What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

As we’re doing our final takeaways from the night: I know we’ve been rightly cautioning people against reading any national political lessons into the California results. But I do wonder whether there’s something in the relatively high turnout — for an off-cycle race. Namely, that Democrats are willing to go to the polls (or the mailbox) to defend masking, vaccines and other measures to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s determinative in a super blue state like California, but if it holds true it could also really matter in more competitive states and districts.

Don’t worry, everyone, I’m hyping your analysis on Twitter:

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.