Maybe the most optimistic projections you’ve seen. I’ve been following Josh Marshall’s numbers peeps throughout the past few weeks, and let’s just say I’m getting a different impression there.
Anyhow, this is not just a show of solidarity. I’m proposing this bet because I think I’d be more likely to win than lose.
ETA: You’ll have to dig back several days to get any tweets relating to CA-21 in that feed. Over the holiday weekend, sports rather than politics has dominated the discussion.
Just some basic stuff: here you can see the county-by-county breakdown of the Valadao-Cox voting. (Look in the lower left and lower right. I think that big block in the center is the party breakdown of registered voters. I’m ignoring it.)
As you can see, the counties in the district are Fresno, Kern, Kings, and Tulare. None of those counties are entirely in the district. However, we can see that Tulare’s contribution is pretty small - presumably not much of the county is in CA-21 - so the effect of their remaining ballots will be pretty minimal.
From here, we can see that Kings County (Valadao’s best county) is all but wrapped up: the county as a whole has only 1,577 ballots left to count, and 1,040 of them are provisionals, which lean more Dem than the other votes. Basically Kings isn’t likely to help him much either.
So it comes down to Fresno and Kern. Kern is Cox’ best county; he’s gotten over 60% of the votes so far. And Fresno so far has tilted only slightly in favor of Valadao, and what they have left is almost entirely provisionals.
Really at this point, Valadao’s only chance is if the overwhelming majority of the ballots still to be counted in Fresno and Kern counties are outside CA-21. If there are still a few thousand ballots left to be counted between those two counties that are in CA-21, I think Valadao is cooked.
I think that by tomorrow night, Valadao’s margin will be <1/3 of what it is now (assuming he’s still ahead), and there will still be a pile of ballots to be counted.
Cox now leads Valadao by 438 votes.
And the networks still have Valadao called as the winner!
NBC just retracted its call.
A bit behind the curve here, one would have to say.
And yet still ahead of ABC, AP, etc.
538 weighs in on CA-21 - The Last Unresolved House Race Of 2018
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Why the California 21st is likely to be the 40th Democratic pickup.
NY-22 still hasn’t been called.
No, NY-22 was decided about a week ago, when it became mathematically impossible for the GOP incumbent, Tenney, to catch the Democratic challenger, Brindisi. See for example anthony brindisi congressman-elect ny22 112618, It's over: Anthony Brindisi defeats Claudia Tenney in 22nd Congressional race - syracuse.com, and https://ballotpedia.org/New_York's_22nd_Congressional_District_election,_2018, among others.
It was a close election, but not unusually so–a difference of about 4,000 votes out of a quarter million cast.
I believe Tenney has not yet officially conceded, but that’s, well, not official. Who has not yet gotten with the program in calling the race?
I can’t find it now, it was a side column in an article on the Valadao/Cox race, but now I can’t find it.
Cox wins CA-21, so the number of GOP Congresscritters from California in the new Congress will be not-so-lucky 7.
And dammit, nobody took me up on my bet offer. C’est la vie. 
I have to say that, if that’s really the best a California congressional district can do when it comes to properly tallying the outcome of an election, it’s time to stop staffing the county elections offices with DMV employees.
It’s really not the fault of the election workers. It’s a structural side-effect( “flaw” if you prefer )of how CA conducts elections. A majority of Californians vote by mail and mail-in votes are accepted right up until the day of the election. So they continue to trickle in days after the election has taken place and they all have to be sorted, verified and counted. It just isn’t a process amenable to quick results. In fact said results aren’t even formally due until December.
The difference between this district and the others is just that is was very, very close. In most you can extrapolate a winner quickly, just based on election day results. In this one most services did in fact call it when Valadao was up by 7-8% which is a very high barrier to overcome. It just didn’t up holding, which is kind of extraordinary.
Actually, as it turns out, “ballot harvesting” appears to have had a lot to do with it. California now allows a third party to “collect” your ballot and turn it in in a timely fashion. Several counties had massive dumps of harvested ballots, all of which have to be treated like any other off-site voting: careful vetting of validity before being counted. Which leads one to the question: what’s the likelihood that “ballot harvesting” in California is being done more scrupulously correctly than the apparently fraudulent “ballot harvesting” in North Carolina? :dubious:
Does your use of quotes suggest you have some reason to suspect their legitimacy? Or is that just lame smearing?
As I understand it, these are mail-in ballots that are delivered to polling sites up to the day of the election. Prior to the 2016 law, it was legal for a third party to collect and deliver a ballot, but it had to be a family member or somebody who lived in your household. The law was instituted to allow **anybody **to collect and deliver these mail-in ballots.
In my mind, this is no different from me asking somebody to take my ballot down to the post office and mail it, which, as far as I know, is still legal. In both scenarios a small opportunity for fraud is available, but it’s very small, as the ballot has to be verified before it’s counted.
The use of the quotation marks is to indicate exactly what they stand for: I am quoting the language being used. “Ballot harvesting” is not some normal term that is used in everyday speech, so I quote the term to make sure that people understand that I don’t ascribe any particular meaning to it beyond what is being used by the people being quoted.
But, yes, I DO suspect the legitimacy of ballots that are “harvested” (quotes here used to show that I think the term is unusual when applied to ballots, not crops). The ballots in question in North Carolina are “harvested” the same way; they simply were fraudulently “harvested”. How does a county election board know when a ballot was signed and sealed to know that a vote contained thereon wasn’t fraudulently made?
See the North Carolina district thread for a discussion of what can happen in these cases. How do you verify that the ballot was not fraudulently filled out? :dubious:
A cite to the California law regarding ‘ballot harvesting’ is needed here to support your claim.
The current contretemps comes from SB 450. Specifically this change found within:
Previous code: Section 3017 (a)(3) However, a vote by mail voter who is unable to return the ballot may designate his or her spouse, child, parent, grandparent, grandchild, brother, sister, or a person residing in the same household as the vote by mail voter to return the ballot to the elections official who issued the ballot, to the precinct board at a polling place or vote center within the state, or to a vote by mail ballot dropoff location within the state that is provided pursuant to Section 3025 or 4005.
New code: However, a vote by mail voter who is unable to return the ballot may designate any person to return the ballot to the elections official who issued the ballot, to the precinct board at a polling place or vote center within the state, or to a vote by mail ballot dropoff location within the state that is provided pursuant to Section 3025 or 4005.
