Hey, Gang! I'm home from the polling station, and I have numbers to report!!!
I know they've already projected a result. But I'm going to report my numbers anyway…
So I was assigned to a single-precinct polling site in inner-city Cleveland. It's a small precinct, the neighborhood is overwhelmingly Hispanic, overwhelmingly Democratic. The information I'm about to give you is all public information, I'm not breaking any rules by telling you this.
57 votes were cast in my precinct. At intermediate points in the day, a list of people who cast their ballots and their party affiliation are printed and posted on the door of the polling site. Mind you, it doesn't tell you HOW they voted, only THAT they voted.
By 4 p.m., 46 ballots had been cast. This is how the list broke down:
20 Democrats
7 Republicans
19 No Party
So just under 3 to 1 Democratic. No Party does not necessarily mean they are true Independents, only that they didn't vote in the last primary. But think about that - they didn't think that mid-term election primaries were worth voting in, but THIS off-year special election was.
After all the votes were counted, this is how the precinct voted:
So just under 3 to 1 for No. This suggests that the No Party voters broke at about the same rate as the Declared Party voters.
What I don't know is what the actual D-R breakdown is in the underlying population. Is it really 2 to 1, and Democrats showed up stronger? Or is it 4 to 1, and Republicans showed up stronger? And how does this gibe with Election Day Returns that usually skew conservative??
And what can we draw from this sample that is too skewed to be representative and too small to be statistically significant?