Alabama Megathread 3: Results Thread

[IceAgeComing]

all the votes have been counted though - bar military votes and provisionals.  I'd be shocked if that (especially the latter considering that they tend to be Democrat) somehow gives Moore 7,000 votes - or indeed enough to get into recount range (0.5% for a free one, currently 1.5%).

[IceAgeComing]

The problem that the NYT model had this time that it didn't in Virginia is there they had access to Precinct level data for both past elections and this election which meant that they could do a like-for-like comparison with the data and therefore it meant that they had a much better idea what the outcome would be earlier.  Here they didn't have that so they were comparing a complete data set with incomplete data and having to make assumptions based on the data that they had which is always going to be dodgy.  I think that it did a good job though; by the time we began to get a significant amount of data in it settled at a Jones lead and while that did move around a lot and gradually fell it settled at being roughly in the right range - it spent lots of time around 2% and it ended up at 1.5% which is pretty good.  Certainly better than whatever pseudoscientific rubbish Kenobi came up with; perhaps he ought to go back to sending people creepy PMs rather than the political analysis gig.  One other thing: the NYT is saying that over 98% of votes have been counted - using that 98% figure would mean 26,000 votes out there waiting to be counted and Moore would need 21,000 of them to overturn the result.  That would be, err, pretty impressive.

Any idea that this is going to get anywhere near a recount is actually pretty laughable.  You've got two main sources of votes left: Military ballots (unlikely to be that many, and I don't think that they'll be particularly strong to Moore) and Provisional votes (which tend to be pretty strongly Democratic) and he needs to find 5,000 votes in order to get an automatic recount which seems hard.  Mr Moore is more than willing to waste money on a recount if he wishes since above 0.5% the candidate has to pay - but I think that after this result he'll find it very hard to raise the money required since, I mean, who's going to waste significant amounts of money on a recount with like a 0.01% chance at best of changing the outcome and I don't think that he's got $2 million left to drop on it himself.  

Maybe this is the fact that I'm posting this at 5am but I think this'll work out like Clinton: a candidate that was 100% sure that they were going to win losing narrowly beginning to talk about recounts and whatever the night of and refusing to concede; and then after a good nights sleep and talking to some people a realisation might come that running this longer might cause more problems than conceding it will and then he'll decide to bow out gracefully.  Especially considering that the Secretary of State didn't seem overly excited about going down the recount route; and with these results that seems fair enough.  I will say one positive thing about Moore: at least he went and spoke to his supporters: sure it was a rambling mess that said nothing but at least it was something.