The ‘Big Blue Shift’ That Could Decide the Presidency

(Bloomberg) -- The outcome of the presidential election is turning in part on what’s known as the “big blue shift.” Partial results after polls closed on election night Nov. 3 showed President Donald Trump in a strong position and, as many analysts anticipated, he declared victory prematurely. As expected, further vote-counting in some places is shifting the advantage to his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. What’s unclear is whether the shift will be enough to become decisive.

1. What’s meant by ‘big blue shift’?

The term was coined in a 2013 paper by Edward B. Foley, a professor who leads the election law program at Ohio State University. After studying presidential elections back to 2000, he found that Democratic candidates are more likely than Republican ones to make major gains during the official and complete tallying of all ballots. That includes so-called provisional ballots, which are cast with the understanding that local election officials will later review whether the voter was eligible. Foley used “blue” because in the U.S., Democratic victories are commonly shown as blue on a map, Republican ones as red. An example of a blue shift -- though not in a presidential election -- occurred in Arizona’s 2018 Senate race. Initial tallies on Election Day showed Republican Martha McSally with a small lead, but after almost a week of further ballot-counting, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema was declared the winner.

2. Why is it more of an issue this year?

Concerns about the coronavirus spreading at crowded polling places prompted many states to lower barriers for voting by mail, and many ballots cast that way are the ones that remained uncounted the day after the election. And with Trump railing against vote-by-mail as rife with fraud -- though there’s no evidence that’s true -- his Republican followers were more reluctant than Democrats to vote that way. There was special concern that Pennsylvania, a battleground state where the election could be decided, was especially vulnerable to a prolonged and contentious vote count and legal fight.

3. Why is Pennsylvania a special concern?

Pennsylvania is new to mail-in voting. After approving it last October, the state took almost three weeks to count all the votes in the June 2 primary. Unlike in some other states, elections officials in Pennsylvania couldn’t begin processing mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day.

4. Why do Democrats do better in post-Election Day counting?

Foley cites “the rise of no-excuse absentee voting” since 2000 as one possible reason for the post-Election Day blue shift. Thirty-four states plus the District of Columbia now allow any voter to request a mail ballot without having to cite a reason, such as being out of state on Election Day. And counting those mail-in ballots may take longer in the “large, urban counties” that favor Democrats, Foley surmised in a follow-up paper this year with Charles Stewart III, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It likewise takes longer to count provisional ballots, which usually arise because a voter is newly registered or has recently changed address -- two things more commonly associated with younger, more mobile Democratic voters.

5. How long could vote-counting last?

States have until Dec. 8 -- five weeks after Election Day -- to resolve any disputes or contested votes and to report a final result to the Electoral College, which convenes on Dec. 14 in what traditionally amounts to a mere rubber-stamping of a result that’s already clear. Foley, the Ohio State election expert, urged Congress to extend that so-called safe harbor deadline to Jan. 1 this time around, to give states the maximum opportunity to count all ballots. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, proposed legislation that would do that, but Congress didn’t act on it.

The Reference Shelf

• Related QuickTakes on the Electoral College, mail-in voting, and voting rights in the U.S.
• Edward B. Foley’s original paper on the “big blue shift.”
• Foley’s follow-up paper with Charles Stewart III.
• Senator Marco Rubio’s proposal to allow more time to count votes.

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