AK-Sen: Right now, write-ins account for 41% of the vote in Alaska, while Joe Miller has 34% and Scott McAdams 24%. State election officials have bumped up the start of the write-in count to Nov. 10th (from Nov. 18th). Murkowski is one of 160 declared write-in candidates, but obviously quite a few write-ins ballots would have to be spoiled, or for other candidates, for her to lose.
WA-Sen: Patty Murray’s lead widened to 1.6% as votes were counted in the populous Democratic stronghold of King County. The trends look poor for Dino Rossi, who took 40% here in 2004 (when he almost tied Christine Gregoire in the gubernatorial race), but is now at 37% this year.
CT-Gov: Yikes – the AP withdrew its call for Dem Dan Malloy. This one could get seriously topsy-turvy. Whatever the hell is going on here might also impact Jim Himes (vs. Dan Debicella) in CT-04. Not good.
MN-Gov: With 100% of precincts reporting, Dem Mark Dayton holds an 8,854-vote lead over Republican Tom Emmer, within the half-percent margin which would prompt an automatic recount. No recount can start until after Nov. 23rd, when the vote is certified. Note that Norm Coleman’s election-day lead was just 725 votes in 2008. So even though GOP lawyers are already laying in a supply of amphetamines, it’s possible the Republicans will abandon what looks like a futile effort.
IL-Gov: Man, did anyone dig a mangier rabbit out of a shabbier hat than Pat Quinn? After a day of counting more votes in Cook County (Chicago), Quinn’s lead has expanded to 19,000 votes, and Republicans are getting ready to throw in the towel on behalf of Bill Brady. Pretty amazing, for a guy who seemed DOA just a couple of months ago.
OR-Gov: As we noted yesterday, various media sources have called the race for Dem John Kitzhaber over Chris Dudley.
AZ-07: As we noted yesterday, Dem Rep. Raul Grijalva has declared victory over Ruth McClung, with a 3% lead. A Grijalva spokesman said that the remaining ballots are in Pima County, which favors Dems.
AZ-08: Dem Rep. Gabby Giffords leads by 2,349 votes over Jesse Kelly, but again, Pima – they have some 47,000 votes still outstanding. Pima was one of only four counties to go for Kerry – and for Obama, too.
CA-11: With an unclear number of votes left to be counted, Dem Rep. Jerry McNerney has inched into a 121-vote lead over David Harmer. It’ll take four weeks for the vote to get certified, at which point the loser can seek a recount (at his own expense).
CA-20: Dem Rep. Jim Costa trails Andy Vidak by almost 2,000 votes, but there may be something like 30,000 uncounted ballots from Fresno County, which Costa won on e-night by a 2-to-1 margin. So maybe we’ll get lucky here.
IL-08: With 100% of the vote in, Dem Rep. Melissa Bean is trailing in a shocker to Jim Walsh by 553 votes. She isn’t conceding yet, though.
KY-06: With 100% of votes counted, Dem Rep. Ben Chandler has a 619 vote lead over Andy Barr. Barr has until next Tuesday to request a “recanvass,” which would be completed by Nov. 12th. Barr could then ask for a formal recount, but he’d have to foot the bill.
NY-25: Really barfy: As we noted yesterday, Republican Ann Marie Buerkle has moved into the lead, after late results from Wayne County came in. She’s now up by 659 votes. Some 8,300 absentee ballots have been returned so far (out of 11,600 requested), though more are trickling in. Maffei would have to pull in something like 54% or so out of the absentees to pull this one out.
TX-27: It’s looking pretty bad for Dem Rep. Solomon Oritz, who trails Blake Farenthold by 799 votes with 100% in. Farenthold has declared victory, but Ortiz claims his legal team is conducting a review and that he may seek a recount – which he would have to pay for (unless it changes the final results). And check out how far the apple has fallen from the tree:
Farenthold is grandson of Frances “Sissy” Farenthold, a Democrat who served two terms in the state House and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1972. That same year, she finished second in balloting to become George McGovern’s vice presidential candidate at the Democratic convention.
