2020 Presidential Election Results & Exit Polls commentary thread

[Co-Chair Bagel23]

Biden leading in VA by doubles now and breaches 70 in fairfax

[Non Swing Voter]

Biden leading in VA by doubles now and breaches 70 in fairfax

I've been saying for a while that if Biden were the nominee he would hit 70+ in Fairfax and win NoVa by more than 500k.  I think both of those two things are true, though I haven't added up the final numbers in NoVa. 

[forsythvoter]

I did the VA breakdown by metro area:

                         Trump      Biden            Total        Biden%    D Margin
NOVA                  382,025    903,227    1,285,252  70.3%     521,202
Richmond Metro   243,170    364,708      607,878   60.0%     121,538
Hampton Roads   315,426     457,306      772,732   59.2%     141,880
Total Metro          940,621    1,725,241  2,665,862  64.7%     784,620
Rest of VA           1,021,664    687,687  1,709,351  40.2%     (333,978)
Total VA              1,962,285  2,412,928  4,375,213 55.1%      450,643

Biden ran up a 521K margin in NoVA (not all votes have been counted yet so this will expand), and netted another 263K votes from the Richmond metro and Hampton Roads. The combined 785k margin across metro VA easily offset Trumps 334k margin in the rest of the state.

[NOVA Green]

Biden leading in VA by doubles now and breaches 70 in fairfax

I've been saying for a while that if Biden were the nominee he would hit 70+ in Fairfax and win NoVa by more than 500k.  I think both of those two things are true, though I haven't added up the final numbers in NoVa. 

It's just absolutely amazing how fast Fairfax has gone from being an overwhelmingly Republican stronghold to one of the most Democratic voting places in the Country.

I remember watching the 1988 GE Election results at the local DEM Party HQ as the results started to come in, and VA was pretty much almost an instant call, largely as a result of Exit Polls from the NoVA region.

In the Mid '90s, I was dating a GF from Fairfax County (Native), and even then it was still pretty strong PUB country, and I recall getting into vigorous political debates with her about the political culture and geography of the County, while meanwhile she is introducing me to all of her HS Friends & Family, with many of their parents coming from highly educated / professional backgrounds, as well as a decent % from different countries of origin.

Now Fairfax County votes something like how Multnomah County, Oregon was voting back in 2004....

Fairfax County in '04 was something like 53-46 Kerry.

This is one of those places that I strongly suspect: "Ain't going back jack", even in the post Trump Republican GE era (Will there ever be a post Trump era even with Trump out of office?).

[Pouring Rain and Blairing Music]

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1326589302797635586

The First State lives up to its name.

[Bootes Void]

Why did Mississippi swing red ? They are not done counting ?

[n1240]

Why did Mississippi swing red ? They are not done counting ?

Mail-in vote clearly has a hard swing Dem, like other states with small % of mail-in vote relative to total vote. Harrison County mail looks like Biden+28 (Biden 8939 Trump 5111) even though it was Trump+37 end of election night result. Some counties have absolutely no mail-in vote reported, while others have partial or near complete counts.

On average it looks like Trump's margin is 2% worse in counties that are currently greater than their 2016 vote totals, so I think it's reasonable to think MS ends up swinging in the end, with a chance of trending D as well.

[Tender Branson]

Why did Mississippi swing red ? They are not done counting ?

It didn’t swing R.

MS had about 200.000-250.000 ballots left to count after Election Day, mostly D-leaning Mail ballots.

Wait for the official results.

[Pouring Rain and Blairing Music]

so much for it swinging hard D

I don't remember this take at all

Wasn't there some polls showing Trump up by low double digits?

You talking about South Carolina or South Dakota?

South Dakota

Notably, the West River part of South Dakota did swing heavily Dem, while East River generally swung a bit towards Trump.

Source: NYTimes Swing Map

Oh look, it’s East River vs West River in South Dakota! Any South Dakota posters know why East River swung towards Trump, while West River swung towards Biden?

[Non Swing Voter]

NOVA is basically just acting like suburbs in all the other extremely blue metro areas like NY, LA, Chicago.  The suburbs just happen to be in a somewhat competitive state whereas usually these big blue metro areas are entirely within already blue states. 

I think the other factor in why the change has occurred so quickly is that DC has building height restrictions and Maryland was already fairly urbanized so Virginia has grown rapidly by default.

Additionally it's not entirely suburban.  Arlington and Alexandria are basically 100% DC city people who vote Democrat at the same kind of margins.  The McLean/Tysons part of Fairfax county is similar and then you also have areas like Reston which are little mini cities.  So it's really maybe 40% urban 60% suburban.  Demographically it's just very inhospitable to Republicans, the whole region.

[Tender Branson]

State Certificates of Ascertainment will be posted here, starting the next days:

https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2020

State Certificates of Electoral College Votes will be posted after December 14.

[Tender Branson]

Ballotpedia's certification date for LA (Nov. 10) was actually wrong.

