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- The U.S. Election - Will There Be A Quick Result?
The U.S. Election - Will There Be A Quick Result?
U.S election day is nearly upon us.
Can we take a moment to appreciate that these are the best two candidates America has to offer.
Anyway, this election night could be very tricky indeed with early results being far more uncertain than usual.
The old saying - markets love certainty - rings truer than ever around this particular election period.
Before getting into the finer details, let's start with the risk of a contested outcome.
The higher proportion of postal votes for this election could delay the final results (and distort the early results too).
Trump said earlier this week that “it would be very, very proper and very nice if a winner were declared on November 3rd instead of counting ballots for two weeks, which is totally inappropriate and I don’t believe that’s by our laws”.
The Supreme Court didn't agree, ruling in Pennsylvania and North Carolina that postal votes received after election day will still count as long as they are postmarked by election day.
This raises the prospect of ballots arriving late and flipping the early results of a tight election.
The New York Times ran a cheery piece on the Democrats’ Doomsday Scenario and posed the question;
What if early results in swing states on Nov. 3 show President Trump ahead, and he declares victory before heavily Democratic mail-in votes, which he has falsely linked with fraud, are fully counted?
That is the big question, and it's justified.
A Democratic data group backed by Michael R. Bloomberg said this week that it was likely that Mr. Trump would appear to have won on election night by a landslide, a scenario it called “a red mirage.”
Even before Mr. Trump injected new partisanship into mail voting, election analysts identified a “blue shift” in how late-counted absentee ballots tend to boost Democratic candidates.
On election night of the 2018 midterms, a predicted wave of Democratic gains looked like a wipeout. But as mail ballots were tallied in the days and weeks afterward, Democrats kept winning close races. Their net gains in the House went from an apparent 26 seats on election night to 41.
“We’re likely to see a significantly dramatic blue shift in multiple states because of the virus and the political response to the virus,” said Edward Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, who coined the term “blue shift.”
“How will the public process the concept that election night may end in uncertainty, and this phenomenon is not fraud, it’s just the counting process?” he said.
That's the theory.
An early red mirage will give way to a subsequent blue shift.
Presuming he has the early votes, Trump will want to declare victory as early as possible to secure the win and set the stage to claim the Democrats cheated if this blue shift were to come to fruition.
This could lead to a drawn out process to decide the winner, ending with a Supreme Court showdown to determine the winner.
That's the worst case scenario.
Onto the voting
Of the 50 (+1) states, the NY times logs roughly 50% as solid Republican or Democrat wins.
This is a great visual;
NY Times
Ignore the 'Democratic lean' heading in that central column.
All of those seats are battlegrounds and up for grabs.
Retaining the 'red' states from 2016 will be crucial to Trump's re-election hopes.
In case you're wondering, Maine & Nebraska are listed with a 2nd district because they use a congressional district method, and are the only two states that don’t play by the winner-take-all rules under the Electoral College.
All 50 US states and Washington DC have a set number of "electors" in the electoral college – roughly proportionate to the size of each state.
Each state gets at least three electoral votes because the amount is equal to its total number of Senators and Representatives in the US Congress. Washington DC also gets three electoral college votes, meaning a total of 538 electors form the Electoral College.
California, the largest state, has 55 electoral votes, Texas, the next largest, gets 38. New York and Florida have 29 each.
All but two states – Maine and Nebraska – use a winner-takes-all system, so if you win the most votes in a state, you take its entire haul of electoral college votes.
To become president either candidate needs to win a majority of the 538 electors; i.e 270 electors.
On the night, these are the main timings to be aware of.
*in Florida, most polls will close by 00:00
When can we expect a result?
Usually it's clear who has won by around 8AM GMT, with the loser conceding defeat.
But this time it's different
Maybe.
The mail-in voting has definitely thrown the cat amongst the pigeons for any early results this year.
Democrats are more likely to vote by mail this year, so in states where those will be the first type of ballots released, like Arizona, Florida and North Carolina, initial results could skew in favour of Biden.
Places that report in-person Election Day votes first, like most parts of Virginia, will probably look better for President Trump.
Bottom line, if voting numbers are close, neither will want to concede too early.
Wisconsin & Pennsylvania will not even begin processing mailed ballots until election day.
There's also the senate votes
The senate is currently Republican controlled, and anywhere between seven and sixteen seats are considered 'competitive' depending who you pay attention to.
“I could see a pretty clear path to 50-50, but it’s a harder climb past that” for Democrats, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball election forecast at the University of Virginia.
For Democrats to do better, Biden will have to take the White House and win or at least keep Trump’s margin razor thin in states like Iowa and Georgia. If Trump once again can pull off a come-from-behind victory, Democrats might have to settle for holding on to the House.
“It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where Biden doesn’t win and Democrats win the Senate,” Kondik said. “They’re tied at the hip.”
Of the 14 seats considered competitive, Democrats need to win at least five.
This is how things look in the polls (NYT);
In both, Democrats recruited excellent challengers: John Hickenlooper, a two-term former Colorado governor; and Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut married to Gabby Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman shot during an assassination attempt.
These are considered the two seats that the Democrats are most likely to take.
They would still need to gain three further seats for a majority control.
Cook Political rates seven seats as competitive (toss up)
The same mail ballot rules apply for senate votes, so there is potential for a delayed result here too.
Seemingly no-one (except Trump) expects the Republicans to take majority control of congress so that's why it's not covered!
That's the stage set.
This is already getting wordy, so that's enough for today!
I will send out a couple more election notes before the main event.
One will cover the longer term scenarios/forecasts, and I will also prepare a separate cheat sheet election night.
Before I go... About those polls
I don't trust 'em.
Maybe they've got it right this time, but I have seen plenty of 'evidence' that would contradict this.
This RaboBank note by Michael Every sums up the polling issues (from the 13th of October);
Whilst we're on the subject of unscientific polls...
Vote here
A sign of things to come or a very biased FinTwit...?
