4089

I’m from WA-05 (in fact I’m leaving SoCal this evening to go back there and visit family). It’s a pretty conservative district: Trump +13 in 2016. Spokane is a church-y, outdoors-y reliably Republican city, and Rodgers (the incumbent) is a powerful Republican in the House. Rodgers got 47.52% of the primary vote last night, and Democrat Lisa Brown got 47.09%. They’ll both be on the ballot in November, but that thin margin between them is truly amazing for this district.

4090

So far it seems there is little chance they are. In the Ohio 12 race yesterday over 1100 people voted for the Green Party candidate who describes himself as descended from aliens…not immigrant aliens mind you, but actual space aliens. Given that the margin in that race was at one point below 2000 votes and the GOP candidate is a Class A douchebag endorsed by President Douchebag J. Trump himself in a fascist-style rally here last week, I’d say Green Party voters are pretty clearly disassociated from reality in general at this point.

4091

Sigh. yeah , I want to think the best of them, but this kind of stuff makes it hard :(

4092

Yeah, The Stranger has a good summary of all this here:

Rossi pulled in 43 percent of the vote. If you add the other Republican and Republican-ish candidates, that brings his total to just shy of 48. Collectively, the Democrats pulled in 50 percent of the votes. (Side note: who were the 949 people that voted for Tom Cramer? Show yourselves in the comments.) Rossi didn’t crack 50, and that’s not bad news for the Democrats.

Eastern Washington is going to see one of the state’s most exciting races this fall and it could knock Cathy McMorris Rodgers—the fourth highest-ranking Republican in the U.S. House—out of office.

Democrat Jessa Lewis appears to be winning her race against anti-gay Republican Jeff Holy to represent the Spokane area in the State Senate. That’s no thanks to SEIU 1199, who tossed Holy 500 bucks in the primary for his support of nurses getting breaks at work. Hey, union, guess what? Jessa Lewis is pro nurses-getting-breaks, too! She’s also pro-choice, pro-worker, and pro-universal healthcare. Unlike Jeff Holy! Jesus!

And Holy’s not the only Republican incumbent who’s losing. The Seattle Times reports at least 11 Republican House members are behind their Democratic challengers.

And so forth.

4093

I did, in '12, as a protest vote in California.

I regret it. The truth is protest votes mean nothing, and Obama, despite my grievances against his use of drones, was infinitely more qualified for the gig than Stein. If you want to move a party in the direction you want, you have to be engaged much earlier in the process.

4094

Jill Stein is, quite simply, a moron. She is unqualified to hold any position of authority, at all, in any context.

Really, people need to start thinking more about not just whether someone says things they agree with, but whether that person actually has the competence to govern in such a way to achieve some subset of their goals.

Clinton was a great example of this. Tons of people didn’t like her, but the reality is that she would have not only been an infinitely better president than Trump, she would have been infinitely better than Sanders. She would have been infinitely better than OBAMA. Because she always did her homework, and she knew how shit worked.

She wouldn’t have done everything that the far left wants, because frankly, tons of that stuff just isn’t gonna work. It’s not stuff you can just leap to and make happen by snapping your fingers.

Hard shit requires hard work, and patience. And that was what Clinton was good at. But saying, “Hey, this is gonna be a hard slog, and it’s gonna take a while, but we’re gonna get there eventually.” is not what people want to hear.

4095

If ever there was a state where you could make a protest vote though it would be California. However, I suppose it does give whoever you voted for a false feeling that people actually care.

4096

Hahaha fuck Dino Rossi. I wish I lived in the 8th just so I could vote against him and help make him lose- it’s becoming something of a time-honored tradition here in Washington. If you might remember, he lost his first state governor bid by 133 votes (out of 2.8 million, the closest in American history), and was crushed his second run, and again in his bid for Senate. I’d love to see him go down not even being able to take a local election (held by Rs for a while).

4097

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…


4098

Not infinitely, but she could have been something.

