Everyone’s an Idiot on Election Night. Don’t Be One of Them.

Don’t you want to know what’s going to happen this election cycle, just a little bit early? After all the speculating and punditry and ads blanketing the airwaves, wouldn’t it be nice to have a crystal ball right about now?

That’s the promise of a set of dedicated political hobbyists, largely on X (formerly Twitter), who are already spending the day and will assuredly spend the evening insisting that they can predict the outcome from the smallest slice of information.

Take it from a political reporter: We all want to know everything as soon as possible. And social media can be a useful tool for identifying trends before they pop up on network television. But there’s also a steady firehose of crap coming largely from political hobbyists — and some trolls who just want to stir things up.

The desperate quest to be first can lead to the rapid spread of misinformation. So here are a few red flags to avoid on social media.

‘BREAKING: It’s already over’

If you’ve been on Twitter for any election cycle, you’ve seen it: someone going viral for predicting an important race with about 2 percent of the vote in. Sometimes, they’re completely batty — they see a lead for a Republican in New York because a rural county is coming in first and assume that will continue across the state, conveniently forgetting a blue stronghold called New York City. Sometimes, it’s a little more data-driven — a political hobbyist sees a bellwether county trending in a surprising direction and rushes to call a swing state before anyone else.

Either way, and even if these people sometimes end up being right, it’s a terrible process that leads to widespread freakouts. (Here at POLITICO, we’ll call a state once either the AP calls it or three networks do.)

The same dynamic exists with exit polling as well. Notoriously unreliable exit polls begin to trickle out in the afternoon, before poll places close. This can lead some enterprising politics nerds to extrapolate wildly, insisting that exit polls about Americans’ views of the economy, for example, are ironclad evidence of an outcome.

‘The vibes are strong’

You’ll hear this one from both camps. Most people already know to ignore it, but vibes-based posting is still a vast universe online. It includes everything from information about how many yard signs are in a neighborhood to how many doors each side insists they’ve knocked to discussions of interactions with swing voters — real and imagined — and how all anyone is seeing is information that magically spells victory for one candidate.

Echo chambers in real life and social media algorithms make it increasingly likely that most people are presented with information that backs up their prior assumptions about the state of the race. Ignore the yard signs, and in particular ignore the posts about the yard signs.

‘According to my sources’

Someone knows someone who knows someone who saw voter fraud in Dane County, or heard that Trump is throwing fast food across the room in anger at his aides, or insists that the Harris campaign has canceled their order of victory balloons.

Here’s a hint — these are almost always lies. When a social media post begins with something like “I’m hearing” or “The campaign is feeling good about,” that’s usually a pretty good sign to close that browser tab, unless this is coming from a well-sourced reporter directly embedded with a campaign. This is a classic example of people bloviating, insisting they know an outcome based on inside information when in fact they’re just predicting like the rest of us. Whoever wins, someone with some of this “inside info” will surely be taking a victory lap, basking in the glow of being correct about the outcome. But their supposed “sources” will remain made up.

‘We’ve already won’

Take a look at these two posts, a week apart from one another: On October 26, a conservative columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal named Victor Joecks posted on X that “Republicans could win the Nevada Senate seat and every Congressional race. That’s how catastrophic NV’s early voting numbers are for Democrats. Is there time for Ds to close the gap? Sure. But not much.” A week later, a liberal commentator who goes by Swann Marcus on X posted, “So I’m like 99% sure Harris is winning Nevada and it isn’t even going to be close,” including a screenshot of the daily Clark County in-person early vote numbers.

In between those two posts, Democrats did close some of the early vote gap. But the confidence with which each side projects that the early vote has sealed victory for them is obviously misplaced. This same dynamic exists in every swing state with early vote totals and will also exist as we get small slices of election day votes, as referenced above.

‘We learned this last time’

Near the beginning of Election Night in 2020, Democratic partisans started to freak out. Florida, which they thought could be in play, was trending red, with broad swaths of the state looking even more red than they did in 2016. Election betting markets started spiking for Trump, reflecting the idea that the polling miss was once again huge, and that Trump could pull it off. The polling miss was in fact large in Florida, but that didn’t mean that it was enough to sink Biden elsewhere. Every state has different dynamics; the rightward shift in Florida happened largely due to Latinos in the state moving toward Trump.

That wasn’t reflected elsewhere in the country — it wasn’t even true just north of the Sunshine State, where Biden pulled off his biggest upset of the cycle in capturing Georgia. But because of how quickly states count their vote and how they report, there are always overreactions based on what goes first.

‘STOP THE COUNT’

Finally, there’s the most potentially dangerous type of online nonsense — misinformation or misleading info that spreads from the campaigns or from candidates themselves. The most insidious version of this is insisting, based on no credible evidence, that the vote has been rigged or that the other side is somehow cheating. Trump’s rhetoric on this front led directly to Jan. 6, and his continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen has convinced a growing number of Republicans that there will be election malfeasance in 2024.

Campaigns can be misleading in all kinds of other ways, too — like cherrypicking information that fits with their narrative about where the race is headed. The last few election cycles have taught most people in the country an important lesson: Don’t count your chickens. But the people who didn’t manage to internalize that still lurk on X, spinning false or misleading information and trying to drag the rest of us back down with them.

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