No real movement in the past few hours. However I’ve seen some analysis suggesting that WI, MI, and NV all seem likely to remain as narrow Biden victories. With that, and with AZ looking good for Biden and NE-2 in the bag, that puts the “Plan A2” 270-268 scenario in play, even if GA, NC, and PA all go south. Having said that, if we really end up at 270-268 then the entire “faithless elector” situation comes into play, as if we needed more chaos…

A friend has pointed out that in the unlikely event that MI (with 16 electoral votes) and NC (15) were to flip outcomes from how things currently look, we could still end at a 269-269 tie.

Things do not look promising, from my standpoint, for two state-level initiatives I care deeply about. First, California Proposition 22, which classifies app-based drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, appears to have passed. I’ll save my anguish over the process and outcome for some other post some other time. Second, the Illinois constitutional amendment to permit graduated tax rates is currently losing 55-45, although it’s unclear to me how much Illinois vote remains to be counted and of what type. The Illinois results reported to date seem strange to me, with Biden only ahead 55-43 and Senator Durbin only ahead 52-41, which makes me suspect there could still be a lot of left-leaning vote to be counted.

As expected, both my wife’s riding (MN-4) and mine (IL-4) have been called for the incumbent. Oh wait, we don’t call them “ridings” here, we call them “districts” – my mistake. The neighboring rid… district of MN-2, where my wife’s employer is based, has not yet been called. The incumbent Democrat, Craig, is currently ahead of her Republican challenger 49-47. Six percent of the vote went to the candidate of the Legalize Marijuana Now Party, even though he died six weeks ago; before his death he had admitted to a close friend that Republicans encouraged him to run in order to siphon votes away from Craig. Originally his death was going to cause a postponement of the election to February, and although Craig successfully sued to have the election go ahead as planned, litigation on that point may continue post-election.

I got some sleep, and woke up to an even more uncertain and chaotic electoral landscape than I was expecting to find. The New York Times headline right now is “Election Turns Into Nailbiter That May Extend For Days.”

It is very clear that the Republicans had an excellent night. They seem poised to gain some seats in the House, contrary to general expectations, but not enough seats to jeopardize the Democratic majority. It also seems increasingly likely that they will retain the Senate: overnight the Montana race was declared for Daines, and while the Georgia and Maine and North Carolina races remain uncalled they all are looking good for the Republicans.

And then there’s the Presidency. As of right now Biden has only razor-thin leads in both Wisconsin (where the Milwaukee early vote came in an hour ago) and Nevada. Michigan also looks like it will be closer than expected. Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Pennsylvania remain uncertain.

There is a need for patience to allow the various states to complete their normal counting processes, before we can really understand the lay of the land. However patience is difficult. At this point I don’t believe that any news organizations have gone out on a limb and called the election, although Trump made some comments in the middle of the night that have been interpreted as a declaration of victory.

The headline of this article from Politico’s Ryan Lizza sounds about right: “Biden Looks Screwed Even If He Wins.”

It really is time to head to bed, even if I said that an hour ago…

Iowa and Texas have been called for Trump within the last hour. North Carolina remains a remote possibility for Biden. Some pundits feel more optimistic about the possibility of Georgia, where we’re still waiting for a lot of vote from Fulton County and other metropolitan Atlanta areas.

The “two paths” argument for Biden is becoming conventional wisdom: If we presume Biden holds Nevada and flips Michigan and Wisconsin, then Biden can prevail by winning Pennsylvania, or by winning Arizona plus Omaha. Biden is now sitting at +7.5 in Nebraska-2, which is consistent with pre-election expectations.

Biden gave a brief speech in Delaware to his supporters maybe half an hour ago, expressing confidence that he will prevail once all the vote is counted. There is a rumor Trump will give a speech soon but I’m not going to wait up to hear it.

The Senate race continues to favor the Republicans. Montana has been close all night but is currently 52-48 in favor of Daines. North Carolina is now 49-47 in favor of Tillis. Iowa was called for Ernst. The Perdue-Ossoff race is still a wildcard given how much Atlanta vote is outstanding. Too early to know anything about Alaska.

Pundits are saying that neither Presidential campaign expects there to be a result tonight. I’m likely to grab some rest soon and see what additional news the morning brings.

Biden is currently leading in Nebraska-2 (Omaha) 51-47, even though the Republican incumbent Congressman is leading 52-45 in a rematch against his 2018 opponent. Biden is even leading in Nebraska-1 (Lincoln) 50-48.

