2020 Presidential Election Results & Exit Polls commentary thread

[Skill and Chance]

Biden is probably going to fall below Clinton's 2016 margin in CA at this point. 

[Skill and Chance]

https://twitter.com/Garrett_Archer/status/1326725575206076416

Hmmm... that's good for Trump vs. Maricopa at large, but is it close to good enough?

[Skill and Chance]

The laptop with the spreadsheet on it is asleep for the night, but eyeballing it Trump would need to win something like 70% of the remaking votes - and Pima is now the biggest potential source left.

He visto suficiente.

(I've seen enough.)

That does it then.

[Skill and Chance]

Pretty sure NC is down to roughly 18k votes left to count, would've assumed networks would've called it today. I think Trump has actually won a majority of ballots counted since election day (something like 20000-19000), has won the last 17k added today 10k-7k

It hasn't tightened much at all. Would be so, so ironic if the late-arriving-but-postmarked-by-Election-Day ballots are good for Trump in NC and PA!

[Skill and Chance]

Looks like Dems may be peaking in the Southwest (save for CO)?  Remember when we were all worried that Dems were doomed to 2 decades of EV/PV splits and being totally shut out of the senate with a map like this?

Good reminder not to just extrapolate trends indefinitely!

[Skill and Chance]

Popular vote update, per Cook tracker:

Joe Biden 78,629,640 (50.9%)
Donald Trump 73,063,371 (47.3%)

Biden lead is now 5,566,269 (3.6%)

The late counted stuff appears to have been more evenly split than expected?  NY absentees will surely put Biden ahead of Obama 2012 (3.9%) once they are done, right?

[Skill and Chance]

Like did they find anything in the recount?

Floyd County found a problem with one scanner that caused 2600 votes not to be reported on election day.  These netted Trump about 800 votes.  Other counties have reported minimal or no discrepancies.

That is actually a big error by recount standards!  An error of that size could have flipped Florida in 2000. Of course, 14K votes is also a big margin by recount standards and should be in no danger of being overturned.  Would still take 17 more pro-Trump errors of that size to flip the state.

[Skill and Chance]

Any idea when the state of NY will update its votes counting process ?

Counties release results at their own pace, most of them won't post full official results with complete absentee/provisional count until they're done counting (most should be done before Thanksgiving).

edit: might've misinterpreted the question, if you're asking when they won't stop having an obscure absentee counting protocol, I have no clue, think it's been like this for a long time and it needs to change.

Can you imagine a world where NY is the largest swing state and never knowing who won the EC until Thanksgiving?

[Skill and Chance]

Interestingly, the errors identified in the Georgia recount so far (3 unprocessed memory sticks from in person voting) are about an order of magnitude larger than typical vote count changes in a recount.  Trump has netted over 1400 votes.  While it won't change the outcome in this election, a recount shift of that magnitude could have flipped Florida to Gore in 2000, and Georgia has less than half the population of Florida.

[Skill and Chance]

So before anybody panics, all this does is delays Michigan's state certification.

The county has to get certified. If the County Board won't do it, than the State Board and the Secretary of State does it.

If the GOP manages to deadlock the State Board too, does the SoS have the final word?

While the question is strictly academic since the two republicans on the county board changed their mind, I'm actually not sure what would happen.

The Secretary of State implied in her statement today that the Bureau of Elections(which is run by her) would be able to step in. But I havent seen anyone back that up. It seems like one of the options would have been litigation forcing the State Board to certify, since they're legally obligated to do so. Trump supporters were under the assumption the State Assembly would step in and nominated their own electors, and I'm not sure they couldn't.

Is it now academic?  Can the state level board still block certification if it deadlocks?

[Skill and Chance]

https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1329595108078063619
https://twitter.com/brooklynmutt/status/1329503459444465666
What's going on?

Someone important must have said "stop it."

[Skill and Chance]

https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1329957901524480002?s=19

It's wild that the biggest controversies have been in states with Dem governors that Biden won by 1%+ while GA and AZ with Republican trifectas have had next to no trouble. 

[Skill and Chance]

Sounds like at least one of the Republicans has flipped to certify, we'll have to wait and see:

https://twitter.com/TimAlberta/status/1330937395080998914?s=20

This seems to confirm it:

https://twitter.com/jonathanoosting/status/1330939926079221762?s=20

https://twitter.com/TimAlberta/status/1330940255223091206?s=20

The dissenting GOP vote keeps the conspiracy theories going but without a constitutional crisis.

