Alabama Megathread 4: A New Hope

[IceAgeComing]

To reply to Kenobi's thing before I actually get some sleep: I'm not talking about the percentage chance thing or the margin which I've always found laughable enough to stick into the mode where it swings around all over the place because it amuses me - although notably they were always pointing in the right direction even if the impact was exaggerated while you, eh, called the election for the wrong man.  However the other bit of the model: the bit about what votes were remaining to be counted and what already had been counted were perfectly right in terms of general trend if not magnitude: and paying attention to that is what I think made those of us watching elsewhere feel pretty sure pretty early on that things were looking like a very close result but with Jones in front which is what we got.  The wild swings seems to have been because of turnout differentials more than anything else; at least that's what I thought at the time.  Again usually they do this with races where they have precinct level data which is a million times better but they did the best they could with what they had.

Your model caused you to make the wrong decision, which means that either its core principles are wrong; the assumptions that you based it on are wrong or that this election was incredibly odd and unusual.  I don't think that its the latter: indeed a fair few of us thought that it felt oddly similar the to Virginia Governors election: in terms of the fact that it seemed that Jones was leading most of the night despite being behind until 90% of the votes had been counted.  So therefore it must be one of the first two: and after getting a good nights sleep you probably ought to have a close look at it.

Incidentally the only way that Moore can get a recount is if it closes within 0.5%: so he basically needs to find something like 14,000 votes with zero election day votes to be counted.  The provision that allows candidates to pay for a recount only seems to apply to State offices, and not Federal ones.

By the way; this was an election worth staying up until 6am for!