This, in the end, was the story of the entire Brexit results night. Areas that were expected to vote for Brexit by a narrow margin voted for it by a large margin; areas that were expected to oppose it by narrow margins ended up supporting it by narrow margins. There were a few places where the anti-Brexit “Bremain” vote did better than expected, as there always are… but not many. By the time the results were tabulated in England’s version of  “battleground states,” the result was fairly clear on the strength of the vote totals in the “safe” constituencies alone.

Lesson for Americans: you can infer a great deal about the state of the presidential race from even early results in small geographic areas.

We talked this morning about the fact that Donald Trump needs to beat his polls, Brexit-style, in order to win the election, while Hillary Clinton only needs to match her polls to beat Trump. That’s why Clinton is a 2-to-1 (nearly 3-to-1) favorite to win. Let’s take a look at three different ways we can find out quickly which story is the true one:

State-Level

FiveThirtyEight has a very good Election Night Viewer’s Guide that goes through each battleground state, hour-by-hour, and explains the significance of each. I’ll focus just on a couple of very early states (poll closing times in each state in parentheses, all times EST):

Trump Must-Wins: Georgia (7:00), Florida (8:00)

Clinton Must-Wins: Virginia (7:00) , Pennsylvania (8:00)

Bellwether: New Hamsphire (8:00)

Early States: Kentucky, Vermont (both 7:00)

One of the interesting things about this election is that the candidates are competitive in so many places that there are very few true “must-wins”; there is almost always a plausible path for either candidate to recover if they lose one of their key states.

But the four states I’ve listed here really are “must-wins” — without them, there is almost no visible path to victory. Trump has a narrow lead in Georgia and is narrowly behind in Florida. Clinton is comfortably ahead in both Virginia and Pennsylvania. You might say, “That’s not fair to Trump! His must-wins are harder than hers!” Well, that’s because Trump is currently losing the election.

Results in these early states will give us a good idea of how things are going to go. If Florida goes early for Clinton, then she is beating her polls and the race is pretty much over. But if Virginia or Pennsylvania are looking like close races, then Trump is beating his polls, and there’s good reason for Clinton fans to take a few drinks and settle back for a long night.

Most interesting will be New Hampshire, which has been running very close to the exact center of national opinion. An early call for either candidate there is a very good sign for that candidate (though it doesn’t mean the end of the race, since New Hampshire only has 4 electoral votes).

Keep your eyes on the early states, too. Both Kentucky and Vermont should be called immediately for Trump and Clinton, respectively, but keep an eye on the margins in each state: if Trump is going to win the election, he “should” win Kentucky by about T+22 points, and, if Clinton is going to win the election, she “should” win Vermont by about C+57 C+27 points. (UPDATE: +57 was a pretty serious typo! Sorry!) Of course, you should ignore the early counts, when only a few precincts are in, but, by the time each state gets to 60% precincts reporting or so, we should have some idea whether either candidate is having a “Newcastle-upon-Tyne” moment.

North Carolina is a really important state in this election (Trump probably has to win it to win the election), but the vote counting there was a little erratic in 2014. Early N.C. returns showed a near-certain win for Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan based on early voting, which is what the polls had said, but Thom Thillis dominated Election Day voting, and ended up pulling out a squeaker. So just ignore North Carolina until the networks officially call it. (A Clinton win in North Carolina is a very bad sign for Trump, but, because North Carolina relies so much on early voting, it’s not necessarily fatal: Trump could recover with wins in Pennsylvania or Michigan, neither of which have much early voting.)

The problem with state-based forecasting is you have to wait ages for entire states to report in. Let’s drill down to a more granular level.

Congress-Level

Every seat in the House of Representatives is up for election this year, just like every year. Republicans are expected to lose seats but keep their majority, but the number of lost seats depends largely on how many people turn out to vote for Trump and Clinton. (The course of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s future may well be determined by how large his Congressional majority is, since the GOP caucus is already so deeply divided.) If Trump supporters turn out, iffy Republican seats will be saved, and iffy Democratic seats will be lost. If Clinton supporters show up, the opposite will happen.

So here’s another chart from FiveThirtyEight (the whole article is worth reading), which gives us a really good way of tracking which side showed up:

My take:

If Democrats have a “good” or “very good” night by the standards of this chart, Clinton will win the presidency.

