And now we settle in for the second part of the Good Doctor’s second novel! Join us as we dust The Stars, Like Dust— with commentary like powdered sugar on a doughnut! Let’s chat about chapters nine through fourteen!
“The Podcast Was Located in a Little Niche Just Outside the Cabin”
If this novel was feeling a little non-Asenion for your tastes, this installment might be for you! If you love Golan Treveze or the version of Hari Seldon who inhabits the Foundation Prequels, you’ll like Biron Ferrill better as this installment goes forward! If you think that there is a bit too much buckling and swashing in the first section, there is a bit of action where Biron overpowers a guard, tying him up with a pair of pantyhose. But once Gil and Artemisia help steal a space ship things settle down to storytelling and discussing galactic goings on as opposed to any actual going or actually doing anything story-inspiring. Plus, it’s something that passes for a plot twist!
So, let’s go! Help us bust the stars like dust with the vacuum of space!
Here we are at Election Day. It’s been a long road. At some point along the way I thought I’d be doing one of these every night as the election got close. Unfortunately, that ran straight into my need to make a living. But here’s one final probabilistic analysis as the campaign draws to a close.
The Traditional Version
Let’s remind ourselves how these work. I took data for electoral-vote.com either averaging the polls from the last fifteen days or taking the single latest poll if there are no polls in the last 15 days.
We ran 40,000 simulated elections and tallied the results. We ended up with almost 73% of victories going toward Kamala Harris. Running all the states it looks like Harris has at least a 70% chance of winning with less than a 30% probability. I’ve talked about why that is likely an overestimate of Harris’s chances.
That’s why we started running a second simulation.
In our swings-only projection we give every state that is not a swing state to either the Democratic or Republican candidate. That means Harris starts at 226 electoral votes and Trump builds from 213. That’s a slight advantage for Harris.
These simulations give us a 59% probability of a Kamala Harris victory and about a 40% chance of winning for Donald Trump. That’s close but not so close as projected by other sites. It’s going to be a long night but Harris has an edge.
It’s 12:12 AM on election day and I may as well get this thing started. I’ll be adding stuff throughout the day and I’ll be live blogging the results come 7 PM on the East Coast.
My second priority is to get some sleep. That’s in a few minutes but right now I’m watching Dixville Notch New Hampshire cast the first ballots of the 2024 General election.
Is a nice start to the day, a display of pure democracy. The results are in and we have a 3 to 3 tie in Dixville Notch. I’ve been hoping this thing wouldn’t turn out to be as close as everyone seems to think. With luck this won’t be a harbinger of electoral tight ropes yet to come.
I’ll be adding a lot of stuff during the day. The featured image is an electoral map from my final probabilistic look at the election. That might be job number one when I get up. That or my final prediction.
In the meantime, you might be interested in my last probabilistic look at the election. That was a part of Dr. Steve Coleman‘s 37th political pundit night on October 24 th. That’s the video just below and I start at about 5:45 in.
More in the morning.
It’s 7:23 am! Good Morning.
I think I’ll start with my best guess on where the US Senate is going to land. First though, a quick commercial.
I’m mostly looking at the data on electoralvote.com. I’ve been following that site since 2004 and this year they are, IMO, the best source of well considered, clear minded, daily updates on the election.
That link is supposed to update; you can get their current results by clicking the link.
Senate Projection
They currently have the Senate at 48 Democrats and 52 Republicans. I think it’s likely two of the four races that they rate as barely Republican will fall back to the Democratic side. That makes my prediction 50-50 with the winner of the vice presidency deciding Senate control.
There are a couple reasons for that. There are abortion referendums on the ballot in 10 states and since the Dobbs decision those have driven turnout that strongly favors the Democrats. Two of the four are well-regarded incumbents who have demonstrated their ability to win in Ohio and Montana. It also seems like Elon Musk is too inexperienced to be running GOTV efforts.
I’d like to be able to predict that Josh Hawley and Rick Scott will lose this time out but I think their states are too red for that.
Still, if there is an undetected blue wave 54 seats for the Democrats seems not impossibly insane. 
Presidential Projection
Well, now it’s 2:19 PM. The stupid day job, which I’m normally quite happy with keeps getting in the way of my geeking out on election stuff today. But after mulling it over in between all the other stuff, I’m ready to call this. At the macro level, I’m predicting Harris will win. She isn’t just leading in the probabilistic analysis that I have published today, but I think the buzz is good. She ended the campaign on a positive note and a professional one. In the meantime, there’s been even more weirdness than usual in the Trump campaign, and although that never seems to make much of a difference, I suspect this time will be a bit different.
The micro level is a bit more nuanced. I’m a bit gun shy after 2020. The Saturday before the election a Trump campaign caravan, which may have just been a bunch of his civilian supporters ran a Biden campaign bus off the road. I was pretty shaken by that and I thought when news went around, there would be a big swing in Biden‘s direction. It never materialized, so my “official” projection was way off.
