There are an estimated 12,000 ballots left to count as of late Thursday evening. Most of those ballots are from Arapahoe County. Only 85 percent of the county’s votes are reported. Arapahoe County supported Laubacher overwhelmingly (60.9 percent) to Boebert’s 35.8 percent.
According to NBC News, Boebert must win 61.4 percent of the remaining vote to overtake Laubacher.
The race has been called… By alternet…
No news agency holds the golden key to “calling a race” as they are not at all involved in certification of results. If you’ll recall fox news called Florida pretty early in 2000 and many claim everyone was wrong on that.
Yes this is a pretty weak source but it is not confusing why it was posted.
The gold standard for calling races is the AP. They don’t call any competitive race until someone is up by more votes than there are ballots remaining (they say they watch for trailing candidates not having a path to victory), unless polls make it clear that the race isn’t competitive. They’ve got a 100% accuracy rate since 2008, except when counties report incorrect totals.
Totally agree with you a call by AP would be much more certain than this no-name publication. A call by nearly anything else would be more credible.
I was just irked at the suggestion this shouldn’t have been posted, it had relevant useful information and I’m glad I was exposed to it. Sure this is likely an attempt at a clickbait headline by some small website, but it’s very simple to just store this away as that and still get some value.
I also have an irritation with the association between decision desks calling an election and them actually being certified. People mix this up most of the time.in.my experience and don’t realize that a news agency calling something has literally 0 legal connection to the race being won.
And for your final point about the 100% accuracy except when incorrect totals are counted kind of enhances point. Counties often do not report things correctly as fast as we want them to, but they have no obligation to.
That you’re bringing up one decision desk checks notes 14 general elections ago regarding one race that tight shows what I’m talking about. By your own stupid equivocating metric, the State of Florida and the United States Congress may as well be treated like AlterNet because they also called Florida wrong.
It is confusing, because this isn’t an appropriate source to call a race, and no actually credible decision desk has called it (not that “uncredited AlterNet author” constitutes a “decision desk”).
Are you really suggesting that the only time an “actually credible decision desk” has made a bad call was over 25 years ago? I used that example because it was huge and top of mind, I’m sure if I did some research I could find plenty of retractions between then and now.
And how is it that I have suggested Florida and Congress are on par with AlterNet? I clearly stated that this was a weak source, I’ve never disagreed with you on that front.
It was your claiming that this election hasn’t been “called” I took issue with. Your original post suggested there was some official “calling” mechanism we are waiting for and there isn’t. I can’t help but notice you were pretty silent about that despite it being the crux of my disagreement.
This outlet is saying their analysis suggests that Boebert has such a slim chance at victory they are calling it. That is newsworthy, it’s up to the reader to evaluate the source.
I’m glad this was posted and I found it informative.
I’m saying the fact you’re resorting to that example at all is pathetic. You’re digging back over a quarter-century – when models were less refined – to a call on a razor-thin race that ended up correct sans the hypothetical recount and that led to a resignation.
Of the decision desks I listed, Decision Desk HQ is almost always the quickest to call races, and even they exceedingly rarely get it wrong. The only recent one that I know of is the NJ-11 primary. They also last year miscalled the Seattle mayor’s race, but that’s because they received wildly inaccurate data from Seattle themselves.
Genuinely the only noteworthy one I can think of from the AP within the last 15 years is in 2018 in a House election. And errors like that (as noted in the article) get decision desks to painstakingly and methodically improve their models. The actual estimate of retracted calls:
Unlike AlterNet, decision desks have a reputation to uphold, the expertise to uphold it, and an accountability that forces them to adapt and improve their model. Some anonymous author on AlterNet has none of those.
“I’m sure if I actually tried to substantiate the stupid argument I’m making with actual, salient points, I could.” Well I just “did some research”, and it shows pretty clearly that out of tens of thousands of races, decision desks are trustworthy.
The thing you are missing is the accuracy of decision desks has absolutely nothing to do with the argument of calling elections. Even if they were 100% accurate (they aren’t, I just found 5 from past 10 years with a cursory Google search) the point still stands.
An election being “called” means nothing more than a journalistic institution deciding that they think the outcome is certain enough to publish. That’s it!
That was my whole point from the start till now. Your pedantic obsession with the accuracy of decision desks has nothing to do with my claims. But go ahead and keep beating that straw man if it makes you feel better. I’ll happily prove they get it wrong despite that being an entirely different argument.