Hindsight on my election punditry

On the Friday after Election Day, before anyone else said so because of the ballot count fiasco in Clackistan, I declared that Congressman Kurt "NRA" Schrader didn't stand much of a chance of catching up to his primary opponent, Jamie McLeod-Skinner. And I was right. He didn't catch up. At the point I wrote that, he was behind 9594 votes district-wide. He wound up losing by 8422, and so between my post and his bitter end, he narrowed the gap by only 1172.

But as I confessed at the time, I based my prediction on a lot of soft numbers and assumptions, some of which turn out to have been substantially off. For example, I guessed that there were 75,000 votes left to count in Clackamas County, whereas in retrospect it was more like 88,000.

And one key figure that I didn't have was how many of those uncounted Clackistan ballots were from Democrats in Schrader's district. Based on what had been counted up to that point, I guessed 16,000. Way off! As best I can tell now, it was 34,564. And so old Kurt had a greater possibility than I thought of closing the gap, which in point of fact he didn't do. But not that much of a chance.

I wrote:

In order for Schrader to make up 9,600 votes with only 16,000 left to go, he'd have to get 13,800 of the 16,000, or 86.3 percent. That would be something, and it doesn't seem likely. So far in Clackamas, Schrader's margin is 55 percent to 44 percent. If it all comes down to Clackamas, it's hard to see JMS losing.

If I knew that there were 34,564 Clackamas votes left to count, I would have said:

In order for Schrader to make up 9,594 votes with 34,564 left to go, he'd have to get 22,079 of the 34,564, or 63.9 percent. That would be something, and it doesn't seem likely. So far in Clackamas, Schrader's margin is 55 percent to 44 percent. If it all comes down to Clackamas, it's hard to see JMS losing.

In fact, Schrader ended up winning Clackamas by 52.6 percent to 46.8 percent. And so despite my weak estimates, he was still impossibly far from a potential win as of the time I wrote.

Of course, there were some votes trickling in in the other counties in the gerrymandered district, but only a few thousand. It looks to me like Kurt picked up some help there, but wound up losing ground in Clackamas County from where he stood on that Friday.

Anyway, it's all water under the bridge, as JMS now takes on Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the Republican. LCD is scary, folks. But to keep things light, in this Battle of the Hyphenateds, keep in mind that neither candidate actually lives in the district in question. Oh Oregon, my Oregon.