General overview 2012: the state of play
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Live thread on Election 2022
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11:03pm: New Hampshire Senate’s called for Maggie Hassan (D-incumbent). Her margin appears to be something like 10 points better than pre-election polls. See my Twitter thread. I am not feeling a Republican wave. Possibly a tiny feeling in the opposite direction.
11:49pm: OK, we have enough governor’s results to start using the PEC Polling Error Calculator. (FYI, it’s called a nomograph.) In Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Wisconsin, plotting actual margins (86-87% of vote counted) shows margins that are 1-2 points more Democratic than polls. This means that November D-minus-R margins slightly underestimated Democratic performance, at least so far. Need to wait for more vote-counting to be sure. One implication: Arizona governor (R+3% in polls) might be very close.
1:01am: Here’s the nomograph for Senate. Seems useful for Arizona and Nevada, which are near-ties. Don’t be surprised if Democrats get to 50 seats without Georgia, which appears to be headed for a December runoff.
Note that the election-denialist candidate for Secretary of State, Mark Finchem (R), is running with an almost identical margin as the Senate race between Kelly (D) and Masters (R). It’s quite possible that Finchem and Marchant (R-SoS Nevada) won’t make it.
With that, good night.
How much of a factor do you think the NYS redistricting (thrown out by the NYS Supreme Court) was for the upstate seats? Was that potentially a 3 seat swing?
Hypothetically under statewide voting patterns, the map that was struck down would have elected 3 or 4 more Democrats on average.
This is barely an anecdote but I found it interesting. I worked at the same polling location in Kentucky for the May primary and then again yesterday. In May we had something like 375 voters and at least a couple of dozen people wearing MAGA hats. Yesterday, we had 780 voters and I only saw one person wearing a MAGA hat.
I also was surprised by how many young people turned out, many of who it appeared to be their first time voting based on their questions.
Personally I’ve enjoyed watching Biden work. He’s been around long enough to know that it’s not important to win the current news cycle when it is at the expense of the long game. The US electorate sometimes seems to have a collective memory problem and Biden knows this. Delivering too early on some campaign promises and they are forgotten before election day.
His timing of the student loan program was nothing short of brilliant. He gave the Republicans enough time to block it in court right before election day. And you were surprised at the youth turnout? 😉 Republicans thought Biden had ‘gaffed’ and saw it as a gift of red meat for the base. Seems the red meat was just the bait for a very well laid trap.
An astute observation! One which I have not seen elsewhere.
…that was meant as a reply to 538_Refugee.
Looking a your senate predictions vs actual outcomes, and comparing to Electoral-vote.com, did you, like 538.com, get sandbagged by all the late R polls that came out – or was there something else that you think happened?
For the Senate, your perception is incorrect. We did fine – as we did in 2020. The calculation delivered exactly as expected. In the aggregate, polls were within the range of expected error.
You seem to expect the center of the range to be the outcome, but you are supposed to look at the whole range. The range always included 50-51 seats, which is exactly where things are headed.
For the House…looks like the generic vote was about 2 points off. Similar to Senate polls. The slight bias of the national map toward Democrats surprised me.