Election 2012 liveblog

Welcome to the Measuring Shadows 2012 election liveblog!  We'll be live chatting on the widget to the right, and writing longer comments on this page.








11:30pm: Obama has been called the winner of the 2012 presidential election.  The Democrats still looking unexpectedly strong in MT and ND senate.  And no news so far from Rep. Pete Stark's re-election campaign from California's 15th congressional district.

11:10pm: The story of the night, so far, has been (1) the polls were right, (2) slight Republican overachievement in the House, and (3) slight Democratic overachievement in the Senate.  So far Democrats have held all the seats they were favorites to and have good shots at ND and MT.

10:10pm: If anyone wants to take Romney's side of a 97:3 bet right now, I'll take Obama's.

8:30pm: I fed some exit polls into Lame38 pretending that they were actual results for purposes of estimating national popular vote (but not for purposes of assigning the electoral votes), and it gives Obama a 98.7% chance of winning the election--exit polls are really misleading but if they're not consistently biased, Obama's going to win.

8:00pm: Livechat is back up.  Also, FWIW, if Obama actually wins Florida by 3 points then it's over; Lame38 has Romney winning in 0 of 10,000 of those simulations.

7:55pm: We're working on getting the chat on the right side of the page up; it should be up soon.

6:45pm: Currently Obama is running at -22% in Indiana and Joe Donnelly running at -4%--that looks good for Donnelly; Obama should lose Indiana by at most about 13%.

6:30pm: Fun facts about Indiana, according to Lame38: Obama's projected to lose it by about 8.7 points and currently has a 95.1% favorite for the election; if he loses it by 12 points he'll be a 93% favorite, if he loses by 4 points he'll be a 99.9% favorite.  Shift down about 4% to get closer to 528 projections.

5:55pm: Another race that I'll be looking at is the race for California's 15th congressional district, between incumbent Pete Stark and challenger Eric Swalwell.  Both candidates are democrats.  If you don't know much about stark I highly recommend you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Stark#Controversies: I promise it'll be worth your time.  Polls close in California 11pm Eastern time.

5:30pm: If there are any Lame38 simulations you want to see, comment in the post and I'll do them.  Also, follow me on twitter @MeasuringShadow; I'll be live-tweeting as well.  Also, for your edification, here are when polls close (all times Eastern):

7:00 pm: GA, IN, KY, SC, VT, VA
7:30 pm: NC, OH, WV
8:00 pm: AL, CT, DE, DC, FL, IL, ME, MD, MA, MS, MO, NH, NJ, OK, PA, RI, TN
8:30 pm: AR
9:00 pm: AZ, CO, KS, LA, MI, MN, NE, NM, NY, ND, SD, TX, WI, WY
10:00 pm: IA, MT, NV, UT
11:00 pm: CA, HI, ID, OR, WA
1:00 am: AK

5:15pm: I wrote Lame38, a shitty implementation of 538, the other night.  Here are some calculations done using it:

Probability that Obama wins if:

He wins Ohio by 3 percent: 99.5%
He wins Ohio by 0.1%: 97.2%
He loses Ohio by 0.1%: 75.2%
He loses Ohio by 3.0%: 50.4%
He loses Pennsylvania by 1.0%: 39.0%
He loses Massachusetts by 1.0%: 0.1%
He loses California by 1.0% but wins Texas by 1.0%: 93.1%


5:10pm: For those who don't know, Obama has about a 90% chance of winning reelection, the democrats are poised to roughly hold their 53 senate seats, and the house should remain comfortably in republican hands thanks to redistricting--in short, not a whole lot should change.