He didn’t have a whole lotta people in his corner, but it looks like Raul Grijalva had enough to survive last night’s slaughter:
Democrat Raul Grijalva claimed victory in Arizona’s District 7 congressional race Wednesday, leaving Republicans with a gain of two seats in the state’s delegation.
A spokesman for Grijalva said the congressman had decided he was the winner in the southwestern Arizona district, although a number of mail-in and provisional ballots remained to be counted.
Right now, with 99.6% reporting, Grijalva leads Republican Ruth McClung by 3,586 votes, for a percentage spread of 49-46. I note that some folks raised their eyebrows when we shot this race straight from Safe D to the Tossup column. I hope you understand where we were coming from now!
At least some of the good ones are coming back.
I was wrong to doubt you, and wrong to laugh at Republican polls. If this wasn’t enough to convince a skeptic like me, soon-to-be Rep. Blake Farenthold certainly would.
I was also wrong about Cardoza trailing Costa, but then again I didn’t think CA-20 would turn into what our British friends call a “rotten borough,” either. 63K total votes?
But my question is, did the foreclosure crisis save Grijalva? Y’all may not realize this, but there’s been a ton of White exburban growth in the Pinal and Maricopa County parts of his district. I knew that both of these areas had been absolutely battered by the housing crisis, so I figured that their populations were smaller and more Hispanic than they were in 2008 (more Hispanic not only because of the voters who lived there before making up a larger share of the population, but also because of working-class Hispanic renters and middle-class Hispanic homebuyers picking up good deals among excess housing stock).
Still, though, I was shocked that Grijalva won Maricopa County 49-45, as my baseline had him losing this area by double digits at this point. The vote share there made up a notably smaller percentage of the vote than it did in 2008.
While she still lost, I take my hat off to Ruth McClung, who I frequently mocked. While she would lose this district comfortably if this election were solely on ideology, she clearly tapped into something and ran a tough and smart campaign. Maybe not in AZ-07, but she has a political future.
Or just Grijalva? I don’t think he’s actually going to lose, but it’d be nice to have some independent corroboration.
How many possible votes are left out there?
That’s nice that “the Congressman had decided he was the winner”, but he’s not the decider of who wins, the voters of AZ-07 decide that.
How arrogant.
Our biggest mistake in the final months of this campaign was to pretend that Tip O’Neill’s old adage of all politics being local still held true. It doesn’t any more. That’s why all but a couple of conservative Democrats that Nancy Pelosi tried to protect were wiped out last night. The Democrats should have nationalized the election around defending their actions loudly and proudly. Everybody should have done what Tom Perriello did. It was an easily defendable record had anyone tried. The Democrats should have hit the airwaves in the final week with a montage of all the Republican House leaders insisting their will be no compromise on anything.
Would this have avoided a shellacking? No. The economy’s in the toilet and the party in charge was gonna be punished for it no matter what. But I’ve never known a situation where a party that hides from its accomplishments, however controversial, avoids a drubbing. And from the tone of Obama’s speech a couple hours ago, it sounds like our party’s response will be to go along with borrowing a trillion dollars from the Chinese to give massive tax cuts to millionaires for the rest of eternity. Wouldn’t we be in a better bargaining position if we had campaigned on a nationalized theme on this issue? As I’ve said before, if the Democrats don’t even have the stones to draw a line in the sand on this, then they’re absolutely useless.
Anyway, back to the monthslong Tea Party victory parade….
Hard to believe the election is over, what will I do? Maybe some work…
Dems beat the spread in the senate. I was disappointed with nv and co, but I won’t let it get me down–especially after sitting through 06 and 08. House basically what I expected: heavy losses that fell in not predictable ways. Biggest surprise in the house was the lack of surprise survivors out of the first tier–no “dead men walking” came back from the dead.
Two final surprises (to me): 1. atdleft was right about nv, I was going with the public polling and not buying what I thought was the spin of a true believer. I was wrong. 2. Apparently We Ask America seems to have their finger on the pulse of IL house races: foster and hare were DOA and walsh and dold showed some quite unexpected strength. I thought those polls were a bit too good to be true–if only MRG were the WAA of CT…
I know Giffords leads by a percent or so with plenty of Pima County still uncounted; is there any word on when we’ll know final results? Or if the outstanding vote is from precincts conservative enough to change the result at all?