In recent years, I've almost never watched election night on TV, nor followed the minute-by-minute returns. Usually, I just wait until a little news flash pops up on my iPhone screen telling me NBC News (or whoever) has projected a winner. Or maybe if I'm on the 'net reading something not related to the election, I see an announcement in the margins or on Twitter.
Last night, for no visible reason, I was watching as the returns came in on the Warnock/Walker race and at times, it seemed way closer than it actually was. Herschel Walker seemed to me like the worst possible candidate, coming across as outright stupid, uninformed and not quite understanding of what the job involved. I get the feeling that a lot of people who voted for him felt the same way…but they weren't really voting for Walker. They were just voting for The Republican…or maybe in some cases, the Trump pick. It's still kind of frightening that he came as close as he did.
For some moments there, as the results trickled in, he came a little too close at times and was even briefly leading for fifteen minutes around the time the percentage of votes counted was hovering at 91%. I could have spared myself some needless angst if I'd taken the advice that Josh Marshall offers this morning: "Save Your Brain: Don't Watch TV on Election Night." An excerpt…
If you were watching last night's election on TV you probably had the sense the race was a close run thing with the lead bouncing back and forth, with Herschel Walker possibly mounting a comeback after weeks of coverage that made Raphael Warnock appear a favorite to win a full term.
If you watched the results through my curated Twitter feed of election number crunchers, though, you saw something very different: from the very first returns it looked likely and then with growing clarity that the results would roughly bear out the polls which showed Warnock with modest but significant lead. The final results this morning show Warnock beating Walker by just shy of three percentage points, almost on the dot of what the consensus of polls predicted.
The man is right. When you watch live, your view is colored by the order in which the ballots are counted. There were counties last night in Georgia that were heavily for Walker and others that went overwhelmingly for Warnock. If Walker's counties had all reported first, he could have at one point had a huge lead…and then it would have seemingly dissipated as the counties for Warnock came in.
This is the kind of thing some folks don't understand and it fuels those "the election was stolen" claims: "My guy was winning handily and then suddenly, all these votes for the other guy came out of nowhere. They must have been manufactured!" No, they didn't come out of nowhere. They came out of counties that didn't count as fast as others.
One thing I will say about Herschel Walker: He had the class to concede when he did. He could have pulled a Trump and tried to gin up a scandal but he didn't. I wonder if he was ignoring some advice that came from You-Know-Who.