If it’s even (with maybe one or two surprises), Clinton is very likely to win the presidency, but it’s not quite a closed book.

If Republicans are having a “good” night, then the presidential race is a tossup.

If Republicans are having a “very good” night, then Trump will win the presidency.

That may seem unfair: the Democrats only need to run even in the House to have a strong chance at winning the presidency, while the Republicans have to have a “very good” night to have the same chance. That’s because Trump is currently losing in the polls, and requires a strong Republican showing across the board just to pull even in his race for the White House.

And, of course, as in every election, there will be upsets — possibly even multiple upsets on both sides of this chart. When you’re looking at small districts rather than huge states, things go against the trend a little more frequently just because of the greater variability.

So if the race in the 9th Indiana Congressional District (Trey Hollingsworth vs. Shelli Yoder) looks close, don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that it’s all over and Clinton won. But if Democrats go on to win all four seats in Florida… then yeah, it’s probably all over and Clinton won.

But there’s still one more way we can track the trends in this presidential election: county-by-county.

County-Level

This method is simple: find a county where 100% of precincts have reported results. Let’s say rural Boone County, Kentucky, at the very tippy-top northern part of the state. It’s an extremely safe county for Trump, and their polls close at 6 PM Eastern — less than an hour after this post is published — so I expect them to report fairly quickly. (Kentucky’s polls overall don’t close until 7:00, so don’t expect results to be released until after that.)

You can find detailed county-by-county results in each state in many places around the Internet. I like to use Politico’s user-friendly results report. (Click the state you’re interested in, then click “detailed results” to see a county-by-county map.)

Remember that you’re looking for counties with 100% or very nearly 100% reporting. Figure out who is winning and how much they’re winning by. Great. That’s step 1.

Step 2: go to ShareBlue Benchmarks. Find that same county. Hover your mouse over it. You’ll now see a (decent) estimate of who will win the county and by how much, based on statewide polls and demographic information about the county.  (Boone County is Trump +38%.)

If Trump is beating his ShareBlue benchmarks in a lot of counties in several states, he’s got a really good shot at winning.  If not, or if Clinton is beating her benchmarks, then he’s pretty much going to lose.

There’s going to be a lot of random statistical noise down here in the weeds, so don’t invest too much faith in any one county. Remember that, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Brexit beat its polls by 10 points, but only won nationwide by 4 points.  That’s going to be true here, too: Trump will beat his benchmarks by wide margins in some areas, Clinton will do the same in others, and the question is whether Trump is able to do it consistently enough, in enough places, by large enough margins (2-3%) to come from behind and win the election.

Although I caution you against reading too much into this, I think it is also the fastest way to draw useful inferences about what’s happening in the presidential election, so it’s what I’m going to be focused on during the early part of the evening.  You can do a lot by comparing actual results to benchmarks.  I would much rather have results from 100% of precincts in rural Boone County than from 5% of precincts in the entire state of Florida. 5% of Florida is way more people than live in Boone County, but, because I don’t know where those votes are coming from or how they’re being mixed with the early vote, I can’t draw inferences from them.

UPDATE: The New York Times Upshot blog will be doing a lot of this automatically tonight, which will save us all a great deal of work. Tune in there for rapidly estimated early results, complete with statistically-reliable margins of error!

The Bottom Line

The odds are, this election will be over early. The networks won’t call it until Clinton officially has 270 electoral votes, but Clinton is going into this thing with a comfortable polling lead.  We should know after a couple of states whether the polls were basically on-target, and, if they were, Clinton is almost certainly going to win.  Trump needs to beat his polls, which is doable, but we should know fairly soon whether he actually is. And there are plenty of reasons to think he won’t.

Those of you following the election with this blog, then, have a very good chance of knowing the outcome of the election by the time polls close in Minnesota (9 PM Eastern), before — perhaps long before — the networks call it.  I’ll be staying up late to see who wins the Senate — which is a genuine nailbiter according to the current polls.

On the other hand, Trump could beat his polls, and, if he does, you will be among the first to know that it’s going to be a long night.

Either way, I’ll be watching Gods of Egypt (as promised) after the final results are known. Expect my review by the weekend.

