Trump and Harris are neck and neck in the battleground state where we spoke to voters on the ground.

Election Night is upon us, with all of its finger-gnawing anxiety, its cortisol-driven fear, and, for roughly half the country, the possibility of ecstatic relief after another surreal presidential campaign.

Results could take days, even weeks, to shake out. But the state of the race could also reveal itself surprisingly quickly. At 7 p.m. eastern time tonight, polls will close in the battleground state of Georgia. At 7:30 p.m., polls will close in North Carolina, another crucial toss-up. Both swing states are known for counting their ballots quickly, due to state laws that allow them to tally early and mail-in votes before Election Day.

[Read: Election anxiety is telling you something]

So when will we know the results, how can we sensibly extrapolate the early returns, and—perhaps most important—what information and analysis should we ignore? David Wasserman, a political analyst with the Cook Political Report, joined my podcast, Plain English, to explain how to watch the election returns like a pro—without falling for false hope or conspiracy theories. Here are three tips for following Election Night without losing your mind.

1. This might sound weird, but don’t expect this election to be as close as 2016 or 2020.

Wait, what? Aren’t Kamala Harris and Donald Trump essentially tied in national and swing-state polling averages? Didn’t Nate Silver put the odds that Harris will win this election at an exquisitely decimaled number between 50.00 and 50.99 percent? Isn’t there a nonzero chance that both candidates win 269 electoral votes?

Yes, yes, and yes. “This is the closest election in polling that I’ve covered in my 17 years, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to produce the closest result,” Wasserman told me. The 2016 and 2020 elections were absurdly close contests, both of them decided by about 78,000 votes. But, he said, “even elections as balanced as 2024 aren’t likely to hinge on 80,000 votes distributed across a handful of states.” Close polling does not predict historically close elections.

To understand what Wasserman means, perhaps a sports analogy is useful. Both sports betting and political polling try to express uncertain future events in the language of probabilities. The 2016 and 2020 elections were a bit like Super Bowls that went into overtime—something that’s happened only twice in the game’s six-decade history. Let’s say the next Super Bowl, in 2025, looks like a statistical dead heat, with two 13–4 teams with the exact same point differential. Let’s furthermore say that Vegas sportsbooks throw up their hands and declare the game a “pick-’em,” meaning neither team is favored to win. Even with all of this balance, it’s still very unlikely that the game will go to overtime, because so few games ever go to overtime. It’s the same with this election. We are still a normal polling error from either Trump or Harris winning the seven closest swing states, which would be a decisive victory.

[Brian Klaas: The truth about polling]

We don’t know how to forecast future events in any language outside of probabilities, and it’s hard to make peace with a world of probabilities. If you flip a coin 10 times, the median outcome is five heads and five tails. But you shouldn’t expect that 10 flips will yield five heads, because that outcome has less than a 25 percent chance of occurring. You’re 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. It’s very unlikely that your highly specific prediction will come to pass, and that includes an election decided by 80,000 votes.

2.  Ignore the exit polls.

Exit polls are exciting, because they provide a morsel of data during a highly anxious evening when audiences and news organizations are starving to know what’s going to 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 possibly misleading—sample. Exit polls might actually be less useful than other public-opinion surveys, Wasserman said, because the majority of voters now cast their ballots before Election Day.

If you’re watching a newscast that’s making a huge deal out of exit polls, it might have more to do with the need to fill time before we get actual election results. Rather, if you want to get an early sense of how things are trending on Election Night, the best thing to do is focus on county-level results that report the complete tally of votes. That means you’ll also want to avoid being overconfident about election results that are incomplete.

3. For the earliest bellwether counties, watch Nash, Cobb, Baldwin, and Saginaw.

By the end of the night, we’re likely to have nearly complete results from counties in Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan. Here are a few to watch:

Nash County, North Carolina

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

[Listen: It could all come down to North Carolina]

Cobb County, Georgia

Metro Atlanta makes up most of Georgia’s vote, and Cobb County is packed with the sort of highly educated suburban dwellers who have shifted left in the Trump years. In 2012, Mitt Romney won Cobb by more than 12 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won the country by 14 points. For Harris to win the election, she’ll need double-digit margins in highly educated counties like Cobb across other swing states.

