The Illinois primaries have a few squeakers tonight. It looks like Alexi Giannoulias will beat David Hoffman, but they haven’t called it yet. That’s the senate race. The governors races are tight on both sides. The incumbent Pat Quinn is leading challenger Dan Hynes by about 6,000 votes with over 90% reporting. On the Republican side, less than 3,000 votes separate first place from third place. State Senator Bill Brady has about a 1,000 vote lead on Kirk Dillard and Dillard has about a 2,000 vote lead on former Illinois GOP chairman Andy McKenna. Assuming that Bill Brady pulls this out, he’ll make an interesting general election candidate. That’s because he’s insane:
Brady is not for abortions in cases of rape and incest nor when just the health of the mother is at risk. The only time he said an abortion should be permitted is if the mother’s life is at stake.
He opposes gay marriage and civil unions. He voted against the state law passed in 2005 that banned discrimination against gays and lesbians in matters of housing and employment.
On education, he supports allowing local school boards to teach creationism. Brady wants to eliminate the quasi-independent State Board of Education or, avoiding a constitutional fight, limit it to an advisory role in favor of a down-sized agency answering to the governor.
Brady supports tougher contribution limits than the campaign reforms Democrats pushed into law. And he backs limits on the number of terms for statewide officials as well as House and Senate lawmakers. He backs reducing the size of the House and Senate by a total of 13 lawmakers and reinstating the cumulative voting system that ensured at least one Democrat and Republican per legislative district.
Brady won’t release his income tax returns or reveal his net worth. State economic interest statements outline holdings that include property management, an Amish furniture store, a Days Inn in Danville and an interest in the Bloomington indoor football team. Florida records showed he owns a Fort Lauderdale condominium that he said he bought in recent years for $380,000.
Brady thinks his business acumen would help close the state’s vast budget gap.
To bolster the economy, he would eliminate the sales tax on gas, the state estate tax and multiple taxes and fees imposed by Blagojevich. But he estimates savings of $7 billion a year largely through privatizing Medicaid and making across-the-board spending cuts, a difficult mission if Democrats keep control of the legislature.
I bet Bill Brady could fuck up Illinois bad enough that it resembled California. Go GOP!!
If you’re worried about the U.S. Senate seat, one good sign is that about 770,000 votes have been counted so far in the Democratic primary compared to about 610,000 in the Republican one. That’s a 56%-44% split.
Iunno why Open Left is fretting so much about Giannoulias. His campaign is far superior to Coakley’s and the other Dems. Yeah, he will have to deal with that banker crap which could be bad, but I’m not worried.
Plus, the primary turn-out is a good sign. People may have stayed home as they thought Kirk was a shoe-in, but that wouldn’t explain why they didn’t come out to vote in the GOP primary.
I expect a Democratic win in the gubernatorial race as well, judging by the close results. This is the same thing that swept Blagojevich into power.
in the gubernatorial primary*
Sounds worse than Arnold to me.
We have a new exterminator running in the 10th district.
That’s going to look so pretty when it’s a nice shade of blue:
http://scoreboard.dailykos.com/map/electionMapIndex.php?autoPlayOn=1&mapMode=House&mapView=e
lection&colorScheme=manualSolid¤tElectionYear=2008&autoStateIndex=13&autoDistr
ictIndex=9
😀
Thanks, Tea Baggers!
Also, that’s not the only district where the tea baggers are doing well.
Ratowitz, Walsh, Kinzinger, Newman, and Hultgren are all winning their races.
They just secured a shit-ton of House seats this November. I don’t want these Democrats getting complacent, though.
Sorry for posting so much, but there’s no edit button >:(
I don’t know the local candidates, so I don’t know what these results mean.
Here’s some reading material for you. This is the campaign website for Teri Newman, who the Republicans just nominated to run against Rep. Costello.
http://www.voteforteri2010.com/
Basically, erm, the House seats I listed are secured for Democrats unless they really fuck it up.
Every race is going to be Democrat vs. Insane Wingnut.
IL-5 Mike Quigley, IL-8 Melissa Bean, IL-11 Deborah Halvorson, IL-12 Jerry Costello, IL-14 Bill Foster.
All get teabagging crackpots. Depends on how the rest of the primary season plays out but Team D nationalizing November might be the way to go.
Well, based on how divided Dems are on the Gov race, it’s good to have a lunatic to run against.
5-7% of the GOP vote in the Chicago metro counties. If he holds on, he’ll pull the whole ticket under.
Running against Quinn and his plans for big tax increases on the middle class, I dunno.
