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Highlights from The Downballot: Pre-election Q&A session [1]

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Date: 2022-10-28

“In 2020, we didn't know many of the most important results until days after the election. Can we expect to see the same thing again, and when might we know the final results?” Zelaya read out loud.

Nir replied:

This is an excellent question. I'm sure everyone remembers in 2020 that we did not find out the result of who won the Electoral College until the Saturday after Election Day … I think we would all like to know the results sooner rather than later, though I think in a lot of key cases we won't. And some of those are for different reasons. We have some big important states where a lot of votes are cast by mail and votes are allowed to arrive after Election Day as long as they're postmarked by Election Day, and they are therefore tallied often well after Election Day. This is particularly true in places like Nevada, in Washington, in Oregon, also in California, and that is just something that we have gotten used to.

The bigger problem, according to Nir, is that some swing states—mostly in the East, where Republicans are in control of state government—have deliberately refused to allow ballots to be processed early so that the votes can be tabulated more quickly. “The reason why they do this is because they know that these mail ballots lean to the left now and the Election Day vote, which is typically tallied on Election Day, leans to the right thanks to Donald Trump,” he elaborated. “And so you have these situations where the early counted vote leans heavily to the right and then these crazy conspiracy theorists led by Donald Trump say, ‘Oh, well the vote changed, it became bluer later,’ as though this is some evidence of a conspiracy theory.”

Singiser pitched in that another factor to consider is that, as was the case in 2020 and then into 2021 back in that election, we may be relying on a Senate runoff to determine who's going to control the Senate. “Hypothetical situation that's very possible: the Democrats claim Pennsylvania, but they lose Nevada,” he posited. “Now you're waiting on the Georgia Senate race, which based on polling data, it is entirely possible that neither Warnock nor Walker will get the 50% and you're waiting on a December runoff to determine those things.”

Beard thinks that Democrats should probably be rooting for a late night and a long week or two weeks—possibly even a runoff—because the alternative is that Republicans do very well on election night, even if we don't know the result of certain races. He added:

Because there will always be close races no matter what the overall national result is, some races will be at that margin and we won't know about them for a while. But it may be if Republicans have a really good night, then we'll know the Republicans have taken the House, have taken the Senate, and we'll know that on Wednesday and the rest of the results don't matter as much as we figure out the exact numbers. So really the better scenario is we go into Wednesday, we go into later that week, control is very tight. Democrats are still in contention to hold the Senate, potentially in contention in the House if it's a relatively good night for Democrats. So a late night and a long week is actually a good thing in the scenario.

Zelaya moved on to ask, “As results come in on Election Day, what House districts should we look at as a barometer for how the election will go?”

Virginia is a good place to start, Beard noted:

Their polls close early. It closes at 7 PM and results do start coming in relatively quickly after that. There is a bit of a skew, obviously, as Steve mentioned about when the Republican-leaning versus Democratic-leaning votes come in, but they're usually pretty complete or close to complete before midnight, which you can't say for some states on the East coast. That's a good place. It also has two competitive races that are good to look at. Virginia's 2nd District, where Elaine Luria is running for reelection in the Virginia Beach area, that's a very hard district, so that's the kind of district that if Democrats can hold, you can at least think about the idea of keeping the House or staying close to the House, something in that range. And then we have Virginia's 7th District where Abigail Spanberger is running for reelection in the Northern Virginia area. Her district is a little more Democratic, so you would really expect her to hold on to it unless it's getting to be kind of a bad or pretty bad night for Democrats. Those two seats, we should be able to know before midnight the results of those seats and sort of give us a general idea of where we're standing in the House.

Singiser mentioned a district that will close not long after those: North Carolina’s 13th District.

That is an open seat. Ted Buds running for the US Senate. It pairs Bo Hines, who's a Republican former quarterback in North Carolina state with the state legislator, Wiley Nichol. Every poll taken there, and it's one of the few districts, by the way, where there's been quite a bit of polling has been within a couple points either way. And the district is almost perfectly split between Biden-Trump. And so I would say that's a district that if the Democrats claim it, maybe it's a better night than we thought it was going to be. If Bo Hines goes on to a mid-single-digit victory, then you start to get a little bit nervous.

Singiser, Nir, and Beard also took questions on how things are looking in the CA-3 and MI-10 House races.

Next, they explored legislative elections and the outlook in competitive chambers.

According to Singiser, the conventional wisdom is that Democrats are going to have to play some defense:

There's a couple places where I think you'll be looking. Colorado is one of those states that counts pretty quickly and efficiently. We'll probably know election night where they are. They've got a good-size majority, but it's not impenetrable. Minnesota House is, on the other hand, on a nice edge, and there's another state that can go either way and is quite swingy, particularly in midterms, so there's another state to watch. That's actually a state to watch for two reasons because the Democrats, that's one of their best offensive opportunities is the Minnesota Senate, which is just narrowly, by two seats, Republican. You hope that they can play a little offense on election night. If they do, I would look at Arizona, which is only a one-seat, two-seat difference to gain the majority there. And since you asked about Alaska, the answer there is, you might as well get comfy because they did announce this week that they will not be doing the run of the instant run-off until over two weeks after Election Day. So it's going to be, I think it was the week of the 23rd. That's not going to probably matter, we don't think, and maybe the three state-wides that all look like there's a pretty comfortable margin there. But in a lot of these state legislative races, particularly the State House races, I would expect you're going to have to wait until the 23rd to even have a clue of who's won them.

Nir and Beard mentioned that Alaska and Arizona are dealing with interesting situations where Democrats might have a chance of flipping the chambers.

Lastly, the trio touched on nonpartisan races—which are often overlooked, but can have outsized impact on local communities. As Nir put it:

We have seen across the country that these officially nonpartisan races, at many levels of the ballot, have become increasingly partisan. One of the most extreme examples are the state Supreme Court races in Wisconsin, where there really is just no doubt anymore who the progressive or liberal choice is and who the conservative choice is. And I think in some of these lower salience races, there are these right-wing networks that really help propel certain types of school board candidates or other local candidates, including things like election clerks. And these partisan queues get shared totally out of view of many mainstream voters. But these networks can be really, really effective. I'm sure everyone remembers getting email forwards from your right-wing aunt. Well, now that stuff is all on Facebook, and so the approved candidates get the seal of approval from the MAGA brigades, and that is how these queues are circulated. I think there's probably less of that on the left, as is often the case. I feel like the right is much better at these super-in-the-weeds further down-ballot races than we are. And I think it's definitely an area where progressives need to focus on and improve because, man, some of these maniacs taking over school boards, it is obviously terrifying.

The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts! As a reminder, you can reach our hosts by email at [email protected]. Please send in any questions you may have for next week's mailbag. You can also reach out via Twitter at @DKElections.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/28/2131713/-Highlights-from-The-Downballot-Pre-election-Q-A-session

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