CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--The most rational analysis of Tuesday's election would predict that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to enjoy a fairly easy victory.
There are too many chances for them to pick off a state that Trump absolutely needs in order to win, and they have a pretty solid base that is, as they say, in the bank already.
But we are nervous. Very Nervous. And we will be up late on election night watching the results come in. This nervousness is probably just superstition, as one of my colleagues argues, or perhaps it is a bit of stress disorder left over from George W. Bush's reelection victory in 2004. The science argues against our nerves (see below), but there we are.
There are just a few states to watch, and with one exception, their results will come in quickly and we may have definitive results by the end of the night. We have assembled here a guide to watching the election night returns, including which states are likely to provide reasonably trustworthy counts as the night goes on.
It's kind of a continuum actually. There are a lot of states that we can expect to go solidly for Trump or solidly for Biden, and we can dismiss them from our concerns. Alabama will go for Trump even if an asteroid hits it on noon of election day. California will go for Biden even if the sea rises up and engulfs the Orange County coast. But then there are Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, and (shudder!) Pennsylvania.
For those freaking out about what is going to happen in the elections, here is the panicker’s guide to election night.
What can we expect in terms of the timeline for getting the results? As in so many other questions, we have a good set of answers from Fivethirtyeight.com. In this case, it is a list of all the states along with the time when we can expect each state to provide trustworthy numbers. By this, I mean that we will see enough votes from enough voting populations that we will have a decent sense of who the winner is going to be when all of the votes are finally counted.
You can find the descriptions of how long each state will take right here.
But before you delve into that page too deeply, I would like to point you to a different page from the same group. It’s their prediction on the election as a whole (right now they have Biden as about 90% likely to win) and if you scroll down near the bottom, you will find a box with drawings of a few states. These are the swing states – the ones that could give Biden a lock on the electoral college if they go the right way. In recent days, these have been Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona.
Below, you will be provided with a list – in order from east to west – of which important states to follow on election night.
Notice that Wisconsin and Michigan are not in this list, because they are predicted to go to Biden. To quote FiveThirtyEight.com, Biden is Clearly Favored to win Michigan and Clearly Favored to win Wisconsin. That description is based on a likelihood of 90% or better that Biden and Harris will win the state.
Therefore, don’t get worked up just because some email scam or your next door neighbor runs to you with the bad news that one new poll shows Trump improving in the Midwest.
Now about the overall prediction -- You can find it here. To make life simpler, I have combined the swing state data with the timelines to get valid vote reports.
What is actually likely to happen, and when?
There are eight states that have been singled out by FiveThirtyEight.com for special attention. They are the states that are likely to be close when the presidential votes are counted, and which are important to one or the other candidacy. We've listed them from east to west, since the polls close earlier in the east. Thus we take up Florida first, and move across the country to Arizona and Nevada.
Florida: 29 electoral votes: Biden is slightly favored to win. This is a must-win for Trump. Florida should be among the first to provide a reasonable count, as it preprocesses mail-in ballots and does not allow for an extended period after election day for late ballots to trickle in. There is a caveat here, in that the bigger counties with likely heavier Biden support may be slow to get all their mail-in ballots counted. The television news folks will be looking closely at representative counties and letting us know what is likely, what is unknown, and what we will have to wait for. A substantial victory for either candidate will most likely show up within a few hours of polls closing, which would be anytime after 8 PM Pacific time. If the totals are going to be like the year 2000, it could be another agonizing wait.
Look for the point where 70 or 80 percent of the votes have been counted, and if Trump is substantially ahead, it’s on to the next state for the Biden camp. If Biden is substantially ahead after most of the Trump votes have been counted (the networks will let us know when that is), then the election is over for Trump
Georgia: 16 electoral votes: Biden is slightly favored to win. This state should also be relatively quick, as early votes and mail-in votes have been getting processed since mid-October. Another must-win for Trump
North Carolina: 15 electoral votes: Biden is slightly favored to win. FiveThirtyEight.com tells us that the majority of the results will come fast, in that as much as 80% of the count could be announced right when the polls close (4:30 PM Pacific time). Most of the remaining votes will come in over the course of the evening, so we may have a fairly trustworthy result from North Carolina by the end of election night.
