Not rain outside the capital, but rain on their previous election day. It turns out that rain creates a “barrier” to Democrats voting, costing Democratic candidates as much as 2% of the vote:
Apparently, Democratic Congressmen get spooked by the election day results and think their support has fallen, when really all that happened is that it rained so unreliable voters stayed home.
It won’t be raining in CA on Election Day, I can tell you that. 
Happily enough, I live in Oregon, which has vote by mail. I’m always taken slightly aback when I hear the phrase “stay at home” on election day, because I don’t have to go any further than my mailbox at the end of the driveway to vote.
Voting is a fundamental right, and a pillar of a free society. It should be as easy as possible to vote. Hell, I think even the cost of postage should be waived. Also, make it possible to vote online (with the appropriate security measures, of course).
There’s been talk of that up here. First, we have a few ballot drop-off points where you don’t need postage, and they’re talking about greatly expanding those, but also there’s been rumblings of sending a postage-paid envelope out with ballots.
Incidentally, do I recall correctly that in Oregon, ballots have to be received by end-of-day on election day? Here in Washington, they only need to be postmarked by election day.
Yes, that’s right. But you can drop them off until election day at various places like libraries and city halls. Or the county elections office, which is what I do, since it’s only a mile or so away.
There’s lots of people who do this. In fact, in the first election with all vote-by-mail (2000, I think), there were so many who did this in Multnomah County that it delayed their release of voting numbers for two or three days. During that time, the totals reported for Oregon were in favor of the Republicans, yet no one was calling the state for Bush. A lot of people not familiar with the situation wondered why, but the bulk of the Democrat voters are in that county and they outnumber the Republicans in the rest of the state.
And if it does, we’ll be out dancing in it and might as well go vote while we’re out.
Here in Minnesota, individual areas are free to choose voting by mail (like Oregon does). But since we have same-day registration, they do have to have a polling place open on Election day to register new voters. Several areas, mainly low-population, rural ones. But the law specifically prohibits the large cities in the state from doing this. Because those cities are strongholds of Democratic voters, and Republicans don’t want to make voting easy for them, IMO.
The interesting part is that pols know that rain represses Democratic turnout disproportionately. Yet they react this way anyway.
I think the Mondale-Reagan race of 1984 is even more interesting. Mondale lost in a landslide and the Democrats responded by concluding that the New Deal coalition was no longer intact and that they needed to retool. I’m not unhappy with the result.
But if you control for incumbency and the state of the economy, Mondale didn’t do too badly. In fact he beat the point spread as it were. But nobody had heard of Ray Fair’s work at the time, so none of this was appreciated. Oddly enough, it’s not generally understood to this day.
https://fairmodel.econ.yale.edu/
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14893182&postcount=47
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18517921&postcount=2
This video does a good job of explaining why that’s a really bad idea.
never mind