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Editors’ Blog
Having discussed the results and prediction markets, let me address a different question I saw brought up last night. If the polls have been this wildly off in Wisconsin and Michigan, how can we be confident that Democrats are set for a banner showing in November?
The best answer to this is that you shouldn’t be confident, or, at the very least, certain of anything. But the comparison is mostly apples to oranges. Midterm elections are fairly high turnout affairs and we have lots of historical data about turnout patterns. So the composition of the electorate is fairly predictable. Fairly. Primaries are quite different. It’s a bit like saying you have a hundred kids who are going to be in the school lunch room — a table with the jocks, one with the nerds, one each for the goths (dating myself), the richies and the stoners — and they’re going to vote for student body president. But now let’s say only 20 students are going to show up. It’s a very different result if it’s the goths and nerds who show up vs. the jocks and the richies.
We went late into the evening waiting for absentee ballots in Milwaukee County last night. But Milwaukee County executive David Crowley will become the Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin, despite it seeming like a certainty that Francesca Hong would be the winner. As of yesterday, every recent poll had shown Hong at least 20 points ahead. The two most recent public polls had her 22 and 25 points ahead. (The most recent poll from Crowley’s own camp showed Hong 19 points ahead!) We’ll come back to the question of why these polls have been so wildly off. But there was a different casualty from the night’s results that I personally enjoyed witnessing because it’s a hobbyhorse or pet peeve of mine — and it seems to be as well of the numbers crunchers/data nerds whose Twitter feeds I watch on elections night. I’m talking here about the “prediction markets.”
John Light has a run-down of results from last night’s major primaries in South Carolina, Wisconsin and Minnesota in this morning’s Brief. The evening saw DSA-backed progressive Francesca Hong lose her bid to become Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate in an upset, prominent election denier Mike Lindell lose his own gubernatorial bid in Minnesota, and more surprises.
Check out John’s post for the TLDR on a busy primary night.
The Democratic Wisconsin governor’s primary is looking a bit like a replay of the near upset in Michigan but with a twist. It looks like the more conventional Democrat (Crowley) is going to beat the progressive insurgent (Hong).
It’s too close to call. But as of about 10:15 p.m. ET it doesn’t look like Francesca Hong is getting the number of votes in the counties she needs them in to win. The current totals show David Crowley with less than a one point margin. But if you look at where the votes are coming from and how many have been counted, it’s probably not that close. One potential wildcard is that if this is really close, Milwaukee County, counts its absentee ballots last, and a non-trivial number were likely cast before Crowley even got back into race. So who knows how that would play out. Assuming Crowley wins this is going to launch a complicated debate about the degree to which this was a pretty gargantuan polling error vs. whether there was just a big, big consolidation of the vote for Crowley in the final days. Either way, the odds currently seem to favor Crowley.
Meanwhile, and as expected, the Trump-backed election denier Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) — who was really a major over-achiever about his 2020 election denialism, both voting against certifying President Biden’s win in key states and signing on to a failed lawsuit to overturn the results in his own — easily won the Republican nomination for governor in Wisconsin tonight. Khaya Himmelman has more on his devotion to the cause here.
Update 10:31 PM ET: The current results and where the race is likely to end up have tightened a bit. But what looks to be the remaining vote still seems to favor Crowley, just less clearly.
Update II 11:03 PM ET: This race has gotten much, much tighter. The result is much more in doubt. It looks like it will come down to absentee ballots in Milwaukee County, with the uncertainty created by Crowley briefly not being in the race.
Late-Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) sister Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC) and Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) will both advance to an Aug. 25 runoff to determine which Republican will appear on the ballot in November to replace Graham after his unexpected death earlier this summer. The Associated Press projected Graham’s sister would advance early in the night, but it was unclear if Norman or Rep. Russell Fry (R-SC) would clear the hurdle until moments ago when the AP determined Norman would advance as well. None of the candidates were able to secure the majority of the vote to avoid a runoff.
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