US Election Week 2020

[DGuller]

I think the Fox stats guy and the AP are now torching their credibility with every minute that goes buy where the "called" state is the most uncertain of the ones remaining.

Presumably, they called it when they were told 96% of the vote was counted.  If I see a large advance on Biden that can't be gapped with 99.5% of the 4% remaining votes, I'd be calling it to.  However, it seems Arizona fucked up in reporting the results, since it was 82-84% of the vote counted instead of 96% and that makes a huge difference, unknown to Fox and the AP who called it.

If they called it for Biden at 82% of the vote in, and knowning such, then they were obviously wrong.

It's understandable why they called it originally.  However, they really fucked up when they failed to retract after the data was fixed, and now they've just dug themselves into a hole.  They're now all-in on their bad judgment to not retract, it seems, and they're just praying now, as we all are, that AZ will go Biden's way regardless.  They're hoping that if it goes Biden's way in the end, then it'll be "no harm, no foul" freeroll that everyone will forget.

[alfred russel]

I'm running the numbers in Georgia. Trump is up about 31k votes.

About 90k votes are uncounted. Of those,

32k are from Fulton County (metro atlanta), that went for Biden 72-26.
16k are from Chatham County (savannah), that went for Biden 58-41.
7k are from Clayton County (gone with the wind location outside atlanta), that went for Biden 85-14.
5k are from DeKalb County (metro atlanta), that went for Biden 83-16.

Those are the largest by ballots uncounted. The rest are suburban and rural counties. They are early votes, so could skew democratic.

Biden needs to win the uncounted ballots about 2-1. It looks doable but not a slam dunk.

[Valmy]

Are there automatic recounts in States where the margins are razor thin?

Yes and no and sort of. It is different in every state.

[FunkMonk]

I think maybe the Fox/AP guys were under the impression that these late VBM ballots in AZ were more Biden-leaning than they actually are. As it looks now it's definitely a toss-up.

They're probably hoping PA gets called late tonight. 

[DGuller]

I think maybe the Fox/AP guys were under the impression that these late VBM ballots in AZ were more Biden-leaning than they actually are. As it looks now it's definitely a toss-up.

They're probably hoping PA gets called late tonight. 

And definitely hoping that GA doesn't get called before PA, so that they don't have to explain why Biden having 280 EV is too close to call.

[viper37]

I think the Fox stats guy and the AP are now torching their credibility with every minute that goes buy where the "called" state is the most uncertain of the ones remaining.

Presumably, they called it when they were told 96% of the vote was counted.  If I see a large advance on Biden that can't be gapped with 99.5% of the 4% remaining votes, I'd be calling it to.  However, it seems Arizona fucked up in reporting the results, since it was 82-84% of the vote counted instead of 96% and that makes a huge difference, unknown to Fox and the AP who called it.

If they called it for Biden at 82% of the vote in, and knowning such, then they were obviously wrong.

It's understandable why they called it originally.  However, they really fucked up when they failed to retract after the data was fixed, and now they've just dug themselves into a hole.  They're now all-in on their bad judgment to not retract, it seems, and they're just praying now, as we all are, that AZ will go Biden's way regardless.  They're hoping that if it goes Biden's way in the end, then it'll be "no harm, no foul" freeroll that everyone will forget.

Ah, I missed the part where they just dug themselves.  I'm only watching WP's site, not tv.

[Valmy]

I'm running the numbers in Georgia. Trump is up about 31k votes.

About 90k votes are uncounted. Of those,

32k are from Fulton County (metro atlanta), that went for Biden 72-26.
16k are from Chatham County (savannah), that went for Biden 58-41.
7k are from Clayton County (gone with the wind location outside atlanta), that went for Biden 85-14.
5k are from DeKalb County (metro atlanta), that went for Biden 83-16.

Those are the largest by ballots uncounted. The rest are suburban and rural counties. They are early votes, so could skew democratic.

Biden needs to win the uncounted ballots about 2-1. It looks doable but not a slam dunk.

Ooooh. That's bad. So close.

[OttoVonBismarck]

My guess is Georgia finishes up as close 10,000, and we won't know until basically the end of counting on which side.