I may or may not post further updates tonight, but I can tell you I’ll be following FiveThirtyEight’s LiveBlog, the Upshot’s projections, and I’ll probably be tweeting a bit as the spirit moves me, so tune in there if you want to know what’s up.

May God bless America. Vote SMOD 2016.

A few weeks ago, Trump supporters were talking about how their man was going to win even though all the polls showed him losing, “just like Brexit!”

Those of us who knew something about Brexit said this was stupid, and rightly so: the final Brexit polls showed Brexit losing by about 0.5%, and Brexit went on to win by 3.8% — a polling error of 4.3%. The global elites who had been handicapping the race had been predicting a loss for Brexit, but they had ignored the polls (which showed a close race). The elites looked like idiots after Brexit won, and rightly so, because the lesson of Brexit is you should always pay attention to the polls.

So when Trump supporters started saying they were going to win by beating their polls, “just like Brexit,” those of us with sense went and checked the polls.  At the time (right after the third debate), Trump was losing by an average of 7 points.  In other words, even if Trump beat his polls by 4%, “just like Brexit,” he’d still lose the election by 3%!

Brexit comparisons three weeks ago were silly.

Brexit comparisons today are not.

The polls have gotten much closer in the past couple of weeks. Clinton still has a clear polling lead, but that lead has shrunk to about 3%.  Worse for her: Trump has a clear advantage in the electoral college, because her best groups (minorities) tend to be concentrated in safe states, while Trump’s best groups (non-college whites) tend to be concentrated in swing states. Clinton’s lead in swing states is somewhere around 2%.

In other words, if Trump supporters show up in a big way and beat the polls “just like Brexit,” based on today‘s data… then Trump will win.  He’ll win the national popular vote by 1%, he’ll win the electoral college, and he’ll tie the vote in Michigan, with a map that looks like this (you didn’t know Colorado was so close, did you?).  He doesn’t even need a Brexit-sized polling error, at this point: a perfectly average error will do.

On the other hand, there’s no particular reason to think that Clinton couldn’t pull off a Brexit surprise herself.  Clinton could just as easily beat her polls by 3.8%, and then she would win by around 11% 8% — a landslide that brings her 358 electoral votes or so.

But Clinton doesn’t need to do that.  All she needs to do is make her polls to win (or miss them by a very small amount).  Trump is the one who has to beat his polls.  That’s why Trump still has a chance to win, but Clinton is still the 2-in-3 favorite.

There will be signs early in the evening on Election Night of what kind of a night it’s going to be. Brexit, once again, lights the path.

…but we’ll get to that in my next post. (Assuming I manage to post again before it’s all over.  I might not!)

For swing state voters, there are no good choices on Election Day. As Ross Douthat argues, it is too dangerous to vote for Trump. As Janet Smith argues, it is too dangerous not to. As Rachel Lu argues, for me to signify support for Trump by voting for him risks injury to my soul (for that matter, the same case applies to Clinton). Yet it seems to me that, under our fundamentally flawed first-past-the-post voting system, failing to use my vote to advance the best available version of the common good risks the same injury. As far as I can tell, they’re all right.

We talked about the awfulness of all our choices back in May, so I won’t belabor this point except to say that, in the six months since I wrote that post, things have somehow gotten worse. Those of you who don’t live in swing states are very, very lucky. (I posted a full list of “safe” and “swing” states on Saturday morning.) Those of us who do live in swing states have been trying to figure out how we are going to vote.

I’ve been leaning toward supporting my preferred presidential candidate, Mike Maturen of the American Solidarity Party. (Here is his platform. It is imperfect, but better than what you’ll get from Trump.) Crucially, a vote for Maturen is not just a symbolic gesture in Minnesota: if Maturen gets 1% of the total (~30,000 votes), the Solidarity Party gains official status in Minnesota, which brings with it public financing. And public financing means that an alternative to the Republican and Democratic Parties — which is absolutely essential — will be able to run more candidates for more state offices in 2018. My vote for Maturen could thus do real good in Minnesota.

However, many of you do not live in Minnesota, so the practical argument for Maturen doesn’t apply. Many others who do live in Minnesota still wonder whether it is morally justifiable to help a minor party gain public financing in one state if the price is the election of the Greater Evil major-party candidate. (And, because we are a swing state, it very well could mean exactly that.)

