How Election Week 2022 Went Down

Every election, you get bombarded by data points from exit polls dissecting what issues voters said mattered, what share of the vote came from certain demographic groups and how those groups voted. Now, exit polls are useful in that they attempt to reach people who actually voted, so their results can be valuable when it comes to understanding trends and the importance of various issues. However, we’re here to caution you to take a wait-and-see approach with exit poll data tonight.

For all the attention they get, exit poll data is best used after the election is over. That’s because exit poll data is reweighted after results start coming in to better match the vote percentages from the location they were sampled and more accurately reflect voter preferences. As the night wears on, you may see the exit poll figures change in meaningful ways as further reweighting occurs. Exit polls will stop changing only after we have most or all of the results, but that’s typically very late on election night or even a day or two later, especially in an era with more mail voting. As a result, exit poll numbers — particularly the early results — are not a good measure of a candidate’s support, either in the overall race or among a certain demographic.

Moreover, an exit poll is still a poll, so there is some degree of potential error from the sampling process, including the risk that certain groups of voters will be less likely to respond to an exit poll worker at a sampling precinct. And while exit polls aim to talk to actual voters, the rise in alternative forms of voting, such as voting by mail or early in-person, has complicated how exit polls are conducted — and raised questions about how well they can gauge the actual makeup of the electorate. For instance, FiveThirtyEight largely avoided using exit poll data from vote-by-mail states like Colorado in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary because there was no way of being certain that respondents, reached by phone, had actually voted. And in the 2020 presidential election, the national exit poll may have exaggerated the share of the electorate that was nonwhite, which has been a long-term challenge for exit polling.

This is not to say that exit polls don’t have value — they do! But they’re most useful after the election, not on election night.

In Louisiana, today isn’t just the general election: It’s also the primary. Unlike the other 49 states, Louisiana holds open primaries on Election Day for all its local, state and congressional races, meaning all candidates in a given race appear together on the ballot, regardless of party, and voters select their top choice from the full suite of candidates. A candidate, however, must receive at least 50 percent of the vote to win; if there’s no such winner in a race, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, will face each other in a runoff general election, which this year would take place on Dec. 10.

Why doesn’t Louisiana hold open primaries earlier and instead make national election day its run-off date? Well, it used to. This current system was first introduced in the 1970s, with the open primary date occurring in October. However, in 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana’s setup violated federal protocol, as over 80 percent of races were being decided in the open primary, a full month or so before the rest of the country. The state subsequently revised the protocol with a later run-off date in December.

This system is unique, to say the least, and also controversial. Critics say it helps uplift fringe candidates who finish in second place by large margins in the primaries, while others say turnout suffers when voters have to visit the polls twice within a couple of weeks. Between 2008 and 2010, legal challenges forced the system to be put on pause. There have since been other efforts to amend Louisiana’s voting structure in the years since, but nothing has panned out.

This year, while there are some crowded races on the ballots tonight, our forecast shows that most frontrunner candidates have very likely chances of winning tonight: In four of the six House seats, the top contender has at least a 99-in-100 chance of winning. The other two also show strong prospects: Republican incumbents Clay Higgins in the 3rd District and Julia Letlow in the 5th District have an 88 percent and 92 percent chance of winning, respectively. For the Senate race, incumbent GOP Sen. John Kennedy (not related to those Kennedys) similarly has a 93-in-100 chance of winning. Still, Higgins, Letlow and Kennedy are all running against at least four other candidates, including other Republicans, so the possibility of a run-off come December could still be looming.

Maggie, Kelly stood out this year because she was a Democratic woman running for governor who wasn’t emphasizing abortion rights — in fact, she seemed to be actively avoiding the issue. That might seem counterintuitive after Kansas voters decisively rejected an anti-abortion ballot amendment in August, but the strategy actually made a lot of sense for Kelly.