NY-09, Special Election Thread

[Torie]

No, only someone dropping crazy statements on here for a while would accuse folks of thinking that way on here.

But I will say that a race like this does mean that the Philly suburbs are likely in play this year and that the Dems can't blindly count on Pennsylvania this year.

I've seen some pretty out there predictions from Republicans here before, I'll just leave at that.

There is a difference difference between a House races and Presidential races. NY-9 was decided on Israel, probably almost totally.

Get your sh*t straight. You could make an argument for that in Brooklyn, you absolutely cannot write off the piss poor performance in Queens on the Israel issue. That is Obama through and through right there.

Yes, this gay marriage thing was way overblown due to one of our posters who really cares about that issue. Sure it may have cost Welprin a couple of points. I think the Jews in NYC in this CD are more concerned about other Obama policies (think Middle East, Muslims, etc.), along with the economy like everyone else.

[Torie]

Is it just me or are the ones that want sh^t crazy posts all over this thread all Dems. There may be only like 4 of them, but they are all Dems.

I appreciate the other 90% of D's and I's on here that do write sane posts.

Hopefully that wasn't directed at me. Just go take a look at the map of NV-2 in Clark County. It doesn't come close to the urban core of Las Vegas, or the Democratic stronghold of North Las Vegas. I stand by my statement, Politico doesn't know what it's talking about.

I never mapped NV, so I for one can't opine on this. But it would seem that the Dem CD in Vegas would have sucked up most of the most Dem precincts, and then we have a second CD which sucked up the marginal ones, which leaves  ... ?

[Torie]

I projected on my spreadsheet assuming all the remaining precincts are the same size as those which came in, and the votes counted will be the same break as those already counted in Brooklyn and Queens respectively, and came up with this - an 8% to 9% margin for Turner. It dropped a bit because the Turner percentage margin in Brooklyn has dropped a bit. About 15% of the precincts are left to be counted.

37551   54.4%  Turner
31481   45.6%  Welprin
   
69032   8.8%  margin

[Torie]

Is the Dem machine in these parts toothless? Just asking. Welprin seemed to think he could get a disproportionate Dem turnout in a low turnout election. Maybe he did, and that is why he didn't lose by 15%.    Or maybe it is BS. Any opinions?

[Torie]

By the way looking at the Nevada map, CD 2 definitely does include a decent portion of North Las Vegas and its pretty safe to say that most of the 6,000 votes came from part of Clark county since the southern part is very rural. I mean there is like one road throughout that part and a couple very tiny towns.

That was North Las Vegas they just got creamed in.

Ok, mapped things out on DRA. The district contains about 86,000 residents in Clark County. Of them only 27,000 live in North Las Vegas, excluding Nellis AFB (which doesn't have that many people anyways). What we seemed to miss was the city of Mesquite. That adds another 25,000 odd residents. And it's on the Utah border. Also those precincts in the south do have a lot of people, and those are relatively wealthy areas and they vote Republican. About 40,000 odd people there. The North Las Vegas portion is about 50% Hispanic, wheareas the district overall within Clark County is only 27% Hispanic. In a special election I really wonder how many people showed up. The rich areas to the south I am sure showed up, and Mesquite seems like it would be teabagger central. Unless we have precinct results, we can't tell whether there was a catastrophic swing in North Las Vegas or not. And considering how few people actually voted in Clark, and the fact that no one advertised there, it would be safer to look at the populated areas of northern Nevada. Carson City results are very interesting to me.

Next to nobody voted in North Las Vegas.  That is the reasonable inference from the really low turnout in Clark. It was only 18%. In Washoe it was 32%  

[Torie]

Bob Turner is not Jewish.

That makes his pandering even more disgusting.

Why is that? He's reaching out to his potential (now actual) constituents. Is that wrong? And maybe he really agrees with their point of view. This particular WASP is also very pro Israel, and I make no apologies for it - none. But yes, I also favor gay marriage.

And I admire the Orthodox Jews for voting for a goy over one of their own tribe, if that is what he is. It shows they are not parochial in that particular way. Good for them!

[Torie]

Surveys like that tend not to be worth the paper they're printed on, though that particular pattern is obviously true. To repeat, the cause for concern isn't anything specific to Jewish voters in the district.

Yup. Obama really needs to worry about lower middle class and working class white Catholics more. He's being killed there at the moment. And there are a lot more of them of course across the fruited plain. In the handful of precincts in this CD in that category, Welprin was probably slaughtered. It will be interesting to see the precinct by precinct results, since due to my mapping I think I now know the CD quite well.

[Torie]

From the below, you can see just how tight a correlation there was between the McCain vote and the Turner vote. It appears to have been a generalized swing (at least among whites), rather than something special to Orthodox Jews.  If anything, at least based on the coloration, the swing appears to have been higher among Catholics. That McCain area in the NW corner of the CD is Catholic.

[/quote

[Torie]

Yes, NY Jew, there does appear to have been an especially strong swing in Rego Park to Turner (I noticed that before and should have mentioned it, but was pressed for time when I posted, and forgot), along with the Catholic areas in the NW corner (Middletown), where you see a lot more red than in 2008. I wonder why Rego Park voted for Obama but not Welprin, when the rest of the Orthodox areas also voted for McCain. I suspect in white areas there was a swing everywhere (including upper middle class fairly Jewish more secular Forest Hills), it was just a matter of degree.  I don't know about the Hispanic precincts, as to whether they swung, or just didn't vote much. They still went for Welprin.

The white Catholic areas of Brooklyn of course swung massively to Turner. They went for McCain, but this time by much larger margins.

[Torie]

I need a Yiddish dictionary! 

[Torie]

Woah, we're still talking about this?

We just can't seem to nail down precisely exactly where the lines on the Venn Diagram go delimiting the nexus between certain Jews and gay nuptials. It will probably take another several pages to get that most important job done. Deal with it! 

[Torie]

Behavior of that sort doesn't do anyone any favours.

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Anyways, that's quite a bit closer, right? The same thing happened in this district at the last normal election. So... if his election had been a tad closer, would it have bee possible for a wrong winner to declare victory and get seated (I think that's the American term)?

Correct verb American style, but no. It is highly unlikely that Turner would have been seated if there were some loose ends. The Dems would have howled. It would have required them to have been silent. But if he were "seated," and the numbers were reversed, he would have been "unseated."

Those uncounted precincts seemed to have never been counted, however (I checked and the numbers did not increase). They must have merged precincts, and nobody told AP. Thus the margin was less, because the "uncounted" were mostly in the Pubbie zone.