Sorry for the slow updates recently.  There is a lot of new stuff on the horizon, and I want to settle before committing to projects.  In layman’s terms, cool things soon.

In the meantime, please enjoy this incredibly terrible Seattle Times headline.

With Clark County finishing up a few minutes ago, every county in Washington now has certified results for the 2008 General election.  Your final numbers are:

President - Obama +17.18%
Barack Obama (D) 1,750,848 (57.65%)
John McCain (R*) 1,229,216 (40.48%)
Ralph Nader (I) 29,489 (0.97%)
Bob Barr (L) 12,728 (0.42%)
Chuck Baldwin (C) 9,432 (0.31%)
Cynthia McKinney (G) 3,819 (0.13%)
Gloria La Riva (S&L) 705 (0.02%)
James Harris (SW) 641 (0.02%)

Governor - Gregoire +6.48%
Christine Gregoire* (D) 1,598,738 (53.24%)
Dino Rossi (R) 1,404,124 (46.76%)

Lt. Governor - Owen +21.60%
Brad Owen* (D) 1,718,033 (60.80%)
Marcia McCraw (R) 1,107,634 (39.20%)

Secretary of State - Reed +16.65%
Sam Reed* (R) 1,644,587 (58.33%)
Jason Osgood (D) 1,175,086 (41.67%)

State Treasurer - McIntire +2.16%
Jim McIntire (D*) 1,420,022 (51.08%)
Allan Martin (R) 1,360,063 (48.92%)

State Auditor - Sonntag +27.07%
Brian Sonntag* (D) 1,770,977 (63.54%)
Dick McEntee (R) 1,016,396 (36.46%)

Attorney General - McKenna +18.92%
Rob McKenna* (R) 1,689,764 (59.46%)
John Ladenburg (D) 1,152,174 (40.54%)

Commissioner of Public Lands - Goldmark +1.11%
Peter Goldmark (D) 1,416,904 (50.55%)
Doug Sutherland* (R) 1,385,903 (49.45%)

Superintendent of Public Instruction - Dorn +4.77%
Randy Dorn 1,333,290 (52.38%)
Terry Bergeson 1,211,909 (47.62%)

Insurance Commissioner - Kreidler +22.76%
Mike Kreidler (D) 1,679,696 (61.38%)
John Adams (R) 1,056,693 (38.62%)

In addition, I-985 lost by 19.98%, I-1000 won by 15.64% and I-1029 got the most affirmative votes ever (2,113,773) for any Washington state ballot item, and won by 45.05%.

There are approximately 55,392 outstanding ballots in the state of Washington.  Democratic challenger Peter Goldmark currently leads incumbent Commissioner of Public Lands Doug Sutherland by 20,041 votes.  Even assuming there are 60,000 votes remaining (and some appear from nowhere, as they’re known to do), Sutherland would have to win the remainin ballots over 2-to-1 to take back the lead

The problem?  About two-thirds of outstanding ballots are from King County, where Goldmark currently holds 62% of the vote.  Allocating the remaining ballots based on current results in their respective counties gives Goldmark over 54% of the remaining vote.  We’re also mostly past the point where late balloting favors Republicans.  We’re getting down to the question ballots, which tend to be Democratic.  Pierce County, for instance, has unloaded several super-Democratic batches in a row, and today’s King County batch ticked up the margin for almost every Democrat.

Even if that weren’t true, Sutherland would truly need a perfect storm.  This is beyond “remote chance of re-vote” territory, to “asteroid-hits-earth event plus gross mis-report of remaining ballot totals” zone.  Sutherland was counted out too early by the Associated Press.  Now, he is staying too late.   Expect him to lose by about a point.

It’s been pointed out to me that in a lot of counties, the remaining ballots are mostly screw-ups that need to be transferred to new ballots to work.  There also may be a few international ballots remaining.  Provisionals in Pierce and King County are also likely still well-represented.  RCV in PierceCo may be creating a nightmare, and it’s unclear how many of the remaining ballots are RCV-only, traditional-only, or both.

In either case, King and Pierce are way over-represented in projected remaining ballots - 51% and 25% of the statewide total, respectively.

It also appears that these provisional and error ballots are heavily Democratic, as they do tend to be.

Memo to the mainstream media:  In Washington state, you can’t just extrapolate early ballot results by county and predict a winner.  Otherwise, we’d have Rep.-elect Darcy Burner right now.

That being said, with nearly 99% of the vote in, it’s looking very unlikely that incumbent Republican Commissioner of Public Lands Doug Sutherland can recover to defeat upstart challenger Peter Goldmark.

Goldmark leads 50.9% to 49.1%.  Even my most Republican-friendly model has this race essentially in a tie, and the most Republican-friendly model just isn’t going to happen.   That’s also a big difference between the 1.2% lead it showed Sutherland with last week.

Side note:  Late ballots aren’t uniformly Republican.  Obama had great batches today in Whatcom, as well as Pierce (which he won by over 20 points in today’s ballot), and Thurston (where he’s now at 59.996%).   Obama also expanded his lead in Klickitat County, from 17 to 20 votes.  I’m not entirely sure what ballots these are, honestly.  I’d think a lot of military (international, so late-arriving) would be mixed in.  But the Pierce result seems odd, viewed in that context.

