What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

It can be tricky to guess the final margin because of the difficulty of estimating the margin of the remaining election day and late-arriving mail ballots. But for what it’s worth, betting markets currently suggest that the recall is favored to fail by more than 20 percentage points. In that case, the polling average will have underestimated Newsom by at least a few points. But we’ll have to wait a while until we get the final margin, since late-arriving mail ballots can take weeks to count.

Another question now that the recall is projected to fail: Can we say anything yet about how accurate polls are looking to have been? Or too much of the vote left to count for that?

And so while ABC News and other outlets have projected that the recall vote will fail, one thing to point out is that Question 2 on the ballot — who should replace Newsom — is essentially moot. As such, it will not be projected by the ABC News Decision Desk. That said, it seems as if Elder was leading on that question with more than 40 percent of the vote.