I’m not from Kentucky, but from what I read the next step for Bevin would be to request a recanvass, and from there he can request from the courts for a recount. He’s already said there were “irregularities” that have been “corroborated”.
I love the part in this article when the law professor says:
Has he not been paying attention the past few years to Republican conduct?
They couldn’t give a flying fig about appearances because their supporters don’t care. The whole party is becoming increasingly hostile to democracy, and their supporters are enabling it to happen. The Republican controlled legisilature will do everything in their power to make sure the scales are weighted in favor of Bevin.
I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect there will be a recanvass, followed by a recount followed by “irregularities” that result in a Republican win.
Bevin, using traditional Fox/Limbaugh talking points as his governing principles (unions=bad! Tax cuts=good! Medicare:bad!) was 34% popular. In KY.
Trump added 15%.
Does this imply that the market has effectively collapsed for traditional, post-Reagan, conservativism and that the only thing which kept the R’s in power in 2016 was the whitelash?
That’s my take as well. Pundits gonna pund and they have to fill up hours of tv but I don’t think local races are going to be a big indication of things to come.
I also agree that the vote for governor doesn’t have much to do with how the presidential election is going to go. Even here in NJ a republican governor gets voted in when people are pissed off about what is happening in the state. Maybe even next election (Murphy is not too popular). The next time the state goes republican for President I will be long dead and forgotten.
Here’s my take:
In 2016, Trump seemed to speak to these people’s grievances. Even if they were superficial ones, borne of frustration, he was speaking to them.
Bevin stopped speaking to these people. He campaigned for re-election on the issue of Trump’s impeachment and how bogus it was.
Whereas his opponent spoke, yet again, to the issues that impact the people of Kentucky - their jobs, their healthcare, their retirement, etc.
Meaning, I think what worked for Trump was a version of “I feel your pain”. Except it’s proven hollow (as any reasonable observer of Trump could have predicted); come the 2020 election, these people will yet again look for somebody to recognize that they have frustrations that need to be addressed…
The question is will Trump speak to them on a visceral level - again addressing their concerns (however weakly) - or will his re-election just be an ongoing boastful rant about his greatness and his concerns (like the “unfair” impeachment).
More importantly, will a Democratic candidate be able to provide more genuine messaging?
Except that turnout in Virginia looks to have been in the mid-40s, percentagewise. (This is by my own calculations*, comparing with recent years; no firm reporting yet.) It was 47.6% in 2017 (when the gubernatorial race was on the ballot) and 29.1% in 2015 (when, like this year, it was just the state legislature that was on the ballot). (Cite.)
That’s your information, right there.
*ETA: I’m literally having to add up individual race totals on a hand calculator. Those counts are from here, but the adding-up part is mine. I’m getting ~1.25 million Dem votes alone.
Follow-up: Well, not so much. LG candidate not only ran well behind Hood, but about two percentage points behind the Democratic AG candidate, who was a black woman running on an openly progressive platform. I suspect his vote for a rather draconian anti-abortion bill cost him, and I’m definitely coming around to the “you may as well run to the left, because you aren’t really going to make inroads among people who incline toward the other party in any meaningful way, and meanwhile you alienate your own party’s most reliable voters” point of view.
And it begins. All they need to do is follow the process. Do the recanvass, make up some lies about irregularities, and then contest the election to the KY House and Senate. Democracy will be usurped and Republicans will cheer.
I’ve already called my Congressman (Hoyer), saying the House should be proactive on this, and remind the KY legislature that, per the Constitution, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” so the Federal government has the authority to intervene if Kentucky refuses to abide by the results of its election.
The guy answering the phone seemed to be pretty sure that the legislature can’t do anything like that, noting that Alison Grimes, the Kentucky Secretary of State, has already declared Beshear to be the winner. I pointed out that the legislature would act after the Secretary of State’s role in the election was over, and he said something about the FEC. I pointed out that the FEC is gutted right now - doesn’t have a quorum to act (which is how the GOP likes it). He brushed that off, but said he’d pass my concerns on to the Congressman.
There isn’t much the House could do besides hold hearings, but it can raise the visibility of this issue. It’s a bit harder for the national media to ignore the story if the action in this story isn’t just happening in Frankfort, but is happening on Capitol Hill as well. And the more attention being paid to this story, the less likely the KY legislature will be bold enough to overturn the election. If the national reporters start circling, they’ll be more likely to feel that they’re out of their league in trying to do this.
It’s really the same sort of information that midterm elections and special elections give.
Like you just documented, first that even in an off year no governor’s race election turnout was big, and with Ds coming out to vote.
And then further analysis of where the votes will either support or go against various theories that inform moving forward. And I am very much looking forward to those analyses.
The initial take on this election (see 538’s first stab for example) is that suburban performance shifting very D-ward is the story line. And yes those are the seats that shifted. But I’d love to know how much the margins were in rural districts compared to 2015 or even 2016 and 2018. Yes the D more often lost there but was it by less? A lot less? Analysis of midterm results showed that there was a bigger shift in rural districts than in suburbs, even if majorities in those districts voted R. Like in other elections how the vote goes relative to the partisan lean (or past performance) tells us more about the national mood of the demographics.
Q: Election Day 2019. Will today’s results show how things are trending for next year?
A: We can project and predict all we want but IMHO we’re still too far out to do more than fantasize. Much unpleasant shit can materialize before then. Yes, IF nothing screws up the works THEN we can say, “Look at this trend!” without total discombobulation. But am I willing to place serious bets on 2020 outcomes? Not hardly.
It would take a mammoth shift in rural districts to make up for the shift in the suburbs: rural America just doesn’t have the population density, unless you’re talking about Wyoming or North Dakota. if we’ve got the cities and the suburbs, there just isn’t that much left over.
Here’s the totals I came up with from the numbers on the Virginia elections website - for whatever reason, I couldn’t get them to load into Excel at work, but I could at home, which made the arithmetic a lot easier. In the 40 Virginia Senate races, the Dems got 1.211 million votes, the GOP got 892,000 votes, and there were another 158,000 votes for third parties, independent candidates, and write-ins. (That a 57.6% share of the two-party vote turned into a mere 21-19 edge in the state Senate suggests that that body might be just a wee bit gerrymandered. But the Dems have full control through the end of 2021, so they get to draw the lines for the 2020s. But I digress.)
Democrats don’t outnumber Republicans by anywhere near that much in Virginia. But they showed up in big enough numbers to make it seem that way.
I haven’t seen the details behind the math yet but Dave Wasserman tweeted a couple of days ago that, had Virginia Repubs not gerrymandered so aggressively back in 2010, they would have held on to the state legislature this year. I’m hoping the same over aggression helps Dems in North Carolina next year.
We desperately need multi-member super districts as proposed in the Fair Representation Act to eliminate gerrymandering once and for all. Doing so will make us a better country.