[EL] Seats won by closing time

[Charles H Stewart]

Earlier today, in the discussion of the Toobin piece, several people remarked on the fact that the magnitude of the Democratic win in the House was only clear once California's results were reported --- and even then, we've had to wait for all the California votes to be reported.

This prompted me to do the following analysis.  I took the election returns from all the House districts (thanks to David Leip's wonderful website) and mapped them onto the closing times of the polls for the states involved.  I then produced two graphs:  (1) the % of votes and seats won by the Democrats, broken down by the poll-closing times of the states, and (2) the cumulative votes and seats won, broken down by the poll-closing times of the states. (Please don't e-mail me to remind me that Oregon, Colorado, and Washington really don't have poll-closing times.)

This graph confirms the observations.  As the evening goes on, the results become more Democratic.  Not only that, early in the evening, Democrats tended to under-perform in the win column, compared to the votes they were receiving.  As the evening went on, they caught up.  Also, because this analysis assumes that all the votes were reported on election night, when in fact they weren't, the "west-coast effect" (I think it's more than just California) can be seen to sneak up on people.

Enjoy the graphs.

Charles

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Charles Stewart III
Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts   02139
617-253-3127
cstewart at mit.edu<mailto:cstewart at mit.edu>

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