CPRM, Pt 2: AL (RO) 7/17; GA (RO) 7/24; TN 8/2; 274K ballots left in CA

[Virginiá]

California's elections are bullsh!t. That is what happens when you have supermajorities all across the board, and really no one to keep you accountable.

I mean, Democrats just got a supermajority back in 2016, afaik. And due to some resignations, they might even be short a vote (or close to it) right now. Newman's recall is also an issue. So it's kind of hard to use a supermajority as an excuse when it isn't nor has it been consistent.

And I'm not sure what you mean by 'across the board'. Democrats haven't locked up all the counties yet. I don't think Orange County has a single elected Democratic supervisor despite it being ground zero for Democratic House prospects this cycle.

[Virginiá]

bernie has a really bad track record in 2018 so far.

Dems are rejecting his BS

good to see.

I wouldn't say that. He has pushed the party towards his policies even if he isn't having success with actual candidates. He's pretty much made Medicare-for-All a litmus test in many areas.

[Virginiá]

8,916 votes have been counted. Nearly 100k were cast in 2016.

I honestly don't know how some of you make it through the day.

Heavily medicated

[Virginiá]

Is the combined Republican vote and combined Democratic vote indicative of the November outcome?

You are still looking at a primary with primary turnout, and the results can and do change with more voters later on. Issa led Applegate by 6 points in the primary (link) and then went on to almost lose in November. So regardless of what the primaries are, and even if the Republicans do decently, they could still end up losing big later on. CA's top-two doesn't change the limited usefulness of primaries here, beyond the obvious issue of a lockout, that is.

[Virginiá]

If I were Dems I would be thinking about rolling back the gas tax, at least reducing it by a few cents. Repeal proposition is probably going to drive a lot of GOP voters to the polls moreso than John Cox ever could.

Republicans already might have gotten a repeal initiative for it on the ballot for November, an initiative which also requires voter approval for new gas taxes. I think another Atlas user said they submitted signatures week(s) ago.

Gas really doesn't have to be so expensive in CA. As far as I know, it is higher than avg even without the new gas tax for several reasons (special blend only CA uses, pipelines, etc). Democrats might need to reconsider some of those things if they want to raise gas taxes, because they can't just pile on regulations and taxes and expect no backlash.

[Virginiá]

Wellllppp, I have to go to bed, but it's troubling news to see LimoLiberalism has gone airborne and is spreading!

Has bagel never watched an election / CA primary before?

[Virginiá]

Good-ish. No Dem lockouts are really that plausible anymore. Republicans recalled Newman, but Democrats gained AD-76 by shutting out Republicans.

And the 2016 trends appear to be manifesting themselves in places like Orange County where all the Dems are leading statewide except for Governor and Insurance Commissioner

Not to mention that Democrats have a few state Senate seat prospects in November, if I recall. I don't have the seat #s on hand right now but I think at least one of them is a bigly Clinton district, so Democrats could be back with a supermajority as soon as January 2019. I wouldn't be surprised to see them get up to or more than 60 Assembly seats as well.

Newman is a shame, but Democrats need to be more careful about taxes - especially the gas tax, which they already have inflated beyond the national average for a number of voluntary reasons (they chose environment over cheaper gas).

[Virginiá]

I kind of wish they would just get rid of recalls except for cases of gross impropriety and other things recalls were traditionally meant for. The gas tax is an issue that could have waited until the next election. Something that deserves a quicker response is Newman getting arrested or involved in some crazy sick stuff. But this recall, just like Nevada's recalls, is just Republicans trying to repeat an election they recently lost.

Oh well! Still, interesting night nonetheless.

[Virginiá]

Freitas was just endorsed by Americans for Prosperity (Koch Brother's Group). Moving VA-Sen to Tossup/Tilt D if he wins the primary over Stewart. He's a very charismatic, good looking state delegate. Kaine is in for a major challenge in a state where Trump isn't even above 50% in disapproval, according to the latest poll.

Gillespie was also considered a good candidate and he lost an open seat contest by almost double digits. That you think Republicans could topple an incumbent Virginia Senator in a D-favorable year is quite funny but predictable for you.

Republican candidate quality doesn't really matter in that race. No matter what happens, you never seem to learn a thing. Your mind model always has a thumb on the scale for Republicans.

[Virginiá]

Except you don’t. You post ridiculous predictions like this new garbage of Virginia being lean d. Another great example is today Trump’s approval in Q went up from 39/54 to 40/51 and you said that proved “blue wave is dead”. Going from 39 to 40 and 54 to 51 is not big at all and you’ve been here long enough to know that

The truth, whether or not he will admit it, is that Limo is as much of (if not more) a hack as the people he has been criticizing lately. It's incredibly clear that he made up his mind of an R-favorable year a long time ago, and he ignores D-favorable data/conditions whenever necessary but jumps on any R-favorable data the second it drops. To him, any data favorable to Democrats is just misrepresenting the situation, which he is sure will be considerably more Republican-leaning by November. And this is putting aside his trolling too - I do believe him when he says these are his real beliefs.

I'm just not sure what happened to convince Limo so deeply that 2018 was not going to be a Dem-favorable year. I wonder if it was as mind-numbingly stupid as what King Lear said when I asked him the same question: "the polls were wrong in 2016"

[Virginiá]

I'm just not sure what happened to convince Limo so deeply that 2018 was not going to be a Dem-favorable year. I wonder if it was as mind-numbingly stupid as what King Lear said when I asked him the same question: "the polls were wrong in 2016"

Like when a pubescent teen picks a person to crush on and convinces themselves that they are or will be in a relationship with that person. And they spend all time rationalizing that it can and will happen and latch onto any sign that it’ll occur and ignore any and all warning signs.

