How to watch the 2018 election results without going off the deep end
We’re less than twenty-four hours from when we start seeing the first results begin to arrive in the 2018 midterm elections. It’ll be a night in which more than four hundred House and Senate races are going on, along with several races for Governor, and downballot races as well. The hard part: not going off the deep end while the partial results trickle in, and television pundits seek to fill the slow stretches by overhyping things, for fear you’ll go watch Netflix instead. Here’s your guide to keeping a level head while watching the results.
– Take partial results for what they are. If Smith is up by five points over Jones with 20% of the votes counted, that absolutely does not mean that Smith is ahead by five points, or that he’s even ahead at all (ask any statistician). That’s because those 20% of votes are not spread out evenly across the district or state. Instead, certain precincts have finished counting and reported all of their votes, while other precincts are still counting and haven’t reported anything yet. If the Smith-leaning precincts happen to report first, it’ll show Smith “ahead” even though it doesn’t mean he’s ahead.
So how are you supposed to interpret partial results? You can go online and look at the maps that show which precincts have reported and which counties they’re in, and then you can look to see how those counties have voted in past elections. Yes, it’s that complicated. Or you can just listen to whichever TV pundit is showing county level results, because that’s the one person on that channel who’s looking at the numbers meaningfully – as opposed to everyone else on that channel, who will simply say “Oh look, Smith is ahead” without understanding how this kind of math works. If that all makes your head hurt, just ignore the partial results; they usually tell you something other than what’s really going on.
– Know when to get excited. Once a major news network does “call” a race for a candidate, it’s nearly a guarantee that they’re correct. It didn’t used to be this way. But the TV networks got tired a few years ago of looking foolish by jumping the gun, and now they tend to wait much longer before calling a race. Some of them wait longer than they should, just to play it safe. So as soon as one major network calls a race, you can almost certainly bet on that call being correct, even if another network hasn’t called it yet.
– House and Senate majority math. Thanks to time zones, most of the races on the east coast will be called long before most of the races on the west coast. That’ll leave everyone trying to figure out what the east coast results tell us about the rest of the night. But again, this kind of math is tricky and misleading. If ten House races have been called for the Democrats, and five House races have been called for the Republicans, this is not necessarily an indicator that the Democrats are going to win the House.
Keep in mind that there are a number of House seats in far-left districts that will be all but automatically won by the Democrats, and the same goes for Republicans and far right districts. So you can’t just start counting up wins on both sides as if they were all made equally. Instead you have to look at which districts are being won by which side, how much they’re being won by, and how much they were expected to be won by. For instance, if the Democrats start outperforming the polls by five points in House races on the east coast, that’s a strong sign that they’ll outperform the polls by five points on the west coast as well.
– Understand what your side really needs. The Democrats very much want to win the House and Senate, for obvious reasons. But the Senate will be a major challenge. Of the thirty-five Senate races going on (including a couple special elections), the Democrats currently occupy all but nine of them. In other words, this is a year where the Democrats are playing defense in Senate races, whereas the Republicans will have the Senate math stacked against them in 2020. So if the Democrats don’t win the Senate, it’s not necessarily a sign of weakness, but rather a sign of bad timing.
The bottom line is this: if the Democrats win the House but not the Senate, it’ll still put Donald Trump on a path to ouster and prison. The Democrats can use the House committees to launch nationally televised investigations into every one of Trump’s criminal scandals, while sending subpoenas flying, and coordinating with Robert Mueller’s indictment machine. So even if the Democrats only win the House, those who stand opposed to Trump should breathe a major sigh of relief and sleep more soundly than they have in awhile.
