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

[Ebsy]

From the PPP exit poll of the district:

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/989150202022985728

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Lesko's margin of victory was about the same that Joe Arpaio got in the district in 2016. So generic R is basically performing similar to Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County now...

AZ Republicans are SO SCREWED.

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/Politics1com/status/989186570120060928

[_]

https://twitter.com/Politics1com/status/989186570120060928

HERE WE GO AGAIN

[Young Conservative]

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

[GeorgiaModerate]

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.

[Young Conservative]

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
.

[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.

[Tartarus Sauce]

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.

[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:

[Lamda]

The blue wave is dead because Lesko won by 5 discrit that Trump won by 21(and Romney by 25).

[Progressive Pessimist]

I said from the beginning that I would be content with a single digit loss for Tiperneni and I predicted that Lesko would win by 9, which is a loss I would have been okay with. Lesko winning by only about half of that makes me absolutely thrilled. This should not have been close, Republicans! The chickens are coming home to roost.

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

ALERT: Lesko's margin is now down to 4.8%.

Now smaller than Arpaio's margin.

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/989347820669939712

[NOVA Green]

Anyone happen to have a stashed/cached copy of the initial EV vote dump number by Candidate and Precinct for this election stored anywhere electronically on their systems?

Wanted to delve a bit deeper into some of the numbers today, and accidentally closed or refreshed my browser window that had this data, and now it appears that it has disappeared from the internet...

Anyways PM me if you have that, either way got some other items to work on, still is a nice data point to have available, especially since I don't know if we'll get official final breakdowns by EV/ED by Precinct/Candidate posted for this election...

[Tender Branson]

Update (new batch of election day/dropoff votes):

  95.499 Lesko (R)
  86.771 Tipirneni (D)
       635 Write-Ins

183.118 total votes cast (incl. 213 over/under-votes)

52.21% - Lesko (R)
47.44% - Tipirneni (D)
  0.35% - Write-Ins

Lesko wins by 4.77 points.

[NOVA Green]

Update (new batch of election day/dropoff votes):

  95.499 Lesko (R)
  86.771 Tipirneni (D)
       635 Write-Ins

183.118 total votes cast (incl. 213 over/under-votes)

52.21% - Lesko (R)
47.44% - Tipirneni (D)
  0.35% - Write-Ins

Lesko wins by 4.77 points.

Hmmm.... your data might be slightly off on the final % margins... apparently there are still an estimated   < 1k ballots outstanding...

https://twitter.com/Garrett_Archer

Haven't spent much time digging into these ballots, but am assuming they will be primarily Provisional voters and Military absentee ballots, etc....

Wouldn't be surprised if they break something like 70-30 D, considering they will likely be heavily younger, Latino, etc....

Still, at most that might move the needle 0.1% in favor the Dem, but we still do have a few last votes to count in Maricopa for us number geeks!

[NOVA Green]

Lesko's margin of victory was about the same that Joe Arpaio got in the district in 2016. So generic R is basically performing similar to Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County now...

AZ Republicans are SO SCREWED.

Important point (Bolded)....

Even worse for the Pubs, is that the composition of the electorate in the '18 Special Election skewed much more Senior Citizen and with a much lower voter turnout and composition of younger voters and Latino voters than the '16 GE where both Trump and Arpaio were both on the ballot....

If Pubs are getting slammed hard with Flip 'Pubs and Pub leaning 'Indy Seniors in AZ CD-08 with a "Generic 'Pub" on the ballot, with a demographic population that doesn't have any recent history of being a major elastic demographic here, AND the major base of their three legs of their "Core Base" within Arizona, that's obviously a Yuuuge problem going forward...

I created a thread on Maricopa County back in Nov '17, that nobody responded to that summarized a few basic breakdown numbers by Cities with a few charts....

These numbers were focused more on some basic macro level breakdown data things like Margins/Swings from '12 >'16 by larger cities, vote share by place, etc, throw in a few vote shares and swings by City within Maricopa County....

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=277087.0

Anyways--- your fundamental point stands, and any Atlas user (Or all of you new lurkers out there that want to register) interested in the fundamental importance of Maricopa County to the overall importance of Maricopa County to final results in ANY statewide election in Arizona, need only use the Atlas search feature and type Maricopa in, and y'all will get what we are talking about.

