Election Day 2020: Noon update
A quick hit laying out some info, plus what I'm going to be looking at this evening
Hi, folks. First: I appreciate y’all, and the messages you shared with me last night.
Thank you.
OK, so it’s ELECTION DAY. FINALLY. AT LONG LAST. Reader: I couldn’t sleep. I woke up at like 6 am, after tossing and turning. My girlfriend, Meg, is up in Boston helping the Boston City Elections Department with logistics; she sent me a lovely, wan selfie after getting things set up.
Meanwhile, I’ll be doing GOTV calls this afternoon into my old Ohio Congressional district (the 12th, where Democrat Alaina Shearer is challenging Republican Troy Balderson, an utterly anonymous nonentity who inherited the solidly GOP district in 2018, after the previous incumbent (Pat Tiberi) resigned. I grew up on a farm in Licking County, so I know the land fairly well. It’s north and east of Columbus, and it’s home to suburbs that have dramatically rejected Trump and the GOP — territory that was firmly Republican in the past, but now, suddenly, isn’t.
Could Shearer win? Well, Danny O’Connor came within 1,700 votes of winning in the 2018 special election to replace Tiberi, and lost the rematch 51%-47% in November. Real Clear Politics and Niskanen both have OH-12 as one of the most likely Congressional Districts in the state to see a flip in 2020 and the Columbus Dispatch calls Troy Balderson "one of the most endangered incumbents in the state."
You can join me here. Please do!
Anyway, after that, I’ll be doing voter contact in my neighborhood at a polling location, trying to get local voters to vote for Joe Biden and AOC and other good folks on the Working Families Party line - Row D in our ballot parlance. New York has fusion voting, which basically means that multiple parties can run the same candidates, and their votes get added all up at the end of the night. New rules this electoral cycle require all political parties to tally at least 130,000 votes or 2 percent of the final count in order to retain their automatic ballot lines — no small feat for a minor party like the WFP.
Why the new rules? Long story short, it’s because Andrew Cuomo is an unbelievably petty, thin-skinned politician who’s mortally offended that someone might challenge his political dominion over New York politics. So, if you’re in New York — vote Row D all the way.
What about tonight? Early voting is certainly important (with at least 100 million voting this way, it's too large to ignore. But it’s looking like, so far, Republicans are battling back from a large deficit to numbers about in line with party registration
So what matters tonight? I’m keeping an eye on the following states. First, Indiana and Kentucky. They close early, and you can look at swing counties like Hamilton County in Indiana and places like Northern Kentucky to see where the wind’s blowing early.
After that: Florida and North Carolina. They’ve got loads of electoral votes, they finish early — and they count their votes fairly quickly. In 2016, my first inkling that shit was going pear-shaped was when I was doing the run of show for the Florida Dems election night event and watching the boiler room turn into a morgue (that’s a story for another time). If Biden wins both, well…I’m not tempting fate.
Obviously, I’ll be watching Ohio (my home state), Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and finally, Texas.
(as I was writing this, and tracking numbers, I just noticed we’ve passed 101 million votes. Absolutely wild.)
I’m going to be using the redoubtable Daniel Nichanian’s election day cheatsheet tonight, which you can find here (PDF), and using Bloomberg’s election results dashboard here.
OK, talk with y’all later.