Of course, a President Clinton would face entrenched opposition even greater than Obama did, with the same 30% of Maga hat morons going around saying 2016 was rigged. GOP Congress would probably have drawn up articles of impeachment by now, for something or other. It would have been almost as big a shitshow as our timeline.

Almost.

4099

That would’ve been a perfectly acceptable, garden-variety shitshow. Compared to this.

4100

Yes, I’d still take that timeline in a heartbeat, obviously.

4101

The fact that kobach isn’t recusing himself from his own recount is like fucking gifts from the wisemen to the Democrats. If he actually makes it to the general, that kind of story can be used to majorly depress the GOP vote. They’ll be able to run all kinds of ads about how he stole the primary from the other Republican.

4102

I don’t think that’s how Republicanism works.

4103

No way.

  1. Clinton was already able to work effectively with folks in Congress.
  2. Clinton was white.

I wouldn’t have thought number 2 at one point, but now? Yeah, I recognize that some major component of opposition to Obama was pure racism.

4104

I think the extra 8 years of crazy train and concerted demonization would have overridden those factors.

4105

I just saw on tv that the loser can ask for a hand recount. They have to pay for it of course. Guess whose office decides the cost of the recount?

That’s right, Kobach’s office.

4106

Survival of the fittest…primal republicanism.

4107

So, with the smoke cleared a bit from Tuesday, some “Whoa there. Eaaaaase up on those expectations” talk.

The analysts I admire a lot – Nate Cohn at the Times, Michael McDonald with ElectProject and Dave Wasserman at Cook – all made basically the same point late yesterday, and it’s completely valid. Tuesday was a good day for Democrats, but should be tempered and taken with a grain of salt.

Democrats did really well on Tuesday. But when you dig in on the results, you can see why they did well, and why…they’re likely not to improve on their Tuesday results in a lot of places, and may even recede a bit in November.

What’s at issue in both Ohio and Washington both is enthusiasm, and how that has an outsized affect in primaries and special elections. For instance, Danny O’Connor nearly pulled off a tremendous upset in the Ohio 12th. How’d that happen? The biggest factor was that the pieces of Franklin County – Columbus and suburbs – showed up huge and voted. Turnout was down in the rural areas of the district, even for a special election. And this election had a huge amount of money dumped into it.

So. That’s good on the one hand: Democrats are clearly energized and enthused. They’re going to show up at the polls. But here’s why some excitement should be tempered: turnout on election day is typically a good deal larger than special elections and primaries. And these are red districts. Even if unenthused, it’s very likely that by the simple tide that raises all boats of a general election, Republican turnout will increase, and it’s tough to see how the Democrats in some of these red districts improve their turnout too match. It’s already sky-high.

The same is kind of true in Washington. Again, high Democratic enthusiasm that swamped the boats, so to speak. But the challenge will again be that even if disaffected by Trump, Republican turnout will be greater on election day in November, and it’s tough to see how the Democrats will match that.

So the issue, I guess, boils down to this: Democrats in some of these red districts are already at November 2018 fever pitch. Which is awesome. Republicans were definitely not at that stage on Tuesday. And they’re unlikely to be at that stage in November. But they may be just marginally more enthusiastic enough to scrape out tough, very close wins in some of these races when they’re contested in November.

Another takeaway: we’re talking about tempering enthusiasm in districts that should be either “Likely Republican” or have a pretty strong “Lean Republican” history, districts that are PVI +7 Republican or higher. If the district is a PVI +5 Republican or smaller? That’s a MUCH different story in November.

4108

I appreciate the calls for realistic expectations, and I especially agree with the last paragraph. But I’m not sure that the quote above tracks all that well.

I think that the number of ultra-enthused Democrats that are showing up to the primaries and/or special-elections is probably representative of the percentages of new/previously-apathetic Dems-leaning folks that we’ll see in November… or even under-representative of the total. I don’t think a lot of these outraged Democrat-ish voters really care who wins the primaries – they’re just waiting for November so they can vote for whomever will fight Trump on their behalf.