Don’t look now but with 31% reporting in, New Jersey is neck and neck with the Republican one point ahead.
If things hold up like it looks like they’re going to, it’s hard to overstate how little time Democrats have to turn things around before the 2020 midterm. Early voting in some states means that the next election is about ten months away.
Man, it’s like they’re already too late!
Looks like India Walton’s celebration of having beaten Byron Brown in the Buffalo city mayoral race primary months ago was pretty short-lived.
“With 87% of precincts reporting, Write-In leads India Walton, 59.7%-40.4%.”
33K to 23K — for write-in against an “unopposed” candidate.
And New Jersey insists in staying interesting. Percentages 49.9/49.4 at 11:30 with 73% in.
Some times I do wonder if they’re on a different calendar…
85% reported now and less than 500 votes have Jack slightly ahead. As a good part of the remaining 15% are mail in ballots and they believe the mail-ins will favor Murphy, most think Murphy will win in the end.
Locally a friend of mine won his minor township election. So that’s cool.
The “conservative” slate seems to be ahead in Seattle’s municipal elections. While the late votes always break progressive, Bruce Harrell is probably too far ahead for Gonzalez to catch. Nikkita Oliver is closer to their challenger, Sara Nelson, but Nelson is still likely to win. Teresa Mosqueda is the only progressive candidate ahead of her challenger, so she’s likely to hold on. But it’s worth noting that her opponent, Kenneth Wilson, is an absolute nobody (even the Seattle Times made no recommendation in that race rather than endorsing him), but is still pulling 47% as of last night’s vote drop.
And then there’s our city attorney race, pitting the ‘abolitionist’ Nicole Thomas-Kennedy (NTK) against the switched-to-Republican-in-2020 Ann Davison. The reasonably sane incumbent, Pete Holmes, got squeezed out in a close primary where every candidate got > 30% of the vote. Turns out NTK’s abolitionist platform is too extreme, even in Seattle. I doubt she’ll be able to close the gap with the late votes, but we’ll see.
Next up is a recall for city councilmember Kshama Sawant, a socialist whose MO tends more toward theatrics than governing, and sometimes those theatrics break the law. (And when I say socialist, I don’t mean social democrat a la Bernie Sanders, but a the-government-should-seize-productive-assets-like-Boeing’s-factories socialist.) Anyway, as for borderline-illegal theatrics, specifically, first, she disclosed the address of our current mayor. Normally, the address of public servants is known, but Jenny Durkan is a former prosecutor, and due to some case she prosecuted, she has been allowed to suppress her home address from public record to protect her safety. Also, Sawant opened doors at city hall for protestors to enter in violation of city-wide pandemic rules. And on the more penny-ante side, there’s a mini-scandal where she produced campaign literature using a city photocopier. She represents the youngest, most progressive district in the city, though, so my guess is she’ll survive.
Very suddenly Murphy is ahead with 89% of the votes in. He is now up by 15,000. So most likely a large city reported in.
Also at least 5 counties haven’t included early voting results in the tallies released.
Congrats to Eric Adams, The new NYC Mayor. A Democrat and former police captain.
I will fully confess that I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the Virginia race this year. I have a lot of other things going on, it’s all the way on the other side of the country, and I’m probably a little burned out still from the 2020 election. But what’s filtered through to me is this: McAuliffe ran primarily on a campaigning of painting Youngkin as Trumpy. Youngkin ran on local issues, and made a lot of hay out of Critical Race Theory. If that comports with how a low-information Virginia vote would have seen the race, I honestly can’t be too surprised that Youngkin pulled it out.
And the take-away is obvious: in 2022, Democrats should run on their accomplishments (economic growth, child tax credit, etc) [*] and on what more they can do with larger majorities (climate change, paid family leave, taxing the rich and corporations.) It turns out when you get away from Defund the Police (which isn’t really a mainstream Democratic position), Democratic policies are popular. With redistricting the and the headwinds of a midterm, I’m not sure it’ll be enough to win for them, but it’s a hell of a lot more likely to than running against a former loser president, again.
[*] Assuming they can get those fucking bills passed. If they can’t, they’ll lose big in 2022, full stop.
Well, the progressives and blue dogs are conspiring to prevent anything from passing.
A good-faith question… isn’t it mostly the Blue Dogs that are keeping things from passing? The progressives seem to be quite generous here from where I’m getting my news. I mean, can you blame progressives for doing all they can to fight for the remainder of an already gutted bill?