It's actually Nov. 19th:

https://www.sos.la.gov/ElectionsAndVoting/PublishedDocuments/LouisianaElectionQuickFacts.pdf

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/baseballot/status/1324020956973719553https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/1326541925227261952https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/1326664081567342594

[NOVA Green]

so much for it swinging hard D

I don't remember this take at all

Wasn't there some polls showing Trump up by low double digits?

You talking about South Carolina or South Dakota?

South Dakota

Notably, the West River part of South Dakota did swing heavily Dem, while East River generally swung a bit towards Trump.

Source: NYTimes Swing Map

Oh look, it’s East River vs West River in South Dakota! Any South Dakota posters know why East River swung towards Trump, while West River swung towards Biden?

However the Biggest City in the State Sioux Falls (East River) swung +6.7% Biden:

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=411611.msg7764365#msg7764365

[wbrocks67]

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

People need to stop predicting counts like this out of CA, etc. We don't know what's left. Again, it's possible he does. But it's also possible that late-arriving ballots skew Dem, and bring his margin back up, like in CO for example.

[wbrocks67]

Looks like 113K new votes in IL, 86K went to Biden and 27K for Trump.

Biden now +16.1%

It appears OH and MS are taking as long as humanly possible to count their mail in ballots

[Kalimantan]

Florida is crying in the corner about not joining the party

For the first time since 1992 (when Perot got 20% in Florida), which was the first time since 1960, which was the first time since 1924. Florida has backed the winner the other 21 elections in this time

[Figueira]

God, that means Republicans get to carve a Republican CD out of New Hampshire, right? At least the state is elastic enough that it probably can't be completely Safe R.

[wbrocks67]

So when do we expect the networks to call Arizona? After tonights Maricopa dump? Isn't it mostly Pima left?

[brucejoel99]

God, that means Republicans get to carve a Republican CD out of New Hampshire, right? At least the state is elastic enough that it probably can't be completely Safe R.

Is that even possible, given the size (& federal dynamics) of the state?

[wbrocks67]

Fairfax is only at 92% counted? It looks like Joe's lead could creep up to +10.5 in VA.

It appears areas where the Democratic electorate was even more turbocharged than Republicans (CO, VA, GA, etc.) is where polls performed best.

[Crumpets]

Looks like 113K new votes in IL, 86K went to Biden and 27K for Trump.

Biden now +16.1%

It appears OH and MS are taking as long as humanly possible to count their mail in ballots

I remember back before the 2016 election there was a discussion about what counties would be Obama-Trump counties (back when we thought Hillary would massively improve on Obama '12's numbers) and one theory that had some consensus around it was "well, without Obama on the ticket, Republicans should at least be able to win back DuPage, IL." Since Obama '12 it's gone from a 1 point Obama win to a 14.5 point Clinton win to now a 17.5 point Biden win.

Atlas analysis. You've gotta love it.

[GeorgiaModerate]

The website has updated with last night's numbers from Maricopa County.

Arizona now has the following estimated ballots left per https://arizona.vote/ballot-progress.html:

Ballots needing signature verification (deadline has past in most counties): 2727
Provisional ballots: 18514
Ballots ready for tabulation: 3367

Total: 24738

Updating with these numbers and using the same (very) Trump-friendly assumptions as before:

50% of the ballots needing signature cures will be accepted.
80% of the provisionals will be accepted.
Trump will do 10% better (and Biden 10% worse) than the current margins in each county.  Trump has generally not been doing this well in recent dumps.

With these assumptions, an estimated 19672 of the remaining ballots will be accepted, and Trump will net 428 from them.  He currently trails by 11635, so would finish behind by 11207.

Of the estimated remaining 24.7K ballots, 10.7K are in Pima County and 6700 are in Maricopa, which is doing a final drop tonight.  Based on present trends (without the Trump-friendly assumptions) I'm estimating the final margin will be between 12K and 15K for Biden.  Trump has no chance to overtake Biden, and the only interesting question remaining is whether Arizona will end up closer than Georgia (margin of 14,057 pending recount).

[Person Man]

Michigan and New Hampshire were overtaken by Arizona and Georgia as the closest states and still neither will be as close as the former were in 2016.

[Figueira]

God, that means Republicans get to carve a Republican CD out of New Hampshire, right? At least the state is elastic enough that it probably can't be completely Safe R.

Is that even possible, given the size (& federal dynamics) of the state?

Looking at the town map, it's probably possible to make a district that voted for Trump, but it's probably impossible to guarantee that that district will continue to vote Republican until 2030. Even then, it's a bit difficult, because Democrats in the state are concentrated in several non-contiguous areas. You can't connect Dover/Portsmouth to the other Democratic areas without bringing a swath of Republican towns along with them.

So yeah, Republicans might just give up and draw a fair district map, in the hopes that they'll be able to win both districts in a Republican wave year. We'll see.