Are you wondering what I accomplished on my 25-hour Sunday? Well, I raked leaves, and then noticed, about an hour later, while I was obsessing about the election, that it maybe would have made more sense to climb the tree and pluck the remaining leaves from the branches, because the green of the grass was already covered again by the brownish orange leaves of the big maple tree in my front yard. Actually, I sort of knew that was going to happen, but I needed an excuse to be outside doing something on a nice fall day, and now if Mother Nature has any more of them I'll have the same excuse again.
About the election obsessing: my favorite website these days is FiveThirtyEight, which provides a percentage estimate of how each race in House and Senate will turn out. Here are the most recent numbers representing the fractional chance the Democratic candidate wins the US Senate race in the named state:
Florida--------5/7
Indiana--------5/7
Missouri-------4/7
Nevada--------5/9
Arizona--------3/5
That in the world according to Nate Silver &c the Democratic candidate is at least a modest favorite in each of these purple to red states is cause for nervous delight. If the Democrat were to prevail in all of them, the Blue Team would likely be only an upset away--Tennessee? Texas?--from winning a majority in the Senate, and their chances of winning a House majority are in the range of 7-in-8 (FiveThirtyEight's estimate, again). But, assuming I remember my lessons from Probability and Statistics, the chance the Democrats run the table in those races is the product of the five fractions, and
5/7 x 5/7 x 4/7 x 5/9 x 3/5 < 0.1.
In other words, just under a 1-in-10 chance. But that's if the outcomes are independent of each other. Most likely they aren't. It often happens that "something's in the air"--up the butt of the electorate--so that all or almost all of the close ones break in the same direction, either Democratic or Republican. There are signs that if that's the case they are more apt to break toward the Dems. For example, a Quinnipiac poll released this morning showed both Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson ahead by high single digits in their Florida races for governor and senate, respectively. Most other polling had shown them ahead but by just a point or two, three at the most--all well within the poll's margin of error. So in one big state--possible movement toward the Dems detected on Election Eve. Also, the 7-in-8 chance of Democrats winning the House is as high as FiveThirtyEight has pegged it through the entire campaign season.
On the other hand, if the toss-ups break heavily toward the Republicans, they would gain a few seats in the Senate and have a shot at holding the House as well. Trump would then in 2019 push the accelerator to the floor, possibly put out a contract on the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
This is what I mean about obsessing.
My TV crush, former Republican Nicolle Wallace, said on MSNBC last night that the turnout war is all about love and hate. You need a reason to vote, and loving your candidate or hating the other side's are the best motivators. You need one of the two, and she indicated that Democrats were poised to win on account of having both. We hate Trump, yes. But the Democrats also have a lot of really good candidates, many of them running neck-and-neck against a Republican in unfriendly territory. Wallace didn't have time to name them, but I imagine she's thinking, at a minimum, of Beto O'Rourke, Stacey Abrams (the African American woman in an apparent dead heat with the Republican in Georgia's gubernatorial race), and the aforementioned Gillum, who in a debate with his Trumpean opponent landed possibly the season's heaviest body blow (see video above). It was only two years ago that pundits were wailing about the Democrats' lack of a bench and generalized geriatric malaise--Hillary, Bernie, Joe Biden &c. I think that problem suddenly cured itself.
FiveThirtyEight has a guide to watching election returns--what to look for early and late--here. I'll be looking, too, at the top-of-the-ticket races in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These were the five states that fueled Trump's electoral college win, and by chance it happens that each of them has both a US Senate race and a governor's race this year--ten statewide contests in the battlegrounds that two years ago put Trump in the White House. Of course I don't know what's going to happen, but if anyone wants to bet that the Republicans win half or more of those races, I'm in for as much as you want to be.
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