My gut says that given the salience of women’s issues, the abortion issue, and the collective desire of the polling community to not underestimate Trump support this time plus a bunch of other things could have this swinging dramatically in Harris’s direction. But I’m not seeing that in the numbers. What I have seen is this particular configuration cropping up time and time again across my analysis and a bunch of other people’s analyses. Plus, even though the margins are small Harris has been consistently ahead for a week or more in the rustbelt states in Nevada.
That leads me to this projection 276 for Harris 262 for Trump. It wouldn’t surprise me if every swing state tilted in Harris’s direction or even if every swing state tilted together in one direction or the other. Based on the numbers, though this is my best guess.
2:56 PM
Here’s some interesting contacts to the Dixville notch numbers. At a first glance 3 to 3 look like looks like it portends a close election. Here are some context, though. These voters were four Republicans and two independents. all six of them voted for Nikki Haley in the Republican primary.
If the Haley voters split 50-50 between Harris and Trump, Donald Trump is toast.
7:24 PM
I got home and had dinner, and now I’m diving in. No real surprises so far except that it took 6 minutes to call Indiana for Trump. So, Kentucky and Indiana are called for Trump, and Vermont for Harris.
I’m looking forward to the live blog from electoral-vote.com.
7:28 pm.
Two minutes to closings at North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia.
Bernie Sanders is reelected in Vermont! Yay!
10 seconds.
I keep saying this: “Too Early to Call” is not a call. West Virginia is called for Trump. Jim Justice picked up the senate seat in WV. Also, we’ve been to the Moon.
7:45 PM
There has been a spate of bomb threats at polling locations in DeKalb County, GA. Biden won DeKalb in 2020 with 83% of the vote. Someone is scared.
7:57 PM
The polls close in sixteen states in mere minutes. It’s usually like this; there are always some red states that are called early. It will be nice to see Harris get some points on the board.
8:00 PM
Florida is called Trump. Not surprising but having grown up there it still makes me sad. So many states.
Here’s where we are from the NYTimes,
It looks like Harris is underperforming Biden in Georgia.
Harris is running up a big lead in Pennsylvania because this time, the mail ballots are being counted first. It makes me think a quote that’s attributed to LBJ, “Always count your votes last.”
Georgia and North Carolina seem to be on the ball counting the votes this time.
8:57 PM
In three minutes all but eight states will have closed their polls. We have closings from Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Wisconsin, Wyoming.
Four or five calls for Trump, including Texas. Not even New York called for Harris. The democrats usually get off to a slow start in Electoral Votes but this is getting ridiculous.
Some of the signs of Harris underperforming and Trump overperforming in Georgia seem to be replicated in North Carolina. There are good signs in the urban areas but those could get swapped by the same-day votes.
9:24 PM
SarahMcBride is elected to Congress from Delaware. She will be the first openly transgender member of congress.
9:29 PM
New York called for Harris. Finally.
9:49 PM
A bunch of races and states that NBC had as “too early to call” have been recharacterized as “too close to call.” That is every Presidential and Senate race in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
There is reporting that there are long lines at college campuses in all the rust belt states. That’s a positive sign. There is also some good signs for Harris in suburbs in Georgia.
There are still people voting in Nevada who have a three hour wait. That means there will be no data out of Nevada until at least 2 AM.
11:18 PM
Moreno is projected to be the winner of the Senate Seat in Ohio. That’s a huge loss. Brown was an outstanding Senator. Still, that means that the Republicans will almost certainly control the Senate next year.
I’m hearing second hand reports from the Harris campaign. I’m afraid it sound’s like whistling through a graveyard. I want to be wrong here.
They just called Connecticut for Harris. The mere fact that that took hours is a bad sign. Kornacki is talking Trump making big gains in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York. Those are safe blue states but these are not good signs.
11:35 PM
I want some analysis about the effects of the coordinated series of bomb threats that we saw throughout the country. Polling places were cleared; there was a chilling effect on the voters affected. Could this have swung a state or two? Were the precincts targeted at random were the calls targeted at Democratic leaning locations? I have a lot of questions.
11:40 PM
North Carolina is called for Trump. I expected it but I was hoping it would turn out otherwise.
12:12 AM
Let’s check in on the state of the race.
12:26 AM
I’m probably going to hang this up for this evening. Pennsylvania isn’t looking good (well, not just Pennsylvania). The talking heads on the teevee sound like they’re already doing an autopsy.
Has Donald Trump declared victory yet? That’s a weird amount of discipline for that gentleman.
I’ll jump back on if anything significant happens assuming I’m still awake. I may not sleep for four years.
12:35 PM
And just as I write that the call Georgia for Trump. Harris still has a path to victory but it’s frighteningly narrow. There are also a number of states that should not have been swing states that remain to be called.
They’ve called the Senate races in Nebraska (no, the other one) and Utah for Republicans Deb Fischer and John Curtis. That clinches Senate control for the Republicans.
The Harris campaign co-chair just gave a lackluster address and told Harris’s supporters to go home for the evening but that she will address the nation tomorrow. Donald Trump is leading in four of the remaining swing states.
New Mexico has finally been called for Harris and they called Virginia when I wasn’t looking.
1:00
All the polls are closed as voting wraps up in Alaska.
Comics, the Universe, and Everything 