Good news... for Martha McSally!
Leading Off:
• AZ-02: On Tuesday most of the remaining ballots were counted in this swing district, and it appears that Republican Martha McSally has unseated Democratic Rep. Ron Barber. McSally currently leads Barber by 133 votes, with only about 200 to 250 ballots remaining countywide. Unless there's been a major error somewhere, this is a GOP pickup.
Because the margin between the two candidates is less than 0.1 percent, a mandatory recount will take place, but Team Blue shouldn't get its hopes up that the result will change. It will be a while before we have a final official result though. Arizona Public Media lays out what we're in for:
A congressional race in Arizona is subject to recount if the margin is fewer than 200 votes after the official secretary of state's canvass and certification, scheduled for Dec. 1.
The secretary then would go to Maricopa County Superior Court, where a judge would issue an order for the recount, which would be conducted electronically by the secretary of state. Following a hand count of a small number of randomly selected precincts and comparison of that with the electronic count.
If the count is within a predesignated margin, the results will be declared final, and the judge will issue an order to that effect.
For his part, Barber is not conceding and is preparing for the recount. We'll see if anything changes over the next few weeks but barring a major surprise, the GOP will flip a seat that they've spent the last eight years trying to retake.
Uncalled Races: Several races remain uncalled as of Tuesday evening. We recently ran through them here and here is an update for each race where we have new information. You can check who has won each key race at our uncalled races tracker.
• AK-Sen, Gov: On Tuesday, 15,257 additional ballots were counted statewide. Republican Dan Sullivan now leads Democratic Sen. Mark Begich by 8,071 votes, with Begich netting 78 ballots. Independent Bill Walker leads Republican Gov. Sean Parnell by 3,839 ballots, a 674-vote increase from Election Night. There are about 35,316 ballots left, though election officials caution that more can still arrive.
Begich needs to win the remaining ballots by well over 20 points, a very daunting number. We don't know where the remaining ballots are from but unless they're almost all from very pro-Begich areas, it's hard to see the incumbent winning. Parnell will need to take the remaining votes by a little more than 10 points; it's not a good sign for the governor that he lost ground as Sullivan picked up votes.
• CA-07, 16, 26: We're expecting more votes to be counted in the first two seats on Wednesday, and possibly also in the 26th District. In the 7th District, Democratic Rep. Ami Bera currently trails by 530 votes; in the 16th District, Democratic Rep. Jim Costa is down 741 ballots; in CA-26, Democratic Rep. Julia Brownley is up 1,030 votes.
• NY-25: Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter still holds a 582-vote lead over Republican Mark Assini: She has declared victory but Assini is waiting for the remaining ballots to be counted. Updates are expected on Wednesday and Monday. There are reportedly 1,300 absentees left and 2,000 affidavit ballots: About two-thirds to three-quarters of affidavit ballots are usually counted. If there are 3,000 ballots left (Assini's best case scenario), he'll need to win them by a little more than 19-points, which is a very tall order.
Senate:
• GA-Sen: Unlike this year, the Peach State won't see another open Senate race in 2016: GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson says he'll seek a third term, sparing his party the need to defend a potentially vulnerable seat in a year when Democratic turnout is likely to be stronger. With Isakson running again, it's unlikely Democrats will try to make a serious effort here. But if Georgia somehow winds up in play on the presidential level, a capable challenger could find this race suddenly competitive, so the party should prepare for that possibility, even if it's a longshot.
P.S. Kudos to Isakson for announcing so early. He'll be 71 by Election Day, so it wasn't unreasonable to imagine he might retire. But instead of dragging things out as so many senators have done so many times, often to the detriment of their own parties, Isakson wasted no time in in making his plans perfectly clear. Anyone else considering retirement should follow suit and announce before the year is over.
• LA-Sen: Did you miss watching GOP ads tying Democratic candidates to Obama? If you did you're in luck, because the NRSC returns to the Pelican State with a new spot linking Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu to the president.
House:
• WA-04: Even though multiple media outlets have called this contest for Dan Newhouse, intra-party rival Clint Didier declared on Wednesday that he wasn't conceding. Newhouse currently leads by 2,614 votes with only about 3,240 votes left. Didier says he wants every vote to be counted which is noble but not a particularly good reason to hold out hope for an upset: Didier would need to win the remaining ballots with about an 81 point margin to win.
