One day more until the Presidential Election. Although to be honest I’m somewhat distracted today, as it’s my youngest daughter’s 3rd birthday, so I’m focusing on that knowing that I’ll suffer from election fatigue for most of the rest of the week…
Yesterday Jonathan Swan from Axios, who became famous this summer for one of the more probing interviews of President Trump, published an article to the effect that Trump may simply declare victory on Tuesday night in the absence of any bad news out of states like Florida and North Carolina. So, we have that possibility to look forward to.
In an earlier post I had talked in general terms about the theoretical possibility that, due to time delays in counting certain types of votes and voting method preference differences among each candidate’s supporters, it was easy to imagine a situation where one candidate appears to be ahead on election night but the other candidate will prevail once all the vote is cast. A FiveThirtyEight article from a few days ago makes the potential for this outcome in Pennsylvania more explicit. In the Pennsylvania primary, only 46% of the ultimate Democratic vote had been counted by 3am on election night, versus 71% of the ultimate Republican vote. If one assumes a similar phenomenon will happen tomorrow, then (per FiveThirtyEight’s math) Pennsylvania could look like it is going 58-42 Trump on election night, but then go on to be 52-47 Biden once all the early vote is counted.
Both the media and major political figures are going to need to play a big role in educating the populace tomorrow night about the vagaries of the vote-counting process and the need to not jump to conclusions. But what if some outlet like OANN were to muddy the waters by calling the election for Trump prematurely based on the early Pennsylvania returns? At least Biden, unlike Gore 20 years ago, will surely not make the tactical error of conceding on election night only to later retract it (in Gore’s case, as the networks’ Florida call for Bush proved to be premature).
No news yet as of mid-afternoon regarding today’s federal court hearing about the Harris County, Texas drive-thru voting.
A total of 96.7 million votes have already been cast in the election. For comparison, a total of 136.7 million votes were counted for President in 2016. Looking at the metric “early votes cast as a percentage of total 2016 votes cast,” the national figure is therefore 70% but we see some eye-popping numbers in certain important states:
- Texas: 108.3%
- Montana: 99.1%
- Nevada: 96.7%
- North Carolina: 95.4%
- Georgia: 93.9%
- Florida: 93.7%
To what extent do these numbers reflect increased turnout (and in which demographics) versus shifts in preferences on how to vote (particularly in states that expanded early voting opportunities this year)? It will take a while to sort all this out.