Polls close at 7:30 PM ET on Tuesday for the last big special election of the cycle for a House seat: The election in Ohio’s 12th district in Columbus's suburbs, left open after Republican Rep. Pat Tiberi’s resignation to take a private sector job. While this seat went from 54-44 Romney to 53-42 Trump, both sides are treating the contest between Democratic Franklin County Recorder Danny O’Connor and GOP state Sen. Troy Balderson as very competitive. While O’Connor and his allies at End Citizens United released polls giving Balderson a small lead, an independent poll from Monmouth showed the race as a true tossup.
As Daily Kos Elections always does on election nights, we’re offering county-level benchmarks that show the numbers that O’Connor needs to hit, in order to eke out the barest-possible win. We do this by taking the 2016 presidential election results, both in each county and districtwide, as a baseline, and from there, adjust each county’s numbers so they add up to a Democratic win districtwide. This helps you gauge whether your preferred candidate is on track to win, even when one county (which might have a lean very different from the rest of the district) is disproportionately reporting its results early.
The first column gives the name of each county (with only seven counties either partly or entirely in the district, we don’t need to leave any out), and the second column shows the percentage of the total number of votes supplied by each county. In the case of OH-12, blue Franklin County (home of Columbus) supplies the most votes, and the question is whether O’Connor can hold down the GOP numbers in the other, much-redder counties of the rest of the district. The third column shows each county’s 2016 results, and the fourth column shows the adjusted number that O’Connor will need to hit, to get to 48 percent districtwide. (There’s a Green Party candidate on the ballot who’s been polling in the low single digits, so we’re modeling to 48 percent rather than 50.)
| 100 | 42/53 | 48/47 |
| 32 | 57/38 | 63/32 |
| 27 | 39/56 | 45/50 |
| 21 | 33/62 | 39/56 |
| 8 | 33/62 | 39/56 |
| 6 | 33/62 | 39/56 |
| 4 | 23/73 | 29/67 |
| 1 | 24/72 | 30/66 |