AZ CD-08 is the heart and core of the Republican dominance in Maricopa County, designed with '10 'Pub Gerrymandering to create a completely SAFE REP CD district and LD Districts...

Senior Citizens were considered to be the core of the SAFE-R district as a reliable voting bloc in "off-year elections" (Such as the AZ GOV elections), and protect against potential massive swings from Moderate 'Pubs and REG Indies, especially within a district that not only has a rapidly growing Latino and increasing VAP population, but additionally might experience some swings among Educated Upper-Middle Class Anglos (Think Obama '08 'Pub Gerrymandering concerns when they had absolute power after redistricting....

I'm still working my way through the precinct level numbers of overwhelmingly Senior precincts in CD-08, but some of my early data appears to suggest that there were massive swings among Seniors that had voted both for Trump and Arpaio and voted for Tipirneni (D) in 2018....

We can see that simply by looking at the voting numbers for DEM/PUB candidates in generally extremely high voting Turnout numbers, regardless of "off-year" and "Special Elections"....

Data is much harder to crunch at this point when it comes to "Upper Income Anglo precincts", but my initial review indicates that these are places where there was a mixture of both REG PUB and LEAN PUB Indies abstaining, AND potentially a significant number of cross-over votes....

More data to still review on the "Middle-Class" precincts where the vast majority of voters are still Anglo, but with a significant Latino-American, Asian-American, and in some cases African-American populations....

"Working Class" precincts did not appear to have anything close to the turnout levels of 2016, but will need to roll the numbers against 2014 to try a compare/contrast model....

Anyway you look at it and try to slice/dice numbers, it's starting to look pretty clear that Arizona Republicans might have a Maricopa County problem come November '18.....

If 'Pubs are only winning +5 in CD-08 without all of the Sheriff Joe corruption/racist BS, in a Registered Voter electorate model that favors them heavily, AND losing a significant chunk of SoCal retirees, AND there is no massive younger and Latino turnout levels, really starts to make one think about how Maricopa County will vote for US-SEN and AZ-GOV in Nov '18, without even going into down-ballot stuff like the AZ-LD-SEN/HOUSE races coming up....   

Of course at this point, considering the close nature of the race, I suspect that Tipirneni might well win in November 2018....

To close, for anyone interested in a musical interlude, as a Gen-Exer, kinda into the real "Old Skool" Hip-Hop, and I know a huge Pop of Atlas posters are of the Millennial Generation and might not be as well acquainted with topical political songs from the early '90s:

Public Enemy: By the Time I Get to Arizona

I'm countin' down to the day deservin'
Fittin' for a king
I'm waitin' for the time when I can
Get to Arizona
'Cause my money's spent on
The goddamn rent
Neither party is mine not the
Jackass or the elephant
twenty thousand nig niggy nigas in the corner
Of the cell block but they come
From California
Population none in the desert and sun
Wit' a gun cracker
Runnin' things under his thumb
Starin' hard at the postcards
Isn't it odd and unique?
Seein' people smile wild in the heat
120 degree
'Cause I want to be free
What's a smilin' fact
When the whole state's racist
Why want a holiday F--k it 'cause I want to
So what if I celebrate it standin' on a corner
I ain't drinkin' no 40
I B thinkin' time wit' a nine
Until we get some land
Call me the trigger man
Looki lookin'…

Context of the song is extremely topical within the context of CD-08 when it comes to the Senior Population of the State in places like....

Arizona refused to recognize MLK as national holiday, yadam, yada, yada...

Public Enemy releases extremely controversial music video that got banned from MTV after airing only one time (Thanks Tipper Gore)...

https://www.spin.com/2011/11/public-enemy-look-back-20-years-time-i-get-arizona/

Here's a Youtube official link to the song off of their 3rd Album, which I currently proudly possess on a Cassette Tape format from when I was 15-16 years old.

PLEASE purchase song so you can jam to on your earphones at work, or driving in the car, since in many ways it's not only one of the best songs off the album, but also plays out to Indies:

Key lyric from the song if we want to parse lyrics and apply to Arizona Politics, is the Registered Independent Vote (And what likely was a massive swing towards the Dem Candidate among REG PUB and IND voters).
               "
Neither Party is mine, neither the Jackass nor the Elephant"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrFOb_f7ubw

Arizona only a brief decade or so later after this song gets an extremely bad national Rep for "Papers Please" laws, where local LEA are required to demand proof of citizenship for local residents, etc...