Pennsylvania: 20 electoral votes: Biden is favored to win Pennsylvania. By favored, they mean that they have estimated that Biden has an 86% chance to take the state. This is the one you've all been hearing about on the nightly news. All those absentee ballots won't get processed until Tuesday morning. Some absentee ballots won't be processed until their county has completed processing all of the election day ballots. The take home lesson on Pennsylvania is that we may see swings from Republican to Democrat and, in some places, perhaps even the other way around. In any case, the Pennsylvania result, considered to be so important by some analysts, isn't going to be certain for a good long time -- possibly a couple or three days, and possibly even a couple of weeks.
This eccentricity of the Pennsylvania system is why Trump has been whining about taking the election night result and treating it as the true and only result. It's about as absurd an argument as it is possible to make, but we can expect the Trump camp to continue to make it. One advantage, if there can be said to be one, for a slow Pennsylvania count is that the election may be functionally over, well before Pennsylvania makes itself known. All it would take would be a Biden win in Florida, or perhaps Biden wins in a couple of smaller states, and Biden would have his 270 electoral votes.
Ohio: 18 electoral votes: Ohio is rated as a tossup, with Trump given a 51% chance of victory and Biden a 49% chance. That's about as tossup as you can get.
This is another must-win for Trump. Without Ohio, it's hard to imagine Trump holding Biden to less than 270 electoral votes.
Most results should be quick. As of 5 PM Pacific time on election night, all counties are supposed to report on totals for all the mail-in and early votes. As of the moment, those votes are slightly over 2.9 million. The last presidential election in 2016, this state cast just under 5.5 million ballots, so we can expect a modest turnout at the polls on election day, and therefore a fairly quick count of all those election-day votes.
Iowa: 6 electoral votes: Trump is slightly favored to win Iowa, by which the pollsters mean that he has a 63% chance of winning.
Most of the votes will be counted by the end of election night, with a few trickling in over a few days.
Texas: 38 electoral votes: Trump is slightly favored to win Texas, meaning he has a calculated 62% chance. This number by itself is astonishing, considering how conservative Texas is generally considered to be. But there it is. A Texas loss for Trump would signify not only an election loss, but pretty much of a blowout.
Meanwhile, we've all been aware that Texas residents have been voting early in vast numbers, so there will be a lot of early votes that will be reported on election night. Election day votes will also be counted on election night. We can therefore expect that we will have a pretty good estimate of Texas results by the end of election night.
Arizona: 11 electoral votes: Biden is favored to win Arizona (70% chance of winning). Polls close at 6 PM Pacific time, and most votes should be reported sometime on election night. A few mail-in ballots trickling in at the last minute may not be counted for a couple of days, so a very close election could keep us waiting.
Nevada: 6 electoral votes: Biden is favored to win Nevada (87% likelihood). The Nevada polls close at 7 PM Pacific time. For Nevada, we may get substantial results (largely from the Las Vegas area) on election night, but Nevada accepts mail-in ballots until November 10, so if the race is unexpectedly close, we will have to wait it out.
The senatorial races
If the Democrats are to run the table, it's necessary to pick up 4 senatorial turnovers, considering the inevitable loss to the Republicans in Alabama. That would be a net of 3, which is the minimum necessary to take control. The likeliest turnovers are North Carolina, Arizona, Colorado, and Maine, with possibilities in Iowa and Georgia. Kentucky, sadly enough, is likely to stay with the Republicans. It is also necessary to hold onto the Democratic seat in Michigan. Montana is iffy, but a distant possibility. South Carolina is another race that is iffy at best, but will be fun to watch if the incumbent has a few uncomfortable hours.
So there you have it. Douglas Adams wrote a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and he begins with the advice, "Don't Panic." Maybe it's the advice to take.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
