The 2016 Presidential election has induced much gnashing of teeth among voters. It seems like there has been an unprecedented amount of attention paid to election-related stress relief. Voice of San Diego devoted not just one but two sessions “focused on mindfulness, consciousness and reflexivity” in an effort to relax the electorate. The Washington Post recently reported that there’s an app for that.
John Nienstedt, president of Competitive Edge Research & Communication, San Diego www.cerc.net
Despite all the angst generated by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (and a few minor players), voter turnout in San Diego County promises to be strong.
I’m sticking with 75% in the City of San Diego. At the same time, I’ve dropped my San Diego County prediction a couple notches to 78%. That’s still a fine level, but, as I blogged earlier, not what we saw in the 2008 Obama wave and more like what we saw in 2012. Also, in close races, a drop of a couple points in turnout could affect outcomes in extremely tight races.
We also now anticipate that the percentage voting early will come in at 63.5%.
As of Saturday, we believe 35% of the votes had been cast.
With Sunday’s ballots still to tallied, we anticipate that the results released by the San Diego County Registrar of Voters at just after 8 p.m. Tuesday will be based on about 38% of the vote. That’s a very sizeable chunk, and if it were a random sample we’d expect those results to be off from the final result by less than two tenths of a percent. But the early results are not random samples. They only represent the group of what we might call “voters who didn’t wait until election day” — definitely not a randomly-selected bunch. So, despite the Registrar having counted more than 300,000 ballots by 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, those first results won’t be definitive for many close races.
NOTE: Orginally posted on the Competitive Edge website.