2016 Election Night

Jonathan Bernstein posted an underreported statistic about the election the other day (citing Boris Shor): 73 percent of Democratic state legislators are endorsing Clinton, while 5 percent of Republican state legislators are endorsing Trump. This strikes me as incredibly important. Yes, a number of prominent Republicans have refused to back Trump and have even urged a vote for Clinton, and a few others like John McCain have gone back and forth in their support. But only in the state legislative endorsements do you get a sense of the dramatic differences between the major-party candidacies this year. Like most other information about state legislators, this hasn’t been well-covered. Yet it might have given Republican voters greater confidence in casting a vote for someone else or even skipping the presidential race altogether if they knew how many of their party’s elites were opposed to its presidential nominee.

Throughout this evening, we’ll be updating election night forecasts as states are called for presidential and senate candidates. To clear up any misinterpretations, we’re not trying to project states based on partial returns. So if (for example) Trump is leading Missouri by 5 percentage points with 40 percent of precincts reporting, that won’t matter to the model. Instead, our election night model is much simpler than that. It relies upon only these three things:

1. Our pre-election forecasts.
2. States that are “called” by our partners at ABC News.
3. The amount of time that has passed since the polls closed in a state, if it hasn’t been called yet.

To repeat, these forecasts do not use votes counted so far. They also do not use exit polls. They do not look at margin of victory. The only input is a single designation for every state: “D” (called for the Democrat), “R” (called for the Republican”) or blank (not called yet), based on calls made by the ABC News Decision Desk. We can also call states for independent candidates or project that the Georgia or Louisiana Senate races will go to a runoff. Having a state called for you helps in two ways in the model.

• It gives you electoral votes.
• It helps you in our forecast for the other states. For example, if Wisconsin has been called for Clinton, the model can infer that she’s more likely to win Minnesota. And it really helps candidates if they win in an upset, since that’s a sign that they may be beating their polls everywhere.

Our election models have been running tens of thousands of simulations each day in order to account for the relationship between different states in the Electoral College. The most important takeaway is that state outcomes are correlated: If Trump (unexpectedly) wins Virginia, for example, he’s also extremely likely to win North Carolina. So each simulation creates a plausible map based on a state’s region and demographics. In one simulation, perhaps, Clinton might outperform among Hispanics, therefore winning Florida and Arizona despite losing Ohio and Iowa. These simulations are useful for our election night forecast also. Once we know the results in some states, we can make better inferences about the results in the remaining ones. So as states are called, we update the forecasts accordingly based on a series of regression analyses that relate every state to every other one. The model also considers how long it’s been without a call in a state. If it originally expected Clinton to win New Jersey by 10 percentage points, for instance, but New Jersey still hasn’t been called five hours after polls have closed there, it will discount that lead significantly, assuming the state is closer than pre-election polls had it. As a final word of caution, I wouldn’t read too much into the first few called states unless there are substantial upsets (Clinton winning Indiana, for example). But once swing states start to be called and the model has more data to work off, its projections will be more meaningful.

Exit polls asked voters about Obamacare, but instead of the usual dichotomous responses of “in favor” or “not in favor” of the law, voters were given three options: did the law go too far, not far enough, or was it about right? While 45 percent said the law went too far, 31 percent said it didn’t go far enough, suggesting that many of the people frustrated with the law don’t necessarily want it repealed.