Election Post #1

[ceebeegee]

I am so nervous about tomorrow I think I'm going to throw up. Kava kava is my friend.

Virginia, do me proud...please, please break for Obama.

Comments

[minstrel70.livejournal.com]

I used to be a very active campaign volunteer, working on several congressional, gubernatorial and state assembly campaigns back in the '90s. Being a bit of a math whiz and computer-savvy, I got involved in the returns analysis as part of the team that crunches the numbers on election night and determines when the candidate comes out to concede or claim victory. I could have told you, at least in the early '90s, which way a race was going to go based on as little as 5% of precinct returns, depending on where they came from and how big the margins were. Why the media get it so wrong so often is a mystery to me. I love that side of politics (I mostly hate the rest of it these days).

We knew by 8:05 on election night 1993 that Whitman was going to beat Florio, based on just two precincts, one in Newark and one in Camden, because she wasn't losing them by a 2:1 margin. She couldn't come out with a victory speech until much later, nor could the media call it, because most of the early returns favored Florio by a wide margin -- just not wide enough -- and it would have looked bad. But we knew, and it was really fun to watch and be part of the game.

Unfortunately, that's the only campaign I ever worked on that turned out the way I wanted. The next year's Senate campaign was clearly over just as early. At least that left me free to go drink :-)