AZ-08: April 24 general election (Update: Lesko-R wins by 4.72 points)

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

Harold Supernanny is about to get obliterated by Debbie Lesko to Congress

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

Harold Supernanny is about to get obliterated by Debbie Lesko to Congress

wtf

Youtube's computer generated text annotations turned "Hiral Tipinerni" into "Harold Supernanny" in one video

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

Harold Supernanny is about to get obliterated by Debbie Lesko to Congress

wtf

Youtube's computer generated text annotations turned "Hiral Tipinerni" into "Harold Supernanny" in one video

That's a pretty obscure reference.

It was a brief atlas discord meme

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

Here is something I just don't understand...

why are republicans who hate trump (because they think he is not a true conservative) crossing over to vote for democrats?

The entire reason why trump did so bad in suburbs in both primary and general is because they thought he wasn't a legit conservative. They are going to "punish" him by voting dem?

lol what? most people aren't "conservative or liberal". these guys care about social security and medicare more than anything.

and guess what party has been hinting at cutting both? republicans

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

First batch of E-Day voting in. Margin will shrink, but not by enough.

https://twitter.com/SteveKornacki/status/988997248574001152

Do we know what precinct(s)?

Could make a big diff if they break it down how it should be done!!!!....    

Just based on a cursory look, they seem to be from strongly Republican precincts

How do we know which precincts are reporting?

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

Nate's tweet suggests that the returns so far have been from places that were slightly less pro Lesko than the overall district.

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

I just really don't get it. How the hell was there such a big swing!?!? The median age of voters here was 67 and 48% of voters were registered republicans.

The wave is is going to hit everywhere...

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

I hope Tipi can be a senator or something one day. She can try and run against Lesko as much as she wants, but this district is too red for her.

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

I think a ten points national margin of victory is looming for the Democrats in the House.

There's still a lot of time for the environment to change, but if it doesn't this is probably in the ballpark.

The article shows that in 2006, the average special swing was 17 and the final margin was 8. Ten seems like a fairly good estimate for this year barring something dramatic
.

The difference between specials performance and midterms performance in 2006 is a large anomaly compared to other midterm cycles, so it's not particularly wise to use it as a baseline of expectations. Which isn't to say that a 10% point PV win is an unreasonable estimate for Democrats come November, I think arguments could be made for anything between a 7-17% PV win, but the 2006 special/midterm difference is not a good framework to base guesses on.

10% PV win seems pretty reasonable to me. That's already a disaster for republicans.

The reason why the swings are so large in special elections is not because they're special elections necessarily. It's because they ones so far have been concentrated in very red districts (aka, more likely to swing). There's really no more room for dems to swing in places like the Bronx (in fact, I think dems underperform in miniority heavy areas, whereas they way overperform Hillary in heavily white areas).

An 8% swing won't be a uniform 8% swing. It'd be a 14% swing in many rural areas, say a 3% swing in urban, 8% in suburban etc (Just BS'ing numbers here but you get the idea)



Image illustrating my point:

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

Man Tipi was so close to winning some of those really big precincts

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

This reminds me a lot of the Duke Cunningham special election in 2006. Cunningham was forced to resign over some scandal. Brian Bilbray, a former Republican Congressman, ran for the seat but only won by 5%.

Of course this seat went for Trump by 21% compared to Bush having won CA-50 (its number at the time) 55%-43%.

It's also worth noting that there are different baselines here.

Bush won the PV by 2.5%, Trump lost the PV by 2%.

So that special election, assuming there would be an even swing come 2006 in every district, would suggest democrats doing 7 points better than Bush 2004, for a PV win of only... 5.5%. With Trump, that would be a 9% win.

And given that AZ-08 was +21 Trump, this is actually a 16 point swing from that.

Democrats doing 5% better than Bush's 2004 performance would hardly be something to brag about, whereas dems doing 5% better than Hillary would most likely give them the house.

IMO this AZ-08 result is consistent with a D+10 to D+12% result in the house (8-10% swing from the 2016 result). There really wasn't any excuse for this race to be so close. The democrat was definitely better than the republican here, but they got outspent and there wasn't a particularly huge gap anyways. The environment may get better for Republicans come November, and I think it will... until late October, when all of the premium increases start being announced.