Harold Pollack, Stuart Levine, Mike O’Hare, and I will be live-blogging the midterms. (We’ll be chatting by email, and I’ll be posting the juicy bits here.)
First comment from me: It’s time for Democrats to make vote suppression and elections integrity a campaign issue. The only people that will turn off are the hardcore Trumpist Republicans Democrats were going to lose anyway.
If the Democrats take the House, they can pass an appropriate bill (which the Senate will ignore) and then start tacking it to various pieces of “must-pass” legislation.
6:02
CNN is putting up some exit polling. Overwhelmingly, voters think the economy is in good shape (68-31) but the country is on the wrong track (41-56). That sounds right.
Trump’s job performance among exit-polled voters is underwater, 44-55. That’s pretty close to pre-election national polling.
Opinions of the Republican Party are net unfavorable (43-54, of the Democrats net favorable 50-46).
Generic ballot also has the Democrats 10 points up, also consistent with pre-election polls, or just a tad on the high side.
I’ve always found it bizarre that the networks report raw vote without reporting votes in previous elections from the same precincts, which would make the raw vote interpretable. That shouldn’t require much effort.
Predictably, FiveThirtyEight.com is providing a contrast with CNN’s idiot chatter. Here’s how the thing is done, folks:
Looking for signs of what’s happening with Democratic incumbent Sen. Joe Donnelly in Indiana? In Bartholomew County, which had 1 percent of the state’s vote in 2016, a bit more than one-third of its precincts have reported. Trump won it by 33 points in 2016, and Donnelly lost it by 8 points in 2012. Currently Donnelly trails there by 9 points, which is close to his 2012 result when he won statewide by 6 points.
If those 1/3 of the votes are representative of the county - a big if - Donnelly is in good shape; he’s only doing a point worse tonight than he did six years ago, when he won by six points. (Still not clear to me why it’s so hard to do straight precinct-by-precinct comparisons.)
Now here’s some cheerful news from Twitter:
@HLWright
On the Kim Davis race in Rowan County, with 12 of 19 precincts reporting:
Davis (R): 1783
Caudill (D): 2172
@heraldleader @BGPolitics
Closing this thread down and starting a new post.
Stuart Levine says
I wonder how many D votes were lost in GA due to voting problems.