[Skill and Chance]

Crosspost from AAD: Here's the 1992-2020 Georgia county swing map. Two narrow Democratic wins 28 years apart.

So the 1992 vote state was fairly uniform across the state? Of course Perot got 13% in GA in 92 which gets in the way

Aside from Atlanta, this suggests a long term problem for Dems in GA-02 (SW GA) even with the VRA status and a long term opportunity in GA-01 (Seacoast).

[Skill and Chance]

Essex County NY is now a Obama-Trump-Biden county, with Biden winning it by 5%. Biden narrowly fails to flip neighboring Warren County, with Trump winning it by 57 votes (.16%).

You told me that Clinton County, NY will be won by Biden, right? When will we get an update from there?

Turns out they actually have results, it was just not in the link I was usually checking. Biden wins 51.7-46.5, 5.2% margin, just a bit lower than my expectation of 6%.

Still curious as to why St. Lawrence and Lewis counties swung towards Trump. Clinton, Essex, Hamilton, Jefferson, Saratoga (split), and Warren are all within the same district (NY-21) and all swung at least 3.3 points Dem. The only other county in the state outside of NYC that was swung Dem is Rockland, which I think could be explained by a hard swing among Orthodox Jewish communities towards Trump, but don't really have a clue about St. Lawrence or Lewis.

On average, how much have the completed counties in NY swung toward Biden?  This has important PV implications. 

[Skill and Chance]

Essex County NY is now a Obama-Trump-Biden county, with Biden winning it by 5%. Biden narrowly fails to flip neighboring Warren County, with Trump winning it by 57 votes (.16%).

You told me that Clinton County, NY will be won by Biden, right? When will we get an update from there?

Turns out they actually have results, it was just not in the link I was usually checking. Biden wins 51.7-46.5, 5.2% margin, just a bit lower than my expectation of 6%.

Still curious as to why St. Lawrence and Lewis counties swung towards Trump. Clinton, Essex, Hamilton, Jefferson, Saratoga (split), and Warren are all within the same district (NY-21) and all swung at least 3.3 points Dem. The only other county in the state outside of NYC that was swung Dem is Rockland, which I think could be explained by a hard swing among Orthodox Jewish communities towards Trump, but don't really have a clue about St. Lawrence or Lewis.

On average, how much have the completed counties in NY swung toward Biden?  This has important PV implications. 

4.17% with 11.2% increase in vote

That's pretty big vs. national, though I do expect parts of NYC to still swing right after everything is counted so it will be partially cancelled out.

[Skill and Chance]

I just saw the official Arizona website, Biden won by 4,202 votes. Wow. That was a super close call. I think at this point all counties have certified their results.

https://results.arizona.vote/#/featured/18/0

Interesting.  What updated?  The recount threshold in AZ is 0.1% and we are very close to that now if these aren't the final results.  If this is final, it means GA voted left of AZ!

[Skill and Chance]

It's abundantly clear at this point: the next time we have an election that comes down to a single disputed state, the party that controls the legislature will try to directly assign that state's EV to their candidate after the fact.  IDK what SCOTUS will do, but it will end up there. 

[Skill and Chance]

Probably due to rounding, but Biden is offically at a 4% lead on the Cook Popular Vote tracker.

Biden - 51.1%

Trump - 47.1%

In 2024 I'll remember to cut the national poll lead %. The avg was 8-10% going into election day and we're going to be less then half that.

The final 538 average was Biden +8.4, and he's probably going to wind up at about +4.5 or so when everything is counted.  This would be a miss of 3.9%, or about twice what it was in 2016.

Are there enough absentees left in NY to get Biden another 0.5%?

[Skill and Chance]

It's a bit funny to see how Biden got a higher vote share than Obama 2012 but everyone's treating this election like a nail biter but the 2012 one like a solid win

2012 was a blowout compared to this election, because Obama overperformed in the Electoral College.  Obama would have had to have lost the PV by like 1.5% to lose the election.  The battleground states ended up being not all that close, for the most part, in 2012.

While the PV winner won the EC, this election will likely have the largest EV/PV gap since 1948.  It really was closer than it looks. 

[Skill and Chance]

Yeah Obama won the tipping point state by 5.4%, Biden has won it by just 0.6%. Sadly, in the American system that's what matters.

The fact that in both 2012 and 2008 the tipping point state was Colorado feels very weird looking back at it. Colorado didn’t really feel like a crucial battleground either time, more emphasis was placed on OH, FL, VA and PA.

