The 'Blue Shift' Will Decide the Election

[Demovictory9]

The ‘Blue Shift’ Will Decide the Election
Something fundamental has changed about the ways Americans vote.


As polling places closed on November 6, 2018, the expected “blue wave” looked more like a ripple. Not only had some of the highest-profile Democratic candidates lost, but the party’s gains in the House and the Senate looked smaller than anticipated.

The wave, it turned out, simply hadn’t crested yet. Over the ensuing weeks, as more ballots were counted, Democrats kept winning races—eventually netting 41 House seats. In Arizona, the Republican Martha McSally conceded the Senate race to the Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who picked up more than 70,000 votes in post–Election Day counting. Democrats narrowed deficits in races in Florida and Georgia too. Republicans were stunned.

“California just defies logic to me,” then-Speaker Paul Ryan said in late November. “We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every contested California race.”

This sort of late-breaking Democratic vote is the new, though still underappreciated, normal in national elections. Americans have become accustomed to knowing who won our elections promptly, but there are many legitimate votes that are not counted immediately every election year. For reasons that are not totally understood by election observers, these votes tend to be heavily Democratic, leading results to tilt toward Democrats as more of them are counted, in what has become known as the “blue shift.” In most cases, the blue shift is relatively inconsequential, changing final vote counts but not results. But in others, as in 2018, it can materially change the outcome.



Although it is slowly dawning on the press and the electorate that Election Day will be more like Election Week or Election Month this year, thanks to coronavirus-related complications, the blue shift remains obscure. But the effect could be much larger and far more consequential in 2020, as Democrats embrace voting by mail more enthusiastically than Republicans. If the public isn’t prepared to wait patiently for the final results, and if politicians cynically exploit the shifting tallies to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote, the results could be catastrophic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/brace-blue-shift/615097/

[Foolacious]

1. At least one of the reasons for the Blue Shift seems pretty clear:

Urban areas are more heavily Democratic, and have a higher voter/precinct ratio, so those precincts take longer to report in.

[Demovictory9]

2. over on freerepublic, they attributed these late in the evening shifts from red to blue to fraud

i watched it happening live... Trump will exploit / encourage these opinions.

[Foolacious]

3. Why let facts and sense influence them?

In addition, more red voters are retired or have white-collar jobs that permit them to head to the polls any time during the day; more blue voters have all-day jobs so they may tend to vote later. This kind of shift is only relevant to exit polls versus reported votes, though.

[Amishman]

4. Blue Shift is the urban / rural divide manifest

It means two things; as we get more geographically polarized it will be even more significant, but also there is a limit to the number of places it can happen.