Media projections

[Tirnam]

One thing that strikes me when I'm watching American and European election nights is how it is really difficult for American media to have quick and trustable projection.

A few examples: in France the media work with pollsters, the pollster look at some selected precincts and based on the early results in those precincts, give to their media partner, in basically an hour, a precise projection of the final results which have a very small margin of error (in the last regional election, Ipsos-France 2 projections had a margin of error of less than 0.5 points)

In Austria last week, 10 minutes after the polls close, and with some early results, he ORF projected a win for Van der Bellen with 53.6%, at the end he won with 53.8%

Also in Italy, 45 minutes after the polls close, LA7 had a projection of a No victory with 59.2%, the No won with 59.1%

Meanwhile, in the US, we have to wait hours, and tons of result to have a projection. The networks didn't call Ohio for example until 80% of the vote was in, while Trump won it by 8 points. I remember in 2012, in the middle of election night, with a good part of the results in Virginia reported, Chuck Todd was saying that their model had Obama and Romney in that State within 1 point, in the end Obama won it by 4.

How to explain those differences? If Europeans can call and project the final result fast and safe, why Americans can't?

[Tirnam]

In a lot of states in the US, that type of approach wouldn't work well given the frequency of absentee/mail voting (wherein such ballots may arrive days after Election Day and/or may be counted separately and display different patterns than the in-person Election Day vote), provisional ballots, in-person early voting, and other non-traditional mechanisms which sometimes comprise the majority of ballots cast in a state.

I know, and I understand the difficulties involved by all this possibilities. Especially in States like Washington for example,  but in Austria they have also postal absentee ballot, and they manage to have a good estimate of the final result with 700,000 ballots by mail counted the day after.

We actually do have something like that.  Each network sends three reps from their Decision Decks to a giant meeting of the analysts with the exit pollsters and all the data during the day on Election Day.  They then break at 5 Eastern to go back to their networks.  I heard that one of the reps from NBC was expecting a Clinton win slightly larger than Obama's in 2012 when he left the meeting.

Yes, the exit poll, and I understand that an exit poll (especially an early exit poll) can be wrong. But once you have some real votes counted, you should have a quick idea of the final result (compare the swing, watching what's in, what's left, ...)