Just dropped · Trial Balloon · Ep. 194
What Just Happened?
“Nearly two weeks after Election Day, Gina Ortiz Jones (D) on Monday conceded to incumbent Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX) in the race for Texas’ most competitive congressional district,” the Dallas Morning News reports.
Said Jones: “While we came up short this time, we ran a race of which we can be proud. I remain committed to serving my community and country, and I wish Will Hurd the courage to fight for TX-23 in the way in which our district deserves.”
“John Barrow (D) picked up a surprising endorsement in his December 4 runoff bid for Georgia secretary of state: The third-place finisher who forced the race into overtime,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
“Libertarian J. Smythe DuVal threw his support behind Barrow, a former U.S. House member whom he said was able to ‘fix Georgia’s broken election system’ and save tax dollars through a ranked choice voting system that would eliminate separate runoff elections.”
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) accepted a donation from Peter Sieve, a businessman in Washington state known for his white supremacist views, just days after a video published by Bayou Brief surfaced in which she says she would be “on the front row” if a supporter invited her to “a public hanging,” the Jackson Free Press reports.
FiveThirtyEight: “The 2018 election has become a tale of divided government: the House broke for Democrats, but the Senate held for Republicans — and what’s more, Republicans were even able to expand their majority in the Senate. The election has also become a tale of blue waves. But don’t those tales contradict one another? Not really. What the ‘split decision’ narrative sometimes misses is just how well Democrats performed in the Senate despite having to defend more seats than Republicans — and in territory that was largely more favorable to the GOP.”
“Much of this is overshadowed because Democrats did lose Senate seats… But if we look at a state’s partisan lean and the vote share margin in each Senate race, we see Democrats managed to outperform how their states leaned politically in almost every single race — including in the 10 states with a Democratic incumbent that President Trump won in 2016.”
However, First Read notes that Democratic performance in red states might have been their ceiling.
Rick Hasen: “Democrats should stop with the rhetoric that the race was ‘stolen’… First, rhetoric about stolen elections feeds a growing cycle of mistrust and delegitimization of the election process… Saying Kemp tried to suppress Democratic votes and saying the election was stolen are two different things, and making charges of a stolen election when it cannot be proved undermines Democrats’ complaints about suppressive tactics.”
“Rather than questioning the election’s legitimacy or making uprovable claims of stolen elections, Democrats should focus their efforts into doing whatever is possible to prevent voter suppression and incompetence in the upcoming 2020 elections.”
Florida Playbook: “A telltale sign of bad ballot design in Broward (where the Senate race was tucked below the instructions in the lower left-hand corner) was how Broward’s undervote rate in the Senate race was so much bigger than in any other Florida county. Unlike Miami-Dade to its north and Palm Beach to its south, Broward County had fewer votes for the top of the ticket Senate race than governor (as well as the three Florida Cabinet posts). Thousands of people just undervoted the race because they probably didn’t see it on the ballot.”
“If we assume the Senate race would have had as many total votes as the governor’s race in Broward and if Nelson’s and Gov. Scott’s vote-share remained the same, Nelson would have netted an additional 9,746 votes in the county. And that would have dropped Scott’s statewide lead of 10,033 to just 287 votes. Still, that’s a win for Scott.”
Monkey Cage: “This year, Americans appear to have elected a record 53 African Americans to the House — assuming that Republicans William Hurd of Texas and Mia Love of Utah will win their tight races, which haven’t been called as of this writing. Hurd and Love would be the only two black Republicans in this wave; the 51 others are Democrats. Forty-four were reelected. Of those, four-fifths won reelection from majority-minority districts — defined here as districts where non-Hispanic whites form a minority of the voting-age population according to the 2010 Census. That’s what we’ve seen in the past: Historically, black representatives have been elected from majority-minority districts.”
“But here’s the big news: Eight of the nine newly elected African Americans won in districts dominated by non-Hispanic whites.”
“Harry Reid may no longer lead Senate Democrats in Washington, but the political machine he built in Nevada has Republicans on the run,” the AP reports.
“Democrats romped up and down the state in the Nov. 6 midterm elections, ousting Republican Sen. Dean Heller, winning races for governor and lieutenant governor, and expanding their state legislative majorities.”
The Atlantic: “Debate what counts as a blue wave in the rest of the country, but there was a tsunami off the Great Lakes. It was enormous and swept over everything: governor, Senate, attorney general, two flipped House seats with two female alumnae of the Obama administration, plus another that put a Palestinian American woman in John Conyers’s old spot, five flipped state Senate seats, five flipped state House seats, all the way down to the state supreme court and the state university boards. They legalized recreational pot, and the vote wasn’t close. They banned gerrymandering. They created automatic voter registration and an absentee-ballot process, essentially a backdoor way to institute early voting, which together will almost certainly lock in long-term the gains Democrats made.”
