Here is a screen shot of the posts scheduled to go up today, along with the Chicago times they’ll be posted. Note that I have correctly predicted the election results:
I’m calling the election before most people have voted!
I am prescient about the election
November 8, 2016 • 7:37 am
Actually I think you called it months ago but it never hurts to say it again. Except for the other side who will likely have another post-mortem as they did last time. Lot of good it did them.
I am cautiously optimistic that she will win.
One of my main reasons is: Drumpf is back to saying “it’s rigged!” and the (US) stock market is happy again.
If something is rational, it’s the stock markets.
Is 3 pm the official time at which we’ll know the results? I remember it being always in the small hours of the following day.
There is no specific time for knowing and it is different now every election. Generally it is when the media (you pick one) calls the race in enough states to hit the 270 electoral votes to win. I would guess around 6 or 7 pm central time but that is only a guess. I can be later because the polls stay open later and I think they don’t like to call it before the polls close on the west coast. So maybe 9 pm. or so.
FWIW, 7 Central is 8 Eastern, and the polls don’t close here in PA till 8.
I saw an item on the BBC news several hours ago that one electoral district (or office? I wasn’t paying much attention) had already declared it’s count with 37 voters on the roll and 37 ballots cast, there wasn’t any point in waiting for anyone else to come up.
Sorry, but I didn’t note the name or result … found it, at 11:08 GMT today :
and Auntie Beeb remains coy about their result. (It’d require me to install Flash, which I’m not going to do.)
Clinton won 4-2 in first count but Trump won 32-25 in three precincts.
Ummm, vote-rigging joke?
Good one. If Trump wins, he will have to decline since obviously the vote was rigged as he claimed.
At 3pm no state will have finished voting.
That seems to call for a Sinatra song.
I did my duty a week and a half ago. Partly out of concern that RNC poll watchers would be there to cause trouble, but mostly because I wanted to spend today drunk.
See my comment down-thread. Tonight is not going to be a good night for some election officials, heading home at gods-awful-o’clock.
Cushioning against the shock? Six pints of bitter and four packets of peanuts seems to be traditional. Got your “electronic sub-etha device” primed and ready to go?
I don’t actually think there will be much in the way of poll watching, outside of some possible problems happening in Philly, Chicago, Detroit, and New Jersey. I suspect there won’t be much, if any violence, but at least a month of angry rhetoric if trump loses.
And drunkenness is just a way to try to make the feverish coverage that will be unavoidable look entertaining. Just Kahlua in coffee or cocoa for me because I’m a total lightweight.
“poll watching” per se isn’t necessarily threatening (I’ve spent many days doing exactly that in the UK – getting information on which way people have voted for the party’s exit poll and so we can know which people who’ve promised to vote actually have, so that telephone reminders can be sent, drivers dispatched to the poorly-mobile etc. Obviously you don’t do this for people who’ve told you that they’re going to vote for the opposition(s), but you also have to stay within the laws banning the offer of inducements.
It’s a bit of a legal minefield, but the whole process is generally carried out with good humour. I’m not sure that would be the case if some of the people involved were carrying guns though.
No, the poll watching here comes with shades of intimidation. The RNC is actually under an agreement to not engage in poll watching because they used it as a means of intimidation in the past. It’ll expire next year if nothing happens. They’re nervous Trump will mess this up for them, but I’m pretty sure they’ll mess it up for themselves as soon as the order expires.
We have rules, because we have had problems in the past.
On this side of the pond there’s a long and ugly legacy of voter intimidation dating back to the days of ol’ Jim Crow.
Don’t know how widespread it’ll be, but some of Trump’s deplorables will undoubtedly be out trying to challenge voters who appear to be of a non-Caucasian persuasion.
I’ve done that too — but you don’t ask them how they voted. You simply take their name to cross off a list so you can, as you say, identify your known supporters who haven’t yet voted.
I’m just thankful everyone didn’t have your casual “Hillary’s going to win, I’m already counting my winnings” attitude weeks ago. This wasn’t pretty much in the bag until the FBI director stopped the bleeding on Sunday, and it looks like enough people had that attitude that it may cost us regaining the senate. Fivethirtyeight.com now has it as a statistical dead heat.
Harry Enten did a piece on their senate model yesterday – http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/senate-update-the-generic-ballot-is-hurting-democrats-chances/
Seems that is is weighted by the generic ballot, and it clearly swings around a lot – I’m not entirely sure how to interpret that, especially given the upswing in the presidential model count over the last day or so. I guess we will all have data tonight!
Wish I could adopt Jerry’s phlegmatic attitude. Mine is more in line with a friend who sent a group text right after the cubs win last week “now that stickball is over for the year, can we all go back to stressing about the election”
There’s much wishful thinking behind my it’s now “pretty much in the bag” for Hillary statement.
Not to get too bogged down in the four bodily humors, but Jerry’s attitude toward the election seems to have transcended the phlegmatic for the sanguine. 🙂
Hope your right, the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
I think you’re right. But I don’t mind tellin’ ya, when Hillary took her little tumble in the polls last week, I clenched up so tight you couldn’t have pounded a straight pin up my butt with a jackhammer.
I’m gonna need a little help from my birth state of Ohio today to win my bet on Trump scoring under 200 electoral votes.
The term you’re looking for is a “straw-clencher”.
Me too (your first paragraph).
Well, I really hope that you’re right, but I’ll stay in the “cautiously optimistic” camp with jbillie.
And if Trump does lose, I’m also going to predict multiple deaths as Trump’s whipped-up supporters load up and let rip at the “rigged” system. Tonight is not going to be a good night to be an election count worker making their way home in the wee sma’oors.