I hope it's not as deep as a crush, because god only knows what he does when a good Republican-favoring poll comes out

[Virginiá]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/6/6/1769813/-Ignore-the-predictable-demsindisarray-hot-takes-Democrats-did-very-well-in-California-s-primaries

[Virginiá]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/6/6/1769813/-Ignore-the-predictable-demsindisarray-hot-takes-Democrats-did-very-well-in-California-s-primaries

Yeah federal Democrats did very well all in all (minus CA-21 since apparently Valadao is Joe Manchin in reverse). The state GOP didn’t get crushed which is a victory of expectations for them I suppose. Plenty of republican state senators/assemblymen got a good number of Federal-D/state-R split ticket voters it appears.

I'd say #3 on the article's list is particularly relevant to the Bagel's and Limo's of the world. Even with a substantial number of votes pending, Democrats have already improved considerably on their performance in 2016, which was even inflated in favor of Democrats due to the presidential primary, which is kind of a double-whammy for Republicans. The only good news really is what you said - Joe Manchin Valadao and Republican state lawmakers, although I'd really be surprised if Democrats didn't pick up a decent chunk of Clinton-Republican legislative seats up this November.

[Virginiá]

Any new updates on CA48?

Current count:

* DANA ROHRABACHER (REP)   38,629   30.5%
HANS KEIRSTEAD (DEM)   21,893   17.3%
HARLEY ROUDA (DEM)   21,806   17.2%
SCOTT BAUGH (REP)   20,332   16.0%

Next update at 5pm PDT Monday.  https://www.ocvote.com/fileadmin/live/pri2018/results.htm

Does that page list the total vote total for the entire CD, or just the Orange County portion (if the CD has parts that go outside OC)?

[Virginiá]

Right. Is there a regularly updated site that lists the current totals for all the CDs?

[Virginiá]

Wisconsin getting new maps this year is entirely off the table. The only viable situation where it could have happened in time this cycle is if SCOTUS didn't stay the lower court decision. As it stands now, there is just not enough time. There are only a couple months to go before the primary. People are already campaigning. If the lower court tried to force new maps, SCOTUS would undoubtedly shoot that down and punt it to 2020.

[Virginiá]

Holy Nevada! Yes I know 2014 was awful.

https://twitter.com/WinWithJMC/status/1006732817479487488

Such high energy! Maybe NV Democrats can finally consolidate their grip on the state govt for the first time in a generation.

[Virginiá]

2014 basically had no Democratic governor primary and Dem turnout was historically bad in both the primary and GE. 2010 would be a better comparison here.

Oh, fair point. How does it compare to 2010?

[Virginiá]

Is there any particular reason to prefer Rouda over Keirstead (or vice versa)? They look pretty interchangeable to me, tbh.

Keirstead did have that issue where apparently he was accused of sleeping with (graduate) students, but apparently he was cleared of that (at least as much as you're willing to trust a university investigation I guess?). Either way, it's something of a liability.

[Virginiá]

This is just one seat, and it was easily the worst-case scenario for Dems (two equally popular candidates splitting the vote almost evenly) and they still made it pretty comfortably. 1.5 points might not seem like a lot, but in this day and age there are few things in a campaign that move the needle by as much. And again, it's just one seat where this was even a possibility. Compare this to the media narrative that suggested Dems were probably about to get shut out everywhere (including in CA-49 where they took the 2nd, 3rd and 4th spots)...

It is hard to move the needle when each candidate has consolidated support in a general election, but we're talking about races where each candidate was only pulling in like 15, 16, 17 points or so, with an incredible number of candidates. It could have easily gone one way or another, and with Republicans only trailing by <4 points in at least 3 races, I really have to disagree that lockouts were not a real concern in those districts. I don't know if all the hype it got was warranted, but it's not like CA-10, CA-39 and CA-48 did not have close races that could have a different way under slightly different circumstances.

[Virginiá]

I mean yeah, there definitely was a small but real possibility that one of the seats ended up in a lockout, but given that the sort of factors that could have brought that outcome would have to be a district-specific factor, the probability of it happening in more than one seat was minimal. And honestly, it wouldn't have been that big of a tragedy if Democrats lost one seat that was never a top pickup to begin with. In probabilistic terms, it would have amounted to a loss of 0.4 or 0.5 seats. Which, yes, I would have found frustrating, but definitely not enough to warrant the panicky op-eds or (what bothers me especially) the unfair attacks on the top-two system.

Fair enough, although I still think the CA's top-two has brought this on itself. It's an incomplete reform, imo, and I don't understand why this wasn't a big concern when the policy was being crafted. It really needs ranked choice voting to complete it, at which point it'd be a superior voting system. But the way it is now, I just fail to see how it is superior outside of maybe D/R+20 districts where the results are always destined to be a member of the district's dominant party, in which case it is better to just give a choice between two candidates of the same party in the general election. My ideal version of this is a system where people can still do that in safe districts, but also elect the party that most people in a competitive district prefer, even if a ton of candidates run. That we even had to worry about a lockout despite the winds blowing decidedly against Republicans in some of these districts is really not good.

I'm just hoping this election cycle will push either the legislature or some other group to push a ballot initiative adding some form of RCV. That would be a very good system.

[Virginiá]

This idiot was able to transfer into Harvard Law School

I would bet dollars to doughnuts that half these people know they are spewing bs, but they are doing it anyway because no one wants to be the naysayer on their side. People like cheerleaders, and to reaffirm their hopes. It's the same deal for every side in an election. In 2016, the easiest way to get downvoted on reddit was to say anything that went against their cheering or was insufficiently positive for whatever candidate they were pulling for.

[Virginiá]

New thread: https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=295241.0