VA-11: With 100% of precincts reporting, Dem Rep. Gerry Connolly leads Keith Fimian 111,621 to 110,696. The vote will get certified on Nov. 22nd, at which time Fimian can seek a recount if the margin remains less than half a percent (recounts are not automatic).
WA-02, WA-09: As we noted yesterday, a number of media outlets have called the 9th CD race for Dem Rep. Adam Smith over Dick Muri. Meanwhile, Rick Larsen has taken his first lead over John Koster, albeit a narrow one (30% of votes remain to be counted).
Debicella already conceded IIRC. I assume he saw something we didn’t see–probably the same Bridgeport/New Haven debacle that also led the SoS to call it for Malloy.
I would have thought Alexi would pull through if Quinn did. Wonder what happened there.
“Quinn for Illinois: The Mangiest Rabbit Out of the Shabbiest Hat”
Posted this on another thread, but I’ll post it again. Does anyone see it the same like me? I think that Suffolk deserves the medal for the best pollster (although not the most prolific) of the cycle, they only got FL-GOV wrong and that’s it. They got all other races right together with all other pollsters, plus being only pollster to have Quinn, Harris and Reid winning.
I knew that name sounded familiar. I guess the grandson falls far from the tree.
Looks like, from the number of votes case, the Latino turnout in Texas was pretty abysmal.
Makes sense that there might by 30K uncounted ballots in the district because the the 2-party vote total is absurdly and suspiciously low, with only 63K votes. I know it’s heavily Hispanic and that combined with this being a midterm instead of a Presidential partly explains low turnout, but even under those circumstances neighboring Dennis Cardoza’s district still pumped out 93K votes. So another 30K in CA-20 makes perfect sense.
I hope Costa still pulls this out, and I bet he will. That would be sweet because it would mean no Pacific incumbent Dems lost, and in fact we’ll end up a net wash with losing Baird’s seat but knocking off Djou. That’s a huge symbolic victory that’s instructive on how Democratic the Pacific states (excepting Alaska) have really become, that Dems can’t be beaten even under the worst conditions.
I think we may be in for a very contentious recount here. Keith Fimian is now claiming that he won the race. There might also be a huge problem with one of the 3 people on the canvassing board. It’s none other than Hans von Spakovsky. If you have no idea who that is a quick look at Google will make you see why it’s a huge problem.
The AK-Sen numbers sadly reminded me. I think there were nine Republican Senate seats people talked at some point during the campaign about flipping.
AK, KY, NH, MO, FL, NC, OH, LA, AZ
Sadly, the results of all these attempts were 10 point deficits or greater. From the looks of the AK numbers, McAdams trailed Miller by 10. And in the other 8 races, the Dem contender lost by at least 10%. Even in this cycle, I wonder if the losses had to be this wide.
Barely cracked 60% against Some Dude. Also, in exchange for Capps’ district being made more Republican, I bet his district is made more Democratic. And he might retire since I believe he almost ended up doing so in 2006. This district is one of many in California that is a ripe opportunity even now and might end up even better after redistricting.
Here’s KMPH at 11pm PT last night:
Costa won Fresno and Kern by big margins; he lost Kings by a big margin. If this is correct, he can certainly pull it off.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenu…
Exactly as PPP were projectinf for months. Anyway, does anybody get the sense that as bad as the House was that in statewide races the GOP actually underperformed? They certainly were under my expectations in both Senate and gubernatorial races.
So, in the House at least, there were 236 incumbent Democrats and 156 incumbent Republicans running for re-election. (Not counting Diaz-Balart) Out of those 392, 4 lost their primary for re-nomination, and 51 lost on Tuesday. Nine others are still too close…Right now 55 of 392 are out. I’m not sure if 14% is high or not, but when you look at just Democrats, 49 (plus maybe more) of 236 lost. 21% of incumbent Democrats lost. In ’94, 34 incumbent Democrats lost. This may turn around the idea that you need a lot of open seats to take control.
I just went through Tim Sahd’s race rankings at National Journal, his final ones the day before the election. Sahd expanded his list to 90(!) seats by then.
http://nationaljournal.com/mem…
Big stinker for us: he had IL-10, where Seals choked to Dold, as no. 19 in likelihood of flipping. Adding insult to injury, that was the ONLY seat in Sahd’s top 53 NOT to flip. The top 50 Dem-held on his list all flipped, as did the DE-AL and Cao seats which both were in the top 6.
