerk told CNN. 

Outagamie is a county in the central part of the state that includes the city of Appleton. 

The Outagamie County Clerk Lori O’Bright told CNN 20 National Guardsmen are on site to assist with the ballot transferring or do whatever else needs to be done. 

O’Bright said there is no way to know the exact number of how many ballots were affected. She added the best guess is 13,500 based on information from the printers and 101 different reporting units. 

Some background: Last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to take a case that would tell Outagamie County how to deal with the misprinted ballots. The county had to abide by state law, which doesn’t allow clerks to make any changes to ballots, so the only option is to transfer the data from misprinted ballots to clean ones that can be read by the machines.

In Wisconsin, ballots could not be processed until the polls opened at 7 a.m. local time on Election Day, so poll workers were not able to get a head start on this. 

In a release from the Outagamie County clerk’s office after the state Supreme Court denied the petition, the clerk advised that the duplication process will take time and that “it takes approximately four minutes to duplicate a ballot.”

President Donald Trump is watching returns from the East Wing of the White House tonight with his senior staffers and family members by his side, according to the White House communications director.

But Trump’s aides are offering mixed messages on what they expect. Though press secretary Kayleigh McEnany maintained this morning that she's not worried about litigating the outcome because she's confident it will be a "landslide," Alyssa Farah said the White House is expecting some delays in results – “especially in Pennsylvania" – and criticized mail-in voting. 

Farah suggested Trump will make a public appearance in some form from the White House tonight regardless of what happens.  

“I don’t want to get ahead of anything, but I think you might end up hearing from him tonight."

Both sides are seeing tremendous Election Day turnout in key battleground states. That, of course, cuts both ways, considering more Republicans have said they preferred to vote today.

At this hour, the Biden campaign is urgently working to get more people to the polls in several places – Florida chief among them, including in the Miami-Dade area, Jacksonville and the Tampa/St. Petersburg area.

Those are the parts of the state where a surge in turnout after 5 p.m., when more Democrats have historically voted, could provide a much-needed boost for them in Florida.

The Biden campaign does not need Florida to win, but it would make for a smoother evening ahead.

A Biden adviser believes the Southern battlegrounds – Florida, North Carolina and Georgia – present the biggest challenges tonight. They feel much better about the so-called blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Exit polling traditionally involves interviews with a randomly selected sample of voters conducted as those voters leave their polling places. Unlike pre-election polling, where voters can only be identified using screening questions or a history of voting on a voter file, meeting voters where they are ensures that those included in the survey have actually cast their ballots.

To make the 2020 survey more representative, Edison Research has made modifications to the methodology it uses to carry out the exit poll for the National Election Pool, a news consortium made up of CNN, ABC News, CBS News and NBC News.

This year's exit poll will still include in-person interviews with voters who cast their ballots on Tuesday. To make sure that both interviewers and voters are safe, interviews will be contactless. Voters will pick up paper questionnaires and single-use pencils from a table rather than taking them directly from the interviewer, and disinfecting wipes and hand sanitizer will be available for use by both voters and the interviewers manning the table. Interviewers will be masked, and have been instructed to remain at least 6 feet away the voters they ask to participate.

Those interviews are only one piece of the puzzle this year. The share of voters who cast their ballots before Election Day has been growing for two decades, and will rapidly accelerate in this year's election. In 2000, absentee and early voting represented about 16% of the total votes cast. In 2016, that figure was over 40%; this year, it is expected to top 60%.

To account for the large share of early in-person voters in critical states such as North Carolina, Florida and Texas, Edison Research has spent the past month conducting the same type of in-person interviewing that it does on Election Day at a random selection of early voting locations around eight states. The consortium first used this procedure to capture the opinions and vote choices of early voters in 2018 in Nevada and Tennessee. Those voters are answering the same questions that voters will be asked on Election Day.

To account for the large number of by-mail voters, as well as early voters in states where in-person early voter interviewing is not possible, the exit polls will also include the results of telephone polls targeted at these voters. Edison Research has conducted such polling for use in exit polls in states with significant shares of absentee and early voters since 2004.

This year, in every state where exit poll results are available on election night, the results of a telephone poll of early and by-mail voters will be incorporated into the results. These voters are also being asked the same questions that will be asked on Election Day.

When all of these pieces are combined, the exit poll results presented on election night will reflect a complete picture of voters all across the country.

While the economy is strongly positioned as the most important issue for a plurality of 2020 voters, voters are split as to whether the economy is good or poor, according to early exit polls. 

Around half of voters say it is good, while around half say it’s poor.

Around 2 in 5 say they’re better off than they were four years ago; 1 in 5 think they’re worse off, and another 2 in 5 say they’re about the same.

More than half of voters say the coronavirus pandemic has caused them financial hardship.

About this year's exit polls: To account for the large share of early in-person voters in critical states such as North Carolina, Florida and Texas, Edison Research has spent the past month conducting the same type of in-person interviewing that it does on Election Day at a random selection of early voting locations around eight states.  

Read more about exit polls during a pandemic here.

CNN’s David Chalian breaks down the exit polls: