With the devastating news of the NYT needle’s demise, but with anticipation of it being replaced with a bigger, better election tracking tool, I’ve thrown together this quick and dirty DIY reference for following the Ohio CD 12 special election returns tonight, as election junkies across the country turn their lonely eyes towards the Columbus, Ohio ‘burbs (and exurbs).

Ohio CD 12

This isn’t a comprehensive overview of the race and its significance in a broader context. If you’d like to read those stories, people smarter than me have already written them:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-ohio-12th-special-election/

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/05/politics/ohio-special-what-it-means-for-november/index.html

If you’d like a quick reference to use as you watch the results come in, here it is!

Race Overview

Polls close at 7:30 PM. Results should start appearing not too long after. Counties will generally count the early vote first and post those results relatively soon after the polls close. That’s why you’ll see a county reporting “0% of precincts reporting” with thousands of votes in. For reference, in the ’16 general election, a little over 1/3 of the votes cast in CD12 were cast before election day.

The district has 7 counties, but about 8 in 10 votes will come from Delaware, Franklin, and Licking Counties. So I’d pay closer to attention to those 3.

To view the results, you can of course follow along on any one of a number of national news sites. Or you can go to each county’s Board of Elections site if you’re like me and you’re holding out hope that you can see the results there several seconds before they appear on other sites.

I’ll update this post with the live links as they become available, but for now if you click on these links they should take you to somewhere pretty close to where the results will be posted for the district’s 7 counties:

Franklin County

Delaware County

Licking County

Marion County

Morrow County

Muskingum County

Richland County

Early Vote

As noted above, votes cast before election day will account for a large share of the final total vote. Likely between 30 and 40%. And those results should be reported early. That said, keep in mind that early votes in Ohio tend to skew much more Democratic than the election day vote. For O’Connor to win, he will need to win the early vote by a healthy margin — I’d set the benchmark at a 15% target win margin. Anything above that is a good sign for O’Connor, below that, not so great.

Overall Vote Goals

This district hasn’t had a competitive race in its current configuration, and it is impossible to know exactly where turnout will end up, so benchmarking vote goals is more of an art than a science at this point. That said, Hillary Clinton’s ’16 performance in the district gives us a relatively good starting point. That said, that was in a presidential turnout environment — it could be argued that Democrats will actually be more engaged relative to Republicans than they were in ’16. Of course, that’s unusual for a special election… except in this bizarro world we’ve entered during the Trump presidency.

Based largely on the Clinton performance and adjusting to a very narrow O’Connor win, here’s the baseline I will be benchmarking the election results against. Again, the early vote skews Democratic and tends to report first, so expect to see the early results outperforming these numbers in every county, then inching downwards as the election day results creep in. So don’t pop the champagne at 7:45 PM based on partial results (I’ll pop the champagne if any counties have even reported some results by that time).

Here are the rough vote goals for an O’Connor win:

That’s it! I’ll likely be following the results and sharing my random thoughts on Twitter, if you’re inclined to follow along — https://twitter.com/tbonier