Want to Know Who’s Winning the Midterms As Soon As Humanly Possible? Here’s Your Guide.

The Slatest You can spend hours doomscrolling and ruin your day. Or you can actually get the information you need. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Adobe Stock, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, and Evan Vucci/Pool/Getty Images. This story is adapted from the Slatest newsletter. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every day. Election Day is going to be lousy with speculation from campaigns, pundits, and analysts purporting to have advance insight into the outcome of the midterms. Some of them will cite early-voting data, others wait times at polling locations, bad weather, or exit polls. I can’t stop you from eating up the speculation on your feeds, but I can’t recommend it either. It’s a good way to put yourself on an emotional roller coaster and a bad way to learn anything definitive about what’s coming tonight. The truth is that we won’t really know much until tabulated returns start trickling in. Instead, it’s a great day to catch up on how we got to this moment, what this election means, and what’s at stake. As my colleague Jim Newell explains in a piece you actually should read this morning, Donald Trump’s deep unpopularity has buoyed Democratic hopes of retaking Congress, with the president’s legislative agenda, judicial nominees, and final years in office on the line. Or you could check out my colleague Susan Matthews’ take on how inequality—more than just (un)affordability—has become the substrate of the campaign. (We’ve compiled some more of Slate’s best election coverage here.) Soon enough, the results will be in, and there’ll be something useful to watch. As you wait, here’s the big picture: Democrats need to net a handful of seats to take over the House, and they almost certainly will. The marquee matchups are in the Senate, where Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take control of Congress’ upper chamber. Here’s what to watch as the polls close in key states. 7 p.m. ET: Results incoming! Among the earliest competitive states where we’ll get real, live, counted votes is Georgia, where Democrats are defending Sen. Jon Ossoff’s seat and hoping to flip the governor’s mansion. South Carolina, another state where polls close early, has a Senate election that has become surprisingly close. Further north, the results in Virginia’s swingy 1st and 2nd congressional districts will offer early tea leaves about the battle for the House. (One proviso: This is when the polls close and when we start getting results. In all of these elections, it could be hours or even days after the polls’ closing times when a winner is called.) 7:30 p.m.: On to North Carolina and Ohio. Democrats are favored in both Senate races, which they probably need to win to flip the chamber. If they lose either one, it’s a sign that the polling on which Democrats have pinned their hopes may have been seriously off. (Ohio also has a competitive governor’s race that has been roiled by an ugly Republican campaign ad featuring the Democratic nominee’s estranged mother.) 8 p.m.: More Senate results! The slugfest between Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Graham Platner Troy Jackson, her Democratic challenger, will finally come to an end. Will it be the end of Collins’ career, too? In neighboring New Hampshire, we’ll find out whether Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas’ disciplined yet boring campaign can keep a Granite State Senate seat in Democratic hands—and make Pappas the first openly gay man in the Senate. Then there’s Florida. Democrats seem likely to fall short in the Senate and governor races here. But Florida counts votes quickly, which could give a fuller snapshot of how voters (particularly Latinos) have shifted since 2024. A word of warning, though: Florida’s shifts don’t always reflect other states’, as was the case in 2020 and 2022. In the House, pay attention to results from Pennsylvania’s competitive 1st, 7th, 8th, and 10th districts. Maine’s red-leaning 2nd District, where a progressive beat a moderate in the Democratic primary, will test whether lefty candidates can compete on Republican-friendly turf. Florida is also a state where GOP gerrymanders are threatening to backfire, making it an early indicator of whether Trump’s push to redraw House districts to help his party will work as intended. 9 p.m.: This is a big one. We’ll be getting results in a few more key Senate contests, including Michigan’s (which has lately been making not-great-for-Democrats headlines) and Texas’. Democrats also need to defend an open seat in Minnesota, which has become an unlikely nail-biter. If tonight instead becomes a blue tsunami, Democrats could also flip Iowa, Kansas, or even Nebraska. On the House side, Democrats are aiming to flip about a dozen swing seats across Arizona, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. Texas has a few newly redistricted seats Democrats could win, too. We’ll also start getting results in some big governors’ races, including in the presidential swing states of Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Democrats have a shot to flip Iowa’s governorship blue for the first time in more than a decade and keep Kansas’ governor’s mansion in their column as well. 10 p.m.: There’s not a ton of excitement here in terms of Senate races: In Montana, an independent and a Democrat are both running against Republican Kurt Alme. Alme is the favorite, particularly because the Democrat—who is an extreme long shot—is likely to siphon votes from the better-positioned independent candidate. If the independent wins anyway, it’ll almost certainly be a part of a disastrous night for the GOP. Elsewhere, in Nevada, Democrats are angling not just for a Republican-held House seat but also the governor’s mansion, where a blue wave could swamp Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo. 11 p.m.: Bad news for East Coasters: California is notoriously slow to count votes, and if the race for the House ends up closer than expected, we could be waiting days to learn whether Democrats managed to flip two swing seats there. California is also ground zero for Trump’s efforts to put his thumb on the scale. Despite a series of adverse legal decisions, the president kept trying to force the state to set aside 20,000 ballots the administration (dubiously) claims went to illegally registered voters. On Monday, Trump unsuccessfully appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Midnight and 1 a.m.: The last polls in Alaska close at 1 a.m. The enormous state stretches into the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone, making it a full five hours behind the East Coast. But the bulk of the state is in the aptly named Alaska Time Zone, which is four hours behind. That means that while the last polls close at 1 a.m., most of the polls close at midnight. That info could come in handy because the state is home to a Senate race that could be pivotal. The contest was upended last week by revelations that allies of former Rep. Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee, helped recruit a spoiler candidate with the same name as the Republican incumbent, Sen. Dan Sullivan. What Peltola’s allies did is a dramatic but hardly unique dirty political trick. But the GOP, crying foul, is preemptively meddling with the results. A federal judge tossed a Trump lawsuit that would have stopped Alaska from certifying a narrow Peltola victory, but the president is calling for her to be prosecuted. Even if that gambit fails, though, some congressional Republicans are threatening to try to block her from taking her seat if she wins. And even if that fails, it could still be a while before we know the actual victor. Alaska has ranked choice voting, which reallocates support to voters’ second, third, and potentially fourth choices if no candidate wins a majority in the first round. If that happens, it will take election officials at least two more weeks to declare a winner. So if control of the Senate ends up hinging on Alaska, settle in for a long wait. Here’s one other thing you can do while you await results: Play this quiz I wrote about the many baffling headlines Trump’s antics have generated in just the past few weeks. Can you tell the real stories from the fake ones?