AZ-08: April 24 general election (Update: Lesko-R wins by 4.72 points)

[Adam Griffin]

Just making sure we're prepared for the big day!

Here's Griff's patented Election Day Hysteria Generator!

Have fun

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Is everybody ready for the ride? Because it never ends!

Get your panic and popcorn ready, and be prepared to overreact to every single morsel of information as it comes in!

[Adam Griffin]

Yes but just because a republican is voting doesn’t mean they are voting for the republican

In every special election so far, the average gop share of the vote the dem received has been 14%

True. Though considering how Republican this area is, I’m sure you could weight that and still come out with Lesko ahead

Based on mail ballots, winning 86% of Republicans, 5% of Democrats and 40% of independents would give Lesko around 52.5% of the vote. Assuming you hold the former two groups at the same support levels, Lesko would have to fall to 30% or less of indies to lose.

Granted, if ED vote actually does skew substantially in favor of Dems relative to EV, that could change.

[Adam Griffin]

The dem jumped from 3 to 13 on predictit

what caused that?

Last-minute speculation

[Adam Griffin]

Polls have closed

Looks like 25k people voted on election day.

So question on that.... I know Maricopa County released some ED numbers at 11 AM CST today, but other than that the source of estimated ED numbers is from the Arizona Guru....

Although it appears that this individual works for the SoS office, anyone know, and also if we have any official source of updated ED voting numbers?

Most recent update I see (same guy):

https://twitter.com/Garrett_Archer/status/988941334013665280

[Adam Griffin]

Lesko 82,294 (52.92%)
Tipirneni 73,188 (47.08%)

[Adam Griffin]

Even though the ED vote wasn't extraordinarily large, if Lesko only leads by 6 in EV with a 49-28 R/D sample...

[Adam Griffin]

Lesko up by 6. Just around where I thought she would be. Is this all of the vote or is there more?

Pretty sure this is the entirety of the early vote. There are still 25k or so election day votes to count and those should be more Democratic in theory.

[Adam Griffin]

The bad news for Supernanny is that Lesko probably cleared 40% (maybe closer to 45%) of independent voters in early voting. That'd be quite high when compared to this cycle's performance overall.

[Adam Griffin]

There are probably 25k votes outstanding but not necessarily 25k votes were cast today. Early drop-offs haven't been counted yet, either (and probably won't be tonight). Those, however, would probably skew as much in Lesko's favor as the ED votes would in Tipirneni's.

[Adam Griffin]

Tipirneni will need about 70% of the uncounted ballots to win.

[Adam Griffin]

Tipirneni will need about 70% of the uncounted ballots to win.

https://twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/988977707030638595

That's true if what we're seeing counted thus far is only 3/4 of the ballots. However, that'd imply a 200k+ turnout, which I haven't seen floated as feasible. It'd also mean there needs to be like 50k ED votes - I don't think that has happened...?

[Adam Griffin]

NYT has called it for Lesko. Kind of odd - they're never usually the first ones to call.

[Adam Griffin]

Only two precincts (San Miguel and Goodyear) appear to have swung to the GOP compared to 2016 - and both of them are Democratic precincts (and the ED vote will likely improve the margins in most precincts, meaning perhaps none of them will swing GOP in the end).

[Adam Griffin]

HUGE!!

Hiral won around 75% of independents.

This means the ABC15/OH poll that suggested Sinema winning 75% of Independents is accurate. wow.

https://twitter.com/econarnold/status/988985401971949568

How is Tipirneni not winning this with those numbers?

85% of Rs, 25% of Is and 5% of Ds for Lesko would suggest she should be around 48% of the vote.

Lesko must have got >90% of the GOP vote; there's conflicting data here it seems.

[Adam Griffin]

Based on a measurement of [2016 congressional result & 2016 presidential result averaged], AZ-8 is the second-biggest congressional swing of the cycle (D+24), losing out only to AL (D+30).

[Adam Griffin]

On Monday, only 3.500 ballots were returned.

So why do we think that on Tuesday as many as 17.000 were returned and are still to be counted ?

