Between now and Friday you will hear the phrase “too close to call” more often than the names of the candidates. It will be said by people standing in front of enormous glowing maps, in suits that cost more than a used car, in the voice normally reserved for announcing a royal birth.
Here is what it means, and what everything around it means, translated. My notes are in bold, because nobody else is taking any.
“Too close to call”
The news organisations that project winners do not yet think they can safely say who has won. The gap between the candidates is small, and the votes still to be counted could change the result. So they wait, live, on air, for hours, with graphics.
It is the only completely honest sentence anyone says all night. It means “we don’t know”. It is just delivered with the confidence of a man who has never once not known.
“Too early to call”
Different phrase, different shrug. “Too early to call” means not enough votes have been counted to judge anything at all. A race can be too early to call at 8pm and a landslide by 10pm.
Too early means the match hasn’t started. Too close means it’s level at full time and nobody has found the rulebook for extra time. Either way, there is an advert break first.
“We can now project”
A network’s decision desk has looked at the votes counted, where they came from and what is still outstanding, and decided the result will not change. It is a projection, not an official result. The official result is certified later by each state, quietly, with no music.
A projection is a forecast made by a company that sells advertising. It is usually right. It is also, conveniently, always made just before the next segment.
“Razor-thin”
A very small margin. Usually followed within ninety seconds by the word “recount”, which some states require automatically when the gap is narrow enough.
Razor-thin is how television says “close” when it wants you to stay up.
“Bellwether”
A county or state that tends to vote the same way as the overall result. Pundits love bellwethers because they allow a man to point at one small place on a map and explain an entire country.
Somewhere, 40,000 people in one county are being told they are the soul of America. They just wanted to vote and go home.
“It’s going to be a long night”
The presenter has run out of things to say and there are four hours of airtime left.
It is never a long night. It is a long week, sold to you as a long night, so you don’t change the channel.
Why they say it forty times
For a network, calling a race wrongly is a catastrophe that ends careers. Saying “too close to call” forty times is merely boring. So caution wins, and the phrase becomes the theme tune of the evening. To be fair, that is exactly how it should work. A slow, correct call beats a fast, wrong one.
The trouble is you. You want an answer before bed. The count does not care about your bed. The count has never cared about your bed.
Go to sleep. It will still be close in the morning.
Satire, but the facts underneath are real. For actual voting information, check your state or local election office, or vote.gov. Zack is not an election official. Zack is barely an official anything.