WILL EARLY VOTING & ELECTION “GROUND GAMES” DETERMINE FINAL ELECTION RESULTS?

….Nate Silver, Editor-in-Chief of the FiveThirtyEight blog.

 

Clinton has 291 field offices, Trump only has 88!

 

Ok early voting is going full steam and that usually means a larger voter turn-out and that’s usually good for the Democrats. 

 

CNN suggests that Democrats have improved their standing in Arizona and Nevada, compared with the 2012 election. Democrats also are voting at high rates in the key battlegrounds of Florida and North Carolina, according to news reports. The New York Times is estimating the November vote in North Carolina, using the early vote totals and other information. That model so far predicts a Hillary Clinton victory.

 

Since people’s actual votes are secret, election predictions are generally based on the number of registered Democrats and Republicans who have voted early, but some people question how well the early vote actually predicts election outcomes?

 

Statistician Nate Silver at the FiveThirtyEight blog, who correctly analyzed the 2012 early vote data, argues that early voting probably isn’t a good predictor of the eventual outcome in a state. 

 

Oh, and by the way, I am always being asked “Why is Nate Silver’s blog called FiveThirtyEight, and why is Nate considered such a polling expert?”

 

The blog’s name comes from the fact that there are 538 electoral vote in the United States Electoral College.  Every US state has at least three votes, two for their state’s US Senators and one for a minimum of one House member. Then each state's total number of electoral votes is based on how many members of Congress it has, and that's based on the states population as the result of the latest national census.  Today, that’s a total of 538 electoral votes.

 

As to Nate Silver, he is the statistician that has a different approach to election predictions, and he correctly called the outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 US Presidential election.  He was named one of The World's 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine in 2009.

 

In 2010, the FiveThirtyEight blog was licensed for publication by The New York Times. In 2012 and 2013, FiveThirtyEight won Webby Awards as the "Best Political Blog" from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

 

In the 2012 United States presidential election, Silver correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

 

In July 2013, FiveThirtyEight was sold to ESPN, and Silver became its Editor in Chief.

 

But I digress.

 

Using a different set of data, we do find that early vote numbers tell us a lot about which candidate will eventually win. 

 

In several states considered battleground states this year — Florida, Ohio, Nevada, and Arizona — the early vote in 2008 & 2012 was quite close to the eventual presidential vote.

 

By comparing the share of early votes cast by registered Democrats and Republicans to the final vote in those states, we can determine how well early voting predicted Barack Obama’s vote share when he ran against John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. (This calculation does not include unaffiliated voters or those registered with a third party.)

 

Data that was collected by the voter firm Catalist and the Atlas Project show the number of early and absentee ballots cast in the run-up to Election Day in 2008 and 2012 for every state where the early vote amounted to at least 10% of the eventual total vote.

 

In some of this year’s major battleground states, such as Colorado, Ohio, Nevada and Arizona, the early vote was a very good signal of the 2012 final outcome.

 

In general, the party breakdown of the early vote — whether 10 days or one day out — tells us a decent amount about how that state will go.

 

None of this is to say that the early vote is more useful than other sources of information, such as polling or even the simple balance of party registration in a state. But in some battleground states, the early vote is closely related to the eventual outcome. Taken together with the polls, the numbers this year do indeed bode well for Clinton.

 

It is appearing that the biggest issue between the candidates this election is their difference in their “Ground Games”.  The early voting may just be the overall effect of the amount of investment in this part of the candidate’s electioneering.  Now, it’s true that all the free publicity that Donald Trump has received because of his celebrity, that has narrowed some of the election’s results.  But here is the difference between the two ground games:

 

Hillary Clinton currently has 291 field offices in 15 battleground states, while Donald Trump only has 88 offices in 12 battleground states, that’s more than 3 times the number of “boots on the ground” for Clinton than for Trump.

 

As with the 2012 & 2008 election where Obama had the largest and most sophisticated election operation….ever, Clinton appears to be in a similar position.

 

Yes, we are all voting for the two most unpopular candidates to ever run for the highest office in the land.  But it is appearing that having the best investment in an national election ground game may be the major key to the final election results. 

 

We will all know for sure on November 9^th.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016