Mail ballots dropped off in-person on Tuesday will be the vast majority of those 15-20k.

[Adam Griffin]

Figured I'd make an Atlas-specific map of the result using my highly-sensitive gradient (left). As you can tell, there were quite a number of Lesko precincts that were very close - and might have flipped had Tipirneni won. There were also a lot of Tipirneni precincts that were close as well; we're not used to see such huge swathes of congressional districts be so relatively close and/or competitive.

That's why I like my gradient: for races like this in particular, it does a much better job of illustrating the competitive nature of areas than a 10-point or even 5-point gradient.

On the right is a simple hypothetical Tipirneni victory map assuming uniform swing:

Full-size image

[Adam Griffin]

^^^ In fact, only 10% (14 out of 143) of the precincts were even 60% or more in favor of one candidate.

81 precincts (57%!) were within single-digits, with the remaining third decided by 10-20 points.

Are there any recent examples of a congressional race (special or otherwise) having such a huge portion of the district's population being in such competitive areas? I don't know too much about this district, but it's my impression of skimming the data here that the precincts tend to be fairly equal in population compared to many other areas.

[Adam Griffin]

Nova, just for my back-of-the-envelope math, if the various municipalities listed in your one graph where to mirror their share of the districts vote in the presidential election in the recent special election, would lesko have lost? While the heavily Republican far Northern Phoenix exurbs portion dropped some what in its share of the district's vote from 2016, everywhere else it seemed that Democratic areas dropped, a couple split areas basically stayed the same, and the LD 22 share increased for the special election. My very rough back-of-the-envelope Mass says it's still a razor-thin republican win, but was interested in what your numbers show.

I say this because, if theoretically those districts match the presidential election share in 2018, lesko go could lose

Not much difference (around a half-point) assuming I've looked at your question properly (going off of the LD shares NOVA posted here):

Lesko 51.9%
Tipirneni 47.7%

Nor when using 2014's figures, for that matter:

Lesko 52.0%
Tipirneni 47.6%

[Adam Griffin]

Good question Badger and I'll defer to Fmr Pres Griff's math on this hypothetical....

However, the key point is even if we were to use the 2016 GE Voter Share by LD Model, vs the '14 GE or '18 Special Election models, is which precincts within these Arizona Legislative Districts accounted for a disproportionate share of the vote in '18/'14 compared to a '16/'12 scenario...

Anglo Senior Citizens in the 2018 CD-08 Special Election were disproportionately represented, especially in LD-21 and LD-22.... as my Anglo Senior post from an hour ago just demonstrated...

The overall composition of the electorate in a Presidential Election Year appears to be quite different than in an "Off-Year Election"....

Now, lest Democratic Atlas avatars start getting too excitable about what this all might indicate in November 2018, let alone November 2020, we really don't have many data points to indicate that maybe this wasn't just a fluke election, with a Democratic Centrist that showed up and presented an electoral platform that played especially well among the Anglo Upper-Middle-Class Seniors in the district.

What if the 2016 GE numbers were a fluke, and the combination of both Trump and Sheriff Joe being on the ballot skewed the electorate a bit younger and more Latino than is typically the case here?

What if, these same Anglo Seniors that have soured a bit on Trump and the Republicans in Congress, because of the increased support for the Affordable Care Act and Trump's general craziness on a wide variety of political issues, decide to keep heavily supporting Republicans within the Arizona State elected offices?

Personally I suspect that AZ-SEN is most likely definitely lost for the 'Pubs, and quite possibly AZ CD-08 come November....

Key next questions are what do these election results tell us about swings in Upper-Middle Class and Middle Class precincts in Phoenix, Glendale, and Peoria, not to mention the fast growing Exurban areas where acres of desert have been turned into miles of tract housing in less than ten years.....

More data yet to crunch, but obviously Arizona Republicans should be extremely concerned about the collapse of support among Anglo Seniors within this district.

I haven't followed all of the posts/data in this thread too extensively, but based on my skimmings, would a good summary here be: "the electorate was basically a normal midterm electorate in terms of composition, but old conservatives ran over the GOP with their golf carts; it could still be a fluke, though"?