NBC News: “Even in a year where Democrats picked up more than 35 seats in the House, Republicans still won white voters by a solid 10 percentage points.”
“But Democrats won college-educated voters by an even more substantial 20 points (continuing a trend that’s been underway for some years). And Hispanic/Latino voters went to Democrats by a massive 40 points, an even bigger edge than the party usually has with that group of voters.”
These trends — combined with the demographics of several traditional battlegrounds and the results of the midterm elections — suggest Ohio and Colorado may no longer be swing states, but Arizona and Georgia may have taken their place.
“California Democrats completed their sweep of the congressional delegation in Orange County on Saturday as Gil Cisneros defeated Young Kim, a Republican, to capture a fourth seat in what had once been one of the most conservative Republican bastions in the nation,” the New York Times reports.
“The victory by Mr. Cisneros, a philanthropist, was declared by The Associated Press. It completes what has amounted to a Democratic rout in California this year. Democrats set out to capture seven Republican-held seats where Hillary Clinton defeated President Trump in 2016, including four in Orange County. They won six of them.”
“Andrew Gillum conceded Florida’s governor’s race on Saturday as a recount of ballots neared its end, and the Democrat congratulated Republican former Rep. Ron DeSantis on becoming the state’s next governor,” Reuters reports.
Washington Post: “Just 13 GOP women have won election so far to serve in the next Congress, down from 23 this year. With a half dozen races yet to be resolved, the House GOP — the minority party next year — is all but certain to have the lowest number of women in its ranks since 1994.”
“That drop off came amid a national political climate that saw female voters sharply break from Republicans. Women favored Democrats over Republicans for Congress, 59 percent to 40 percent, according to exit polls.”
“It’s set off an internal debate within the Republican Party about how to address this crisis, both in terms of appealing to female voters and then recruiting and retaining women in Congress.”
“A U.S. Senate runoff that was supposed to provide an easy Republican win has turned into an unexpectedly competitive contest, driving Republicans and Democrats to pour in resources and prompting a planned visit by President Trump to boost his party’s faltering candidate,” the Washington Post reports.
“Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith stumbled recently when, in praise of a supporter, she spoke of her willingness to sit with him in the front row of a public hanging — words that, in the South, evoked images of lynchings. She has struggled to grapple with the fallout, baffling members of her party and causing even faithful Republicans to consider voting for her opponent, former congressman Mike Espy.”
“That Espy is attempting to become the state’s first black senator since shortly after the Civil War made her remarks all the more glaring.”
Politico reports President Trump has scheduled a rally for later this month help Hyde-Smith’s candidacy.
“More than 2,000 women will serve in state legislatures when those chambers convene for their upcoming sessions, representing roughly a quarter of all state lawmakers across the country. That mark will eclipse the record of 1,875 who served this year,” the AP reports.
“The number could rise as ballot-counting concludes in close contests across the country. The Associated Press has not yet called 216 state legislative elections, races that include about 185 female candidates.”
“In another first, women could end up holding the majority in two state legislative chambers at the same time — the Colorado House and Nevada Assembly… The only previous time women comprised the majority in a state legislative chamber was in 2009 and 2010 in New Hampshire’s state Senate.”
NBC News: “To have a chance at overcoming Gov. Rick Scott’s 12,603-vote lead in their Senate race, incumbent Bill Nelson (D-FL) desperately needed a manual statewide recount to show that tens of thousands of votes here in Democrat-heavy Broward County had been misread by scanners.”
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) “has run out of time, run out of favorable court rulings and is about to officially run out of votes,” Politico reports.
“After losing to Gov. Rick Scott (R) on Election Day, losing after an automatic recount and appearing to not make up the gap following a manual recount Friday, Nelson’s campaign was dealt a mortal blow later that evening by U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker, who crushed the Democrat’s last major hope by upholding a Florida law that forbids county election offices from counting vote-by-mail ballots received after 7 p.m. Election Day.”
Rep. Mia Love (R-UT) is winning her re-election for the first time since Election Day after an updated vote count in Utah County pushed her narrowly over challenger Ben McAdams (D), the Salt Lake Tribune reports.
“Love is currently ahead by 419 votes, reversing Thursday’s 1,002-vote lead for McAdams, who has spent the past week in Washington going to House orientation meetings and appearing in the freshman class photo with new lawmakers from across the country.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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