All the GOP heads asploding, would sound like popcorn from space. Oooh, popcorn!
I was praying the pieces wouldn’t fall on me.
-Dylan, “Day of the Locust”
The PredictIt model is one approach, and yeah, odds are still great this will be a GOP win. Even 4 to 1 seems surprising, honestly. If they did it like lots of sports betting I wonder what the spread would be now?
I’ll take R+6 as my spread bet. That would be a 15 point shift from the margin that Trump won by. If that happens the significance of this sort of district shifting by that much is giant. It’s one thing to have had shifts of that sort in suburban districts, another to have them in predominantly white blue collar districts, to have that sort of shift also in one that is overwhelmingly White, mostly older, wide margin registered as Republican, sunbelt one, that national GOP PACs have poured money into? The implications for not only the House but even for Senate races like Cruz v O’Rourke are hard to overstate.
Cook Political Report has shifted its estimate from “Solid R” to “Likely R” – still a long shot for Democrats, to be sure.
Even if she doesn’t pull off the upset, it sounds like Tipirneni comes off as a strong new Democratic face in AZ politics. Considering that Democratic politicians in AZ have overall been rather lackluster in the past few years, having a solid D candidate in AZ is useful.
So called for Lesko with current margin 52.9 to 47.1 (about 6 points) with total vote count so far 82 to 72K. If that holds I claim the bragging rights 
and more importantly, dang a 15 point shift in that district. It will of course be reported mainly as the GOP win but I am fairly sure a good many GOP candidates are taking notice of its real meaning.
I’m curious about something: On average, how much of an advantage do you think incumbency is? Like, if you had to put it in terms of points in an election, is being the incumbent worth an extra one point? Five? Ten? What’s your best guess?
According to this, it’s at least 8 points.
I have no idea how valid (or not) this is, but for kicks, I typed in “impeach Trump” into the Google Trends search engine. Idaho, Arizona, and Iowa are in the top 25 states in terms of “search interest.” I doubt that there’s any serious interest in an actual impeachment, but I’m wondering about the extent to which this could reflect the political mood in these states.
Close but no cigar. The degree to which the Republican brand has diminished even in a deep red district is encouraging. I hope Nancy Pelosi is doing some curls to work up the muscle in her gavel hand.
“If the only data point you had to go on was last night’s #AZ08 result, you’d think a 30-40 seat Dem House gain in Nov. would be way low.” - Dave Wasserman, Cook Political Report
I see blue wave a-risin’… 
… just asking questions, but who do you have winning the next 3 Super Bowls? 
Not nearly as big a deal, of course, but last night a Dem won a NY state assembly seat on Long Island that had been in Republican hands since 1978. The Dem, Steve Stern, beat Hillary’s 2016 margin by 11 points, and Obama’s 2012 margin by 15.
'Pubs see trouble on the way. 
Oh, they noticed: GOP unsettled by narrow win in US House race in Arizona
Except Republican politicians have scant experience listening to their constituents, instead choosing to focus on listening to their donors. Frankly, I’m surprised any of them realize they aren’t the same thing.
The wave unseating Repubs is going to be, dare I say it, HYUUGE.
Yeah, but I’m not just going to be okay with this. On Friday, Bill Mahar said it best. He said that Blue Wave sounds like a cheap cologne found at Walgreens. “Blue Wave, from the same people who brought you ‘Inevitable’, by Hillary Clinton.” Yeah, we know all about counting the chickens before they’re hatched.
We’re only one Trumpster (Reichstag) Fire away from disaster.
So is Tipirneni considering a run for either of the upcoming Senate seats?
We’ve already got a good candidate for Flake’s seat in Kyrsten Sinema, who’s doing well in the polls.
If McCain resigns or dies in time for his seat to be on the ballot in November, maybe Tipirneni can run for that one.
Even if McCain isn’t out (one way or the other) in time for November, it’s almost certainly going to be soon.
43 Death Pool players (including me) have him on their 2018 lists.