Election Night with Biden's Data Guru

[brooklynite]

New York Magazine

The last time chief analytics officer Becca Siegel had been inside Joe Biden’s sprawling campaign headquarters in Center City Philadelphia, her department had about 15 staffers on its payroll. That was in March. In late October, her team had ballooned to about ten times that size, but now only nine of her colleagues could join her in person — from a safe distance, wearing N95 masks, subject to a regular virus-testing protocol — for the final sprint to Election Day. Siegel, who had spent most of the pandemic working from a basement in tiny Manitou Springs, Colorado, had begun preparing for the first Tuesday in November months earlier. “Normally, I’m pretty low-key about it, because when the polls are closed, the votes have been won,” she said, speaking a few days after the AP and the networks had finally declared Biden the winner. “But this one was obviously a different situation. Because of the occupant of the White House, and the way the votes were going to be counted, it was clearly much more complicated.”

Their task was to figure out, in real time, if Biden was on track to win. Others in the Biden orbit, scattered around the country but mainly concentrated in Wilmington, Delaware, and Washington, D.C., were in charge of countering the expected confrontational messaging and legal fights from Trump’s campaign. In Philadelphia, Siegel and her colleagues patched in over 100 co-workers whose assignments covered 17 targeted states and laid out a to-do list of 300 items to get through before polls opened the next week. They’d need to figure out exactly how each county would be reporting its results and also how they should set up their internal vote-total projections, down to the precinct level, based on what kinds of ballots (in-person? Vote by mail?) the local governments would report and when. And then, they’d have to consider how to adjust their expectations and projections throughout Election Night and potentially the next few days too. “We spent a long time thinking about, What does it mean to overperform expectations in vote by mail? Does it mean we will overperform on Election Day too?” Or would it suggest an underperformance? They’d learn the answer when votes were counted. But until then, they had to get ready to navigate an information black hole.

Siegel, who is 28 and joined the campaign at its inception in 2019 after stops in the Democratic data world including Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Ohio, had been briefing Biden’s top aides on his progress every morning since early voting began earlier in the fall. These meetings turned hourly, and then continuous, on Tuesday night. Beaming into the Wilmington war room soon after polling places began closing, she ran the former VP’s inner circle through the vote counts state by state, discussing what kinds of votes were still outstanding, what that likely meant for his chances, and what to expect next. (You could do worse than to think of her, at this point, as the campaign’s private Steve Kornacki, armed with much more data but similarly little sleep.) There were few surprises, and not much to celebrate, when she first dialed in around 7:30 p.m. Biden appeared to be hitting expectations in the highly educated Indianapolis suburbs — which Siegel said was likely a good sign for similar areas in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania — but he was obviously lagging badly in rural, heavily white areas in Florida, where other warning signs were also popping off the map, most obviously in Miami-Dade County, where Trump looked like he was crushing expectations.

The previous evening, Siegel had walked the campaign’s top brass through her team’s final expectations. She had two overriding messages: first, that the count could take a while, and second, that the public would likely not have a full understanding of what was happening based solely on the numbers on TV or the New York Times’ interactive map, so they might have to do a lot of explaining. She said that her team had multiple scenarios mapped out — a good one, an okay one, and a bad one — for each hour, so they could easily track Biden’s pathways to 270 electoral votes depending on how the actual numbers matched up with their projections. And she laid down some markers. For weeks, Siegel had been souring on Florida and had in recent days tried convincing colleagues to lower public expectations for it. “That’s probably not going to happen. If it does, great,” she remembered thinking about the state — if Biden won it, he would almost certainly win the presidency early on Tuesday night. That was the simplest path. But that wasn’t the expectation: Siegel predicted more success not only in the swing states Clinton had won, like New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Nevada, but also in the “blue wall” states that Biden’s team considered the most likely avenue for getting him to 270 electoral votes: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. If those didn’t work out, he might be able to look to some other states, all of which Trump had also won in 2016, and whose recent history was far more Republican. Arizona, for one, was well within Biden’s grasp, too, she predicted. North Carolina and Georgia were a bit more of a stretch, she said, but wins were also within the realm of possibility there.

[Drunken Irishman]

1. That was intense and I knew the outcome.

But it's proof the campaign saying the polls were wrong was not a campaign tactic. They knew. And that alone should be lauded.

Biden ran a very good campaign.

[octoberlib]

2. Yes he did.

[questionseverything]

3. Bless the numbers geeks

They protect us