Even Moderate Republicans move Extreme-Right or get threatened with a primary loss among the "Rabid Base", that went full tilt hog-wild after ACA and the Obama era....

Needless to say all sorts of these policies, and even Sheriff Joe was still extremely popular in his home district and CD-08 has moved to only a narrow Lean R district....

The times they are a changin', and it seems to be coming from voters 65+ in places like PA-18 and AZ-08, throw in a mixture of AL-SEN along the Seniors of the Gulf Coast (See some of my posts elsewhere on Baldwin County)....

Republicans currently appear to be having a major "Old Anglo Voter Problem" in the current Trump era in extremely regionally diverse parts of the Country from AL to WI, to PA, and now AZ....

HOUSTON we have a problem!!!!

More data and numbers to follow, but hell, allowed a minor break from spreadsheets on a work-night when I work swing shift....

[Adam Griffin]

Figured I'd make an Atlas-specific map of the result using my highly-sensitive gradient (left). As you can tell, there were quite a number of Lesko precincts that were very close - and might have flipped had Tipirneni won. There were also a lot of Tipirneni precincts that were close as well; we're not used to see such huge swathes of congressional districts be so relatively close and/or competitive.

That's why I like my gradient: for races like this in particular, it does a much better job of illustrating the competitive nature of areas than a 10-point or even 5-point gradient.

On the right is a simple hypothetical Tipirneni victory map assuming uniform swing:

Full-size image

[Adam Griffin]

^^^ In fact, only 10% (14 out of 143) of the precincts were even 60% or more in favor of one candidate.

81 precincts (57%!) were within single-digits, with the remaining third decided by 10-20 points.

Are there any recent examples of a congressional race (special or otherwise) having such a huge portion of the district's population being in such competitive areas? I don't know too much about this district, but it's my impression of skimming the data here that the precincts tend to be fairly equal in population compared to many other areas.

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

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

[Tender Branson]

Final (?) vote dump of some 1.000 ballots:

  95.995 Lesko (R)
  87.299 Tipirneni (D)
       636 Write-Ins

184.149 total votes cast (incl. 219 over/under-votes)

52.19% - Lesko (R)
47.46% - Tipirneni (D)
  0.35% - Write-Ins

Lesko wins by 4.73 points.

[Tender Branson]

Even more ballots have come in:

  96.012 Lesko (R)
  87.330 Tipirneni (D)
       636 Write-Ins

184.200 total votes cast (incl. 222 over/under-votes)

52.19% - Lesko (R)
47.47% - Tipirneni (D)
  0.34% - Write-Ins

Lesko wins by 4.72 points.

[Sestak]

NOVA, do you think Schweikert's vulnerable?

[NOVA Green]

Now that the overwhelming majority of ballots have been counted in CD-08, excepting an extremely small number of ballots outstanding from active duty service members and Americans living overseas, we have pretty close to a complete picture of the election....

Let's start briefly with a few topics such as turnout and early voting:

1.) Based upon official results, it's looking like overall turnout was about 40.4% of Registered Voters, compared to roughly 49.9% in the 2014 November General Election....

Although this number sounds pretty impressive for a Special Election, it is significantly lower than early voter models had predicted based upon historical data.

2.) It appears that voters in Arizona are increasingly relying on Early Voting, rather than Election Day Voting, as the State increasingly transitions more towards a Vote-by-Mail (VbM) model.

In the 2012 GE roughly 70% of voters cast their ballots through Early Voting here, in 2016 roughly 80% did....

In the 2018 Special Election, roughly 90% of voters cast their ballots early....

3.) This explains some of the discrepancies we have seen in the various polls of the district, where trying to weigh EV vs ED numbers alongside of Party Registration Data becomes a bit problematic.

4.) A relatively low turnout election (By the historical standards of this CD) skewed the electorate heavily Senior, in a CD where Senior Citizens even in normal Presidential GE environments tend to be a pretty hefty chunk of the electorate.