Baldwin County, Georgia

Although most eyes will be on Atlanta’s Fulton County, Wasserman told me that he’ll also be scrutinizing smaller and midsize 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, “it would be a sign that Harris is perhaps underperforming in both turnout and vote preference among younger Black voters and young voters” across the country.

Saginaw County, Michigan

How will we know if polls yet again undercounted Trump’s support among white men without a college degree? By looking at working-class counties like Saginaw, where Democrats won cycle after cycle before 2016. No Republican presidential candidate had won the plurality of votes in Saginaw since 1984, until Trump carried the county by just over one percentage point against Clinton, only for Biden to claw Saginaw back into the Democratic column by a mere 0.3 percentage points in 2020. “This is a place where organized labor powered Democrats to victory for many years,” Wasserman said. “If Trump wins Saginaw by five points, it’s going to be very difficult for Harris to overcome that.”

Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada hold the keys to the White House.

Every four years, some liberal Americans threaten to leave the country if a Republican wins the presidency. Canada has become almost a joke—or maybe a fantasy—in certain left-leaning circles, not just a country but an escape hatch, a next life waiting if the election goes the “wrong” way. But some liberals insist that they’re not joking this time: They are very scared, and very ready to leave if Donald Trump is reelected.

I spoke with Americans from different backgrounds and communities about their plans to emigrate if Trump wins. Some are worried about their physical well-being, others about the future of same-sex marriage, and still others are distressed about the possibility of large-scale violence in the aftermath of his victory—or even his defeat. How many Americans are seriously considering leaving is unknown, but a New York Times callout to readers over the summer generated some 5,000 responses from across the political spectrum, including people who had already moved and others who were planning to. Whatever the true number, these Americans’ plans are evidence of the unusually tumultuous and threatening period the country now finds itself in. Some of them certainly will not follow through; emigrating is not easy, and many would lose benefits both hard and soft—Medicaid, jobs, friendships, familiarity—by leaving. But even so, their fear is great enough that they are seriously considering it.

I am a refugee. I came to this country from Afghanistan, in 2021. There, women have lost all basic rights, including the right to education. There is no longer freedom of speech. The economic system has collapsed. Daily life is permeated by an atmosphere of fear. Trump is a different sort of threat—an obviously lesser threat than the Taliban, I would argue. But I still empathize with would-be émigrés. I can very much understand the need to leave a place that no longer feels safe, and I believe that their concerns are genuine.

[Mira Kamdar: Why I’m glad I left America]

Pamela Reading-Smith, a Democratic activist from South Carolina, told me she believes that most Americans are underestimating what is at stake in this election. “He is going to turn this country into an authoritarian country,” she said of Trump. She fears that if he comes to power, violence will follow, and he will “crack down on the media,” including this publication. “Once we lose the media,” she said, “who are the people of the country? They are no one, because they have no knowledge of what’s going on.” If Trump wins, she plans to move to Spain, where her son and his wife live.

Many of the people I spoke with told me they fear political violence. Cynthia, also from South Carolina, said: “My perspective is that he did encourage people to take over the Capitol. If Trump were to lose, I would be concerned about far more widespread violence.” She and her husband are considering moving to the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada, starting with six-month visas. They will stay in the Pacific Northwest of the United States around election time and make their final move from there. Tony Proscio, a 70-year-old from New York, told me that a second Trump presidency is one of several reasons that he and his husband may soon move to London, where they have visited many times and have a good number of friends. “When you’re two men married to each other, it’s not hard to imagine how that could go badly for you,” Tony told me by phone during a recent trip to London to meet with realtors. He said he was very worried about whether Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision that legalized same-sex marriage, can survive a future Supreme Court, if Trump makes yet more appointments.

