Like a horror movie villain, the “red mirage” is back for a sequel.
Four years ago, Donald Trump used the fact that Republican-leaning ballots cast in person on Election Day were counted quicker than Democratic-leaning mail ballots to prematurely declare victory, setting off a sequence of events that led to the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In the key state of Pennsylvania, that underlying dynamic — which led to the “red mirage” of a Trump win on election night giving way to a “blue shift” as Democratic votes were counted — is still in place.
Due to opposition from Republican state lawmakers, Pennsylvania has not updated its laws to allow for faster counting of mail-in ballots. With Trump and Kamala Harris tied in the polls in the battleground state, that means it could take awhile for the winner to be known, adding to the uncertainty. A number of election models point to Pennsylvania as the state most likely to decide the presidential race.
From a legal standpoint, there’s nothing wrong with this. A ballot counted right after polls close is worth exactly the same as a ballot counted the next morning, and election administrators would rather get the vote total right than get it faster.
But the delay could give Trump an opening to argue to his supporters that the election is being stolen, as he did in 2020.
Pennsylvania bars officials from opening and processing mail ballots before Election Day. In other states, the laborious process of checking signatures, removing ballots from envelopes and stacking them to be counted can be started in the days prior, allowing the votes to be counted almost as fast as — or even faster than — ballots cast on Election Day itself.
In the past, that wasn’t a big concern because voters from both parties were equally likely — or unlikely — to vote by mail.
But Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting in 2020 have had a lasting effect, leading Democrats to be much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans. The GOP has made a big push to convince its voters to “swamp the vote” by casting a ballot early this year, with intermittent support from Trump, but that appears to have had mixed results so far.
Data from the University of Florida Election Lab’s early voting tracker for the 25 states that report early voters’ party registration showed that, as of late last week, about 39% of total votes had been from Democrats, 36% from Republicans and 25% from independents and third parties. What’s more, results from the six states that also report early voters by gender — Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia — showed that about 54% of the votes were from women, 44% men and 2% unknown.
Given the gender gap in Harris’ favor, that could mean the early vote is even more heavily in her favor. The “red mirage” phenomenon was detailed in a 2020 study by the data firm Hawkfish, which is funded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and has done work for the Democratic National Committee. Trump, who has claimed that his losses in everything from the Emmys to the 2016 Iowa caucuses to the national popular vote were only due to fraud, has again made baseless claims about the 2024 election. He recently posted on Truth Social that “[r]eally bad ‘stuff’” with elections was going on in Pennsylvania and claimed without evidence that “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery” took place in the 2020 election. Harris told NBC News that her campaign is prepared for the possibility that Trump may prematurely declare victory. “We will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that as well,” she said.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
