Election 2018 Open Thread - Part 1

[Brittain33]

NJ is now 11-1 on NYT site, but NJ-3 and NJ-7 are extremely close.

[Brittain33]

Hey guys Atlas didn't crash! Thanks Dave!!!

And Virginia, for crafting the changes to help keep it up.

If Virginia in charge of the IT side of Atlas?

She takes initiatives.

[Brittain33]

Looks like Dems will win the House Popular Vote by around 4% which is not the 6%, 8%, 10% etc figures we were hearing. It it less than 2006 & 2008. So this isn't a wave. This is like only 2% better than 2016.

What are you going on? We have a few million votes in California we won't see for many days to come. It would be surprising for Dems to have taken the House with a 4% swing when we were told it needed >5%. 

[Brittain33]

Looks like Dems will win the House Popular Vote by around 4% which is not the 6%, 8%, 10% etc figures we were hearing. It it less than 2006 & 2008. So this isn't a wave. This is like only 2% better than 2016.

If Dems had done 3-4% better like it was expected (D+7/8), probably 30-35 more House seats would have been in play & FL/AZ would have been easy wins with perhaps an upset in Texas ! Maybe we would have had a 51-49 GOP Senate even if ND, IN & MO were gone.

4-5% certainly isn't a wave.  What is shocking is Florida went 5% to the right of the National PV.

To a degree yes, but Trump's approvals are relatively high in Florida compared to other key states. As I said earlier, I think he keeps the sunshine state in 2020 regardless of the national outcome (unless there is a 2008 Obama style victory for Democrats).

Yes, Trump's strength with Florida Man is the mirror of his weakness with educated suburbanites. It's a state that fits him.

[Brittain33]

Something to remember: outside of the Atlas/punditsphere, a majority of Americans were expecting Republicans to hold both the House and the Senate.

Huh, I didn't notice that pre-election.  Do you have a source on this? (Genuine asking)

I do, but I'm on my phone right now, and I saw it a couple of weeks ago, so i don't have a quick link to post. I'll post it when I do.

This is basically impossible for me to believe when "Blue Wave" was a completely mainstream meme.

It was in Gallup's last poll. I think on Monday. People thought Republicans were going to hold the House by a 50-44 margin. The numbers for Senate were more lopsided.

[Brittain33]

Were Rosendale and Morrisey the only carpetbagger senate candidates, or did any win?

[Brittain33]

Rosendale is not a carpetbagger.

Oh, my bad.

[Brittain33]

Andy Kim officially took the lead.

Nice! 11-1!

Even Chris Smith got a far closer race than he's used to. It's amazing NJ Dems managed to do so well despite Menendez's toxicity.

Big failure by Van Drew to barely win by 5 in a so called Safe Seat. Like ik pundits aren't the best but I generally do take their calls on the safe seats.

The thing here is that this is the kind of district Dems have tanked in since 2012. It’s not metropolitan at all. I attribute the closeness to the fundamentals. The district was safe because Van Drew was supposed to be unbeatable titanium and the Republican was horrible, but it turns out VD wasn’t such a Superman.

[Brittain33]

Looks like NM-2 may follow NJ-3 into the blue column.

[Brittain33]

Does anyone else think that Mitt Romney's win in Utah was a little underwhelming? Barley getting 60% and losing two counties he won when he ran in 2012, plus maybe an outside shot of losing Salt Lake County.

Romney's win was very underwhelming. He did about 9% worse as compared to 2012, and as you have noted, lost two counties (and only narrowly won Salt Lake County). Why Romney underperformed to such an extent is beyond me. Some people on here actually thought he would get 80% of the vote!

I think a good chunk of suburban Mormons around SLC are moving away from the Republican Party under Trump. Not enough to wildly flip any results for the foreseeable future, but it's something.

Are they moving away from Rs, or did they just sit out this election because they don’t like Trump and Romney was a shoo-in? Governors’ races in Utah are in presidential years so Mormons could safely stay home.

[Brittain33]

How else can you call the people who voted for Grossmann other than deplorables?
And  of course pundits will accuse Democrats that they don't do enough to reach out to them.

Given how few people follow news well and how undercovered and underadvertised this race was and how uneducated this district's population is, it's possible a large number of Grossman's voters never even heard about his views and just voted party line.

[Brittain33]

Andy Kim's lead in NJ-03 has expanded, he's now up more than 1% (around 3,500 votes). I think it was the remaining Willingboro votes, which he didn't end up needing to take the lead because of absentees but did pad his margin. There are now no precincts outstanding, though maybe a handful of absentees and provisionals. Seems like that race should be called; 1.1% is a significantly wider margin than any other uncalled race outside of California and UT-04 (where a lot of ballots remain to be counted).

