//This is a difficult article to write. Not for any deeply personal reason, but just because I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to lead with — the most likely outcome or the uncertainty around that outcome.
Either way, there’s the potential for misunderstanding. People can mentally “round up” high probabilities to certainties. An 86 percent chance might seem like a sure thing, but it isn’t — would you board a plane that had a 14 percent chance of crashing?
But an 86 percent chance (or around 6 in 7) — which is the chance that Democrats have of winning the House, give or take a bit in the various versions of the FiveThirtyEight forecast model — is nonetheless a pretty good chance. (Republican odds of keeping the Senate are also just north of 80 percent in a nice bit of symmetry.) To say that the range of plausible outcomes is broad and includes Republicans keeping the House does not mean that all such outcomes are equally likely — a point on which some people may be confused too.//
//Likewise, Democrats need a couple of things to go wrong to lose tomorrow because not very much is going right for Republicans. (At least not when it comes to the House; it’s all going quite swimmingly for the GOP in the Senate.) At a macro level — based on national indicators and the historical tendency of the president’s party to lose seats at the midterm elections — the situation looks bad for Republicans. But at the local level — when you evaluate factors one district at a time, as our model does — it looks worse. The polling is bad for Republicans, the fundraising numbers are awful, and the slate of potential Democratic pickups runs deep into Republican territory. The data is uncertain, because it contains a margin-of-real-world-error. But I don’t think the data is ambiguous. It says Democrats are over the threshold they’d need to win the House.//
Filibuster_HK
2018-11-6 09:12:12
US midterm results and maps 2018: When will we know the election outcome?
People will take to the polls across the 50 states from 1pm GMT on Tuesday November 6, with polls closing from midnight GMT onwards. Below are the last polling times for each state.
19:00 EST (midnight GMT) (0800 HKT): Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia
19:30 EST (00:30 GMT) (0830 HKT: North Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia
20:00 EST (01:00 GMT) (0900 HKT: Alabama, Conneticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massacheutts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee
20:30 EST (01:30 GMT) (0930 HKT): Arkansas
21:00 EST (02:00 GMT) (1000 HKT): Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin, Wyoming
22:00 EST (03:00 GMT) (1100 HKT): Iowa, Montana, Nevada, Utah
23:00 EST (04:00 GMT) (1200 HKT): California, Hawaii, Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington