This one had seemed wrapped up a couple weeks ago, but there’s nothing wrong with an abundance of caution. At any rate, the AP finally felt like it could call the race today, in favor of sophomore Dem Jerry McNerney.
The latest ballot-tallying updates from the most populous part of the district showed McNerney, D-Pleasanton, again had widened his lead over Republican challenger David Harmer to a margin of 2,475 votes, or about 1 percent of the 237,808 ballots counted. The Associated Press reported fewer than 1,900 ballots remained to be counted.
Harmer hasn’t conceded yet, although McNerney declared victory way back on Nov. 10. This means that, despite the onslaught of destruction in other parts of the nation, the GOP didn’t pick up a single House seat in California (and only one on the West Coast: WA-03). This also leaves only one race that remains to be decided in the House: NY-01, where Dem incumbent Tim Bishop leads by 235 with all absentee votes counted but with challenged ballots still to be sorted out.
General question, but were there more close races this cycle that couldn’t be called on election day than others, or did it just seem that way?
Which means we need +25 to get to 218 in ’12.
California did this election cycle, we should all follow suit because they did a phenomenal job at electing Democrats this year.
Ever scale back or at least offer some evidence of their histronic claims of “large scale voter fraud?” This might have had nothing to do with Harmer’s camp and merely been the tea party group blowing smoke, but it would be pretty tacky if such an allegation came directly from a top-tier candidate like Harmer without any evidence…
We lost an open seat in WA, but we knocked out Djou in HI-01. So it’s a wash, and in fact the only West Coast incumbent to lose was a Republican.
And we won all statewide races in HI, CA, OR, and WA. Only in strongly Republican Alaska did we lose federal or statewide races.
In a year like this it’s a stunning result. It’s a result that would make us very happy in a neutral environment, let alone this one.
All of a sudden I want to move to Cali. Who’s with me?
At bare minimum, the idiotic incumbent protection plan costs us seats in the general area of Lundgren’s and Calvert’s seats.
The area is a sea of red. Even without disturbing the blue seats in the state at all, a gerrymander that at least attempted to create Dem districts would have lead to Dem seats in northwest CA and around Riverside. There are several pockets in these red areas that are far more Democratic than others, and they could have been connected to make Dem seats without risking anything at all.
(And the dummymander is why McNerney’s seat was so close, as this district was built to be Republican, even though it borders some extremely solid Dem districts.)
It brought out enough young liberals who otherwise wouldn’t have voted.
One of very few in a district with a GOP PVI. I’m going to do a diary on such things. Stay tuned.