The man who heads Fox News’ election Decision Desk is prepared to make one prediction about the Nov. 5 presidential election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris: the final results won’t be in until Nov. 9 – the Saturday after the Tuesday vote.

“The over/under is Saturday,” said Arnon Mishkin in an interview with Politico. “Which was when the call was made last time.” Mishkin is best remembered by some as being the network election analyst who called Arizona for Biden in 2020 well in advance of anyone else – infuriating Fox’s largely conservative, pro-Trump audience and even some of the other pundits surrounding Mishkin that night. Fox fired a number of election pundits over that call.

He also took on the former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, Karl Rove, who said in 2016 that Barack Obama could not have won in Ohio. But despite past controversies, he maintains he gets no direction from the management to “make our audience happy.”

Mishkin explained his contention that it will be a slow process to finalize the 2024 election results, by saying “the race seems very, very close. It is dependent on a number of states, like Pennsylvania, that we believe are going to be reporting in a pattern similar to the way they have reported in the past. So I’d say, the over/under is Saturday. Which was when the call was made last time. Which is when Pennsylvania is likely to come in.”

He told Politico that anyone watching this year’s presidential election must “accept the reality that we don’t really know how close this election is going to be. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be close,” Mishkin said, although he acknowledged some polls are indicating precisely the opposite, that either Trump or Harris will win in a big way. 

“There’s some reporting that Trump is sort of gaining. Some of the polls have showed he’s gaining,” Mishkin told Politico, even as he mused that “he may be declining.” He said Trump is the focus of any election he’s in. “It’s less about who’s running against him than it’s about Trump.”

Mishkin said the competing election results of mail-in ballots and election day voting will be a huge factor in determining a winner in 2024, just as they were the last time around. But he doesn’t think it will be as decisive a factor. “What we don’t know now — but we kind of knew then — was that there was going to be an enormous skew in the vote type. I believe that Joe Biden won every state in the mail-in vote with the exception of Alabama — and that Trump won every state on Election Day with the exception of Vermont and maybe Connecticut,” he said.

“I think that skew is going to be less this time. I don’t know how much less. I know it’s still going to be there, but the Republicans are doing a much better job of encouraging people to vote however they want.”