Election 2022: Naive Forecasts for US Races
If you are like me, you are in suspense concerning the outcomes in various of the 2022 US general election races.
You probably are not enough like me to actually code up a program to go through the CNN county data and do the naive projection for each uncalled race in the House and Senate. So I’ll share what I got out of that.
Just to be clear about what I mean by “naive projection”, let me describe this. CNN provides data on a county-by-county basis for things like how many votes each candidate has reported for them and the percentage of votes that are reported. Totaling the votes among all the candidates produces a total number of reported votes. With that and the percentage reported, I can derive a projected final vote total. Using the current percentage of the vote share per county, the naive projection is simply that percentage of the projected final total number of votes. Summing the naive projections across all the counties gives the final naive projected vote per candidate. So there is no adjustment in this for things like “I think late ballots will break more for candidate X”; this is just a “if everything stays in the same distribution as what we’ve seen so far, what happens?” set of scenarios.
US House Uncalled Races as of Noon 2022-11-12
In Alaska, I’m assuming Peltola takes it, based on two rounds of elimination. Even if Palin gets every 2nd choice vote from Bye, Peltola need only get 10% of Begich’s 2nd choice votes to win.
House race AZ-1 w DEM leading (155558 (+4029), projecting DEM win (183009 +4740) for Jevin Hodge. Lead change projected: False
House race AZ-6 w REP leading (149672 (+2906), projecting REP win (176298 +2371) for Juan Ciscomani. Lead change projected: False
House race CA-3 w REP leading (89150 (+9962), projecting REP win (172666 +21886) for Kevin Kiley. Lead change projected: False
House race CA-9 w DEM leading (44513 (+9918), projecting DEM win (117877 +27487) for Josh Harder. Lead change projected: False
House race CA-13 w REP leading (39697 (+84), projecting DEM win (85061 +1188) for Adam Gray. Lead change projected: True
House race CA-21 w DEM leading (44710 (+7463), projecting DEM win (90334 +14573) for Jim Costa. Lead change projected: False
House race CA-22 w REP leading (29677 (+2878), projecting REP win (70644 +4024) for David Valadao. Lead change projected: False
House race CA-27 w REP leading (73119 (+15633), projecting REP win (140613 +30063) for Mike Garcia. Lead change projected: False
House race CA-41 w REP leading (65105 (+1598), projecting REP win (135635 +3329) for Ken Calvert. Lead change projected: False
House race CA-45 w REP leading (85592 (+12701), projecting REP win (138800 +19510) for Michelle Steel. Lead change projected: False
House race CA-47 w DEM leading (100228 (+4555), projecting DEM win (145258 +6601) for Katie Porter. Lead change projected: False
House race CA-49 w DEM leading (110047 (+9073), projecting DEM win (156057 +13954) for Mike Levin. Lead change projected: False
House race CO-3 w REP leading (162040 (+1122), projecting REP win (170489 +1376) for Lauren Boebert. Lead change projected: False
House race CO-8 w DEM leading (112258 (+1691), projecting DEM win (120401 + 535) for Yadira Caraveo. Lead change projected: False
House race ME-2 w DEM leading (138099 (+15013), projecting DEM win (146030 +16102) for Jared Golden. Lead change projected: False (This is another ranked choice race, and I haven’t done any further analysis on this one.)
House race NM-2 w DEM leading (96860 (+1300), projecting DEM win (106618 +2081) for Gabriel Vasquez. Lead change projected: False
House race NY-22 w REP leading (132762 (+3925), projecting REP win (139745 +4128) for Brandon Williams. Lead change projected: False
House race OR-5 w REP leading (150062 (+6792), projecting REP win (176138 +6323) for Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Lead change projected: False
House race OR-6 w DEM leading (118246 (+4058), projecting DEM win (148637 +8265) for Andrea Salinas. Lead change projected: False
House race WA-3 w DEM leading (146372 (+4959), projecting DEM win (161344 +6188) for Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Lead change projected: False
That’s 12 projected wins for DEM, 9 projected wins for REP. If that comes to pass, the House will be 220 REP, 215 DEM.
The only projected lead change is in CA-13, where the REP candidate leads now, but DEM Adam Gray appears to be able to take the lead.
US Swing Senate Races
The numbers on these come from a day previous. I’ll try to update them.
Nevada
candidate, reported votes, projected votes
laxalt 467208 495153
cortez-masto 466387 493345
none-of-these-candidates 11483 12160
Arizona
candidate, reported votes, projected votes
kelly 1128917 1364561
masters 1005001 1194142
victor 46189 55144
Georgia
candidate, reported votes, projected votes
warnock 1941769 2078404
walker 1906340 2010273
oliver 81188 85893
Arizona has since been called for DEM Kelly. Nevada looks like a REP win given the naive forecast. If that holds, the Georgia senate seat run-off election will be for control of the Senate. If Nevada goes for Cortez-Masto instead, the Georgia senate run-off will have no significance besides choosing between Warnock and Walker, and I’d expect that to go in a lopsided win for Warnock. If control of the Senate is still on the line, though, I’d expect a ton of GOP and dark money to push for Walker, and it will all be down to GOTV and turnout.
Update: Nevada Senate race won by Catherine Cortez-Masto (D)
As various sources had predicted (but not the naive projection used here), the county ballots did indeed turn more favorable to Cortez-Masto, and she was able to take a final lead in the race, blocking Adam Laxalt (R).
That means that the Georgia run-off between Rev. Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker is no longer fraught with being for control of the Senate. Hopefully this will mean somewhat less GOP and corporate dark money flowing into the race.
