When did you first realize Bill Nelson was likely to lose?

[Tekken_Guy]

When did you first realize on election night 2018 that Bill Nelson was likely to lose re-election?

[ProgressiveModerate]

I didn’t even really pay all that much attention to 2018 so I just thought FL would be FL and was going to be very close

[PAK Man]

Not until Election Night when the votes started rolling in and he wasn't pulling away like he usually did. Every opponent Nelson had faced had been hyped up to be the be all end all Republican and in the end it was never particularly close (Bill McCollum, Katherine Clark, Connie Mack IV, all went down fairly easily). I kept thinking back to 2012 in particular when everyone thought Nelson was in this super competitive race and he clobbered Mack by 13 points. Not once did I think Scott would actually defeat him, and that was definitely the biggest senate shocker of 2018 for me.

[WD]

Don’t remember exactly, but probably when the panhandle came in and Scott had a substantial lead, that looked hard to erase with votes from Democratic areas. (IIRC it was about 35K)

[TML]

The first indicator was the early/absentee vote in Pasco County. Nelson trailed by tens of thousands of votes in that count, just like Hillary did in 2016. The next indicator was the margins in the suburban/exurban counties in and around the I-4 corridor. Those margins were much closer to Trump’s 2016 margins than Romney’s 2012 margins. Finally, at around 7:50 pm, Nelson’s lead wasn’t large enough to overcome the expected Republican margins in the Central Time Zone counties.

[Bootes Void]

Outside of Miami Dade, Nelson was doing slightly better than Clinton in most areas when talking %s. I thought Nelson would narrowly win out by less than 1 to 2% until 12 am or so when it was obvious there wasn't enough votes in the rest of Florida(South Florida) to make up the deficit.

What didn't kill Nelson wasn't just the margins but the turnout as well. Red counties had way higher turnout compared to the blue counties and that's what narrowly beat Nelson.

If you looked at the margins alone and compared it to 2016, you would think Nelson would narrowly win it but obviously that didn't happend because of the turnout differential from the counties.

[brucejoel99]

Wednesday Nov. 7th, when turnout numbers starting showing Scott leading by ~20K votes. At that point, I don't think any recount was overturning that wide a gap.

[Mr. Smith]

The moment Gillum started going under.

[Common Sense Atlantan]

Within the first two hours iirc. I think 91% or something was already counted by the time the polls closed. When they called the gov for Desantis, I knew it was definitely over for Nelson.

[Mr.Phips]

Don’t remember exactly, but probably when the panhandle came in and Scott had a substantial lead, that looked hard to erase with votes from Democratic areas. (IIRC it was about 35K)

Same here.

[OSR stands with Israel]

In the Summer of 2019 I thought Nelson would lose then in the fall I thought it was a pure tossup