Still on track: A Seattle Mayoral Election Update

Dear reader.

We had a modest sized ballot drop today that favored Wilson by 51.6%. That increased her vote share by 1.2% and reduced Harrell’s by the same amount, which is nice.

The totals are 52.6% for Harrell, 46.9% Wilson.

Wilson needs 55% of the likely remaining votes to win.

If we consider past precedent to be our best guide, Wilson still looks likely to pull ahead. With help from a spreadsheet of daily results in past races put together by Daniel Jones, a computational biologist at Fred Hutch, I can explain why. (Thank you Daniel for your quick help!).

Fridays are not only big days in terms of lots of votes counted. They are days where the share going to progressives counted on that day jumps a bunch, relative to Thursday.

In fact, Cary Moon’s share of the votes counted on Friday was 9% higher than votes counted on Thursday. Gonzales' was 5%. (And she was coming off a huge Thursday increase). Wilson’s primary jump from Thursday to Friday was 14%.

Mondays are also good days (for vote counting, anyway!) with high percentages for progressives candidates, though far fewer votes counted. And by then most of the counting is done. Moon’s Monday was 12% higher than her Thursday. Gonzales’ was 4.5%. Wilson’s primary was 12%.

Every single one of those numbers is high enough for Wilson to win. 

If Wilson nabs just the bottom one—4.5% more than she did today—she will average 56.1%! That is more than a point higher than she needs. If we just do a simple average of the Gonzales and Moon races (the use of a primary feels a little risky to me and anyway, flatters on the upside), you get a 7 point Friday vote-count-percentage jump, and 8.25% for Monday. Those numbers are well beyond what Wilson needs to win.

Again, anomalies are always possible, I’m not predicting anything with any kind of certainty. But if history is any guide, we should find today encouraging.

Special thanks again to Daniel Jones! Assume any bad analysis here was my fault - he mainly just put all the data into a format I could understand and use.