The term Red Mirage came up during the second hearing into the January 6 Capitol riots. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, asked former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt at Monday’s hearing about the so-called “red mirage.”

In the 2020 elections, mail-in voting had been opted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many experts feared that this process could give voters a false sense of who is winning – which is known as a red mirage, or a blue shift, in US politics.

This is an observed phenomenon under which counts of in-person votes are more likely than overall vote counts to be for Republicans, whose party color is red, and with provisional votes or absentee ballots being counted later – it more likely is to indicate a Republican is ahead.

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However, with the addition of provisional ballots and absentee ballots into the count, the result may show a Democratic victory. The Democratic Party’s color is blue. 

During the 2020 elections, then-President Donald Trump had a  substantial lead in votes counted on election night based on higher rates of in-person voting by Republicans in some of the major states. This, however, faded as states counted mail-in ballots with greater support for Joe Biden. 

The fears turned out to be true, as, within hours after the earliest poll closings on the evening of November 3, 2020, Trump claimed victory in several states. 

At the time he had a lead in Michigan of 300,000 votes and in Pennsylvania of 690,000 votes. Wisconsin was also seeing a red mirage, but the state was called for Biden after a ballot dump of 69,000 absentee ballots turned Trump’s 31,000-vote lead into a narrow lead for Biden that would be impossible for the outstanding vote total to surpass.

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When counting of absentee ballots begun, Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania reduced to 610,000 and in Michigan, Biden had pulled ahead.