The most vulnerable Dem-held seat NOT to flip was Martin Heinrich at 54. Kurt Schrader at 55 also survived. Jim Costa is 59, Gabrielle Giffords is 61, and Gerry Connolly is 62, and I believe they’ll all win based on what we know about their vote counts. Everyone from 66 through 70 survived, but our people made up 17 of the final 20 and we actually lost 5 of those, all the way down to Oberstar at 89(!).
That’s 62 losses total out of the 84 Dems on Sahd’s list, and we still lost 3 more not in Sahd’s top 90! Melissa Bean, Bob Etheridge, and John Adler were those 3.
I’ll try to do the same evaluation for Cook and Rothenberg, but suffice it to say that Sahd did a stellar job that only one of his top 53 didn’t flip.
We go defeated badly here. 20+ Dem State Representatives lost reelection.
I think this is kind of interesting, ranking Senate Republicans by their percent of the vote, to see what states over/underperformed. Of course, numbers are still in flux a little bit, so it will be worth revisiting in a couple weeks.
HI: 21%
VT: 31%
NY: 33%
MD: 36%
NY: 37% (special)
DE: 40%
OR: 40%
CA: 43%
WV: 43%
CT: 44%
NV: 45%
CO: 47%
IL: 48%
FL: 49%
WA: 49% (or less, probably)
PA: 51%
MO: 54%
NC: 55%
IN: 55%
KY: 56%
LA: 57%
OH: 57%
GA: 58%
AR: 58%
AZ: 59%
NH: 60%
UT: 61%
SC: 63%
IA: 65%
AL: 65%
KS: 70%
OK: 71%
ID: 71%
ND: 76%
SD: unopposed
Some thoughts: Hoeven is popular! Portman almost outperformed Isakson, who did about as well as he did in 2004. Ayotte outperformed McCain, who did kind of crappy (he won with 77% of the vote in 2004!).
I put this together kind of thinking about whether a realistic map for Obama in 2012 involves holding the NE, the West (NM, CO, NV) plus NC, GA and putting AZ in play. Democrats did surprisingly well in NC and GA at a federal level (it may be overlooked that Marshall overperformed in GA-08 compared to its PVI, while Bishop eked out a win in GA-02). But that map would depend on massive mobilization of the black and hispanic vote, which is a dicey play.
I did this above for Tim Sahd’s National Journal House race rankings, now it’s time to look at Cook’s final product, on election eve.
Cook had 29 Dem-held seats in the likely R or lean R categories, and all 29 did, in fact, flip. Alan Grayson was the only incumbent out of the 8 seats in likely R; the others were open seats. And sure enough, Grayson got blown out. The 21 Dems in lean R included 4 open seats and 17 incumbents.
Cook had 49 Dem-held seats as tossups, with 45 incumbents and 4 open seats. Only 17 survived, including Jim Costa and Rick Larson who I expect to win as well as Grijalva and Giffords. So that’s 32 more that flipped.
Cook had 21 Dem-held seats in the lean D category. Out of those we’ve lost 3: Ortiz; Etheridge; and McMahon. Maffei also is on this list but his outcome is genuinely undecided and hard to project.
Finally, Cook had 18 Dem-held seats in the likely D category. Melissa Bean was the only loser on this list.
It’s a credit to Cook that every lost seat was somewhere on his list, and that 64 of the 65 to flip (again not yet counting Maffei as a flip) were no better than lean D. Indeed, 61 of the flips were no better than tossups!
Regarding GOP-held seats, Cook misfired on IL-10 just as Tim Sahd did, having moved it from tossup to lean D a couple weeks before the election. Of the 3 GOP-held seast we flipped, Cook had Djou as a tossup, Cao as lean D, and DE-AL as likely D.
Pretty good performance by Cook, everything was at least on his radar.
There are still some races to be called which could affect these numbers slightly, but the overall outcome is clear.
