The 2014 primary season ends (Sept. 9: DE, MA, NH, NY, RI)

[bayareademocrat]

If there are two GOP candidates in the general for Controller in November, you can bet Perez is going to be eating some tough [inks] from the party.

If there are two, the California Democratic party needs to put their full forces behind repealing our idiotic top two system. The results are still early, but it's unsettling that 2 Republicans lead for the Controller race, and aren't far off from leading in CA-31 again.

Even if Perez/Yee sneak through, at the time of this post Perez's lead over Evans has reduced to 1924 votes. California needs to do its best to get rid of top two. It's just terrible election policy. Maybe we should do a popular referendum. My bet is that top two would die if it went up for a vote in 2016.

[bayareademocrat]

So, to introduce myself, I am a 19 year old Democrat from the East Bay. Yesterday was my first voting election. Today I joined this site. In my free time I play around with ideas from elections, so here is what I got from the numbers today. Sorry that I am partisan and include some opinion in my psephology which should be a non-partisan practice,but nobody can be perfect.

First I studied the performance of Neel Kashkari vs. Donnelly by county.  Here is the link to results of anybody who is curious/wants to check my work: vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/governor/county/all/. My original hypothesis was that Donnelly would outperform Kashkari in more Republican areas.So I divided the counties into 3 groups. 1. Brown outperforms state avg. Brown>.545. 2. Brown mildly under performs .545>Brown>.445 and 3. Brown severely under performs, Brown<.445.  This did not lead to anything because group 1 had Donnelly beating Kashkari (D>K) 10/18 of the time. In two it was (5/12) and in 3 it was (13/27). This went nowhere.

So I decided to take a look at places where D>K. The following counties are where D>K. Alameda, Alpine, Butte, Contra Costa, Del Norte, Glenn, Imperial, Kern, Lake, Lassen, Mariposa, Mendocino, Merced, Modoc, Mono, Napa, Nevada, Plumas, San Benito, San Bernardino, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Sonoma, Tehama, Trinity. The pattern I discerned from this is that the more conservative candidate won in areas that were either sparsely populated or so Democratic that Republicans could not create a normal party structure. The exceptions being San Bernardino, Kern and arguably San Luis Obispo and Shasta. Coming off of this hypothesis I decided to look at places where the difference between Kashkari and Donnelly was wider than the state as a whole. So K-D>4.2. The following counties qualified: Calaveras, Colusa, El Dorado, Fresno, Kings, Los Angeles, Madera, Orange, Placer, Riverside, Sacramento, San Diego, San Joaquin, Sutter, Tulare, Ventura, Yolo, and Yuba. Despite only containing 18/58 of the state's counties. This group of counties includes almost every major Californian city outside the Bay Area. In the D/K groups the only cities in the top 20 population wise outside of the Bay Area are San Bernardino and Bakersfield.

So in conclusion, in the state of California, based off of the 2014 gubernatorial primary, when faced with a choice between a Tea Partier and a Moderate, The Tea Partier will win in extremely liberal places and sparsely populated areas. The Moderate will win in cities that are conservative enough to have an established Republican structure in place. I will look through other results later this week in similarly built states to see if this holds. Feedback is appreciated. Hopefully this made some sense.

[bayareademocrat]

Good hypothesis Smoltchanov. I'm just thinking about the Republicans from around here (Alameda Co.) that I know (all about 15 of them). All but four are Tea Party types, and all they do is complain about living in such a liberal area. So it makes sense that the moderate Republicans in the area would just switch to DTS or Dem.

[bayareademocrat]

So I guess that I'm on summer and have nothing better to do, I will post what I have here. Today I examined something I found troubling as a Democrat in the statewide elections Tuesday. We have astonishingly terrible discipline. Not knowing how to vote nearly (and still could but likely wont) cost us a candidate in the Controller's race and gave an embarrassing amount of the vote to Leland Yee in the Secretary of State's vote. This is problematic. As a result I wanted to map the offenders and see if the problem is more or less localized or if it is statewide. The measurement I used is overperformance based on partisan vote. To form this I took the "bad" candidate's number in a county and divided it by total Democratic votes in that county.
First the results for the Secretary of State's Race: Yee's proportion of Democratic share statewide was .1884. So any county Where Yee>.1884 is on my sh**t list. The counties were Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, Del Norte, El Dorado, Fresno, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Lassen, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Modoc, Mono, Monterey, Nevada, Orange, Placer, Plumas, Sacramento, San Benito, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Joaquin, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Solano, Trinity, Tulare, and Tuolumne. This makes up 35 of the 58 (.603) counties in the state. The GOP candidate won 31 of these for (31/35) (.8857). He won 40 counties statewide so .775 of his counties were Yee overperformers. Absent from the bad list is a vast majority (14/18) of districts captured by the main Democrat, Padilla.

Then I moved onto the disaster of the night, the still unresolved race for Controller. Nobody on this site has mentioned the stinker candidate that could have sunk us here, Tammy Blair. A completely random Democrat, who is not in line with any real movement in our state. Blair somehow gained 5.2% of the vote statewide. When I isolated this to only Democratic votes she receives .1082 of the Democratic vote. She overperformed in 41 counties, of which 37 of these went red. In the counties were she underperformed her Dem avg. (Alameda, Contra Costa, Fresno, Los Angeles, Marin, Monterey, Nevada, Placer, San Benito, San Diego, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Sonoma and Yolo). The Democrat won 12 times. In Fresno, the low Democratic amounts could be explained partially due to the fact that the mayor of Fresno was a Republican nominee and therefore only the hardest core Democrats would not be voting for her. Otherwise it strikes me as a very geographical explanation. All three major metropolitan areas in the state (The Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego) were underperformers for this race. I am still trying to think of a theory on why some counties have better inner party discipline than others, but for now my hypothesis is the following, typically more Democratic areas will have better party discipline than less Democratic areas. This is especially true in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the two areas of the state where the Democratic Party spends the most resources on turnout and information. Please comment your feedback, criticisms, and theories on why this difference occurs. Message me if you want the full data.