Other Races:
• CA State Assembly: Since Friday, it's been clear that Democrats have lost their supermajority in the state Assembly. Team Blue also fell one seat short in the state Senate. The two-thirds supermajority would have allowed Democrats to raise taxes and place constitutional amendments on the ballot without Republican votes. However, the GOP's victory was more symbolic than anything else: The beleaguered state party wanted to show donors and potential recruits that they could still win tough races in the Golden State. Democrats may be able to get the Assembly supermajority back in 2016, but they don't have any good Senate targets next cycle.
• IL Treasurer: Outside of Alaska, the only remaining uncalled statewide race from last week is the battle for state treasurer in Illinois. The post was open this year because Republican incumbent Dan Rutherford made a disastrous bid for governor that crashed and burned in the GOP primary. That set up a fight between Republican Tom Cross and Democrat Mike Frerichs, and man is it ever close. According to Scott Kennedy, who runs the aptly named website Illinois Election Data, Cross now leads by just 492 votes out of almost 3.5 million cast, or barely one hundredth of a percent.
That's down from a 22,000-vote edge for Cross on Election Night, so of course Republicans are now hollering about voter fraud!!!11!. It's not clear how many votes remain to be counted statewide, and we probably won't have clarity until on or after Nov. 18 (when election officials will stop accepting mailed-in ballots). But stick with Kennedy, who has stayed on top of this contest very closely.
• ND State Senate: Here's one for the silver linings pile: As you may know, North Dakota's insidious fetal personhood amendment (known as Measure 1) went down to defeat last week, and it didn't just fail, it got destroyed by a decisive 64-36 margin. That's pretty impressive loss for such a red state in such a red year, but it gets better.
Not only did Measure 1 implode, its chief proponent, Republican state Sen. Margaret Sitte, also lost, and by a big spread as well: Democrat Erin Oban, pictured above, ousted Sitte with a crushing 58-41 victory. In addition to her fanatically anti-choice activism, it certainly helped that Sitte is bugnuts crazy. As community member by Rashaverak detailed last year, Sitte opposed a bill that would require caretakers to notify the authorities if a child goes missing or dies. Why?
I affectionately call this bill the "Make Mary and Joseph Felons Bill," because Jesus was missing for three days.
Oh. My.
What makes Sitte's defeat even more amazing is that her 35th District is very, very red—in fact, it went for Mitt Romney 60-38 in 2012. The means Oban out-performed Barack Obama by an astounding 39 points despite the massive GOP wave. There may not be any other Democrat in the nation who can lay claim to a feat like that. In a year with very few positive developments for Team Blue, this surely counts as welcome news.
• San Jose Mayor: Despite trailing in the few publicly released polls, Councilmember Sam Liccardo has been elected as San Jose's new mayor. On Monday, fellow Democrat and Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese conceded, ending this close race. Liccardo's win is a disappointment for labor, who hoped that Cortese could roll back some of outgoing Mayor Chuck Reed's pension reforms; several labor-backed city council candidates also lost.
• State Legislatures: Several state legislative seats still remain uncalled, and Ballotpedia has created a tracker to keep an eye on them. No chambers are at stake, but the Democratic supermajority in the Illinois House depends on them holding HD-79. Democrats also want to hold the two remaining Colorado Senate seats, which would give them an easier path back to the majority in 2016.
• VA State Senate: The entire Virginia legislature will be up in 2015, and Daily Kos Elections community member Johnny Longtorso takes a look at the state of play in the state Senate. While Democrats only need one seat to take back the majority, they're almost entirely on the defensive this time: It may be a while before the chamber returns to Team Blue.
Grab Bag:
• Election Outlook: Last week we at Daily Kos Elections experienced the shameful joy of being the most correct about how poorly the Democrats would do in the 2014 Senate races, in terms of the Brier score for our Election Outlook, compared with other major model-makers. We started wondering about whether that would also apply to our model for gubernatorial races, even though there's a limited data set there (only Huffington Post and FiveThirtyEight bothered to calculate individual odds in these races, which remain unsexy compared to the Senate despite the fact that the state houses, not the completed gridlocked Congress, is where any action is going to occur in the next couple years).
It turns out that we were also the most correct of the three prognosticators who looked at gubernatorial races. The difference is paper-thin, 0.08 versus 0.09, but Election Outlook again finished a nose ahead of the pack.
• Psychographics: If you're interested in the nexus of politics and retail (not retail politics, but actual retail), no doubt you're aware of the Starbucks vs. WalMart ratio that Nate Silver pioneered in 2008, then followed a few years later by Dave Wasserman's more refined and precise Whole Foods vs. Cracker Barrel ratio. However, thanks to a new app created for Time Magazine by AggData, we can now pinpoint the most polarized retail duo: the American Apparel vs. Belk ratio! (In case you're not familiar with them, American Apparel mostly targets 20-somethings in major cities, while Belk is a mid-range department store mostly in malls in southern suburbs.)
