My wife, who is almost never sick, has been laid low by influenza for the last three days, and this has thrown a real monkey wrench into our Thanksgiving plans and preparations. I need to step up to the plate here, so this post will be brief.
Here's the *change in margin* in the key CA races between Nov. 7th and today (via post-election day counting).
CA10: +4.3-point shift to Dems
CA48: +5.1 D
CA39: +6.2 D
CA21: +6.4 D
CA45: +6.7 D
CA25: +7.1 D
CA49: +7.8 D— Will Jordan (@williamjordann) November 21, 2018
There is nothing out of the ordinary here. The main reason Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory kept growing and growing weeks after the election was over was because California takes a long time to count their ballots and the late ballots trend much more Democratic than the ones that are cast early.
What I’d like to see in the future is more recognition of this fact when the media cover election results. First impressions mean a lot, and they can actually have real-world implications for the eventual outcome of close elections, as we saw when the 2000 Florida recount was shut down. Had Al Gore been closer on the Election Night, he would not have conceded only to have to take back his concession shortly thereafter. And if he had been holding a narrow lead as the chad-fiasco unfolded, it would have been a different drama in every respect, with the Supreme Court more interested in prolonging the process than in bringing it to a premature close.
We have now seen this post-Election Day surge for Democrats in California repeat itself enough times to be able to anticipate it, and it’s something that happens in other states, too, to greater or lesser degrees depending on their partisan lean and how they conduct their absentee, provisional and/or mail-in voting.
The Networks should really have a built-in and ready assessment of how many votes candidates stand to pick-up after 100 percent of the precincts have reported. It wasn’t impossible to predict that the Democrats would ultimately win all or most of the close elections in which they were trailing when we went to sleep on November 6th, especially in California. Failing to do so impacted the narrative and could have conceivably changed the outcome in a race or two.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving. I have to get to work.
. . . rightwing majority’s corrupt intentions/motivations in 2000:
Yup.
My remembrance of the tortured logic of the majority in Bush vs. Gore was that George W. Bush had won Florida, and if the vote count was allowed to continue it might result in Gore winning Florida. The Justices wrote that the prospect of that potential change in the outcome would irreparably damage Bush. In other words, we shouldn’t allow the counting of votes to take away Bush’s win.
To the degree that Gore’s premature concession played into that fucked-up premise, yes, it was hurtful.
And they used the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to do it. And some of them had never cited that clause to protect any minority in any decision in their careers……until a white Republican needed it.
Trump is no outlayer…..he is part of a natural progression that started long ago.
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. . . Totenberg (NPR) trying to parse what it meant in realtime on-air as she read it for the first time fresh out of the copier/fax. Then immediately finding and reading the decision online myself. Two impressions stand out, unchanged to this day:
. . . in the outcome at all, but rather simply determining what the actual outcome actually was!
Good luck with the baking and cooking. Hoping that whatever you make has people at the table that can enjoy it with you. Wish a very swift recovery to your wife and that nobody gets what she has.
A recent change in California election law which is almost certainly adding juice to the post-Election Day vote count changes here: we now require County Registrars to count all votes from mail ballots which were postmarked on or before Election Day. Before this change, our elections excluded ballots which were delivered by the Post Office to the Registrars after Election Day.
This change makes it easier for people to vote, and it makes more intuitive sense to boot. We should create voting processes which are easiest for all voters to execute, no matter their political views.
IMO this also had the added benefit of…….taking our time. What’s the hurry? So now close races are not called early….and perhaps the ridiculous tradition of candidates being pressured by the media into conceding relatively close contests on Election Day will fade away. Why concede early when there are thousands of ballots still to be counted?
The media spends months building up every Election Day, then spent from 5-10 o’clock on Election Day wanting to wrap the whole thing up nice and neat. Just like the Kentucky Derby.
This was probably my last year of voting in person. Each year there are fewer and fewer voters at my location, I assume because so many are now taking advantage of vote by mail.
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In my rural county about 10,000 ballots were either mailed in or dropped off and only about 200 votes were cast in person. One of the drop off locations is a secure box at the curb, so a completed ballot can be dropped off at any time of day. No excuse for not voting. No impediments to discourage voting.
. . . But of course functional democracy is anathema to the Banana Republicans, since their actual program consigns them to permanent minority status in one. But they like power — getting their way against the will of the majority — even if that requires clinging fascistically to power as a minority. So they cheat.
I’m sorry but I’m really not all that concerned about the the arrangement of the deck chairs right now.
This is somewhat out of the ordinary, or at least the old ordinary, as the post-election night shifts are larger than they used to be. When election night was over, Democrats in several of the OC congressional races were behind 1-2% and my thought was “hm, maybe”. Actually we ended up with fairly decisive wins in those races.
The networks are limited in how well they can forecast these shifts as there is a lot of variation and I don’t know any good way to get an estimate. I think the magnitude of these post-election shifts surprised a lot of people. (Mime Walters, one of the post-election defeats, had already filed for her re-election campaign, snerk.)The simple reality is that the election night count is becoming less and less useful as more people shift to mail voting.
Not sure why we need to know the outcome on the same night.
In India, national elections are held over multiple days. And then the results are announced on a specific day. What would be lost if a similar procedure is adopted here?
With time differences and some news channels (Faux Noise) projecting before the polls closed on the west coast, it just seems we have the most antiquated election system in all democracies!
. . . among “democracies” any more.
A Happy Thanksgiving to you too, Martin! I’m grateful for all the insight and analysis you provide to help make sense of this world we inhabit. And a speedy recovery to your wife from the flu!
The Networks should really have a built-in and ready assessment of how many votes candidates stand to pick-up after 100 percent of the precincts have reported. It wasn’t impossible to predict that the Democrats would ultimately win all or most of the close elections in which they were trailing when we went to sleep on November 6th, especially in California. Failing to do so impacted the narrative and could have conceivably changed the outcome in a race or two.
Why would they do that? The networks and big media are all corporations. They either have shareholders, owners or both that skew quite far to the right. They aren’t your friends. They’ll never be friends to even any vaguely left-leaning government or group. Look at how savagely a place like The Guardian attacks Corbyn instead of the corrupt and incompetent Tories. Do people not remember the NY Times right before the 2004 election?