General Discussion

However, on MSNOW, an additional concern is that almost all election day voting has not been counted. However, the early voting occured at the time when Crockett was polling better. In the last week or so, Talarico has been polling better.

At this point, Talarico is several points ahead even after the Dallas early vote dropped. I think what Wasserman is seeing is that in what is in, Talarico is over preforming while Crockett is under preforming in some areas.

I assume that he is using a model that projected the number of voters in each county and likely estimates of what percent each will get. As data comes in, the estimates of both the number of votes and the percents for each are adjusted and aggregated over all the counties. The model probably has the ability to look at the likely range for each of these variables. He makes the call when the model shows that it is very high probability that he can correctly call the race.

Looking at the numbers on the NYT site which has detailed results, without doing any math, it does look like Talarico will win.