2014 US Congressional Election Results

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Vosem, I doubt California will be worse than R+2 and even that is being charitable to the Republicans. Costa will not lose because Fresno doesn't count its vote till late. Brownley, Bera and Peters are in a bit of trouble though. Aguilar should pull it out as well.

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Vosem, I doubt California will be worse than R+2 and even that is being charitable to the Republicans. Costa will not lose because Fresno doesn't count its vote till late. Brownley, Bera and Peters are in a bit of trouble though. Aguilar should pull it out as well.

Tacherra is out to a lead of more than 1000 votes now. I don't know how much margin Fresno will give Costa, but he'll need every vote. CA is R+2 right now (Aguilar, but Ose/Tacherra/DeMaio), with Democrats having more narrow leads and the Central Valley, from Garamendi to Valadao and everything between them, getting more Republican as counting progresses. In an ideal scenario for Democrats D+1 isn't out of the question, but I think R+2, or worse, is quite conceivable.

In intra-party races, Newhouse, Honda, and Knight have all maintained consistent leads in the high single digits; I'd imagine they all win. Knight was considered a distinct underdog to Strickland, and Khanna was considered to have momentum against Honda. Newhouse was expected to win.

In 2010, Costa sat behind by something like 2-3 points for days until Fresno finally got its sh**t together. Although this year with very low turnout, especially among democrat leaning Hispanics and Asians, that might not be enough. We shall see. 

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Also, Costa lost in a D+7 district. Fail.

The fat lady hasn't sung yet, and likely won't. Yay Fresno!

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Also, Costa lost in a D+7 district. Fail.

The fat lady hasn't sung yet, and likely won't. Yay Fresno!

Is the stuff that's still out in Costa's favor? I didn't know

Nah wait sbane, 100% of precincts are in, and Costa is down 49-51.

Oh, trust me there is a lot. Especially in poor, hispanic heavy inner city Fresno. I think Costa was in an even worse shape in 2010. I wouldn't be surprised if he won by more than 2-3 points. From what I can see the state hasn't released an unprocessed ballot report yet. Keep an eye on that.

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Elk Grove may end up saving Bera. It is a middle class, fairly new suburb with lots of minorities, including blacks. It is the sort of place that would love to vote by mail. Also, it is not correct to compare Bera's district to Baca's. Sure, both have lots of minorities but they are different. The minorities in Bera's district are middle class and less likely to sit out an election. Also Bera isn't thwt reliant on young people in his district as it is basically suburban. 

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/0622020.html

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So a likely recount in Ca-7? That should help Bera even if he ends up a few votes short in the first count.

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http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CO/53335/148748/Web01/en/summary.html

So Udall won all the suburb counties and still lost?  Wow, bunch of idiots living in Denver voted for the Uterus.

Yeah, good luck ever winning a presidential election in Colorado again.

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It is extremely frustrating how in all these close western US races, the final votes always seem to favor the Democrat.  Of course it is a given that provisional favor the D candidate; just the nature of the beast that is provisional voting.  But absentees is another phenomenon entirely.  The CA Democrats must have this process down to a much better game plan.

Since these are mostly permanent vote by mail voters, these people have a better turnout than Election Day voters due to the convenience of voting by mail. This means they more closely model a presidential election as opposed to a midterm election. Soft supporters of the democrats end up voting for them even during these waves whereas they might not have done so if they had to wait an hour in line.

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With 33,000 left to count in CA-07, Ose is up 530; I think Bera wins this.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article3727753.html

McSally's lead has dropped to 179 votes; unsure of how many are left to count. A judge also refused her move to stop counting some of the provisional ballots.
http://www.chron.com/news/article/McSally-lawyers-trying-to-block-some-ballots-5883510.php

As to AZ-02:

"McSally leads Barber by 179 votes with about 4,000 left to count in Pima County including write-ins. An automatic recount will be triggered if the two candidates end up separated by about 200 votes or less."

That means about 2,200 left to count in Pima in AZ-02.  That means Barber needs to get about a 54-46 split on the balance (a bit more if one deletes the write ins and over and under votes), to close the gap aside from all of the legal contretemps, and absent a recount changing the numbers much. I am fairly confident that has not been his margin in the late counted votes - absent something weird happening with the provisionals, which may be what this is all about. 

