Election night is upon us, with all its gnawing anxiety, its cortisol-induced anxiety and, for about half the country, the possibility of ecstatic relief after another surreal presidential campaign.

It may take days or even weeks to receive results. But the situation of the race could also reveal itself surprisingly quickly. Polls will close in the battleground state of Georgia this evening at 7 p.m. Eastern Time. At 7:30 p.m., polls close in North Carolina, another crucial contest. Both swing states are known for counting ballots quickly because state law allows them to count votes early and mail them in before Election Day.

Read: Election anxiety tells you something

So when will we know the results, how can we meaningfully extrapolate early returns and, perhaps most importantly, what information and analysis should we ignore? David Wasserman, a political analyst at the Cook Political Report, joined my podcast. Simple Englishto explain how to follow the election results like a pro – without falling for false hope or conspiracy theories. Here are three tips for watching election night without losing your mind.

1. This may sound strange, but that's not the case expect This election may be as close as 2016 or 2020.

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

Yes, yes and yes. “This is the closest polling election I have watched in my 17 years, but that doesn’t mean it will produce the closest result,” Wasserman told me. The 2016 and 2020 elections were absurdly close contests, both decided by about 78,000 votes. But he said: “Even elections as balanced as 2024 are unlikely to depend on 80,000 votes spread across a handful of states.” Close polls do not predict historically close elections.

To understand what Wasserman means, a sports analogy might be helpful. Both sports betting and political polls attempt 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 has only happened 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 exactly the same point difference. Let's also assume that the sportsbooks in Las Vegas raise their hands and declare the game a pick-'em, meaning neither team is favored to win. Despite all this balance, it's still that way very The game is unlikely to go into overtime as so few games ever go into overtime. It's the same with this election. We're still a normal polling error if either Trump or Harris won the seven closest swing states, which would be a decisive victory.

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We don't know how to predict future events in any language outside of probabilities, and it is difficult to make peace with a world full of probabilities. If you flip a coin ten times, the average result is five heads and five tails. But you shouldn't expect 10 tosses to yield five heads, as the chance of that result occurring is less than 25 percent. You actually are three times He is more likely to get a number of heads other than five. So don't invest too much in a particular voting map. Your very specific prediction is very unlikely to come true, and that includes an election decided by 80,000 votes.

2. Ignore the exit polls.

Exit polls are exciting because they provide some data on a very tense evening when viewers and news organizations are desperate to know what will happen in the next four hours or four days. But an exit poll is nothing special. In many ways, it's just another survey, albeit with a larger – and potentially misleading – sample. Election polls may actually be less useful than other opinion polls, Wasserman said, because the majority of voters have now cast their votes before Election Day.

If you watch a newscast where election polls play a large role, it may be more due to the need to fill time before we get actual election results. If you'd rather get an early sense of how things are shaping up on election night, your best bet is to focus on the county-level results, which provide the full vote count. That said, you should also avoid becoming too self-conscious about incomplete election results.

3. The oldest counties are Nash, Cobb, Baldwin and Saginaw.

By the end of the night we will likely have almost complete results from counties in Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan. Here are some to check out:

Nash County, North Carolina

If you're looking for a voting district in a coin election, you'd be hard-pressed to find one better than Nash, just outside of North Carolina's Research Triangle. According to Wasserman, the county has been decided by fewer than 1,000 votes in every presidential contest since 2004. In 2016, Trump won by less than 100 votes with about 47,000 votes counted. In 2020, Joe Biden won by less than 200 votes with around 52,000 votes counted. If Harris keeps Nash in the Democratic column, it would suggest she can fight for a tie with Trump in poorer areas while picking up votes in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.

Listen: It could all come down to North Carolina

Cobb County, Georgia

Metro Atlanta accounts for the majority of Georgia's vote, and Cobb County is full of highly educated suburbanites who have moved left in the Trump years. In 2012, Mitt Romney won Cobb by more than 12 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won the county by 14 points. For Harris to win the election, she needs double-digit margins in high-education counties like Cobb and other swing states.

Baldwin County, Georgia

Although most eyes will be on Fulton County in Atlanta, Wasserman told me he will also be looking at smaller and medium-sized Georgia counties like Baldwin County. Just outside Macon, in the middle of the state, Baldwin County is about 40 percent black, and because it is a college town, many young people live there. In 2016, Baldwin voted for Hillary Clinton by 1.7 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won by 1.3 points. If Trump breaks through Baldwin, Wasserman said, “it would be a sign that Harris may be underperforming in both turnout and voter preference among younger black voters and young voters” across the country.

Saginaw County, MI

How do we know if the polls have again underestimated Trump's support among white men without a college degree? Consider blue-collar counties like Saginaw, where Democrats won cycle after cycle before 2016. No Republican presidential candidate had won a majority of the vote in Saginaw since 1984 until Trump won the district by just over a percentage point over Clinton, only Biden will push Saginaw back into the Democratic column by just 0.3 percentage points in 2020. “This is a place where organized labor has helped Democrats win for many years,” Wasserman said. “If Trump wins Saginaw by five points, it will be very difficult for Harris to overcome that.”