Before the election, there were 64 Democrats in red districts (R+1 or higher) and 7 Republicans in blue districts (D+1 or higher). This represented 16.7% of all districts (excluding the 9 districts with Even PVIs).
Now, there are 15 Democrats in red districts and 17 Republicans in blue districts, representing 7.5% of all districts (again excluding the Even PVIs).
There are now far fewer outliers:
19 of the 22 Democrats in R+7 or higher districts lost. Only Ross AR-04 (R+7), Chandler KY-06 (R+9) and Boren OK-02 (R+14) remain.
Republicans lost all 3 of the D+7 districts they held: DE-AL (D+7), HI-01 (D+11) and LA-02 (D+25). The bluest district now held by a Republican is IL-10 (D+6).
Candidates may matter in higher profile races (such as Senate or Governor), but prior voting history is more important in House races and that was especially true in 2010.
In CA, statewide Dem candidates got 50-55% of the votes and we lost very little in congress if at all.
In NY Gov and the two senators get 60+ and still we lose big in congress. Is it how the districts are drawn or something else?
I am really pissed off with Dem NY state senators who also had a lot of self-inflicted wounds. I really cannot ask anyone to vote for Sampson, Malcolm Smith and the gang. How come we do not have equally bad senators in California? Term limits?
I’ve done Tim Sahd and Charlie Cook above, and now it’s time to look at Rothenberg’s work.
Rothenberg had 17 Dem-held seats in the R favored category, including 7 open seats, and all 17 flipped.
He had 8 Dem-held seats, all incumbents, under lean R, and again all 8 flipped.
He had 23 Dem-held seats, 5 of them open, under tossup/tilt R, and sure enough all 23 flipped.
He had 17 Dem-held seats as pure tossups, and 10 flipped. Surviving incumbents were Giffords; McNerney; Heinrich; Bill Owens; Schrader; and Critz. Keating won in open MA-10. The flips included 8 defeated incumbents and open seats lost by Kuster and Oliverio.
Rothenberg had 5 Dem-held seats in tossup/tilt D, and 2 of them, McIntyre and Tim Bishop, survived.
The aforementioned lists account for 61 of our lost seats.
Rothenberg had 11 Dem-held seats in lean Dem, and all 11 survived.
And Rothenberg had 19 Dem-held seats in Dem favored, with 3 losing: Oberstar; McMahon, and Ortiz. Maffei also is on this list with his outcome undetermined.
That leaves one seat we definitely lost that Rothenberg rated as safe Dem: Melissa Bean.
Overall Rothenberg did well, about the same as Cook. Rothenberg didn’t have Bean on his radar, and Cook did. But Rothenberg had 61 of our 65 losses as no better than tossup/tilt D.
On GOP-held seats, Rothenberg had Cao’s seat as Dem favored; DE-AL at lean Dem; and Djou’s seat as a pure tossup. He had IL-10 as tossup/tilt D, and of course that was our big choke job.
http://voices.washingtonpost.c…
Just got to thinking, Scott Brown probably has seniority over about 12-15 senators heading into 2011. Not bad for 6 months work.
In the 2 years from the 2009 seating of the Senate to the 2011 seating, there will be close to 30 Senators seated in that time. is that a record across even a 4 year period?
Two states that didn’t have gubernatorial elections on Tuesday are getting new governors very soon: Earl Ray Tomblin (D) will become acting Gov. of West Virginia sometime this month, and he will have to call a special election at some point (it’s unclear whether he can wait until 2012.) Jack Dalrymple (R) will become Governor of North Dakota when John Hoeven resigns, which will apparently be in December.
Republicans will control 204 seats (could go down because of Florida), Democrats will control 47 seats. That last number would’ve been 100 except every liberal I know voted for Prop 20. Unilateral disarmament.
I am not one of those who believes this ensures a permanent Republican majority in the House, but I get the sense that things will become even more uphill.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/…
(Anyone know what the numbers were like in 2000?)
–As mentioned in the main posting, we’re still waiting for tons of same-day mail-in ballots along with provisionals; there are over 375K votes yet to be counted statewide, including 47K in Pima County and over 3400 in Cochise County.
