CA-AG: Improvement for Kamala

Update: Err. DCal points out a good point that Santa Clara’s reported an extra 86k votes since their last update. That means, well, Kamala doesn’t stand to gain as much. Revised, we’re saying Kamala will gain about 55,000 votes…leaving her about 7,300 short.

Hate to pull the roller coaster on y’all, but I’d rather be realistic than unrealistically optimistic.

After combing through the individual county websites and aggregating the information with the latest Unprocessed Ballots Report (UBR), Kamala Harris is actually down 62,258 votes thanks to a large number of votes of San Diego and Orange Counties reporting beyond the latest UBR.

We’ve adjusted the UBR for the new results from each County on top of the latest SoS report – for example, the UBR lists 84,005 votes left to process in the OC, but 29,651 more votes were added in today’s OC update; therefore, we’re using 54,354 ballots left outstanding in Orange. Given all this, we actually project Kamala Harris to pick up 70,612 votes in the ballots left outstanding (again, assuming the same breakdown in the Abs/Prov/VBM ballots as the ballots already counted) – meaning she’d win by 8,354.

But even then, Harris has been outdoing that in the few examples where counties have more fully reporting. I don’t buy into the “bellwether” theory, but consider San Benito. On Saturday, Harris was trailing by 41 votes in San Benito; today, she’s winning San Benito by 226 votes. Just one example, but – if you buy the bellwether theory – a powerful one!

We’ll keep updating as more results roll in – we think a county-by-county update encompasses results more fully than just using the SoS update, and lets us better manage the timeframe issue.

Better yet, not all of Harris’ improvement is attributable to the methodology switch – by yesterday’s method, Harris would lose by only 48 votes!

Movers and shakers below:


























































































































































































































County Total Harris Cooley Unproc Harris Cooley Margin
Los Angeles 1,883,468 1,004,737 743,482 322,428 171,999 127,276 44,724
Alameda 329,011 218,539 86,461 108,257 71,908 28,449 43,459
Santa Clara 459,996 251,940 168,327 108,000 59,152 39,521 19,631
Santa Clara 459,996 251,940 168,327 21,526 11,790 7,877 3,913
Contra Costa 236,809 125,361 93,978 85,000 44,997 33,732 11,265
Sonoma 138,383 79,052 45,321 40,000 22,850 13,100 9,750
Santa Cruz 67,290 41,786 18,478 27,905 17,329 7,663 9,666
Marin 83,391 51,689 25,850 27,050 16,767 8,385 8,382
San Mateo 168,055 95,316 59,945 26,812 15,207 9,564 5,643
Monterey 70,549 38,040 26,600 29,470 15,890 11,111 4,779
Mendocino 19,097 10,321 6,159 12,358 6,679 3,986 2,693
Solano 106,516 54,321 43,701 25,522 13,016 10,471 2,545
Humboldt 35,966 18,011 13,436 13,104 6,562 4,895 1,667
Yolo 47,516 25,421 18,162 10,536 5,637 4,027 1,610
Napa 28,480 14,229 11,711 17,877 8,932 7,351 1,581
Imperial 19,488 9,432 8,213 7,953 3,849 3,352 497
Lake 14,980 6,585 6,430 5,372 2,361 2,306 56










































































































































































































































































































































































County Total Harris Cooley Unproc Harris Cooley Margin
Fresno 127,070 45,013 72,289 79,748 28,250 45,368 -17,118
Orange 798,056 245,400 484,693 54,354 16,714 33,011 -16,298
San Diego 766,960 294,759 402,289 80,000 30,746 41,962 -11,216
Kern 159,058 42,875 100,947 22,953 6,187 14,567 -8,380
San Bernardino 382,526 141,174 202,961 36,000 13,286 19,101 -5,815
Shasta 47,590 12,778 29,737 16,200 4,350 10,123 -5,773
Riverside 444,463 161,930 246,523 28,800 10,493 15,974 -5,481
Sacramento 304,620 135,123 145,080 101,722 45,122 48,447 -3,325
San Joaquin 113,918 46,769 55,184 39,715 16,305 19,239 -2,934
Butte 56,937 20,635 29,626 18,007 6,526 9,370 -2,844
Tulare 70,879 20,762 44,573 7,475 2,190 4,701 -2,511
Ventura 234,659 91,180 126,123 16,648 6,469 8,948 -2,479
Tehama 13,013 3,527 7,798 7,354 1,993 4,407 -2,414
Madera 27,635 8,130 16,872 5,806 1,708 3,545 -1,837
Placer 107,703 31,998 66,112 4,800 1,426 2,946 -1,520
Calaveras 14,501 4,168 8,236 4,918 1,414 2,793 -1,380
San Luis Obispo 93,036 34,907 49,042 8,291 3,111 4,370 -1,260
Stanislaus 110,462 41,587 59,205 6,980 2,628 3,741 -1,113
Sutter 22,671 6,642 13,871 2,384 698 1,459 -760
Santa Barbara 110,837 47,845 53,209 14,537 6,275 6,979 -704
Nevada 37,088 14,129 19,126 4,730 1,802 2,439 -637
Amador 14,112 3,963 8,306 1,741 489 1,025 -536
Yuba 14,555 4,312 8,484 1,209 358 705 -347
Siskiyou 16,827 5,455 9,196 993 322 543 -221
Del Norte 6,876 2,520 3,562 1,008 369 522 -153
Tuolumne 21,104 6,629 11,962 524 165 297 -132
Mariposa 7,010 2,096 4,051 267 80 154 -74
Merced 38,323 15,435 19,618 400 161 205 -44
Inyo 6,649 2,084 3,758 115 36 65 -29

