Why Midterm Results May Take Weeks, and Why Wall Street Isn’t Worried

Some races in the November 3 U.S. midterm elections may take weeks to clear recounts and court challenges, and MarketWatch reported on November 2 that Wall Street is not concerned about the timing. The calm rests on a simple distinction: the calendar of the count is not the same as the outcome the count produces.

Unofficial results begin posting after polls close on election night and keep arriving until every ballot is tallied. The Election Assistance Commission describes that process as running until all ballots are counted, which in a close race can be well past the first night. Absentee ballots, which voters cast by mail or before Election Day, lengthen the process because each one must be received, verified and processed before it can be added to a total. Where a full hand count is required, the work can take days or weeks.

Hand counting is becoming more common. The EAC’s 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey reported that the share of jurisdictions hand-counting paper ballots rose from 17.8% in 2022 to 21% in 2024, according to the EAC’s 2024 report. Hand counts are slower than machine tabulation, so a higher share of them tends to push out the timeline for any race where the margin is narrow.

Certification comes after the count. It is the official sign-off by state authorities that a result is final. PBS NewsHour reported that state laws set deadlines for certification, and those deadlines often fall weeks after Election Day. Politifact reported that recounts in some races could run into December or beyond. Until certification, a race is still technically open, even if a media organization has called it.

That is where the calls come in. The Associated Press told Reuters it would deploy more than 4,000 reporters to county election offices for the midterms. Those reporters gather counts at the local level, which is where the public record of each race is built. A projected winner and a certified winner are different things, and in a knife-edge race the gap between them can be long.

For markets, the more useful question is what was already expected. Strategists began mapping out positions for the midterms months ago. Bloomberg reported on September 10 that they were drawing up game plans less than two months before Election Day. Earlier, Bloomberg reported that Wall Street was bracing for stocks to fall if Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress, according to an October 22 report. Ed Yardeni warned that a Democratic sweep could deliver a “very cold shower” for stocks, per Yahoo Finance.

Bloomberg also reported that polls ahead of November 2 pointed to a midterm result that would upend the balance of power in Congress. Stock bulls, meaning investors who expect prices to rise, were betting on a bounce after the vote, according to Bloomberg’s November 2 newsletter.

In my view, that combination explains the lack of alarm. If the feared outcome is the political shift itself, a slow count does not change the shape of the risk. It only delays confirmation. Markets tend to price the likely outcome before it is certain, so a week or a month of uncertainty over a handful of seats may matter less than the headline result in the races called on the night. The risk for investors is that a narrow outcome in a few races keeps the picture unsettled for longer than the pricing assumed.

For savers and borrowers, the practical point is modest. The count may take weeks, but the direction of Congress is what carries policy consequences, and that direction could take some time to confirm in the closest races. Nothing here is a call on how stocks will trade. It is a reminder that the timetable for knowing a result and the timetable for certifying it are different, and the second can run well after the first.