The campaign of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman announced on Monday that the counting process in Pennsylvania could take “several days” before the results are made clear.
“Buckle up for a long week,” reads a memo published by Fetterman’s Campaign Manager Brendan McPhillips. “This race is close, and we should all be prepared for a process that takes several days before all eligible voters are properly counted and the results are clear.”
Similar to the 2020 presidential elections, Pennsylvanians are allowed to cast their votes via mail-in ballots, and more than 1.4 million mail ballots have been requested in the state for the Nov. 8 midterm elections.
According to the memo, roughly 70 percent of those requests came from registered Democrats, while about 20 percent were from registered Republicans.
McPhillips said he issued the warning due to concerns of a repeat of what happened when President Donald Trump and Joe Biden were on the ballot.
In 2020, Trump initially had a large lead over Biden in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania before election officials started to count mail-in votes, giving people the impression of a GOP victory that later triggered election fraud accusations when the Keystone State was declared for Biden.
“We expect that in-person votes will skew Republican, and that mail votes will skew heavily Democratic—similar to how they did in 2020,” the memo reads.
“Because Pennsylvania is one of the only states that reports Election Day totals first before ballots cast by mail, and because more populated counties around Philadelphia can take longer to report, we should expect one of the most dramatic shifts in the country from initial GOP support in early results to stronger Democratic gains as more votes are processed,” it added.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also said on Monday that election results likely won’t be known on Nov. 8 and the final tally won’t come for “a few days.”