97 thoughts on “CA-AG: Improvement for Kamala”

  2. That leaves three counties, including San Benito with outstanding ballots… are San Benito (and the other two) fully done according to their county?

  6. In the UBR, San Francisco reported today at 3:55 PM that they have 21,376 ballots remaining.  I would think that would take precedence over any prior estimate that they made.  The estimates go up and down over time, but the latest report should be the most accurate one.  (Harris could gain up to 11,000 if there are still 21K ballots to be counted).

    Santa Clara had 108,000 ballots remaining as of 11/4, but since then 70,000 votes came in for Harris and Cooley combined, plus an unknown amount for the minor party candidates.  So, Santa Clara may have as few as 30,000 ballots remaining.  (Harris netted 16,000 votes from the 70,000 that were counted.)

    These two changes would partially offset, but would  reduce the expected net gain for Harris by about 5,000 votes.

    Harris’ best hope is with the provisionals, which are usually counted last, to swing the percentages in her favor.  Provisionals are usually election day voters who had one problem or another, such as being told to vote at the wrong polling place.  Election day voters favored Harris by a few percentage points overall.

    Riverside, for one, appears to be out of absentees and only has provisionals left.  Most other counties are probably at this stage as well.

  7. Based on the Orange County late ballots, I think that Harris is probably doing somewhat better with the late ballots statewide than she did with the election day ballots plus the early ballots. Therefore, I think that the projected 8,000 vote victory may indeed be slightly conservative, if anything. I think she’ll win. If so, she’s a name we’ll be hearing a great deal about in future years.

  8. looking at the numbers for San Benito and Santa Barbara, which are accepted as the “bellwether” counties, the Dems underperformed their numbers in these two counties relative to their statewide numbers most of the time. (BoE = Board of Equalization, the state’s equivalent to the IRS.)

                   Statewide   San Benito   Santa Barbara

    Boxer            51.7         48.9          49.0

    Brown            53.2         50.7          48.8

    Newsom           49.9         45.2          42.2

    Harris           45.6         45.3          43.2

    Bowen            52.8         49.7          49.7

    Lockyer          56.1         55.5          53.7

    Chiang           54.7         50.7          49.9

    Jones            50.3         46.3          45.8

    U.S. House       53.2         55.7          49.8

    St. Assembly     53.2         51.7          46.1

    St. BoE          51.7         49.1          48.0

  10. but over on DailyKos, SoCalLiberal doesn’t think much of your counting methods.

    Okay, they are not paying attention to the actual numbers coming in and they are looking at un-updated totals of ballots left to count.  It’s a serious problem.  They are also looking at numbers of ballots yet to be tabulated and assuming they will break the same way as the margins in the counties currently are.  This sort of analysis is unbelievably silly.  There was a massive swing to to Harris on election day.  Humboldt County is just one example of the swing (she lost among early Vote by Mail ballots by 4% but won election day precincts by 22%).  The key thing to remember is that the outstanding ballots are those that were cast on election day.  Either they were Vote by Mail ballots that were dropped off on election day or they were provisionals cast on election day.  

    Another thing to keep in mind is her surge in Los Angeles County late in the race.  She didn’t just surge in LA County but also surged among Decline to State voters where she went from trailing by double digits to leading by double digits.  Why is this important?  Because while partisan Democrats were likely to pick Harris and partisan Republicans were likely to pick Cooley and this would play out among early Vote by Mail ballots, Decline to State voters were most likely to wait until the very end to drop off their ballots.

    FWIW, the Field Poll had Harris up in Los Angeles County by only 6 points, and she seems to be up now by about 14 points (the SoS website seems to suddenly not be working at this moment).  So he’s correct about the late surge in favor of Harris.  Does your model account for that when thinking of the absentee ballots dropped off on Election Day that are still left to count?

