[EL] Seats won by closing time

[larrylevine at earthlink.net]

A reporter in Los Angeles asked me Friday why the late vote count has tipped
so heavily toward Democrats. I gave him several possible reasons. 1 -
Democrats have been stressing vote-by-mail registrations in recent years; 2
- Democrats have been organized to make sure those voters cast ballots; 3 -
Democrats have a large pond in which to fish for these increased ballots
because a) Republican registration is shrinking and aging, b) those who
think of themselves as Republicans and are loyal to the party tend to be
already registered to vote and have a higher propensity to cast ballots; 4)
Republican positions on issues have increasingly isolated them from key
voter groups. 

I have read much hand wringing among Republicans in the past week in which
they say the party has to make some changes to appeal to more voters. That
would mean becoming pro-choice instead of anti-abortion, supportive of
social security instead of continually trying to undermine it, less
bombastic about immigration issues, and a whole raft of other issues that
would leave adrift  the majority of those registered with the party.

So, the equating of seats held vs. total votes will become more and more an
historical curiosity and less and less a predictor of future election
results.

Larry

 

From: Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> On Behalf
Of Charles H Stewart
Sent: Monday, 19 November 2018 4:09 PM
To: Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: [EL] Seats won by closing time

 

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

 



 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------

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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