I hear you. Heck, I agree with you: if I allow Clinton to win by supporting Maturen instead of the only viable alternative to Clinton, I won’t be able to look my daughter in the eye. On the other hand, if I allow Trump to win by voting for Trump, I still won’t be able to look my daughter in the eye!  It seems I’d better study her eyes closely, because I won’t ever see them again after Tuesday!

After several weeks of thought, I think I’ve found a compromise. It’s not perfect, and I’m not convinced it is the best solution. I may still vote for my Solidarity Party of Minnesota. But it is the closest I’ve come to a solution that my conscience can accept. Some of you may find the distinctions it makes too fine, too academic, to be taken seriously. All I can say is, this is the best I can do. I offer my compromise here for those of you who might find it helpful.

I call it Voting the Slate.

As we discussed earlier this week, when you vote for a presidential candidate, you aren’t really voting for that candidate. You are actually voting for a slate of presidential electors who support that candidate’s political party. Each slate of electors is hand-picked by their party, and the party that gets the most votes in each state on Election Day gets their slate appointed as that state’s official electors in the Electoral College.  The official electors meet in their state capitols on December 19th to cast their votes for President; the votes are then counted by Congress when it meets in January. It is these votes, not yours or mine, that actually elect the president.

There are 538 electors in the country, and, if any single candidate wins a majority of the electors (270 electoral votes), that candidate becomes president. Otherwise, the House of Representatives must pick the president from among the top three vote-getters in the electoral college. This system was designed by the Founding Fathers to be deliberative and collaborative: the states would elect their wisest and best people to serve as electors, the electors would select the three wisest and best people in the country as candidates for President, and the House would then select the very wisest and best person to be President.

Unfortunately, the system has not worked out as the Founders envisioned. Every four years, we end up waging base populist contests between demagogues, just as the Founders feared most, and the electoral college merely ratifies our choice. The House’s role in brokering consensus has been entirely bypassed.

Nevertheless, we still follow the Constitution on this. When we vote for president, we aren’t voting for a presidential candidate. We are voting for a slate of electors. (Here are Minnesota’s slates. Here are most others.) The name on the ballot (“Donald J. Trump”) is only there as a convenience to voters — and to obscure the true nature of the electoral system our Founders wanted us to have. When you fill in that little checkbox marked “Trump” or “Clinton,” you aren’t really voting for Trump or Clinton. You are voting for the Republican or Democratic slates of electors.

Looking at the two slates in my state, I can say without reservation that I would much rather be represented by the Republican slate than the Democratic slate. The Republican slate is mostly composed of grassroots, pro-life conservative types with good heads on their shoulders; many of them were Rubio or Cruz supporters who were elected to the slate before Trump became the nominee. I’m personally acquainted with a couple of them (though I doubt Linda Presthus or Chris Fields remembers me), and my interactions with them have shown them to share many of my values. By contrast, the Democratic slate is composed of people who, by and large, are absolutely opposed to me on all the issues that matter most. (Neither slate suffers from the deep-seated corruption and moral turpitude of the actual candidates. Kudos to both sides on that.)  I imagine the same is generally true in other states.

One solution to this election, then, is simple: I could mark “Trump” on my ballot, remind myself that I’m not really voting for Trump, but rather for the slate of Republican electors, and that’s it.

By voting the slate, I would not be assenting to Trump.  On the contrary, I would continue to fight Trump in every way that I can. I would continue to support efforts to have the Republican National Committee to strip Trump of the Republican nomination (which they can still do after the election). I would pressure all Republican electors, including my own Minnesota electors, to exercise their true authority as electors and vote for somebody else on December 19th. There is good reason to believe this would happen, particularly in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin where Republican activists harbor a special disdain for Trump. (Although many electors are “pledged” to particular candidates, I consider such pledges legally null and void under the Constitution, as do many legal scholars.) I would continue to cheer for the candidacy of Evan McMullin, should there be a recount or revote in Utah, and I will support him all the way to the White House if I can. If Trump found his way to the White House despite these efforts to block him, I would support his impeachment and removal over his prior fraudulent business practices or the criminal abuses of presidential office he would almost certainly commit in short order.

In other words, marking “Trump” on my ballot does not mean I support him; only that I would rather be represented by Minnesota’s Republican electors on December 19th, and that I trust them to vote for the best Republican in the country (i.e. not Trump). If the electors decided on December 19th to choose Trump anyway, it would not be with my support or consent. I would have thus done my bit to stop Clinton without supporting Trump.