My best guess is that in the fullness of time Biden wins 290-248, which represents the Clinton states plus Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nebraska-2. But it will be days before we have clarity.

NBC News just called Ohio for Trump as I was writing this.

I haven’t seen any news out of the Iowa or Montana Senate races yet, but it may transpire that the Democrats’ possible path to 50 Senate seats runs through the January runoff between Warnock and Loeffler. But who knows.

By this point I think we know that it’s not going to be a Biden blowout night, and that if the Democrats do eke out a Senate majority it will be a slim one.

Florida has not yet been called for Trump but it seems likely that will occur tonight. North Carolina is razor-tight, both in the Presidential race and in the Senate race, with the Republicans slightly ahead right now but some urban vote thought to be extant. Ohio is similar. Arizona looks promising for the Democrats, in both the Presidential and Senate races. It is unclear what the Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin data is telling us.

Senators Cornyn (TX) and Graham (SC) have already won their races, which were ‘stretch goals’ for the Democrats. Two Senate seats have switched hands, the Gardner seat (CO) going blue and the Jones seat (AL) going red; however those were the most likely seats to switch. No news from the Collins (ME) seat, although ranked choice voting in Maine may make that race late to resolve since there is a progressive independent expected to get a few percent of the first-choice votes.

If we think back to Silver’s characterization of the Presidential race several days ago: It is looking like none of the several “Plan Cs” (Florida, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia) may materialize for Biden, so we’re down to Plan A1 (Pennsylvania) or Plan A2 (Arizona + Omaha). And it’s too early to know about either of those.

We know nothing, for all intents and purposes.

Florida doesn’t look particularly good for Biden, particularly in Miami-Dade. Some potentially promising news out of North Carolina, and mixed news out of Texas and Georgia, but it is really hard to make sense of the limited available data.

Likely to be a long night.

Election Day is finally upon us. Of course, something like 99.7 million Americans have already cast their vote prior to Election Day. My wife and I are both among them. I voted in my home district, the remarkably-shaped Illinois 4th, two-and-a-half weeks ago thanks to Chicago’s well-organized early voting system. She voted in her home district, the much more sanely-shaped Minnesota 4th, using vote-by-mail and received confirmation days ago that her vote had been received and would be counted.

Not that either of our votes will matter, in all likelihood. There is no chance that either Biden or Senator Durbin will lose in Illinois, and no chance that Congressman Garcia will lose in the Illinois 4th (a district that has voted at least 76% Democratic in each Presidential election since 2000). Up in Minnesota, Trump’s hopes of flipping the state have faded significantly, and Senator Smith seems to be a safe bet for re-election; as for 10-term Congresswoman McCollum in the Minnesota 4th, she’s won between 57% and 66% of the vote in each election since the district’s boundaries changed in 2013 to extend eastward from St. Paul to the Wisconsin border, and I’d never so much as heard the name of her Republican opponent until I looked it up in the course of writing this post.

Still, the principle of the matter is important – particularly to me, who spent almost two decades of my life living in the U.S. but unable to vote. And it seems the principle is important to an increasing proportion of Americans. 138.8 million votes were cast in 2016, representing turnout of approximately 55%. FiveThirtyEight is predicting that turnout will be somewhere in the 147 to 168 million range in 2020, which would represent turnout in the 57-65% range; we haven’t hit 60% turnout for a Presidential election since the 1960s.

We’ll see what happens. I’m going to try my best to put my head down and ignore politics during the workday, as it’s likely to be a long and chaotic night.

As I’ve been discussing, one of the potentials for chaos relates to the fragmented nature of how Presidential elections are conducted in the U.S., where state and local officials have adopted widely disparate approaches to when and how votes are collected and tabulated. I suspect there may be a push for electoral reform in the wake of 2020.

In that vein, yesterday I noticed a very interesting article in Bloomberg Opinion from a Chicago lawyer (and one-time Democratic congressional primary candidate) named Thomas Geoghegan. He argues that Congress could indeed promulgate uniform federal standards on how all federal elections are conducted, and that such a law would be constitutional under the “privileges and immunities” clause of the 14th Amendment. Interesting thought.

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.

