(RCV) Both Portlands (ME, OR), Fort Collins, CO, Evanston, IL. Still pending the count in Nevada and King County, WA, a handful of smaller cities in CO, UT and CA.
Rejected in Washington counties north and south of Seattle, which puzzles me a little.
Depends on the counties. Seattle is a very dense pocket of blue, which bleeds somewhat into Shoreline to the north and a bit less into Tacoma to the south, but after that it fades rapidly to a vast ocean of red in the rest of the state. But that vast ocean of red is made up mostly of sparsely populated wheatfields, forestry land, and abandoned industry space, so Seattle’s voters call the statewide shots. In other words, Washington is a blue state overall, but minus the metropolis it’s as reactionary-conservative as Alabama. It’s not surprising that a progressive reform initiative would fail outside the city.
A comment from a non-Doper who’s also watching the results:
“I feel like a guy whose compass is so goofed up I have no idea which way is north,” Gingrich said.
From that article:
“The issue set was clearly in our favor — on inflation, on the border, on crime — and yet we failed to meet expectations,” said Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff.
The idea that the issue set was clearly not in their favor – on immigration, on civil rights including genuine religious freedom, bodily autonomy, and the right to vote and have one’s vote counted, on the crimes members of their party have been committing and/or advocating – doesn’t seem to enter their heads.
Thanks for this, I knew that there were some states that require same-party replacements or special elections. It goes the other way too — NC has a Democratic Governor but is required to fill a vacancy from a party list.
When do we expect the next tranches?
No, we don’t need any more of this, at all. The less we start seeing toxic buzz like this the quicker the political discourse will (and darned well better) improve.
Re - the bolded - no - it won’t be more educating. It’ll simply be more fodder for the alt reich to bray about “duuuuuur election fraud!”
Really? I thought it was neck and neck with 1% of the vote remaining, with a future possilibity of recount?
RCV was actually on Portland ballots twice. Once as a standalone measure for county elections, and once as part of the major change in city government. Both passed.
Portland currently has a one-of-a-kind commission government where five commissioners each manage departments like police, fire, transportation, etc. We swapped that out for…another one-of-a-kind government with a city administrator running the departments and three commissioners each in four districts elected using a unique form of RCV. Unlike most RCV schemes, in this system first-choice votes are assigned to the second choice either when the first choice is eliminated, or when the first choice already has enough votes to put them over the top. It’s a complex system that needs its own thread for deeper discussion.
I voted for it with the thought that the current system was broken, and it will be easier to fix the parts of the new system that don’t work versus getting approval of an entirely new system.
This is true in every state outside of New England. When I lived in PA we had a name for the red area: Pennsyltucky.
Yep. Cities are blue islands in a Red Sea. That’s the reality of American politics. Really it’s not that unusual or surprising from a historical perspective.
The bit that gets me is the one where people think this means that more if the nation is red.
Indeed - they look at a congressional map and get panicky.
There’s a great comeback to anyone suggesting that the vast sea of red on most political maps means that this is a conservative country, and that the blue cities shouldn’t have as much influence:
“Land doesn’t vote, people do.”
Yeah, really.
I myself have experience working elections at various levels, and like the Arizona officials explained, what all these people are claiming to be suspicious things, are just the way these things always work.
Because they don’t know how it really works, they are easily convinced there must be somethign wrong afoot if things don’t come out like they expected it to happen. But the reality is there are always delays in getting all the absentees and provisionals verified, always delays in certifying final count totals if a race is close, always people who only find out on election day where is their polling station, always stations with long queues, always machines that jam, always misvoted ballots/hanging chads/transposed numbers.
People are just used to that in a majority of cases the trend is clear early on and it once used to be that everyone would agree on what that meant and candidates would concede and media outlets would call; in the end if some final numbers changed it usually didn’t change the bigger picture – oh, a majority flips by fewer seats than expected, or you reelect vs. flip two or three different offices than you planned, but still wind up in the general ballpark you expected; and if there’s a close count for a critical seat, well, that is something that for most of us is happening somewhere else… so “of course” something’s wrong if it happens HERE.
But explaining all this to them would, in their minds, only be proof that the system IS rigged because all that is just not what is supposed to happen.
The people who take this position don’t get it. And it’s very hard to explain. They genuinely think it’s unfair for city people to have more political power just because there are more of them.
I have been having this conversation since 2000. When it was proposed that the electoral college is undemocratic, they cools t see past the notion that it’s just fundamentally fair to weigh small states’ votes more heavily.
In part I think it’s because they aren’t thinking of themselves as individuals but rather as members of a group. And every group should get a fair say. Or something? I guess?
Heck, it’s even true in Redxas Texas.
Last I checked, New Jersey is not New England and we’re mostly blue or purple except for our most rural counties. You see the same in New England actually. NY has vast Red area but it has vast rural areas still.
When a majority of people say that inflation, crime, immigration, etc are the main things they’re worried about and the majority of people say that they trust Republicans on those issues more than Democrats, it’s not unreasonable to think that the issues are in your favor.
However it seems like a large factor was “We trust Republicans more on [issue] but not THOSE Republicans…” This is something that Democrats will need to work on for next time when they can’t trust in the low quality of GOP candidates to compensate for lack of public trust.
This map from the 2020 election shows detail finer than county-level:
It shows a blue band through New Jersey running from NYC to Philly and from Philly to Atlantic City, with the rest of the state red (although not the deep red seen in rural areas in larger states. Most of NJ is at least pink.
Heck, even MA, CT, and VT have pink rural areas, although less than half the state. NH and RI are about 50% each way. ME looks like the typical non-New England state.
We still have the AZ Governor race left. Hobbs (Dem) vs Lake (MAGA). There will be a drop tonight that should put an end to things. Lake needs 56.5% of the remaining 266k votes which are expected to be slightly red but not nearly enough.
Lake predicted that she would win in a landslide and explicitly said that she didn’t want any McCain Republicans in her tent.