Both cycles it was considered a tossup though. CO was a relative new swing state; VA and OH were more sensational because they were the larger prizes, same with PA, and VA had gotten a lot of media. CO never really got that.

CO will probably never get that kind of attention. Its days as a swing state are passed.

I think geographic isolation from the rest of the swing states of its era was a big factor.  Colorado had <10 EV and was in a different time zone from every other competitive state.  Consider how national Republicans poured resources into Virginia much longer than they ever should have because it was right next to DC. 

[Skill and Chance]

Yeah Obama won the tipping point state by 5.4%, Biden has won it by just 0.6%. Sadly, in the American system that's what matters.

The fact that in both 2012 and 2008 the tipping point state was Colorado feels very weird looking back at it. Colorado didn’t really feel like a crucial battleground either time, more emphasis was placed on OH, FL, VA and PA.

Both cycles it was considered a tossup though. CO was a relative new swing state; VA and OH were more sensational because they were the larger prizes, same with PA, and VA had gotten a lot of media. CO never really got that.

CO will probably never get that kind of attention. Its days as a swing state are passed.

I think geographic isolation from the rest of the swing states of its era was a big factor.  Colorado had <10 EV and was in a different time zone from every other competitive state.  Consider how national Republicans poured resources into Virginia much longer than they ever should have because it was right next to DC. 

Good point.
It might have been different if NM and AZ were massively up for grabs as well in the 2010s?

I'm sure it would have been.  Also, thinking about 2020, Biden probably didn't give AZ/NV enough attention for this reason.  He probably hit the saturation point in PA long before election day, and the convenience stops in OH were the Dem version of the 2018 RNC spending in NOVA.   

[Skill and Chance]

Dane/Milwaukee recount status:

Dane: 11.2% of vote recounted, Biden loses 35 votes, Trump loses 13 votes, Trump net of 22 votes
Milwaukee: 12.6% of vote recounted, Biden gains 1 vote, Trump gains 1 vote, net of 0 votes

Milwaukee City and Madison currently do not have any votes tabulated for their recounts yet.

update:

Dane: 23.2% of vote recounted, Biden loses 51 votes, Trump loses 10 votes, Trump net of 41 votes
Milwaukee: no change, will check later

Dane: 36.2% of vote recounted, Biden loses 81 votes, Trump loses 15 votes, Trump net of 66 votes
Milwaukee: 25.7% of vote recounted, Biden gains 3 votes, Trump loses 6 votes, Biden net of 9 votes

note: nothing from Milwaukee city or Madison (they don't seem to report results until full municipalities are counted)

Dane: 46.7% of vote recounted, Biden loses 83 votes, Trump loses 17 Votes, Trump net of 66 votes
Milwaukee: 41.0% of vote recounted, Biden gains 10 votes, Trump loses 4 votes, Biden net of 14 votes

Dane: no change
Milwaukee: 45.8% of vote recounted, Biden gains 4 votes, Trump loses 3 votes, Biden net of 7 votes

note: vote changes are cumulative, not single day, so Trump net of 59 overall as is.

Milwaukee and Dane have to be counting different types of ballots first?  Or using different rejection criteria altogether?  They have similar populations so this makes no sense.

[Skill and Chance]

Looks like Ohio has had the lowest increase in vote so far.

Ohio really stands out vs. the rest of the Midwest.  Trump basically held his entire 2016 margin. Even Iowa shifted somewhat toward Biden.  Wonder what makes Ohio different?

[Skill and Chance]

Been comparing the last NYT polls in AZ, PA, WI & FL to the AP exit poll to see where the differences lie, biggest difference appears to be among older voters, pollsters seem to have been reaching a disproportionately democratic group of 65+ voters across multiple states.

NYT WI poll: 65+: Biden +15
AP WI Exit poll: 65+: Trump +7

NYT PA Poll: 65+: Biden+12
AP PA Exit Poll: 65+: Trump+6

NYT FL Poll: 65+: +2 Biden
AP FL Exit Poll: 65+: +11 Trump

NYT AZ Poll: 65+: +1 Trump
AP AZ Exit Poll: 65+: +7 Trump



Here are the final NYT margins vs the results

WI: Biden +11 : Biden +0.6
PA: Biden +6   : Biden +1.2
FL: Biden +3   : Trump +3.4
AZ: Biden +6  : Biden +0.3

Average error: 6.8% treating each state independently. 

Wonder if the 65+ polls were conspicuously different (much Trumpier) in Georgia?  That is the one swing state where polls were generally accurate.