5.) I already touched on EV turnout by Party Registration in previous posts, but what we do know is that EVs represented a much larger share of the total vote compared to RVs in terms of Registered Republicans, as well as to a somewhat lesser extent Registered Democrats, and Registered Independents comprised a much smaller share of the electorate than their Voter Registration status....

Unfortunately, I don't have the final numbers broken down by party registration by EV/ED but as of the official numbers posted Monday, there were 155.7k EV ballots that were cast by registered party ( 27.9 % D, 48.3% R, 23.8% I)....

6.) Considering that 90% of the electorate voted early, the actual Election Day numbers appear to indicate that not only did registered independents that voted swung hard Democrat, but additionally that there was a significant Republican defection as well towards the Centrist Democrat running in this district.

Ok--- now let's look at a few numbers and charts.

Here are the % of Vote Share by Arizona Legislate District (LD), results by LD for the special election, and historical results by LD for precincts located within this CD.



Several things to note here:

1.) LD-22 was disproportionately represented in this special election, accounting for 38.5% of the Vote share in the Special Election...  for historical standards it accounted for 36.6% in the "off-year" 2014 General Election, and only 34.9% in the 2016 General Election, much closer to the 34.1% RV share. Part of this might be explained by the fact that it contains some of the fastest growing exurbs within CD-08.

This is especially significant, as it is the 2nd most Republican LD of CD '08 and voted for Lesko by +10.

2.) Vote share was down, even compared to the 2014 GE in the handful of "Democratic Leaning" LDs (LD-4, LD-29, and LD-30), which although they contain a relatively small share of the total electorate, start to become more significant in a hypothetical close election within the district.

3.) Vote share was significantly down in LD-20, which in previous postings I described as not only a "must win" LD for Dems, but a "must win by double-digits" place.

4.) LD-21 vote share was roughly between '14 GE and '16 GE numbers, which I had described as a "must flip" Dem LD.

Now what interesting patterns stand out from the April 24th results by LD?

1.) Democrats achieved their best numbers ever in recent elections in LD-22.

The swing compared to the 2016 Sheriff Election was higher here than anywhere else within CD-08, and the fact that a "Generic Republican" only won it by +9.5 should obviously be of deep concern to any Republican observer of Arizona politics, as it was a + 32 Romney and + 28 Trump LD and 47% of Registered Voters are Republicans (and close to 50% of the EV).

2.) Other interesting record gains for Democrats are observable in the heavily Upper Middle-Class and educated areas North of Phoenix (LD-01) and Northwest Phoenix (LD-15).

LD-01 has long been a base Republican stronghold with not only a HUGE Republican voter registration edge, but also regularly a +35 to +40 R margin edge, so seeing only a +20 R edge for a 2nd Election (the only previous one was Sheriff Joe) is noteworthy.

LD-15 is an interesting bag.... one the one hand it has the 3rd highest % of Registered Pubs in CD-08, but increasingly appears to be flirting with the Democratic Party... Needless to say, there are plenty of other similar precincts in what is generally considered solidly Republican "North Phoenix".


3.) LD-21 is an interesting beast, and although it appears that this was a Republican HOLD based upon the top-line numbers, what is obscured is that extremely low turnout in heavily "Base Democratic" precincts around El Mirage, and parts of "South Peoria", is the main reason we didn't see a flip here, despite some pretty favorable swings towards the Dems in the more Upper Middle-Class neighborhoods, and to some extent in Sun City as well...

4.) We actually saw a drop in Democratic margins in three LD's compared to the 2016 Sheriff Election (LD-4, LD-29, LD-30)....

These are relatively small LD's (See note above on Vote Share by LD), but still elections are won and lost on the margins, as I frequently like to emphasize....

These areas all have an extremely higher number of Latinos, Younger, and more Working-Class voters...

Democrats would obviously want to see turnout levels in November in these areas be more like 2014 GE numbers (or higher), which is entirely plausible this November considering that Maricopa County residents will be barraged by TV ads for months with all of the competitive elections coming up.

Will be posting shortly with some additional nuggets, now that I have more raw data from the "final" results entered into the Excel Worksheet, just need to run a few formulas, do a bit of compare/contrast, and figure out which themes are the most relevant when examining this election.