Tonight I've been looking at the numbers for the Washington governor's race and I have a lot of confidence that Jay Inslee will win when the count is done. Inslee is up 51.16% to 48.84%, about 49,000 votes. Total votes so far: about 2.1 million. Total votes cast 4 years ago in governor's race: just over 3 million.
I put together a spreadsheet with the county-by-county totals and the expected ballots yet to be counted by each county. A straight extrapolation with each county's percentage yields an Inslee win of 52.2%.
But let's say the newer ballots fare worse for Inslee and there are more of them. This table shows additional votes if Inslee does 3 percentage points worse across the board and there are twice the number of ballots left as currently reported (yielding a ballot total of over 3.6 million out of 3.9 million registered voters).
|
Current Total |
Additional Votes |
Expected Total |
Pct |
Jay Inslee |
1078944 |
735948 |
1814892 |
50.12% |
Rob McKenna |
1030178 |
775924 |
1806102 |
49.88% |
As you can see, Inslee still wins with 50.12%, about 8800 votes. I think Inslee could see a slight degradation in his percentages in the big counties, but 3 points would be a lot. And I doubt we'll get 3.6 million votes. So I feel good about this!
Here's the link to the Google spreadsheet.
Update (11/8) below the fold.
Notes from today (Thursday 11/8);
- King County reported over 70,000 votes today and Inslee got 60.46%, down from the percentage of his King total, which was 62.69%.
- Pierce County reported almost 35,000 votes and Inslee got 48%, down slightly from 48.6%.
- Snohomish is where Mckenna did much better. It reported over 30,000 votes and Inslee got only 48.45% compared to 51.68% previously.
- Interestingly in Spokane County, Inslee did better today. They reported about 20,000 votes and Inslee got 43.42% compared to 42.28% previously.
In any case, King estimates 244,000 ballots to count out of a total of about 637,000 statewide. Snohomish estimates 80,000 left and Pierce 75,000.
So, even with Inslee performing about 3 points worse in Snohomish and 2-3 points worse in King, he increased his vote lead today from 48766 to 50076. Because there are so many ballots remaining in King and because Inslee is winning there by 20 points, it will be extremely difficult for McKenna to close the gap. From the Seattle P-I Blog:
“Whoever is the first media outlet to call this race is two days late: We now have three days data and McKenna is falling further behind,” said Dr. Matt Barreto, the University of Washington political science professor who oversees The Washington Poll.
I agree.