Since you were aware at the time, you should also be aware that the reporting was happening during ongoing vote counting. This was in November 2020, during the first resurgence of Covid, before vaccines were available (which happened Dec 14, 2020). Because of that, many states created mail-in voting processes which hadn’t previously had them. And you should also recall how Trump and the Republican party were hard against voting by mail: a much higher proportion of Democrats would be using mail-in voting, for many reasons, not the least of which was the general right wing notion that Covid was somehow either not very dangerous, or a complete fabrication. (Narrator: It wasn’t.)

During that ongoing count, day-of in person votes were often counted first. Because a disproportionately large number of those ballots were cast by conservatives, the again, ongoing vote counts showed Trump leading early on. That may have made you think Trump was “winning,” but he wasn’t. He was never “winning,” because the winner is determined by, in the most simple terms, “who gets the most votes from all votes cast.” (Edit: Unless you’re a Republican, where you can win the presidency while losing the national popular vote, because the electoral college makes votes in more rural states, which generally vote conservative, carry more weight than votes from more urban states, which generally vote liberal.) While the count was ongoing, only some of the votes had been counted, even though all votes had been cast.

You went to sleep before the mail-in votes were counted. Nothing changed about the votes cast in the 2020 election while you were asleep. The only thing that changed was that the counting was completed.