2016 Election Night

When urbanites learn that I raise chickens on my farm, they often recount an episode of the comedy sketch Portlandia where two diners ask a series of escalating questions about the chicken they’re about to order: How was the chicken raised? How big is the area where the chickens can roam free? What was the chicken’s name? (If you must know … mine are woodland and orchard-ranged, they roam on about five acres, and I don’t give them names.) These are earnest questions with answers that are hard to verify if you’re buying your food far from the farm, which may explain why measures to ensure that farm animals are raised in a humane way have made their way to the ballot in recent years. In California, Proposition 2 passed in 2008, set rules prohibiting certain methods of confinement for chickens raised for eggs; a 2006 Arizona proposition bars tethering or confining pregnant pigs or calves raised for veal, and a 2002 Florida measure specifies the way pregnant pigs can be housed. Now Massachusetts is getting a say on the issue with Question 3, the Massachusetts Minimum Size Requirements for Farm Animal Containment, which would prohibit the sale of eggs, veal and pork produced from animals confined in such a way that they were prevented from lying down, standing up, extending their limbs or turning around. Recent polls suggest that support for the measure outweighs opposition. Supporters include organic farmers and environmental and animal rights groups such as the Sierra Club and the Humane Society of the United States. Opposition comes from industry groups such as the National Pork Producers Council, the Massachusetts Farm Bureau and the National Association of Egg Farmers, who say it would significantly increase the cost of these products.

Bellwether counties show us the election in microcosm. By mirroring at a local level what’s going on nationally, they offer a more human look at the political trends roiling the country. “The New Bellwethers” is a series by FiveThirtyEight senior political writer Clare Malone that examines a few select counties in key states where Clinton and Trump are polling very close to how they are in the U.S. overall (according to Morning Consult polling data collected from August through early October). Our first stop? Gaston County, North Carolina. To read Clare’s article on Gaston, click here.

We’re still several hours away from getting any actual election results, but investors seem to like whatever signs they’re seeing. The major U.S. stock indexes all ended the day higher, though they gave up some of their gains from earlier in the day. The S&P 500 closed up 0.4 percent, while the Dow Jones industrial average rose 73 points. (The Dow had been up more than 140 points earlier in the day.) As I noted earlier, some recent research has found that investors are rooting for a Clinton win. The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Vigna earlier today suggested that the markets were responding to real-time election estimates based on data from Votecastr. Those estimates, which are being published by Slate and Vice, have been generally favorable for Clinton. (At FiveThirtyEight, we’re watching the Votecastr experiment with interest but aren’t relying on its estimates.) It’s hard to know how much weight investors were giving to Votecastr’s estimates or other election-related tidbits; in fact, there’s no way to know for sure that today’s market moves were driven by the election, period. But at the very least investors don’t seem too concerned by what they’re seeing at the polls.