–The Giffords camp seems to feel good about their chances of maintain their lead, noting that they won the early votes that have been counted by about 10K. Realistic, if they at least tie in the remaining early votes, than they should eke out a victory.
–The Kelly camp, meanwhile, has sent out a generic let’s wait until all the votes are counted message. Frankly, given his campaign’s propensity for hubris, with Jesse Kelly himself projecting on election night that he was on his way to a five-point victory, I think the subdued message is pretty telling. I’m not projecting a thing because there’s so much uncertainty, but I do know that I’d rather be in Giffords’ shoes than Kelly’s.
–Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez expects us to have a pretty good idea how all of the close races are going by Saturday. I don’t know if she means that it’s going to take that long for them to get around to posting any returns, or if that’s just when she expects enough results to be in for results to be clear.
–Democratic Attorney General candidate Felecia Rotellini, who is down by almost 67K votes, isn’t conceding yet. As I mentioned, there’s almost 400K uncounted votes statewide, but that’s still a pretty heavy lift for Rotellini. Kudos to her for getting so close in a year when other statewide Democrats were getting walloped.
–Russell Pearce, the author of SB 1070, was elected Senate President. Gross.
No offense, but your blurb on CT-Gov reads as overly dramatic to me. There was a big scoop on this site last night (from Taniel), and it doesn’t even show up in your overview.
Based on Taniel’s well researched analysis, I think it was pretty clear that the AP botched its New Haven numbers, underestimating Malloy’s position by a net of upwards of 12,000 votes. That alone would put Malloy in the lead.
It was great legwork by Taniel, posted in the comments right here, beating the local and national media by more than half a day.
Now they, too, are on it:
http://voices.washingtonpost.c…
As for Himes v. Debicella, the AP numbers don’t include ANY Bridgeport votes. That will add many thousands to Himes’ totals. It won’t even be close.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/f…
PPP says the swing from Obama in 2008 to the House Republicans in 2010 is 14 points (+7 Obama in 2008 to +7 GOP house in 2010).
Ken Calvert has continually done worse in every election here in CA-44, and while it sucks that it might APPEAR that he gained ground in 2010, he has got the fewest ammount of votes EVER this election.
Help me out here, I feel that I will somehow be forgetting something if I try to crunch the numbers myself, but I want to know what Calvert would have gotten this year if it was a neutral year (or even a slightly less republican year in the house). here are the results from the past 3 cycles in ca-44
2006
Ken Calvert (incumbent) 89,555 60.0%
Louis Vandenberg (Some Dude) 55,275 37.0%
2008
Ken Calvert (incumbent) 129,937 51.2%
Bill Hedrick 123,890 48.8%
2010
Calvert (Incumbent) 85,500 56%
Hedrick 68,391 44%
I know for a fact that Calvert should have done better this year. I think his support may have eroded percentage wise. 2008 +7 dem year he gets 51.2, which would mean in a neutral year he should have gotten 63% right? Now in a +7 GOP year, it means that in a neutral year he should have gotten 49%?
If this is TRUE, this makes me very optimistic, but I somehow feel that I may have done something wrong in calculating this (maybe because I compaired Obama swing to GOP house when I should have done 2008 Dem house swing to 2010 GOP house swing?)
Please stamp out my enthusiasm if I have messed this up somehow!
Murray has increased her lead over Rossi to 48,979 votes with the latest releases from King and Whatcom counties. More tallies due from Pierce and Spokane Counties due within the hour. Murray’s carried 68% of the King County votes tallied today and 55% of the Whatcom votes. In both cases this is an increase of 3% over the percentage Murray held in yesterday’s tally. Rossi’s lead in the Spokane votes tallied yesterday was 1.5% lower than it was on election night. Nobody is calling this yet but commentators on KOMO are suggesting they could.
Larsen’s lead over Koster (WA 2) is now 1500 votes.
too big to overcome with ballots outstanding. Larsen’s win percentage was 58% in Whatcom County votes counted today.
WA state senate outlook improved today too with Tom up and the 48th district looking safe. D leads in 45th house seat now, too. In Pierce County Ds extended their leads in 28th district.