Election 2018 Open Thread - Part 1

[Tintrlvr]

There has to be a tabulation error in Apache County or something. No way McSally should even be close there.

Apache County (and Navajo County, too) is crazy polarized between extremely Republican I think mainly Mormon areas in the south and extremely Democratic Native American reservation areas in the north. Totally plausible for partial results to show McSally ahead if the reservations are slow to count.

[Tintrlvr]

Evers now up close to 7,000 votes after a dump from La Crosse (though there's some left there still). Hard to see how Walker makes that up barring an error somewhere. (Though I do recall one year not too long ago Waukesha County came out really late, hours after they said they were done, and dumped a ton of missing votes that switched some races to the Rs, so it's still possible.)

[Tintrlvr]

Evers now up close to 7,000 votes after a dump from La Crosse (though there's some left there still). Hard to see how Walker makes that up barring an error somewhere. (Though I do recall one year not too long ago Waukesha County came out really late, hours after they said they were done, and dumped a ton of missing votes that switched some races to the Rs, so it's still possible.)

That sounds like something that would happen in a third world country

You act like American elections aren't run with the administrative competence of a third-world country already.

[Tintrlvr]

Clark results coming in...

http://www.silverstateelection.com/USSenate/

54-42 Rosen in Clark. Overperforming Clinton's 52-42 margin by 2 points. Rosen wins.

[Tintrlvr]

Dems also appear to have swept the statewide offices in Nevada. The R incumbent Secretary of State and Controller both lost. Sisolak wins the gubernatorial election.

Overall gubernatorial numbers nationwide are D+7, with some chance the Ds could win Alaska as well, though early results have Dunleavy ahead.

[Tintrlvr]

I don't understand how CNN is calculating the percent in in the various Montana counties. There's no way Missoula County is 100% in with just 22,000 votes, e.g. It had 61,000 votes in 2016.

[Tintrlvr]

Does anyone know if Charlie Baker won Boston? I just looked and saw he won Suffolk County 51-49 but I imagine he would have won Chelsea and Revere.

[Tintrlvr]

Can McBath ask for a recount?

I'm sure there will be a recount with the margin being just 57 votes and 100% reporting. But they'll count military absentees and provisionals first - I think those will on net favor McBath, maybe enough for her to lead before the recount.

[Tintrlvr]

Am I seeing this right? Did the Dems actually sweep mainland New England in the House?

Likely. ME-02 is close, and Maine as of this election uses instant run-off voting for its Congressional elections, so they'll need to distribute the preferences of the independents (chiefly Tiffany Bond). Bond was running mainly as a centrist against Poliquin, so her voters will probably favor Golden, but it's hard to be certain, especially since the IRV system in Maine is brand new.

[Tintrlvr]

Will Hurd lost

Yep, and CNN has it called for him, lol.

CNN's total has Hurd up by 7000, or is that too out of date? (and if so is there something more up to date to get the totals?)

Not sure what's going on there. NYT says 100% reporting, ~300-vote margin for Ortiz-Jones. CNN has slightly more votes total, says 100% reporting, ~700-vote margin for Hurd. It's possible there was a tabulation error that NYT has fixed and the others have not, but I'm not sure. NYT's numbers matched CNN's until just recently when they uncalled the race.

[Tintrlvr]

I think Connecticut would be a bigger upset than Kansas, by a small amount.

I'm not sure if it's enough to flip it, but the city of New Haven is still only at 3%.

Maybe not alone, but the city of Hartford is only at 8%, East Hartford has reported nothing, and Norwalk has also reported nothing. Lamont has at least 25,000 net votes outstanding from those places. He'll win.

Edit: Norwalk dropped and gave Lamont net 8,000 votes. He's now down just 13,000. That should be made up by just one of New Haven or Hartford.

[Tintrlvr]

I think Connecticut would be a bigger upset than Kansas, by a small amount.

I'm not sure if it's enough to flip it, but the city of New Haven is still only at 3%.

Maybe not alone, but the city of Hartford is only at 8%, East Hartford has reported nothing, and Norwalk has also reported nothing. Lamont has at least 25,000 net votes outstanding from those places. He'll win.

Last I heard on one of these threads was that Lamont was losing Hartford. I'm not an expert on Connecticut politics, but that sounded odd to me.

I think they meant Hartford County, which was true earlier in the night because the strongly D towns and cities report late. City of Hartford will be 75%+ Lamont when it drops.

[Tintrlvr]

Sh!ttiest consolation prize ever.

https://twitter.com/KCStar/status/1060049222077157376

Not really, by state constitution, the Missouri state auditor picks somebody to draw legislative disitricts!

For the state legislature only, or do they control congressional redistricting also? The latter might be significant, the former probably not so much as I can't see the Democrats winning the Missouri state legislature on a fair map any more than an R gerrymander.