Congratulations to the real first Korean-American congressperson!

Some guy was elected in Southern California in the early 1990s... I think in Riverside?

[Brittain33]

35+ seats in the house
At least a 7% popular vote victory
Net loss in senate of 2, maybe even 1 depending on Florida despite the worst possible map
7 governors mansions gained
This is a wave my friends

As soon as the words "net loss" appear, the "wave" argument becomes problematic. 

Normally, the party that doesn't control the presidency loses. This is within the normal range. It is not as strong as the shifts in 1994, 2010, both in terms gains and total numbers of seats.  The gain was a bit better than 2006, by one seat, but the total seats are much lower; in that one the winning party gained 6 Senate seats. 

I'm still of the view that it wasn't a blue wave, but something else altogether that doesn't have a pre-determined term.

What do you make of people claiming it was a red wave?

Likewise,if the term "net loss" is used in regard to the House, it isn't red wave either. 

J.J., you may be interested to learn that 100% of the House is up for election every two years, while only 1/3 of the Senate plus special elections is up every two years, and Democrats went into this election with something like a 75% share of Senate seats. If that gets knocked down to a 65-35 win, well, you can tell yourself what you like about what “net loss” means, but I think other posters here will draw their own conclusions.

[Brittain33]

Even if the margin narrows to 13k votes it will be very hard for Nelson to win



He has to win more than 19000 of the 25000 votes then to win and that means he will have to win over 75% of the undercount

I mean, if Gillum has 25k votes more than Nelson in that county, doesn't it mean the the undercount might be superior to 25k since I would assume most Gillum voters would have voted for Nelson? How do DeSantis's and Scott's compare to each other in that area?

At this point we don't know if it's an undercount or an *undervote* caused by bad ballot design. If it's the latter, well, statistically we know how 99% of those votes would have gone but there's no recourse.

[Brittain33]

Mimi Walters is only up by 2,020 votes at the moment. 103,975-101,955.

[Brittain33]

Ya usually I’m on board with Nate’s odd data perspectives but it doesn’t make much sense to include the House gains as a president gains office with his first midterm.

There needs to be some way to account for the different exposure each President had to a reversal in the House. Otherwise you're "penalizing" the Dems in this comparison because Obama was a better candidate than Trump running in a landslide win.

[Brittain33]

https://twitter.com/Garrett_Archer/status/1062133529654394882

Which means dems F***ed up here, since they only had one nominee instead of two (you get two votes for the MMD house districts). If they had two nominees who both won, then the house would be 30 - 30.

Their nominee only got 34% of the vote!

Does that mean anything, though? People voting Republican cast two votes, one for each R; people voting Democrat cast one vote and forfeited their second vote rather than vote R. If there were 2 Dems, wouldn't each have gotten a little more than a quarter of the vote?

[Brittain33]

Even if McSally is only being nice because she wants to run again... we could do with more Republicans behaving responsibly toward Democracy even if it’s only out of self interest, because our system needs people to accept a loss gracefully because they are confident they will get their turn in the future.

[Brittain33]

Pretty funny that in AZ, the Green Party candidate is named Angela Green ... and she‘s black.

What's significant about her being black? It would be weird if she were green-skinned, but the odds are very high she'd have been white if she weren't African-American, and what's interesting about that? Lots of Americans have last names which are colors: Green(e), Brown, Black, and White are common.

[Brittain33]

Pretty funny that in AZ, the Green Party candidate is named Angela Green ... and she‘s black.

What's significant about her being black? It would be weird if she were green-skinned, but the odds are very high she'd have been white if she weren't African-American, and what's interesting about that? Lots of Americans have last names which are colors: Green(e), Brown, Black, and White are common.

I think he means that it's that it's very uncommon to see non-whites in far-left movements like the Greens.

The thing is, that may be a stereotype, but it's not true.

I mean, also, Jill Stein isn't full of beer, but that's not that interesting.

[Brittain33]

I don't think Utah is projected to get a 5th seat yet.

[Brittain33]

Am I the only one who was a bit surprised to see Brian Fitzpatrick winning? I wasn't shocked, and I knew Wallace was a weak candidate, but I sort've expected Wolf/Casey Coattails to pull him over the line. In any case, this should be a top target in 2020.

It surprised me too. Remember polls in PA-7 showing Wild up by high teens, and polls with PA-11 competitive? But I guess it makes sense if you think about how rate of college education is lower in Lower Bucks than in other suburban counties.

[Brittain33]

This thread got too long and that can't continue even while California continues counting. Locked, please proceed to new thread.

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New thread: https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=306940.0