Margaret, 83, a Floridian who is retired from medicine, said that if Trump wins, she will be leaving the country as soon as she can. Like Pamela, she is considering Spain. “I don’t trust him. I don’t think that he knows what he’s doing,” Margaret told me. “I just find the man’s behavior, his attitude toward women, shocking.” (Both Cynthia and Margaret asked that I not use their last names, as they live in deeply conservative areas and their views are unpopular.)

Kim Lawson, 63, from Newnan, Georgia, is also considering leaving if Trump wins. “He’s a very fluid liar, and I don’t share values that he has; he is demeaning and derogatory towards people. And I don’t want to listen to it for four more years,” she said. She and a group of her single friends are looking at Spain or Mexico for their possible relocation. Lawson pointed to Project 2025 as evidence of changes Trump might make to the country. “I don’t want to be part of it,” she told me.

Of course, many people who want to or even make plans to leave won’t actually do so in the end. It is hard to move to a different country, obtain residency, and build a new life, especially for those who don’t speak the local language. And moving can be politically and morally complicated; some may decide that they want to stay and fight Trump’s policies, working toward electing Democrats in other elections. “I personally can’t imagine giving up my country unless my family were starving, [or] if we were under threat of death,” Cynthia Lowe, a Democrat from South Carolina, told me, though she said she understood why other people who were more personally threatened by Trump’s policies, such as immigrants, would be quicker to go.

Most of the people I interviewed for this story are past retirement age; they have enough financial resources to consider moving abroad. Many younger citizens may not be able to do so, and may have additional challenges—building a career as an immigrant, the difficulties of living away from family—to consider.

From my perspective as a refugee to America, there is something surprising about all of this. For those outside the U.S., it can be hard to really see its challenges, to understand the intensity with which people living here fear for their country. This is a liberal nation. But for the people I spoke with, it will no longer be a place to call home if Trump returns to power. You cannot realize what is going on in America until you start living in America.

Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove me wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student standing near me had on a hoodie that read Jesus Christ. It was late September, and several hundred of us were here to see the conservative movement’s youth whisperer. Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was in Missoula for a stop on his “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” in which he goes from college to college doing his signature shtick of debating undergraduates. He invited anyone who disagreed with him to come up one by one and take their shot, in a carnivalesque “step right up” style.

I had not traveled to Montana simply to see Kirk epically own college kids. (That’s not a hard thing to do, and in any case, I could just watch his deep catalog of debate videos.) I’d made the trip because I had the feeling that Kirk is moving toward the heart of the conservative movement. Few Republicans have as much purchase with all factions of the party. In Montana, Kirk delivered a simple message. “Now, all of you—I’m sure you’re feeling this: Things are unaffordable,” he said. “They’re out of reach. It is harder than ever to be able to have the American dream … and that is because of Kamala Harris.” Days before the Missoula event, however, Kirk had said that Haitian migrants “will become your masters” should Donald Trump lose the election, that “this election is literally about” whether Americans will be “allowed to fight back against invading armed hordes,” and that “swarms of people want to take our stuff, take women, and loot the entire nation.”

I arrived in Montana thinking that Kirk’s code-switching was part of a cynical move to expand his reach. He hosts one of the most popular news podcasts in the country, and his YouTube channel is a clout machine. But I came away realizing that Kirk is less of an influencer than an operator. While he spoke, volunteers moved around the crowd asking people if they were registered to vote. Later in the day, Kirk appeared at an event with Tim Sheehy, the GOP candidate trying to defeat Senator Jon Tester. Kirk bragged that Turning Point had registered 100 new voters that day. (A spokesperson for Turning Point USA did not respond to multiple requests for comment or an interview with Kirk.)

Kirk’s apparatus has gone from a conservative youth-outreach organization to an all-encompassing right-wing empire—one that has cultivated relationships with influential conservative faith groups, built out a powerful media arm, and hosted rallies for Trump and other top Republicans. It has allowed Kirk to wedge himself into a powerful role: He is the gatekeeper of a bridge between mainstream conservatism and its extreme fringes. Instead of merely serving as a roleplayer on the right, Kirk now leverages his influence to bend conservatism closer to his own vision. Kirk has power, and he knows it.