Arizona I think is actually a Biden hold. McCain's big pollster in Arizona basically is saying "yes Trump can pull it out here, but you'd rather be Joe Biden in this scenario." His reasons were that something like 40k of the votes remaining are from Pima County, which is a genuine blue county, and while Trump did hit exactly the margin (no more no less) he needed in the last dump, we don't know where in Maricopa county these votes are coming from. Maricopa is geographically and population quite huge, with areas that are strong red and areas that are strong blue. It's a true unknown, it could be the next few batches are real bad for Biden and then he needs even bigger vote share from subsequent batches and doesn't get it. Or it could be the last batch was Trump's low batch and he crushes the remainder and wins a narrow victory in the state.

Nevada it sounds like the data analysts are much more bullish on Biden, the margin there is scary tight, but it appears basically all the remaining votes in NV are mail in votes from Washoe and Clark county, these are blue counties in like every election, and in Nevada the partisan shift between in person election day votes vs mail is quite large, so there's no reason to expect Trump closes that margin at all and a lot of reasons to expect Biden quite meaningfully widens it.

PA is worth looking at their counting website: https://www.votespa.com/About-Elections/Pages/Counting-Dashboard.aspx

As of 11:25pm ET: Biden is down about 165,000 votes, 763,000 mail in votes remain. Virtually no in person votes remain ( a few small precincts in a few small counties that likely had counting issues.) The partisan tilt of mail in ballots thus far has been in the +40 to +50 range for Biden in PA. Philadelphia has not updated its count since like 4pm ET or so, and in that time Biden has continued to cut down the lead--because even mail votes from red counties are more blue than red, like there are counties Trump will probably win 75/25, where he's up 80/20, because we haven't counted the blue ballots there. So Biden is building margin basically statewide with every set of mail ballots counted, and he's down to 165k behind with several very very strong Biden counties with huge population not even giving us a ton of new vote in the last 6-7 hours.

I would say in PA you almost need a "data problem" to save Trump. With the data we have I don't see how he wins the state. But maybe in some nightmare scenario they come out tomorrow and are like "ohh, yeah it's not 760,000 mail ballots left, it's only 120,000" RIP. That probably won't happen, but I bet fear of just that scenario is why people are still being cautious around PA with Trump still up over 100,000 votes. When or if Biden gets that down to even a slight lead, I'll expect a big narrative shift everywhere, but that likely comes like noonish or 3pmish tomorrow.

[The Minsky Moment]

Based on the numbers AR cited Georgia could be closer then 10K, maybe in the 0-5,000 range.
if Biden wins 70% of the ballots on average in the 4 counties where he leads it cuts the lead to 3000.  At 80% Biden goes up 5000.
Then you'd have to see how the other 30K ballots split.

[Valmy]

[OttoVonBismarck]

To get more specific on PA, if the 763,000 remaining follow existing trends, Biden will net 595,000 or so votes from the remaining mail ballots. Trump will net 167,860.

You end up with something looking like:

Trump: 3,385,000
Biden: 3,646,000

Pretty substantial margin.

[Valmy]

So we have this criminal county sheriff who is presently indicted for felony evidence tampering after he destroyed a video to cover up the murder of Javier Ambler last year by his deputies. Fortunately, despite the asshole spending shitloads of money to stay in office he lost by 12 points. The new Sheriff will be the first Democrat to hold a county wide office in this county in 25 years. We will see if he can hold it.

But that was an election we just had to win. The guy should be in prison but for now just having him out of office is a good start.

[katmai]

.  Georgia

According to CNN:

-Approx. 99,000 votes to go.
-Biden needs around 55% of those.
-Biden's average for the votes that have been coming in tonight is around 70%.

[Valmy]

Whether it is 90K or 99K seems to matter a lot. Crazy.

But either way I think it should be enough to get that double Senate runoff.

[HisMajestyBOB]

Whether it is 90K or 99K seems to matter a lot. Crazy.

But either way I think it should be enough to get that double Senate runoff.

That would be awesome, even though it's just setting me up for crushing disappointment in Jan.