I wanted to give some advice on the following election results on Tuesday.
There are two things to keep in mind: poll closing times and how results come out.
Different states close their polls at different times. The “standard” closing time is 7 pm local time, but some states contain two time zones or have extended polling hours. So the control of the House and Senate will likely not be decided until 1-2 hours after the competitive states close which means about 8 pm PST time or 11 pm EST.
For the Texas senate race, I would be watching the smallest 200 counties that makeup about 20% of the vote, mainly because we don’t know about turnout in these places and a lot of these counties should vote strongly for Cruz. We are seeing strong turnout in the more urban and more liberal districts, but if turnout is good in the more conservative areas (and it is in the larger conservative counties), Cruz will probably win. Obviously, not everyone in Austin will vote for O’Rouke, and not everyone in Lubbock will vote for Cruz, but we should see a similar partisan map on Tuesday as in past elections. I do agree there are a lot of young and first-time voters voting in this election which is a good sign for O’Rouke, but there are also a lot conservative young people in Texas so this is not necessarily a sign that O’Rouke will win.
This work by BrittanyAlexander is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International