Of the squeaker races, Virginia’s 5th and Maryland’s 1st are looking increasingly good for us, but this one keeps getting worse. With 71% of the vote counted, the results now look like this:
Darcy Burner (D): 118,253 (48.90%)
Dave Reichert (R): 123,585 (51.10%)
More ominously, Reichert has pulled ahead in King County, where Burner had been leading until now. Looks like Sheriff Dave will ride again.
This exact same thing happened in 2006. I was sure Darcy would win this time when I saw her up 57%-43% in early returns.
Either next time we should hope Reichert retires and leaves behind a delicious open seat, or maybe someone else should run. Though I’m not sure who else, I think Darcy was actually a solid candidate.
Even with such a strong candidate, we still couldn’t bring this one home.
Massa won and Kilroy will probably win, but the reruns like Seals, Stender and Burner were failures. I think the message is “if we did not vote for you the first time, we probably won’t vote for you the second time”.
Larry Kissell won convincingly the second time around.
CNN shows eight undecided races but 2 are in LA and will be run in December (LA-2 is a shoe-in barring a trial and conviction of Bill Jefferson). The remaining six look headed for a split.
Kratovil keeps expanding his lead over Harris as the absetees get counted in MD-1. He’s up by 2,003 with no more than 5,403 to count.
Although the VA-5 totals are not as steady, Perriello leads by 648 and I think he will pull this one out.
Stivers still leads Kilroy by a diminishing margin of 146 but Ohio Republican tricks mean that provisionals are overwhelmingly Democratic and that should be the ball game. Hope, hope.
OTOH, Don Young has a huge lead and Politics1 (with no fresh votes) is ceding him the election. (Not so with the Senate seat). I don’t think we’re gaining 15,000 votes on the surly one.
Both Calvert in CA-44 and Reichert in WA-8 now have leads over 5,000 votes. McClintock is edging up agin and now leads by 709.
Our tiebreaker appears to be Caramouche in LA but we need to wait into December for that one.