Here's the latest from the New York Times on the Kari Lake vs. Katie Hobbs contest for governor in Arizona:
Hobbs is winning in the two biggest counties, while Lake is winning in 10 of the 13 smaller counties. And some counties have more votes already counted than others. How will that net out? I created a simple spreadsheet that assumed both candidates kept their current percentages in each county after all the votes had been counted. The result was a victory for Katie Hobbs by 51.1% to 48.9%.
That's a respectable two-point difference, though it's certainly possible that late votes are systematically different from earlier votes in one direction or another. Still, at this point it looks like Hobbs will expand her current lead slightly and cut the knees off Kari Lake's oft-proclaimed "rising star" designation. Keep your fingers crossed.
What do actual results matter when the Pretty Little Fascist won't recognize them?
She can be as deluded as she likes. It won't stop Katie Hobbs from taking office.
Well, then we can completely ignore her going forward. Just another failed Trumper.
OT (somewhat): Using the CNN data of the Georgia Senate race to determine the remaining ballots in the counties that cover the Atlanta metropolitan area, my rough calculations show that there might be enough votes there to still get Warnock past fifty percent. (This depends a LOT upon how accurate CNN's percent counted figures are though.)
If that were to happen, wouldn't that mean Warnock would win outright without a runoff?
Haven't looked at the entire map, but yes, just based on the Atlanta counties there seems to be enough votes to get him over 50% given the huge advantage he has on those counties
Depends on which counties (and parts thereof) are included in “Atlanta counties.” The dark blue/heavily minority description doesn’t apply to all the counties nor to the outlying areas of Gwinnett and Cobb or the old money parts of north Fulton
By my calculations Reverend Warnock will get to about 49.8%. I hope I’m wrong but I think he needs around 90% of the remaining votes statewide to pull off 50% + 1
Anyone do Nevada? Look to me like she still has shot. Not lock but a shag.
Yikes. No a lock, just a shot
What happened to edit? Or delete? Arghhhh
The projections I saw are its gonna be really really insanely close
The problem seems to be this:
It isn't so much which counties have uncounted ballots. It's a question of which batches of ballots remain to be counted.
Based on what's being said on cable, it sounds like the batches of ballots which remain uncounted may tend to favor Lake. There's no way to be sure, of course.
I'd strongly prefer that Lake lose, but if she wins, Democrats may be able to take some consolation in the fact (and it is a fact) that a wingnut of her particular level of wingyness will probably piss enough Arizonans off to further weaken the GOP brand in that state in the runup to 2024.
I don't know on what evidence those people "on cable" are basing those claims, but I'd put good money on it being nothing more than speculation offered to fill airtime. Nobody knows from where in Maricopa County those ballots came, much less who they favor.
The most recent update (as of about an hour ago) added 78,869 ballots to the total. These were the early votes from last Saturday-Monday, and they went 54.8% for Hobbs and 45.2% for Lake. Left uncounted are the 17,000 untabulated "box 3" ballots (which I'm guessing will favor Lake) and mail ballots that were dropped off at polling places and require verification before they can be tabulated. Some of those will be for Lake, but Republican voters were being actively encouraged NOT to vote by mail and to vote instead on election day. That's why I find the belief that the dropoff trend will mirror the one in 2020 (which is the closest thing to evidence that I've seen offered to support the claim that they'll favor Lake) to be speculative at best.
That's a Big Deal if Lake loses. It means Democrats will have held on to all the key governors in swing states, greatly weakening the potential for any state-level GOP legislature to do crap like substitute electors and so forth in 2024.
It would be a flip here in AZ, but the Rs still have the legislature.
God, I hope Kevin's right. Lake is absolutely batshit insane.
Now do Boebert!!!
Last I checked, she pulled into the lead.....
Hopefully just a dump of red locals, and the remaining votes are blue.
Here's the "remaining vote" tracker from MSNBC:
https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/senate-midterm-elections-votes-tracker-n1300492?icid=election_nav
Alas, only for the Senate--and shows number of outstanding votes and major vote getter--but not percentage difference between candidates...
