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

[Skill and Chance]

Swing map.

From what?  2020 President?

[Skill and Chance]

https://twitter.com/ryanobles/status/1602339822256914432

Glad to see Youngkin didn't play games with this.

[Skill and Chance]

https://twitter.com/ryanobles/status/1602339822256914432

Glad to see Youngkin didn't play games with this.

Credit to Youngkin, I assumed he would drag this out.

He will not.

He is a genuinely good person/governor. I just hope he stays Virginia focused and not run for president.

I also do not think the 2023 elections will go well for his party either. Though not disastrous.

Oh god I'd totally forgotten there were 2023 elections.  It never ends. 

My early estimates are

HOD: 51 D to 49 R

Senate: 22 D 18 R

The Senate could be a tad worse for the GOP and the House could be a power sharing agreement.

I went through race by race.

That’s actually about where I am with my predictions (I have HOD at 52D-48R).  I assume you also have Dems picking up SD-07 in January?

Yes, and I am waiting for the January race to make more firm predictions.

I have a hard time deciding between 50, 51, and 52 Dem.. 53 D and 49 D are possible but very unlikely.

The HOD may be disproportionally awful for the GOP if 2025, 2027, or 2029 or Dem waves.

The State Senate is at least Lean D.  The scenario where it would flip would involve a Dem collapse in Hampton Roads/Richmond.  They are likely losing a seat in the mountains that was formerly gerrymandered to pick up college towns, but there is a new double digit Biden district in the Richmond suburbs for them. 

The HOD comes down to several outer NOVA Biden->Youngkin districts that were either narrowly won by Spanberger or narrowly lost by Wexton this year.  Getting to 50/50 looks fairly easy, but Dems need at least one downballot Republican NOVA seat for control.

[Skill and Chance]

Damn, these results are wild. I know that low turnout special elections can give strange outcomes, but it's nice to see that Democratic voters continue to be engaged and energetic.

Yes, also this is not the kind of district where you would expect Dems to overperform in a special.  Could be a very good sign for VA legislative Dems, because there are several swing seats in both chambers that are all or mostly within this CD.

[Skill and Chance]

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.

Maloy is definitely favored, as only 45% of the remaining vote is expected from Salt Lake and Davis Counties. And conservative candidates tend to overperform in late mail ballots.

The remaining vote from these counties is probably mostly election day. Utah does do election day in person voting. Since Salt Lake City/Davis didn't update after their first drop which happened only a few minutes after polls closed, election day ballots almost certainly haven't been counted yet (as there's no way they could have been included in the first counted batch since there's no way election day ballots are counted that quickly).

Utah is a nearly exclusively a mail ballot state, and has been for a while. If you wish to know why, drive out to the rural areas - trust me you'll pass through many on your way to the Parks. Maybe then you will realize that this is the most efficient method for having elections in the region.

To that point, what remains is not all election day. Also counted are the unknown number of mail ballots that will arrive late but with a postage mark from before polls closed. Most of these will show up before the end of the week. In fact, all of the remaining votes in the super-rurals are probably of this nature.

Yes, VBM was a regional Western thing before it became a partisan thing.  Similarly, widespread in-person EV was a regional Southern thing pre-Trump era.

[Skill and Chance]

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).

While these are concerns, there would seem to be a very big difference between early voting in September and early voting the Saturday before the election.  Frankly, I can't see any coherent argument against the latter other than a desire to keep turnout low among people with unstable work/caregiving schedules.