Correction. That should be tax increases on the childless middle class. Fair is fair. He did make that point in the debate. He would also add a thousand dollar kid credit, but that does nothing for the unmarried (except single parents), empty-nesters, and retirees. It probably does nothing for those with kids in college, either, if the age limits are modeled on the federal credit.
This could help the social pithecantropus running on the GOP ticket. His message of cutting taxes, ending welfare, and sticking it to state employees should resonate well in the Suburbs, which is where most state-wide races are won.
Dems aren’t divided on the candidates’ fitness to be senators. We’re divided on their odds of beating Kirk. So there’s no reason to think anybody will stay home because the other guy won. I think Giannoulias will have a harder time in the election, but that’s far from stopping me from voting/working for him.
The old primary date was March 16, and many people thought the weather was too bad for that date. Yesterday, on election day, there was a two inch snow fall. I voted at 2:30PM. Our precinct that has about 800 voters had 53 show up by that time.
The date was changed to February last election to frankly help Barack Obama. Without him on the ticket, no one wants to come out.
I wonder what the turnout would be if the weather was a very likely for that date -7 with high winds and blowing and drifting snow? May or June are much better times in Illinois.
You win some, you lose some. I won Alexi, I lost Dan.
Or so we think. With the widespread use of untraceable voting machines, who knows? Who knows if the machine-readable paper ballots were counted correctly? Mine had undervotes as I don’t vote for unopposed candidates unless I’m very enthusiastic and I don’t vote judges.
Nevertheless, the machine accepted it without a complaint.
The news media had some very incoherent reports on Feb 1 about a “change” in the way we vote. Supposedly, an undervote in the top six races would cause your ballot to be rejected. The local election judges said they knew of no changes. However, as I said, the machine should have initially rejected my ballot as an undervote, but did not. Responding to the media reports, my wife dutifully marked every race, grousing about having to vote for uncontested races and picking out judges she knows nothing about.
Huh. I undervoted, too, and the machine beeped, the judge asked if I really wanted to undervote, I said yes, she pushed a button and reinserted the ballot. This was in Chicago. I think the technology makes the rejection necessary because you never know if your little lines connecting the arrows are good enough for the machine to understand. If you vote for everybody and it goes through, you know it’s OK, If you undervote you don’t know whether the beep just means you undervoted or if you also didn’t draw the line to the machine’s satisfaction.
I thought the touchscreen system was much better, but got pressured out because it was too “techy” to understand just because of the interface.
My main objection to the touch screen is the lack of a hard copy audit trail. I say this from 25 years experience in programming embedded devices. With all the money spent on TV ads, you would think we could spent a smidgen more on our voting equipment and add a cheap small black and white ink jet printer that would print the official ballot, so it could be verified and saved for recounts. Uniform printing, no hanging chads etc. The machine could still transmit the unofficial total and the hard copy would be available for recounts in close races.
I used to vote absentee, but now that must be done on a traceless touchscreen.
The touchscreens I’ve used print out your votes on a tape like a cash register roll. The roll stays in the machine, but you can check that your vote is recorded correctly. I guess somebody could program it to report a different count than is on the tape, but that would be very clear on a recount. Seems like as good a system as we’re going to get. For some reason we were back to the “complete the arrow” ballot this time, which allows for all kinds of “interpretation” by partisan judges.
The tape is not saved, so it is useless for recounts. The reason it is not saved is that when you see an error, you can correct it and another tape entry is printed.
Looks like the hardcore IL teabagger crowd has about 20 percent of the GOP vote, judging by the Brady and Hughes numbers. More than enough to derail Kirk if their drivers choose to.
On the Dem side, I have to wonder if the Senate race would have been different if not for the strong early voting, some of which preceded the height of the bank problem news.
That aside, how is it that we don’t care that somebody can get nominated for US senator because they get 20 or 40 percent of their party’s vote? I guess because we don’t really much care about who runs things as long as we can bitch about it when it’s too late.
I’m pretty sure that he primary nomination method is up to each state party – they could do a run-off based on who cuts the largest fart if they wanted to – but for the general election it has to be 50% of the vote + 1.
IRV would correct that, but IRV would encourage people to vote for third parties and fall back to their major party preference. Both major parties prefer that you only have the choice of the other party, which by definition is comprised of soul-eating demons. Why not IRV for primaries? Probably because people would soon ask for it in generals.
BTW, most of the people at work on Monday said they would like to see “none of the above” or “no candidate” on every ballot position. Even Republicans who had a choice of eight bat-shit crazy loons.