The favored way to vote in Arizona flipped from Republicans voting by mail to voting in person and the Democrats switched from in person to mail since 2016. According to some local pundits, no one knows whether the late arriving mailed ballots, some from the post and others dropped off at voting precincts the day of the vote, are going to break Democratic or Republican. The mailed in ballots counted when the polls closed created 10-15% winning margins for most Democratic candidates. When overnight the in person votes were counted, all the races tightened with some Democratic candidates losing to Republicans in the more conservative Congressional districts. The only hint of how these late arriving votes are to going to break came when the Attorney General race flipped from the Republican to the Democrat after Wednesday night's tally update.
Much of this tea leaf reading relies on people following the same pattern as they did before. There is, of course, no reason that a person who voted early in 2020 couldn't wait until the day of the election to drop their ballot off. So basically we are all guessing. I'm pretty optimistic that Kelly has enough of a cushion to win. Unfortunately Hobbs in running around 80,000 votes behind Kelly. Hard for me to understand why anyone would vote for Lake but her Donald Trump in high heels routine must appeal to someone.
I always assumed projecting the way Kevin described was the obvious thing to do absent more detailed data. Doesn't any media organization do it? If not, why? Second thought... don't answer that.
They don't do that because it's usually wrong. The votes that haven't been counted yet are from voters with different characteristics than those whose voted have been counted. If all you know is what county they're voting in, you don't know much. It's fine for Kevin to speculate on the basis of weak information, but news organizations should not.
I predict Hobbs will win and Lake will scream bloody murder, that Cortez Masto will continue to catch up in Nevada at present rates and therefore win, and MAGA will scream cheating, and that Dems continue catching up in House races and will win the House too, and Republicans will never ever believe again in elections.
I hope Lake loses because it is always bad to have openly fascist people in charge, but unfortunately Kevin’s prediction is based on faulty logic. The big outstanding group of ballots is from people who dropped off ballots on election day. It was a little hard to tell what that means, but I think it means NOT mail in ballots, but ballots dropped in special drop boxes for votes.
The number of these election day ballots are much higher (like twice as high) as you’d expect. The only question is why did a lot more people do this? Maybe it is because Democratic voters think they won’t be attacked by Republicans who have been staking out the drop boxes if they drop off on election day. Maybe. I got to say that the only thing that makes sense to me is if there is some crazy QAnon conspiracy that says if you use the normal voting machines your vote will not count, so use the drop box. But they will change your vote if you do it before election day so do it the day of. That doesn’t make any sense, but it does sound QAnon.
In any case, whichever group came up with a reason for dropping off on election day will probably win the vote. I suspect that means Lake wins, but who knows.
Apparently Hobbs lead has just increased to 31,000. I hope that will be enough, but I have doubts.
I'm cautiously optimistic that it will be enough. A lot of the guesstimates (and that's really all they are) rely upon some important assumptions, such as that the percentages of the 2022 "late earlies" (people with mail-in ballots who dropped them off at polling places on Election Day) will be similar to those of 2020, and that party affiliation equals votes for that party's candidate. The first treats 2020 as a baseline norm when it was anything but (have we already forgotten that we were in the depths of an unchecked pandemic at the time?), while the second ignores the dynamics of the race. Maricopa County GOP leaders are really sick of being the whipping boy of the state's Republican legislators and party leadership, and they're seeing up close the county's shift blueward. They may not have come out and openly rejected Lake, but they actively campaigned against Mark Finchem (who like his base can now spend the next couple of years ranting about stolen elections from the comfort of his own home) and I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't push back at all against the Hobbs campaign's effort to mobilize anti-Lake Republicans.
The bottom line is that while those uncounted ballots from Maricopa Republicans will favor Lake in the end, I doubt they will do so in the numbers needed to offset Hobbs's lead and the gains she'll make from the uncounted Democratic and independent voters, plus the ones remaining in Pima County (which is 1/3 the size of the Maricopa total, but which is currently trending Hobbs +20).
Looks like I was too pessimistic.
The two questions are did the persons who dropped off their mail-in ballots on election day do so because they did not trust the mail/drop boxes, these would be the people who believe the Big Lie, or were they fearful of the armed and masked vigilantes posted at the drop boxes to intimidate Democratic voters?
The latest results indicate a small majority of these voters were leaning Democratic.
Looks like I was too pessimistic.