Still, somehow, this doesn’t seem like quite enough. It’s a bit too semantic for me to feel at ease about it. After all, if someone asked me whether I voted for Trump, it would be difficult for me to answer “no” when I literally marked the box with Trump’s name printed next to it, regardless of what I had told myself about it. Unfortunately, our ballots are designed to force us to endorse a candidate, rather than his electors. This is true even in states (like Wisconsin) where state law is perfectly explicit about what that vote really means.

So let’s take “voting the slate” a step further. Let’s correct the ballot.

If I decide to vote the slate, I am going to line out the names of the candidates and make explicit that I am voting for the slate, not the candidate. In that case, this is how my ballot will look:

According to Minnesota state law, this is a valid ballot. I am voting for candidates for the office actually at issue (the presidential electors) and I am using the correct ballot line to do so. My ballot is not defective in any of the ways listed in our defective ballots statute. Above all, my intent is clear, which, in Minnesota — as in most states — guarantees that my vote must be counted.  I don’t actually have a problem with Pence, but I have to cross out both names to make my intent perfectly clear: I am voting for the slate, not either named candidate.

While it remains possible that some canvassing board official will see this unusual ballot and fail to count it correctly because he or she is confused about state law, it is the responsibility of the canvassing board, not me, to ensure that their error is corrected and my vote for the Republican electors counted.

In other states, you should check your local laws about defective ballots. (I checked Wisconsin’s, and, as far as I can find, this is fine in Wisconsin; Wisconsin is also a voter intent state.) In states with mechanical “hole-punch” voting or similar, you may need to bring your own pen, but the same principle applies.

In states with electronic voting, you may have trouble, since you can’t edit the ballot. You can always write in “Republican slate of electors” in the write-in slot, and this should generally be counted, but canvassing boards tend to be sloppier, and laws trickier, about write-in votes, and I can’t say with even modest confidence whether it would be counted in your state. If your state allows early voting on paper ballots (I know Wisconsin does), you could head down to your local election office on Monday and fill out a paper ballot on the spot.

(N.b.: I believe — perhaps mistakenly — that Trump is the lesser of the two evils, so I am trying to use my vote to block the greater evil, Clinton. However, if you believe Trump is the greater evil, voting the slate can work for you, too! Just replace “Republican” with “Democratic” where applicable.)

Voting the slate is, I admit, an unusual way to vote. I’ve never placed any markings on my ballot other than filling in the little oval. But this is an unusual election, where I find it impossible to vote for any candidate or for none. This option is a middle way, which would allow me to explicitly place the responsibility for choosing the president on the electors — who are not bound to choose either Trump or Clinton. It is an option I will carry into the voting both on Tuesday, when I make my final decision. (And, no, I truly don’t know whether I’ll be voting the slate or writing in Mike Maturen’s name. I go back and forth almost hourly.) If voting the slate is the only option that satisfies your conscience, feel free to use it.

If you are a swing-state voter, and voting the slate doesn’t work for you — whether because of state laws, because you are not confident that your local canvassing board will recognize your peculiar vote, or because you have some personal objection — then I recommend writing in Mike Maturen, or not voting for president. I find, at the last, that I cannot in good conscience recommend a direct and intentional vote for Donald Trump, even if Trump were running against the Devil himself.

UPDATE: A good lawyer friend of mine leaves this comment:

Because both sides have “lawyered up” in anticipation of a recount demand – and I fully expect that would be the case in MN if Trump wins – I would advise against altering the ballot as James suggests. He is spot on regarding the fact that we are really just electing “electors” and his statement of statutory law appears correct, so his moral analysis is sound. My concern is he assumes the law regarding spoiled ballots is clear and will be followed. As a lawyer I have no such confidence.(Remember the lawyerly battle of what does “is” mean.) Check the box knowing you are voting only for electors – but please don’t alter the ballot. We don’t need another Bush v. Gore, even if it goes the right way – which is highly unlikely with our current 8-person Supreme Court.

I agree with her that altering a ballot increases the odds of being discounted by error (or by the malice of opposing lawyers). I stand by my plans, but you should take this into account as you decide what you will do.

Nobody said voting well would be easy, right?