Why are progressives getting equal billing here in this debacle?
Sounds like a topic for a different thread. Leave this one for the election please.
There were some other, even more interesting stories from election night:
The Democrats picked a Democratic Socialist in the primaries in Buffalo. Buffalo was supposed to be a lock for the candidate. But the guy who lost in the primary wound up beating her as a write-in candidate. And it wasn’t even close - the write-in candidate won by more than 20 points. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like that before.
New Jersey was +16 for Biden, and no one gave the Republican a chance. The race is still too close to call.
In Seattle, Bruce Harrell is absolutely crushing the progressive candidate, Lorena Gonzalez, 65-35. Also, all but one of the progressive conncil members on the ballot went down to resounding defeats. In Seattle.
Minneapolis had a progressive ‘police reform’ bill that was supposed to pass. It failed.
Virginia by itself may have not been a national bellweather for progressives, but combined with the results elsewhere they should be very worried that yesterday marked a sea change in American politics.
On the good side for everyone, this election has diminished Trump. Republicans won without pandering to him, he wasn’t invited to any campaign events, and Republicans who thought that fhey would have to put up with Trump to win again discovered that he’s not necessary, and actually a drag on Republicans.
Also, McCauliffe tried to hang Trump around Youngkin’s neck, and it didn’t work. Trump,is even losing power as a weapon against Republicans.
I’m hoping this election will mark the start of the post-Trump Republican era.
All three of the races in Cleveland I care about went the way I hoped, and by comfortable margins. The one for the police oversight board (which would have the power to fire misbehaving officers) passed 60-40. Oh, and my mom’s neighbor got 85% in her race, though that’s not relevant to anyone here.
The city attorney race in Seattle solved a moral dilemma for me. It was a weird one - the incumbent bungled the primary, and the choices were a v. moderate Republican and a mad-left socialist who promised to stop prosecution of misdemeanors, really did mean “abolish the police” when she said it, and tweeted some really (really) nasty things. Turns out that even Seattle prefers that thieves, you know, might end up in jail sometimes. What it solved was the question “when the left’s version of a Trump-level nut comes along, would I consider an R despite vowing never?” turns out, yep. at least for city attorney.
Meanwhile down in Florida, in the late Alcee Hastings’ 20th district (fascinatingly drawn to consist of a number of urban neigborhoods across Broward and Palm Beach counties, but corridored to be connected by a whole damm lotta swamp), the 11-person primary for who’ll be the Democrat candidate in the special election come January ended up with Dale Holness and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick separated by twelve votes. Not points: Votes. This margin mandates a hand recount.
Holness is seen as the closest to an Establishment guy, a county commissioner and former mayor. Cherfilus-McCormick is a twice failed challenger to Hastings in prior races, a health care executive who used her own fortune to finance her campaign (solidly outspending everyone) and has usually run as against the old establishment with an overall progressive platform. National progressives apparently gave divided endorsements, some to her, some to state legislator Omari Hardy, but the contenders that got most of the newspaper and labor union endorsements finished out of the money.
Being a +31 Democratic district it is expected by everyone that whoever wins the primary will finish Hastings’ term, and may face a primary again within eight months of being in office, if they want a term of their own.
Murphy has been re-elected as NJ governor…narrowly.
Glad to know my early vote for him counted in the end.
While I do think that Democrats need to pass the reconciliation and infrastructure bills just to show that they can do anything, I think that them doing so will have a negligible impact on the 2022 elections. The benefits of these bills either won’t be felt for years (infrastructure, affordable housing), simply extend existing benefits (child tax credit) or have benefits that aren’t immediately obvious to the average voter (climate change). Democrats being Democrats, they’ve killed off provisions that could have been short-term dynamite for them to run on like paid family leave and free community college. And the single best thing they could have done politically – dramatically reigning in prescription drug prices – has been whittled down to letting Medicare negotiate over 10 drugs but no sooner than 2025.
If Democrats are going to have a prayer in 2022 it lies in whipping coronavirus and fixing the supply chain and labor problems that are hobbling the economy. And that’s a big haul to get done in less than a year.
I’m really shocked it was this close in New Jersey.
Well my household contributed 4 votes to the effort at least.
NJ had a few state Senate seats flip to Red. I need to check that later today.