Special Election megathread (4/30: NY-26)

[Vosem]

Glad Turner lost. She is an absolute clown. That “concession” speech is pathetic.

I don't know what she was talking about when she mentioned "evil money".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbh5Kvet04

[Vosem]

So here's something that understandably went unnoticed: Mike Carey won OH-15 by just under 17 points, while Trump had won it by 14.

This result was definitely not consistent with what we saw in NJ or VA. Why was the swing in this district so much smaller?

It's kind of a polarized district and the Republicans are pretty maxed out in most of their strong areas in it

Also, Carey was a pretty lazy candidate who tried to coast off his Trump endorsement (and not all Republican-leaners are happy about this, obviously), while Russo actually ran a really energetic campaign. In the current environment it didn't really matter, but if this had been a special in 2017-2018 I'm actually pretty confident it would've flipped.

[Vosem]

There’s controversy over whether or not Celeste Maloy is eligible to be in congress. She was registered in Utah as a Republican (though she lived in Virginia for many years) but was also somehow not eligible to vote. Utah does not have a SoS so the Lieutenant Governor is the chief elections official.

Maloy was probably ineligible to be a candidate at the Republican Convention, but given that she was allowed to participate and was nominated it's sort of too late now. She is eligible to represent Utah in Congress; it was the Republican Party's rules that she violated, not state law.

Hough is going to self-fund a campaign against her and seems basically serious to me. He's not particularly Trumpish but is probably more Trumpish than her (he is a former state party chair and an RNC member under Ronna Romney McDaniel; looking at his website, it seems like he's more focused on social conservatism). It's hard for me to tell how seriously people are taking the Maloy eligibility thing, but if it is serious then Hough stands to benefit.

Edwards' viability is very hard to decipher; it probably depends on turnout of her base of usually-Democratic voters more than anything else. I think 'weird turnout patterns lead to Edwards victory' is much likelier than 'perfect vote-split leads to Edwards victory'.

[Vosem]

Amo's probably the frontrunner for the Senate now, if Jack Reed decides to retire in 2026 in my opinion.

I think Magaziner is aiming for that, but I could also seem them both running.

Feels like Raimondo or McKee both have higher profiles than either man.

Impressive performance for Amo, though; really came out of nowhere. I thought Regunberg had this one.

[Vosem]

Why does deep red Utah have vote by mail? The idea of turning "election day" into election week is ridiculous and should not be the new normal. Before 2018 we never had to wait till after election night to know who won the races.

It’s funny how you guys think that “it takes a few days longer to know the results” is a legitimate argument against mail-in voting.

I'd say there are two arguments against mail-in voting. The first of which (which even Democrats can at least recognize is an issue) is that it creates imbalances of information; often, especially in primaries, but sometimes even in generals, there are huge shifts in voter behavior right at the end, such that casting a too-early mail vote can be equivalent to throwing your vote away. A famous general example would be people who voted for Paul Wellstone in the 2002 MN-Sen election before he died; ultimately those votes didn't play a spoiler role and Coleman would've won anyway, but had it been slightly closer the Democrats would've lost in a very un-democratic way. In primaries, lots of people vote for candidates after they drop out; in many post-Ides of March 2016 primaries -- for example Louisiana -- early votes saw Rubio beating Trump, and day-of votes saw Cruz beating Trump, with geographic patterns strongly implying that there was a clean Rubio --> Cruz transfer...but Trump won because of the disunity. On the Democratic side in 2020, too, certain states, like CO and UT, recorded very strong totals for Klobuchar and Buttigieg even after they dropped out. Voters voting with different levels of information access is undemocratic.

On a different level (and I expect there to be less agreement that this is an issue), it undermines confidence in democratic outcomes when there is no result for a long period of time; it gives the impression that election administrators are cheating, because in foreign countries, that's often what this means. The likely answer I'll get here is that both the people complaining that long counting periods undermine democracy, and the people complaining about election fraud, are conservatives, and they should stop doing it. But I think, based on foreign countries' experiences, that this would be a problem anyway.

Anyway, we should abolish all voting that is not on Election Day. Mail-in voting should be allowed only for those with very clearly-defined excuses, like military personnel or hospitalized individuals (list not necessarily exhaustive).