You’re too kind. It isn’t partisan principles, just partisan spite. And real people get hurt by it.
If there was ever a rebuttal to the, “I’m not going to vote because my vote won’t make a difference” argument…
It would really suck if the Dems missed by 13 votes. But Dems have been losing important elections by even slimmer margins over the last 13 months.
It’s okay if the Dems don’t take the House of Delegates; they need to be hungry for 2018.
You may be right. Losing by 18 votes might be a motivational factor. Knowing that their vote counts.
An update on the House of Delegates races:
Currently, the GOP candidate leads in 51 districts, and the Dem leads in 49. According to the Virginia Department of Elections website, there are currently four districts (all with the Repub leading) where the state would pay for a recount if requested: the 27th, 28th, 40th, and 94th, where the GOP leads are 128, 84, 106, and 13 votes, respectively. The biggest percentage margin of any of these is 0.44%.
There’s one race where the trailing party (the GOP, in that lone case) would have to pay for a recount: the 68th district, where the Dem leads by 331 votes (0.85%).
It’s unclear to me whether they’re still counting the provisional ballots, or whether that’s done. Voters who voted provisionally had until noon on Monday 11/13 to provide ID that would enable their provisional ballots to count.
I assume the Dems will request recounts in all races where they’re within 0.5% once the results are certified, because why not? It’s free, it might swing a race, and if it does, the GOP no longer controls the House of Delegates.
In the 28th district, Dems are claiming that two precincts were inappropriately split between the 28th and 88th districts that the redistricting law from 2010 says are supposed to be entirely in the 28th. Both halves of both precincts went heavily Dem, and would have easily flipped the seat if the Dem claims are correct.
Since you can’t just take votes for the Dem candidate in the 88th and transfer them to the Dem candidate in the 28th, there’d have to be a special election in the 28th if the Dems are correct.
In the 94th, after counting some provisional ballots, the margin is down to 10 in favor of the Republican. The Dems protested the exclusion of 8 Christopher Newport U. students’ votes, which would have got the margin down to 2. (Fun fact: I taught there, 30 years ago.) Is there gonna be a recount in the 94th? Hell yes!
Aaaaand it looks as if the Dems’ claims AREN’T correct about the 28th district. Matt Rowe has a good explanation here.
TL;DR version: the redistricting law describes the precincts as they were at the time of redistricting. Localities are free to redraw voting precinct boundaries, and Fredericksburg did this subsequently. The Code of Virginia also contains boundary line descriptions of the HoD districts, those control, and those boundaries cut through those precincts as currently defined.
So the GOP candidate is still 84 votes ahead, pending a recount.
Apparently they werepartly correct, but the errors were at a more granular level.
The Dems are challenging the results of this race in Federal court.
And there will still be recounts in the 28th and two other districts, including the 94th where the GOP candidate leads by 10 votes in the initial count.
Fat lady ain’t sung yet. 
More evidence that Virginia may finally have rejoined the Union:
They’ve finished the recount in VA-94. Shelly Simonds, the Democratic candidate, has gone from being down by 10 votes to WINNING BY ONE VOTE.
This puts the VA House of Delegates in a 50-50 tie, pending the results of the two other disputed races (28th and 40th).
Never say your one lousy vote can’t matter. In this case, each and every person who voted Dem in that district can pat themselves on the back for having taken control of the VA legislature away from the Republicans.
OK, according to BallotPedia (great site, btw), I’m running behind. The recount for VA-40 has been completed, and the Republicans retained control of that one. So as soon as VA-94 is certified (which should happen tomorrow as a matter of routine), the VA House of Delegates is 49-49 with two races undecided.
One is VA-68, where the Dem leads by 336 votes going into a recount scheduled for tomorrow. (The GOP had to pay for this one, since the margin was more than 0.5%. The likelihood of the recount changing the result is minuscule.)
The other is VA-28, where the Republican leads by 82 votes going into a recount scheduled for Thursday. AND the Dems are also challenging this result in court (see post 229 above) and asking for a new election. There’s a court hearing on the legal challenge on January 5.
IOW, fat lady STILL ain’t sung! 
:eek:
Yes, Virginia, sometimes one vote is what matters.
Wow, I donated $25 to Shelly Simonds. I feel unexpectedly powerful.
Your $25 was the bit needed to run that last batch of copies for the telephone poles and utility boxes of wherever the winning vote was cast… good job, Fretful Porpentine!
AP story is pretty comprehensive, but I especially liked this bit at the end, about the Fredericksburg recount scheduled for Thursday:
If the difference between the candidates was 82 votes, 147 mis-placed votes is a big deal, IMO.
And now some of the ‘progressive’ purity ponies are turning their ire on Northam because he won’t give them a unicorn and has to work with Republicans
No, that wasn’t it at all. People, rightly or wrongly, interpreted his initial remarks as backing down on his commitment to Medicaid expansion. I was following people on Twitter during the interval between Northam’s initial remarks and his later clarification, and it was crystal clear that that was the issue.
Work requirements, cost sharing, and drug testing should be non-starters for Democrats when it comes to Medicaid. They do not work to do anything but keep people who need help from being able to access it.
It sounds like the GOP accepted their loss with good faith and good spirits.
Not like a Mississippi election two years ago where the final vote was tied exactly, the Democrat drew the winning straw,*** the Republican candidate conceded, but the GOP-controlled Mississippi House reversed the outcome*** by finding 5 “illegal” provisional votes. (It seems pretty likely they made no effort to look for “illegal” provisional votes for the Republican.)