The early results from WA-7 indicate that it may have.  Obama led those early returns 84.60% to 14.18%, or by about 70.4 points.  San Francisco currently sits at Obama +70.1%.

Since then, his countywide margin is looking to decline about 2.5 points.  However, WA-7 also contains less Democratic territory, with Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, White Center, Bryn Mawr, Vashon Island and a bit of Burien.  In 2004, Seattle was about 2.5 points more Democratic than WA-7.  Extrapolating this to 2008 essentially erases late Republican balloting improvement.

The result?  We have Obama projected to be up by 70.5% or so in Seattle, with San Francisco at 70.1%.  There are a million things that could bump the former number down.  Still, though, a stronger Democratic return in Seattle seems a very viable, perhaps likely, possibility.

It’s Sunday, so the vote count people are at home.  No model update today.  However, instead of using 2004 turnout+13%, I decided to run the model using the expected number of ballots counties are reporting.  Here’s what I got.  Note that this is not an update, just a theory run.

These reports are historically unreliable.  Columbia County, for instance, currently projects turnout of 2574/2585 (99.6%).  Good luck with that, Columbia County.

President
Model A: Obama +17.33 [-0.54]
Model B: Obama +15.87 [+0.15]
Model C: Obama +16.77 [-0.27]

The difference primarily comes from King County, where the model sees about 125,000 more ballots than King County does.  King County projects turnout at 80.3%; the model says 91.6%.  In 2004, King County turnout was 83.0%.

An alternative model is one that takes 2004 turnout, and applies it to 2008 registration numbers.  This brings us to:

President
Model A: Obama +17.78 [-0.09]
Model B: Obama +16.48 [+0.76]
Model C: Obama +17.29 [+0.25]

Now, the problem here is that this actually reduces the turnout of some counties which have already been 2004 levels. For instance, in Asotin and Klickitat counties, it renders an absurd multiplier of -0.07. Zeroing out the negative multipliers (which bumps Obama down to +17.73/+16.41/+17.22) is a pretty bad solution.  Vote-by-mail has bumped up turnout, and that will be felt less in King County.

I could model out a representation of the VBM turnout bump, but we don’t know that, and at this point we’re introducing far too many variables.  Either way, it should be noted that my model is likely high-balling King County vote totals.  With so few votes outstanding, I mostly just recommend people hang in there.  Obama will almost assuredly win by at least 15.5% (he would win by a bit more if there were no King County ballots left at all), and almost assuredly by less than 18.0%.

Beyond that, I’m retiring the model posts to focus on analyzing the results — the real ones, as they come in.

While we only have early returns, and later absentees tend to veer Republican, Pierce County returns demonstrate an interesting phenomenon:  Poll voters are clearly more conservative than absentee voters.  Interestingly, though, Sam Reed did better with absentee voters.  Perhaps this is a reflection of his contentious relationship with certain dedicated wings of the conservative political sphere.  More puzzling is Peter Goldmark’s nearly at-par performance.

Table follows below.

• King: King County has posted very-early results by legislative and congressional district (warning: PDF).  McCain sustained significant losses versus George W. Bush everywhere, but especially in the suburbs.  In the affluent 48th, while includes the Gold Coast, south Redmond, north and central Bellevue, and a bit of Kirkland, Obama won 2-to-1.  That’s an 18-point swing from 2004 in an area where Maria Cantwell barely improved over Bush in her ‘04 landslide.
• Pierce: Preliminary precinct results online.  These should tighten more than the others, judging on Pierce’s late ballots.  Either way, Obama’s biggest gains are in the suburbs; he’s floating around 60% in Fircrest and University Place, and did well in Tacoma.  I’ll wait for final results for a more detailed analysis.  Interestingly, these prelims have Obama carrying Fort Lewis.
• Snohomish: The nearly-final precinct reports are posted, and Snohomish is predictably bloody for the GOP.  Save for Stanwood (where McCain currently leads by one vote), Obama carried every single municipality in the county, some with impressive swings.

Other counties with early precinct results available online are:  Ferry, Grays Harbor, Jefferson, Lewis, Spokane and Thurston.

Technical error made it impossible to get this up yesterday.  Sorry.

For details, see here.

Model A: “Dumb” model (no late ballot effect)
Model B: Old model (Republican adjustment method)
Model C: New model (New ballot extrapolation method)

Three new batches yesterday, from King, Pierce and Yakima.  The model saw the Yakima batch as pretty good for the Democrats, and the Pierce batch as good for the Republicans.  King was pretty much a wash.  Overall, the rule seems to be very slight GOP gains — except in the one race where it currently matters, CPL.

President
Model A: Obama +17.87 [-0.12]
Model B: Obama +15.87 [+0.01]
Model C: Obama +17.04 [-0.04]

Governor
Model A: Gregoire +7.65 [-0.23]
Model B: Gregoire +583 [+0.04]
Model C: Gregoire +6.66 [-0.15]

State Treasurer
Model A: McIntire +2.92 [-0.23]
Model B: McIntire +1.09 [+0.03]
Model C: McIntire +1.66 [-0.03]

Commissioner of Public Lands
Model A: Goldmark +1.74 [-0.04]
Model B: Sutherland +0.39 [+0.13]
Model C: Goldmark +0.70 [+0.08]