[Tintrlvr]

CNN has Stefanowski up by 1 with 99 percent in?

The 1% is the cities of Hartford, East Hartford and New Haven. Lamont wins.

[Tintrlvr]

FWIW, FL-Sen is now within auto-recount territory.

Whoa. What happened? It just tightened significantly. I don't think a recount could overcome a 39,000 vote deficit, but *maybe* provisionals could make a significant dent in that.

[Tintrlvr]

Holy crap, the Texas gerrymander almost collapsed.

I haven't looked at the state legislative results, but given the Congressional and Senate results I am sure there must be some shocking GOP losses and surprising close calls all over the TX megacities.

I see the Democrats knocked off two incumbent Republican State Senators (Burton and Huffines), and I see at least 7 Republican incumbents who lost their State House seats, plus some close Democratic wins in open seats that I bet were gains (but I'm not familiar enough with Texas to say).

[Tintrlvr]

Another query. Does anyone have news on what the national popular vote share for the house is? How many points did the Democrats win by?

Currently, it is 50.8-47.6 for the Democrats on NYT's website with actual votes, but as per usual the Democrats will add at least 2-3 points to that margin over the next week or so as California counts.

I think they are not counting uncontested seats, of which there were a lot more on the Democratic side than the Republican side, so that figure is also probably skewed around a point or two to the Republicans.

[Tintrlvr]

When will we get a call in AZ and MT?

Not before Thursday or Friday at the earliest in Arizona because of all of the uncounted absentees, and that one could still go either way. Montana could conceivably be called today once they start counting again, but it will probably be called for Tester, not Rosendale.

[Tintrlvr]

As I said back in June when Sanford lost the primary in SC-1, I'm not surprised the Democrats picked up the seat. The overall demographics here do not support that the Republicans are radically right winged, and many people I came across in my professional and personal life all said if Sanford had won, they'd have voted for him, but not Arrington. She won because GOP turnout in the primary was poor and only the radical base showed up.


If the GOP runs a competent candidate in 2020, I doubt Cunningham holds the seat, but I'm glad our district did the right thing and put Cunningham in Washington.

Isn't the Charleston area trending D?

It is, definitely. The seat is still R+10 PVI, though, so will be tough for Cunningham to hold though not necessarily impossible. Will be dependent to a great degree on the Republican nominee. I wonder if Sanford will consider running again.

[Tintrlvr]

Beto O'Rourke and Stacey Abrams got more votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 in those states. That's insane.

I didn't think Democrats winning Texas in a Presidential election could happen before 2024 at the absolute earliest (and was always really bearish on Clinton's chances in Texas, e.g., and on O'Rourke), but based on these results, with Presidential-year Latino turnout and two more years of demographic change, I'd be sweating as a Republican that the Democrats could win Texas in 2020.

[Tintrlvr]

What ballots are left in Florida? Provisionals and that's it?

Apparently over 100,000 ballots still uncounted, with a strong Democratic lean on them.

On-the-day absentees. I think it will be around a 10k margin when they are counted. Not enough for a recount to make a difference but hard to be totally certain on the pre-recount figures. Plus provisionals of course.

[Tintrlvr]

Confirmed that there are 472K votes left to be counted in Maricopa county.

How are the remaining ballots looking for Sinema? Is Maricopa a good county for her?

She currently leads in Maricopa by 1%, but it's way too early to tell if that will extrapolate to the other votes or not

That said, assuming these are late-returned absentees or similar, I would guess that they skew more Democratic than the county as a whole.

[Tintrlvr]

Good news for y'all looking at ME-02. The Ranked Choice vote is likely to go to Golden, polling has shown. If Golden is able to tie, then the 2nd vote should give it to himhopefully.

And then setting up a potential Supreme Court challenge on the validity of ballot initiatives setting rules for federal elections, which I'm sure John Roberts would love to give his opinion on.

Nah, the federal courts have zero desire to wade into that morass.

[Tintrlvr]

FL is still tightening.
Nelson down 30K.
Gillum down 50K.

Just saw. CNN is ahead of NYT here. That was a net of about 4k for Nelson since first thing this morning. Maybe Nelson can pull it out? Seems unlikely to me but I guess not entirely impossible. Gillum is done, though.

[Tintrlvr]

Should they call the CA-25 race for Hill? She has a comfortable lead and provisionals are only going to expand it.

Yes. All of the CA Dems in the lead right now are going to win. I would bet on Harder winning as well. Porter and Cisneros are going to be close but I think they also win. It's not just provisionals (even if they say 100% reporting). California accepts mail-in ballots *postmarked* by Election Day, so new ballots will continue arriving until Friday or so. And the late ballots always skew very strongly towards the Democrats, enough to make up 2-3 points in margin.