This is only based on real estate, i.e. which congressional district their stores are located in, not the more rigorous personal data that aggregators like Experian collect. And, of course, this is only vague correlation, not causation (in other words, putting Waffle House food into your body doesn't change your brain chemistry in a way that makes you more Republican, it only shows that Waffle House is likeliest to put locations in places where people are demographically likelier to be Republican already live). Interestingly, sheer ubiquity tends to push chains more toward the middle; Starbucks and WalMart are close to the center, almost to the same extent as McDonalds, simply because they're everywhere. There's also a feature where you can type in pretty much any chain you can think of, and see what percentage of their locations are in Democratic or GOP districts.
• Turnout: Talking about turnout in a midterm election is kind of a misleading mixed bag, because without a presidential election at the top of the ticket, you get a lot of variation between states depending on whether there are hotly contested races or not. If you look, for instance, at Michael McDonald's latest state-by-state turnout data, you'll see that Maine (with its crazy gubernatorial race) is the state with the highest turnout this year, at 59.3 percent. That's very unusual; I don't think I've ever seen Maine on top of that list before.
Usually it's one of the Northwest's vote-by-mail states or the Upper Midwest, but this year, Minnesota (51.3) and Oregon (52.0) didn't have especially competitive gubernatorial or Senate races, and Washington (38.6) didn't have gubernatorial or Senate races, period. Wisconsin (56.9) did have a competitive race, good for second place, followed by Alaska (55.3) with super-competitive races, and Colorado (53.0) with not just pivotal races but also the full switch to vote-by-mail.
Who's in last place? Indiana, with no gubernatorial or Senate race at all, fared worst (28.0), but only slightly ahead of Texas (28.5), whose turnout problems are constant, and New York (28.8), where Gov. Andrew Cuomo's lack of coattails killed several Dem House members downballot. NPR puts a different spin on that chart, looking at the biggest gainers and losers compared with 2012: Missouri (32.3, down from 44.5), with no Senate or gubernatorial race either, was the biggest drop, followed by Washington. Louisiana (43.9, up from 38.9 in 2012, thanks to a very competitive Senate race) was the big gainer.
That state-to-state variation also explains why it's futile to try and read deeper meanings into shifts in thin-sliced demographic groups from 2012 to 2014, as explained by the Monkey Cage. They focused on Asian-Americans, who appear to have voted much more Republican (49 percent in 2014, instead of 23 percent in 2012). That can partly be explained simply by sample size issues (Asians are only a few percent of the nation's electorate, so the Asian slice of the exit polls are going to have a huge margin of error), but also because so many of those Asian voters were voting in Texas, where the barely-competitive gubernatorial race there inflates the overall GOP numbers.
Finally, rather than keeping on dwelling on 2014, here are some optimistic-looking projections about 2016 turnout, courtesy of the NYT's Nate Cohn. The Republicans continue to fight a losing battle against the increasing diversity of the electorate, as more and more non-white citizens age into the electorate. Even if the Republicans manage to hold turnout down to 2004 levels (instead of the higher turnout of 2008 and 2012), essentially a best-case scenario for them, the white share of the electorate will still be only the same as it was in 2012 (73.8 percent in 2016 based on 2004 turnout; 73.7 was the actual 2012 share). If the Democrats manage to keep 2012-level turnout in 2016, the white share of the electorate falls to 71.6.
• WATN?: Philip Bump takes a look at the 29 Democrats who captured House seats from the GOP during the 2006 wave that returned control of the chamber to the blue team after a 12-year sojourn in the wilderness. Only six still remain: Jerry McNerney (CA-09), Ed Perlmutter (CO-07), Joe Courtney (CT-02), Dave Loebsack (IA-02), John Yarmuth (KY-03), and Tim Walz (MN-01). (Bump also lists VT-AL's Peter Welch, but he picked up a seat from independent Bernie Sanders, who always caucused with the Democrats.)
The rest either ran for higher office, some successfully (e.g., Chris Murphy), and some not (e.g., Bruce Braley); lost to Republicans (like Carol Shea-Porter, twice); or just flat-out retired (Heath Shuler and Gabby Giffords). Former Pennsylvania Rep. Jason Altmire has the unique distinction of losing in a primary to a colleague, Mark Critz, after the two were thrown together by Republicans in redistricting, though Critz went on to lose in the November general election.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, with additional contributions from Jeff Singer, David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Taniel, and Dreaminonempty