It's still a very inconsistent, mixed bag of results by county in New Jersey. It's rare to have such an uneven picture. And I do think the likeliest explanation is that there are a lot of places without all their mail ballots
It is *possible* that the Democrats can be good in Hunterdon, ok in Middlesex, crushed in Cape May and so on. I don't want to dismiss that possibility. But in the absence of better reporting, I think uneven vote by method is the likelier story
And so on that note, I'll ask whether anyone has seen any information that speaks to this question.
on cue, @ForecasterEnten tells me that at least Bergen County has no mail reporting there, so that's at least one case where things may be a little unrepresentative
For some context on effect, there are at least 40k mail votes in Bergen and they're 64-16 Dem by registration. So that would likely give Murphy a modest lead in at least that county, but maybe only a low-mid single digit one
And I do think we have to wonder whether and where that's happening elsewhere, since as far as I can tell there aren't many counties displaying this information
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It will be a while until we have authoritative data on turnout in Virginia, but at the moment I think it's fair to say two things, judged against 2020:
--Black/non-white turnout was weak for Democrats
--Otherwise, Democratic turnout was probably fine
For clarity, I've assigned the turnout among early voters to each precinct using voter file data, allowing for a direct comparison to 2020 turnout using vote history data
In overwhelmingly Black precincts, turnout was just over half of 2020 levels. It was at about 75% of 2020 levels in areas with no Black voters.
I said this to a few people on the phone so it may be worth adding publicly too: from the standpoint of electoral implications, one of the most important things about CRT (either IRL or caricature) is that it's a critique of liberalism from the left.
The implication: it lets certain GOPers be relatively liberal on race.
If CRT is raised to sufficient salience, GOPers don't have to rev up the base with outright conservative views--like anti-immigration or denial of police brutality--to polarize along racial attitudes
Of course, many Republicans will instead emphasize outright conservative views that alienate more voters. I'd guess one might have lost VA.
But for more moderate GOPers, CRT is a gift. They can bash the left and earn cred by merely sounding like... Obama '08
There are only four precincts where Hispanics make up a majority in Virginia, but they did pretty notably underperform our baseline for a tied election--perhaps suggesting continuing, disproportionate Democratic weakness with the group
It also seems like the turnout in majority Black and Hispanic precincts was relatively weak (see right hand column)
I know it's kind of annoying to judge compared to some vague 'expectations,' but it's sort of necessary in Virginia, where all of the absentee/early vote is reported by county, while precincts are all Election Day precincts
It's hard to get a good grip on New Jersey, imo. Not only are we missing result by method, but there's not much consistency among the higher turnout, presumably nearly-done counties. There just aren't many data points in a state w 12 counties or whatever, esp if they're noisy
The Hunterdon County result, for instance, looks totally healthy for Democrats and it looks done. I figured this wasn't going to be close when I saw it.
Cape May County, otoh, looks nearly done and fantastic for the GOP.
So it's hard to balance that
Looking elsewhere, there's a lot more 'bad' for Democrats than healthy. But it's hard to know whether that's because of biases in which kind of methods are reporting until we're at 100% counted
Looking for data errors, I do think there is one possible bug that offers some good--if insufficient--news for McAuliffe: it does seem like Fairfax County is missing quite a few early votes.
Right now, they're at 50-86 percent of expectations, for each of their three CDs, compared to the pre-election number of reported in-person early votes. Might get them another net-40k votes than you'd estimate if you just assumed that vote was over.
That said, Youngkin's expected edge is at least twice that much, so it doesn't get McAuliffe back in it exactly even if it's quite significant numerically
350 precincts counted, and Youngkin is still running slightly ahead of our projections for a tie
And he's doing it in nearly every category we're breaking down
The good news for Democrats: most of the vote reporting so far is election day, rural.
So they'll gain from here.
Still opportunities to run ahead from here.
That said, the needle would be tilting to the right if it were on the internet .