For a while, Kirk embraced a vanilla brand of conservatism. He founded Turning Point USA in 2012 to fortify a small but stable conservative youth movement with a focus on free markets and limited government. The group wanted to reach young people where they were, which included college campuses but also the internet. Early Turning Point memes read as though the organization had hired a Popsicle-stick-joke writer to make bland, conservative-minded witticisms. Kirk’s Twitter account featured mundane perspectives, such as “Taxes are theft” and “USA is the best country ever.”

Even as Trump began to take over the Republican Party, Kirk relentlessly extolled free-market capitalism and repeatedly praised markets as a near-panacea to America’s problems. Though personally Christian, he said that politics should be approached from a “secular worldview.” In 2018, he said that he understood that most people “don’t want to have to live the way some Christian in Alabama” wants them to. He would probably have never described himself as an LGBTQ ally, but he was also not known to go out of his way to bash trans people or speak out against the gay “lifestyle.”

This approach did not please everyone on the right. In 2019, the young white nationalist Nick Fuentes encouraged his followers, called Groypers, to show up at Turning Point events and troll Kirk for not being far enough to the right. “You have multiple times advocated on behalf of accepting homosexuality,” a man in a suit with a rosary around his hand said at one event to Kirk, who was sitting onstage next to a gay Turning Point USA contributor. “How does anal sex help us win the culture war?” Another person used the Q&A time to tell Kirk that “we don’t want centrists in the conservative movement.”

Something began to change around the end of Trump’s first term. Kirk hasn’t just followed the rest of his party to the right. He is now far more conservative than much of the mainstream GOP. Christianity in particular has become a dominant feature of Kirk’s rhetoric and Turning Point USA. Kirk’s position on religion has veered from “We do have a separation of Church and state, and we should support that” (his words to the conservative commentator Dave Rubin in 2018) to “There is no separation of Church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction” (his words on his own podcast in 2022).

In 2021, he established Turning Point Faith, a division of his organization that he has used to make significant inroads with hard-right evangelical churches and their leaders, many of whom have lent their pulpits to Kirk. He has laughed off accusations that he embraces Christian nationalism. Liberals fret about a “disturbing movement of ‘Christian nationalism,’” he said in 2022. “Do you know what that’s code for? That’s code for: You’re starting to care, and they’re getting scared.” But there aren’t a lot of other ways to describe his goal of eroding the barriers between Church and state, and Turning Point Faith’s mission of returning America to “foundational Christian values.”

Kirk has also embraced rhetoric that was previously the territory of white nationalists, making explicit reference to the “Great Replacement” theory, the conspiracy that immigration is a plot to dilute the cultural and political power of white people. Since 2022, he has posted that “Whiteness is great,” and that there is an undeniable “War on White People in The West.” On his podcast, he has accused an ambiguous “they” of “trying to replace us demographically” and “make the country less white” by using an “anti-white agenda” of immigration to enact “the Great Replacement.” Because of “them,” he’s said, “the dumping ground of the planet is the United States southern border.” Some other Republicans now dabble in Great Replacement rhetoric, but Kirk has avoided being outflanked on the right: He’s attacking Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “a huge mistake.”

Some of Kirk’s rightward shift is potentially driven by him astutely putting his fingers to the wind of what’s bubbling among the base. In Montana, the crowd was most energetic when Kirk delved into points about how immigrants and trans people are making America worse. When I went out of the crowd to stand under a tree nearby, I heard a mother talking to her small daughter. “You don’t want to go over there. There’s liberals,” she said, gesturing at the fringes of the crowd, where people were observing Kirk with dour expressions. She then parroted stuff I usually see only in the most unsavory corners of the far-right internet: “They want to kidnap you and brainwash you and probably molest you.”