As to CA-07, it appears to me that Bera is on the pace to a lead by a tiny margin, very tiny. Close to two thirds of the remaining ballots have been counted outstanding in the CD since the prior vote dump (much of the County is not in the CD from looking at the votes remaining in the County) and Ose's lead dropped by just a bit more than two thirds. So the trend line change from the previous late vote dump would have to hold - as near steady as an expensive Swiss watch, to bag it for Bera.

What number of outstanding ballots are you assuming is in CD-7? Remember, this is basically half of the county by population and certainly casted more votes than CD-6 in this election. The other districts in Sacramento barely have any people in it. It might not be a bad assumption that of the 33,000 ballots left to county in the entire county, more than half would be in CD-7. Even if you are conservative, and say that only 15,000 are left in CD-7 (assuming the late voters are disproportionately poor democrats voting in CD-6), you still only need about a 52-48 Bera lead on the remaining ballots for him to win. Not easy to do, but it is certainly doable. And any recount should help Bera, IMHO.

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AZ-2 is an R+3 district, as is AZ-1. AZ-9 is R+1. Yeah, those secret Democrats are really drawing the lines to protect themselves

Those GOP  PVI's were inflated by McCain being on the top of the ballot in 2008.

Inflated, but not inflated that much. A R+3 district is still a pure tossup, maybe just slightly Republican even after accounting for McCain's overperformance. So we have four strong Republican districts, two pure tossups, one slightly Democratic district and two Democratic districts. How is that not a fair map?

Also, Romney won both AZ-1 and AZ-2 while losing by 4 points. So it is charitable to say they are tossups. Probably closer to lean Republican.

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http://sacresults.e-cers.com/resultsSW.aspx?type=CON&map=MPRC

Bera takes the lead. It's basically over with only 19,000 ballots left to count in the entire county (no way to know how many from CA-7) and 9,000 of those being provisionals.

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AZ-2 is an R+3 district, as is AZ-1. AZ-9 is R+1. Yeah, those secret Democrats are really drawing the lines to protect themselves

Those GOP  PVI's were inflated by McCain being on the top of the ballot in 2008.

Inflated, but not inflated that much. A R+3 district is still a pure tossup, maybe just slightly Republican even after accounting for McCain's overperformance. So we have four strong Republican districts, two pure tossups, one slightly Democratic district and two Democratic districts. How is that not a fair map?

The way to gerrymander is to pack your opponents into some districts, while giving your districts a slight advantage.

Now imagine you have a district that is perhaps 53% R, compact and formed from natural communities, such as cities or counties.  You decide to make it more "competitive."

How do you do this, you move Democrats in, and Republicans out.  But switching areas that
are 53% Democratic and 47% Republican is tedious and takes a lot of switches, even though the political similarity suggest a greater community of interest.

So instead you grab a small 80% chunk of Democrats and expel some Republicans to another district that is already overwhelmingly Republican.

But you overlook the fact that the measurement of voters in the 80% Democratic area was in a midterm election, and perhaps against a weak candidate (think of the Ohio gubernatorial race, where a somewhat unpopular incumbent in an extremely competitive state, blew out his Democratic opponent by 30%).   Or maybe the statewide candidate happened to be from the area and ran a couple of percentage points above the partisan trend in the area.

Didn't the commission systematically underpopulate the competitive legislative districts in Arizona?

None of the congressional districts save AZ-9 could be considered to be gerrymandered, and even there the justification for that is competitiveness. The republicans wanted to shove more of Tucson, including white liberal areas, into Grijalva's district so they could take over the 2nd (formerly the 8th). Now that would have been a partisan gerrymander.

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House Democrats really need to send Jerry Brown some kind of present -- his popularity and successful governance was very likely what saved the close Democratic House seats in CA. At some point after he is gone, the dam will break.

The comparison between AZ and OH is a strawman argument. No one disputes that OH is completely openly gerrymandered in favor of the Republicans. The difference is that Democrats seem to feel that AZ is a completely reasonable, non-partisan map, when it's clear that portions of it were designed in 2011 to be favorable to Democrats. Being a fairer map than OH's isn't really a spectacular accomplishment.

Actually, most Democrats ran way behind Brown. Congressional candidates maybe won the state by 10-12 points and state legislators by even less than that. Candidates like Bera and Ruiz won because they are good candidates. Brownley and Baca, not so much.