Election Night 2024

So… election night it is, then?

A Momentary Distraction

Yeah, I can’t face it either. Gonna wait until more polls close, or maybe tomorrow.

I’d hoped to put up a little math-y post about what people mean by “a path to electoral college victory”. But I got tired of fighting with some graphical software, so I’m gonna just punt, show a distorted graph, and talk about the idea.

Imagine the powerset graph of the 7 swing states. There would be 2^7 = 128 subsets of various sizes, the frequencies of which are shown here.

• Size 0 would be the empty set, the score of a candidate who struck out and didn’t get any of the swing states.
• Size 7 would be the score of a candidate who ran the board, and got all of them.

We can arrange those subsets in a directed acyclic graph (the subset lattice) as shown here. (Click to expand; the original is 3000 x 3000. If you zoom in on that, you can just about make out the state names in a set and their electoral vote total. I struggled to make it even slightly legible. Also, the layout will apparently do anything except the sensibly symmetric thing.) The empty set is at the bottom, and the union of all 7 sets is at the top.

A candidate would enter the graph at the bottom, the empty set, carrying electoral votes of all the other states that are likely decided.

• For Harris this amounts to 226 electoral votes.
• For Trump it amounts to 219 electoral votes.

They then travel up the graph, capturing a state and its electoral votes as they go. They stop when their total exceeds the victory threshold of 270 electoral votes.

A likely winner will have many short paths from the bottom, meaning they can win even if they get only a few swing states. A less likely winner would have to travel all the way to up near the top, needing to capture almost all the swing states.

I wanted to colorize the graph for Harris and Trump, to see who had many short paths versus a long path requiring near total command of the swing states. Yes, I know this isn’t what the politicos of the Word Tribe “mean” by “path to victory”. But it’s the only thing my math brain can wring out of it that’s at least in the neighborhood of sensible.

But:

• Mostly that reflects the number of electoral votes with which they enter, i.e., slight advantage Harris.
• There is no real “path”, i.e., one does not capture the swing states in sequence. They all happen in one night. In particular, tonight.
• It’s been some years since I’ve used Rgraphviz, and it’s fighting me tooth and nail on every little issue. There’s a tidyverse version of finite graph drawing that looks pretty cool, but I’d have to forget everything I know and learn a whole new system. Not gonna do that, at least not over this.

So… frustration.

Somehow, that’s the perfect allegory for a frustrated progressive in American politics.

The Weekend Conclusion

I really want this to be over. But not in the way that elects Trump and causes American democracy to be over.

I hope we get a Democratic trifecta in Washington, and then I can go back to ignoring politics from time to time. Wouldn’t it be great not to have to think about Trump every day, except when he gets sentenced?

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarcerandam esse.)

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Notes & References

Nope.