Late last month, Trump came out onstage with pyrotechnics blasting in front of him and dozens of Turning Point logos behind him. Kirk and his group were hosting a rally in Duluth, Georgia, for the former president. “He’s a fantastic person, the job he does with Turning Point,” Trump said of Kirk during the rally. “I just want to congratulate and thank him. He’s working so hard.”

Kirk had spoken to the crowd of roughly 10,000 just before Trump took the stage. He used the platform to explicitly suffuse the event with a nod to Christian conservatism. “We are here in a state that is a very Christian state,” Kirk said. “A state that loves God and loves Jesus.” He led the crowd in a “Christ is King” chant.

Despite Kirk’s embrace of the far right, he has continued to gain standing in the establishment wings of the right. He sat down with J. D. Vance at a Turning Point event in September, and again on Halloween. Kirk has had public conversations with high-profile conservatives such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt. Kirk has spent much of this year campaigning for Republican politicians. He has gone to Nebraska, where he tried to get the legislature to change how the state awards Electoral College votes, and to Ohio, where Republicans are trying to win a Senate seat.

Unlike other, sycophantic portions of right-wing media, Kirk isn’t simply a hanger-on to the conservative elite. When he can, he will try to bend elected officials toward his political vision. On multiple occasions, Kirk has publicly gone after Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Last January, several months after Johnson was elected as House speaker, Kirk posted a podcast episode titled “You Deserve Better Than What the GOP Is Giving You.” Johnson, he said on the show, was “a disappointment.” A few minutes later, he added: “Speaker Johnson is trying to gaslight you. Dare I say, he’s just lying.”

In March, Johnson went on Kirk’s show to kiss the ring. Kirk approached the conversation cordially and in good faith, but he also didn’t shy away from directly criticizing the speaker. Kirk pressed Johnson on why he hadn’t shut down the government last year and dismissed the speaker’s explanation that it would have been politically damaging: “We have been hearing that excuse for 11 years.”

Kirk’s ability to dress down one of the party’s most important members is a testament to how much power he has accrued. People like Johnson sign up for this because older politicians see Millennials such as Kirk as whispers to the rest of their generation, sometimes just because they’re younger, Jiore Craig, a senior fellow at ISD Global who has researched Kirk and Turning Point USA, explained to me: “There is this nervousness that he offers something about the internet and young people that politicians don’t know.” The belief that he can turn out young people makes politicians go to Kirk even as he tries to big-dog them, Craig said. It’s not just his appeal to youth either; alienating Kirk may mean losing an avenue to faith leaders and the broader audience he has amassed. Whether Republicans like it or not (and some don’t), they have to deal with him. This is how he has the freedom to walk around noxious far-right politics and then step back into the polite mainstream with impunity.

Even at 31, clad in saggy suit pants, Kirk has the affect of an eager college conservative. He lacks Tucker Carlson’s resolute confidence and corresponding bored disdain. He lacks the poise and charisma of far-right influencers such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. But to think of Kirk as only a media figure is to miss the point.

Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, who is writing a book about Kirk and Turning Point USA, argues that Kirk’s relationships and organizations have become so robust and far-reaching that besides Trump, Kirk is the most important person in the conservative movement. “No matter who wins in November, he will be the kingmaker,” Boedy told me.

Kirk doesn’t have an outright edge in many of the fields he trades in: Carlson and others have more popular podcasts, there are more prominent figures within the conservative faith movement, and there are better-funded conservative groups. Still, almost no one else has the relative prominence and relationships he does across so many areas. “It’s like Rush Limbaugh with six other tentacles,” Boedy said.

Kirke is all but ensured to sit in an important position on the right for years to come. He is in charge of much more than helping the right win youth voters. He has a relatively prominent political-media empire that he can use to push his ideas forward—one that works in tandem with the rest of his apparatus. His years of relationship-building with faith groups cannot be replicated by would-be challengers overnight. At least for now, Kirk has convinced Republicans that his political project is divinely ordained.