Something that hit me viscerally last night as a resident of Alabama is what a frightening experience it must be, particularly in this election, to be a minority voter going to the vote in a majority white precinct. Surrounded by Trump voters, carrying Trump signs, who have been riled up by the candidate to fear a rigged election, with you particularly as a potential criminal engaging in election fraud.
Pretty sure there’ll be old-timers among those Alabama minority voters who recall the days of poll taxes and literacy tests. You ask me, SCOTUS jumped the gun on rolling back the Voting Rights Act. Look at the way the Republicans in North Carolina rammed through voter-ID laws to try to suppress minority voting.
I really, really, really want Drumpf to lose…but it’s far from a sure thing.
Indeed, his odds of winning are about the same as a typical Major League Baseball player getting an hit in a single at-bat. He’s well within the margin of error for the polls.
If the ±3% polls are -3% across the board, which has lots of historical precedent, Drumpf wins. If a few key state polls, which have much higher margins of error, are leaning the worng direction, Drumpf wins.
Nor is it difficult to imagine how such errors could arise. Drumpf is openly playing to the bigots, and it’s a sure thing that there’re lots of secret bigots who’d never admit to being such in polite society…but who may well pull Drumpf’s lever in the privacy of the voting booth.
One thing is for certain: whoever wins, we lose. Hilary is the absolute worst candidate the Democrats could have put forward, as empirically demonstrated by the fact that she’s unlikely to win a majority of the popular vote against Drumpf, of all candidates. With somebody like Drumpf as the Republican candidate, the Democrats should be winning 80% of the popular vote. And the fact that 45% of voters are willing to cast their lots with Drumpf tells us that the foundations of our society are on very soft ground, indeed.
Anyway…I’m going to eat some breakfast, go vote, pick up some cat food, work, go to rehearsal, and probably learn the outcome before the rehearsal’s over. My only hope is that these times don’t get any more interesting.
Cheers,
b&
So are we allowed to guess at the results? Since I did so bad at the candidates, I’m going to give it another shot.
310:228 Hillary to beat trump
51: 49 Senate Democrat to Republican
240:195 House remain republican
I hope not to see Trump holding up JAC’s headline tomorrow morning. Note that the names Trump and Truman start with the same four letters.
Better to compare the last four and last three.
And it came to pass.
You have invited the curse of the Chicago Tribune. But let’s hope that the Cubs have voided all Chicago curses.
I voted this morning and in my rural community Trump has brought people out of the woodwork to vote. I always vote so I’ve come to recognize the voting crowd but this time was different. I waited in line with people who had never voted before, couldn’t figure out how the voting machine works and complained about smart phones being confusing. These people are on the fringes of society and I wonder how well they are captured by opinion polls. I was amazed by how many of them there were. There can be no apathy in this election.
I’ll be in my safe space if anyone needs me.
The “suburban rural” people in my area – i.e. those living (mostly in apparent squalor) on family property that was once rural and has now been surrounded by suburban development – are pretty much the only ones who post Trump/Pence yard signs, in this majority Hispanic city. Perhaps they think that if Trump is elected, they’ll get a new truck and a $100 gift certificate for WalMart.
About 90 minutes ago (7:30 am EDT), the stock market began to weigh in with a Clinton prediction.
Is someone who’s prescient a prescientist?
If so you’re not a prescientist, you’re a scientist!
So, he must be scient, no?
Here goes … we’ll hope that this doesn’t end horrendously.
Jerry Coyne – Prescient of the United States of America.
And I voted for him.
Twice, as he knew I would.
I hope she wins by a significant enough margin as well. It will be a sad state of affairs if it’s close.
As I sit staring at the electoral map, it appears Hillz is locked into 252 EVs, without counting anything that could be deemed a swing state. From there, there’re a lot of paths to 270. Either Florida or Ohio alone would do it. Or one each from column A and column B of N.Carolina/Michigan and NH/Iowa/Nevada.
I’m heading to the betting markets, see about a price on whether Trump will give a concession speech.
For myself, I did/do expect her to win. But I will wait until the dust settles. This election was nasty enough that I don’t want to hear gloating or despair from anyone.
That Trump got the nomination was already a definite loss.
It is a loss, nonetheless, not without its silver linings. This election will have pushed the Republican Party to cliff’s edge, from which it will need to undertake an existential re-evaluation if it is to remain the center-right partner in a two-party system.
It has also unmasked the utter hypocrisy of the Evangelical right, which has thrown its lot in with Trump, a godless pagan (and not in the good way 🙂 ).
Well, I hope like hell that Drumpf loses, and by the biggest margin possible.
Several reasons:
1. Rarely has a candidate been more visibly egocentric, impervious to rationality, blatantly unsuitable and deserving to lose.
2. It will be quite enjoyable watching the Drumpf and his dingbat supporters whining and making the most unbelievable excuses. Schadenfreude.
3. A triumphant Drumpf would be insufferable.
And that’s quite aside from the unpredictable but probably disastrous consequences down the line.
cr
P.S. What’s that thing he does with his fingers? I keep wanting to break them…
I think the Hannity show on FOX will be particularly enjoyable.
Well, that turned out nicely. Didn’t it?
Brexit & Drumpf. I am going to drink too much tonight, and after that I am going to ignore as much as I can the dangerous political morass we are entering and get on with studying Old Norse, improving my Japanese, and reading the good scholar Jesse Byock on feuds in the sagas.
I shall say, though, that Ben Goren’s prescience was better than Jerry’s, alas, because more based in reality and not on gut feelings and hope, and that the historian Tony Judt, in his remarkable essays in “Ill Fares the Land” & “When the Facts Change”, puts a very prescient finger on why Brexit & Drumpf is such a successful brand.