  11. I have done my own calculation, and it puts Kamala Harris up by 10,000 votes based on outstanding ballots and the lead at 5:00 PM today.  One of the problems is that the SOS page updates the results in a real-time manner, but the uncounted ballots is just a snapshot in time – and they took a snapshot at noon and another at 5pm.  Results in OC and San Diego after 5pm this evening are reflected in the results, but not the uncounted ballots.

    More importantly, look at the gains they each made since last Friday.  From Friday 5pm to Monday 5pm Cooley gained 31,000 votes over Kamala, but based on the counties that were counted, he should have gained 42,000.  He is under performing with these uncounted ballots by a rate of 1.5%.  That’s not a major difference than earlier absentees, but with the remaining ballots this is enough to put her up by 45,000 votes when all is done.

  13. In case people haven’t noticed it, the SoS site has election maps for each statewide race.  It’s a very interesting visual that displays the range between the worst performing Dem (Harris) and the best (Lockyer).

    http://vote.sos.ca.gov/maps/at…

    http://vote.sos.ca.gov/maps/tr…

    The AG race shows the Dem base of the north coast, Bay Area and LA, while the Treasurer race shows what Dems can win with a strong canidate with no baggage… the entire coast except Orange, plus San Bernadino, Nevada county, Fresno and the west/central valley.

    Lockyer only overperformed Brown by three points, but he picked up 11 more counties.

  15. Sorry to be repeating myself from the most recent post to this one, but there’s more discussion here.

    She netted 3592 votes to Cooley’s 3166 votes. Cooley had won Orange 2:1, so he certainly was counting on padding his lead here.

  16. are not yet showing up on Sec of State’s results page, but are on the Alameda County web site. (These votes may have been on the Alameda County web site since Friday, because that is when they last produced a report).

    http://www.acgov.org/rov/curre…

    The Sec of State County Reporting Status page shows Alameda County provided an updated count yesterday at 9:14 AM.  However, for some reason, the vote totals on the results page never got updated.

    The UBR seems to be up to date for Alameda because it is now showing there are only 24,500 votes to be counted there.

    The 78,683 additional votes in Alameda County are distributed as follows:

    Harris: 53,425 (67.9%)

    Cooley: 19,390 (24.6%)

    Other:   5,868  (7.5%)

    Harris netted 34,035 votes from this batch.  Her advantage over Cooley was 43.4% (67.9% – 24.6%) compared to 40.1% (66.3% – 26.2%) in the vote counted previously.  

    Once these votes and the ones from Alameda are added, by my count, Harris would be at 3,848,749 and Cooley at 3,844,901.  Maybe I am missing something here, and if so, please let me know.

  17. The new results on the SoS page which were updated at 10 AM this morning show Kamala only 9,555 votes behind Cooley with LA and Contra Costa still having to count a lot of ballots!

  18. And the new unprocessed ballots chart that was released today by the SOS.

    WHY DOES ORANGE HAVE 30,000 MORE BALLOTS UNPROCESSED TODAY THAN ON MONDAY?

    This looks a little fishy to me…

    SSP says 54,354 unprocessed, unprocessed ballots PDF says 84,005.

  19. Contra Costa County still has a lot of votes to count, Harris leads 53-40 there.

    Sonoma County hasn’t submitted an update to SOS since Nov 3rd (everybody drunk ? :P) – Harris leads 57.2 – 32.8 there. Marin hasn’t updated since Nov 5th – Harris leads 62-31. They’re all big counties.

    On the dark side: Orange County is updating again around 5pm (boohiss). SoCal is such a pain. I lived in San Diego for 10 years, when I moved there I associated surfer dudes with the area not angry white men. The Pacific doesn’t pacify everybody I guess.

    Now I live at the brink of civilization (CA-11, 5 miles from Alameda County line), glad to see McNerney is winning. Re: Pombo – That Pombo family seem to be local oligarchs, given how often one sees the name, streets named after them, too.

    NorCal ought to secede 😀 Anyway, three cheers for the Pacific Northwest, my favorite place on many levels. It withstood the teabag onslaught. Ever since I drove 1/101 from SF to Vancouver I’ve been in love with it.

  20. Sacramento has counted 60k + votes that aren’t on the SOS site yet. While Cooley is ahead (I don’t quite understand why Harris is doing worse than any other Democrat – must be the non-white + female + San Francisco trifecta that has some people scared. Anyway:

    Cooley on SOS site:

    157,361 48.3%

    Newest update:

    178,844 47.20%

    Harris on SOS site:

    142,669 43.8%

    Newest update:

    169,118 44.63%

    Cooley gains 21,483

    Harris gains 26,449

    = Harris nets 4,966 from a county where she’s behind. I’ll take 5k votes 🙂

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