Some of you have requested a cheat sheet that you can print out that gives the expected outcome of each state. This is my first draft of such a cheat sheet. Please let me know if there's anything I should add or change before election day.
Some notes: States are sorted by poll closing time, and then sorted by margin. States that have big margins should be called almost immediately, so I thought this might be a better sort order than simple alphabetical. I'll consider hanging this if needed.
States marked * have polls that may close before or after the noted time, but the majority of polls should be closed by this time, so the networks could call the states at this time.
Alaska is marked ** to denote that it's polls actually close at 12:00 AM, not 11:59PM.
Please put any feedback in the comments.
Thanks!
10 comments:
I will be working out of media range for most of that time, so unfortunately I won't be able to use this except as a post-mortem. :-(
Check out this timetable. They give new and cumulative EV counts after each hour's poll closings, but it seems to be messed up.
First thoughts on your cheat-sheet:
+ I like the hourly vote-harvest row.
+ The sort method you used seems really rational.
-Time: What time zone is it? Is it all EST? Should it be, or local time, or add PST (your timezone)? Or at least label the column?
Maybe the "Poll closing time" column could be more out of the way, farther left.
Or, better idea: just insert a horizontal row with several time zones and the relevant local one(s) bolded or marked. You don't even need a time column. Let times go far left in the Vote-harvest row. Keep it short, such as "3pmPST,6pmEST".
If the polls are only closed in half of the state, then they aren't really closed, are they? Does the posted time mean the last polling station closes at that time, or the first?
-Little % cells: For the D, R, and margin columns, users may want to have a bigger cell with the poll at the top and space to write the reported final results in below. Then one can subtract and get the (opinion)Poll-minus-Vote number in the cell, too, and calculate Poll error or Surprising-ness. I think if people used it they'd want to jot down % results as well as which way states went. (I assume by "Tally" you mean each candidate's EV tally.) It would have predictive value, too. If we found Obama was running 3 points ahead of what the telephone-polling had been in the early states, you could look down and see how that might affect some upcoming state races.
• Voting method? If the states were marked with an E for electronic voting or other voting methods, we could watch them for patterns which are different from other states. That's just a thought, probably not a realistic feature request. Color-coding? Paperless states are gray?
I don't speak Spreadsheet natively, so if it were me I'd copy and paste cells into Word/Write so I could manipulate the page layout more easily.
If you are online, maybe you should liveblog election night as a finale.
I love it! Thank you for putting this together.
Two more points...
* Instead of sorting by margin strong-McCain...strong-Obama, consider sorting by the absolute value of the margin. It makes it a little weirder to look at (in that red states and blue states will be mixed together), but it makes it more likely that the user will get to work mostly from top to bottom of the sheet.
* Because it's unlikely that all of the states closing in a given hour will be called simultaneously, or even within that hour (the close-margin states may not get called until later on), it would help to have each candidate have two columns instead of the current one on the right. In the left-hand of those, you'd put the electoral votes from that state when the state is called. In the right-hand, you'd put the current running total for that candidate (adding the previous running total wherever it is in that column to the newly-added EVs).
I do a lot of hand-scoring of things that look like this, and it really helps to make these things as bombproof as possible.
You should put a spreadsheet (e.g., Excel or some similar format) for people to download!
One thing that jumps out and that people should consider: McCain will jump out to a quick lead because some hardcore red-states will be among the early closers. People should not panic about this.
Related: This and just the map.
Fantastic! Can you update this Tuesday?
this is great! do you plan on reposting it on tuesday to account for this week's polls?
Looks great, so far. I like the idea to publish the final version as an Excel file. In that version I'd like to see a tally total row so that it automatically totals each tally column to keep track as we go.
I second the motion to sort by absolute value of the margin, which ought to keep the early-callable states near the top of their time slot.
See the update here. Thanks for all the feedback!
Updated version available.
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