This morning the New York Times released new polls of four key states, and they are all both consistent with established wisdom about the state of the race in those states, and encouraging for the Democrats:

• Arizona: Biden 49, Trump 43
• Florida: Biden 47, Trump 44
• Pennsylvania: Biden 49, Trump 43
• Wisconsin: Biden 52, Trump 41

Along similar lines, this morning the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal national poll came out: Biden 52, Trump 42.

One interesting thing to note about this year’s polls is how few undecided votes there are. For instance, as Chuck Todd observed this morning on Meet The Press, four years ago the NBC/WSJ national poll on day -2 was Clinton 44, Trump 40.

I think this reflects several key differences between the 2016 and 2020 races. First, in 2020 third-party candidates have received little attention, whereas in that 2016 poll the Libertarian (Johnson) was polling at 6% and the Green (Stein) was at 2%. Second, an increasing proportion of the electorate is casting their vote prior to election day, reducing the potential for undecided voters. Third, evaluating whether or not to retain an incumbent is intrinsically different than deciding which of two non-incumbents to elect, leading to fewer truly undecided voters in the late days of the campaign. And last, this cycle voters aren’t needing to evaluate late-breaking news from the FBI Director casting doubts on one of the candidates.

As such, 48 hours out from the election, it seems increasingly likely that Biden will become President, in a world where the election tallies accurately reflect the voting intentions of every eligible voter who believes they voted.

I crafted that italicized phrase carefully, as there are lots of different ways in which things can go wrong in the process of tabulating election results.

For instance, as difficult as this would be to imagine had we not already lived through it, we’ve had one Presidential election whose outcome can reasonably be attributed to a “ballot design” problem, in which the ballot used in one county of an unusually close state was misleading to voters and caused them to vote for the wrong candidate. Quoting from the abstract of an article published in the American Political Science Review in 2001: “We show that the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election caused more than 2,000 Democratic voters to vote by mistake for Reform candidate Pat Buchanan, a number larger than George W. Bush’s certified margin of victory in Florida.”

Another way in which in theory the process could go wrong is if the election tallies included the votes of ineligible voters, and those inappropriately counted votes were determinative to the outcome in one or more states. I imagine we’ll be hearing Republicans talk about “voter fraud” next week and beyond, particularly since the President has previously claimed that millions of fraudulent votes had been tabulated for his opponent in 2016, even though there seems to be little to no evidence for the concept.

And then of course there’s the theoretical possibility of interference in electoral tabulations by hackers, and the theoretical possibility of outright fraud by election officers. I am by nature a trusting soul so I’m not going to worry myself with such phantoms, but your mileage might vary, gentle reader.

No, the theme for 2020 with respect to breakdowns in the electoral process is very likely going to center around the concept of, votes that were legitimately cast under the rules in effect at the time but are not ultimately counted due to judicial action. As I had mentioned in yesterday’s post, much of this litigation activity reflects a belief by Republicans that certain actions taken by election officials to modify voting processes are inherently in violation of Article II Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, to the extent that said actions were not enacted via state legislation.

This morning I woke up to the news that Republicans in Texas had just filed suit to invalidate over 127,000 votes that had been cast in Harris County (Houston) using “drive-thru voting” process, under the grounds that existing Texas law only authorizes the use of drive-thru voting for voters with disabilities. My understanding is that this drive-thru voting process includes the exact same voter identification procedures that would occur with normal in-person voting. As such it is difficult to make any case that this lawsuit is intended to combat “voter fraud”. Instead it represents an attempt to de-franchise people in a heavily Democratic area who believe they have already validly voted, and who may be unable to vote in person on election day even if they were to learn by then that their previous vote was to be thrown out.

Fortunately the Texas Supreme Court this afternoon rejected the request to throw out these ballots, but tomorrow morning there will be a hearing in Federal Court where the U.S. Constitutional issue becomes potentially germane. More to come, not just in Texas but surely elsewhere.

Finally, and sadly, there are increasing worries about the potential for violence in the wake of the election. Yesterday I had missed a very disturbing story out of Texas, where there is video of a so-called “Trump Train” of pickups waving Trump flags that appears to have tried to run a Biden/Harris campaign bus off the road, leading the Biden campaign to cancel three planned campaign events that day out of safety concerns. Naturally, the President approvingly tweeted a video of the incident with the phrase “I LOVE TEXAS!”, and the Texas GOP chair refers to coverage of the incident as “fake news and propaganda.” What marvelous times these are.