Nancy has already done a nice roundup of last night’s nationwide primary elections. I’d like to add one probable correction to that piece. It looks like there’s a good chance that the Democrats will be shut out of at least one California election, in the eighth congressional district. With 99% of precincts reporting, Republican Tim Donnelly is in second place with a 760-vote lead over Democrat Marjorie Doyle. With plenty of mail-in and provisional ballots still to count, the race has not been called, but incumbent Republican Paul Cook is likely to face Donnelly in the general election. This isn’t some great loss for the Democratic Party since the three Democrats running combined only carried thirty-six percent of the vote, but it’s a shame for Democrats in the district who will now have no one from their own party to select.
As for California Republicans, they’re rejoicing that they’ll at least have a candidate in the governor’s race. It’s not that their candidate John Cox has much of a chance of beating Democrat Gavin Newsom, but right-leaning voters will now have more incentive to show up to the polls and that’s heartening for down-ticket GOP candidates. It’s all the more important because it appears that the Republicans have been shut out of the elections for U.S. Senate and lieutenant governor. Incumbent Senator Diane Feinstein will almost certainly face former State Senate President pro tempore, Kevin de León. The lieutenant governor’s race is shaping up to feature Democrats Eleni Kounalakis and Ed Hernandez.
Had the Republican Party been shut out of all three of the races at the top of the ticket, the threat of carnage at the bottom of the ticket would have been substantially increased.
They had hoped for far better news than that, however. There was the potential for Democrats to be shut out of at least four elections they should have a chance to win, in California’s 10th, 39th, 48th, and 49th districts. But the Democrats prevented that from happening in any of them.
If I had to choose the best news of the night for California Republicans, it would be the strong performance of Orange County Representative Mimi Walters. With 100% of precincts reporting, she stands in first place at 53.2 percent. She made herself vulnerable by voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have cost more than twenty million Americans to lose their health insurance. She’ll face UC-Irvine law professor Katie Porter, a former law student of Elizabeth Warren’s who has a similar profile on consumer protection. This will still be a hotly contested race, but Walters doesn’t look as threatened as the Democrats had hoped.
Looking at the California returns, Matt Yglesias at Vox projects the the Democrats are on track to win a narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. His prediction is based on the fact that the Democrats improved over their 2016 primary performance by average of five percent in the seven most targeted Golden State districts and that Nate Cohn has said that a nationwide improvement of 4.5 percent would be sufficient to take the House. The chances are that that five percent number will grow as all the outstanding votes are tallied.
CA 45th district Mimi Walters got 52,098 votes, while the Democratic candidates together got 43,486 votes. This is probably without counting all the mailed in ballots.
In the November election, there will be a bigger turnout in this district, and the Democratic votes will be behind Katie Porter.
For the Governor’s position, there are 2,473,334 D votes, 1,117,726 R votes.
For the Senate seat there are 2,405,436 D votes, and 1,342,204 R votes.
In the Senate race, the numbers don’t even matter.
Personally I find it shocking that after everything we’ve seen from trump that there would be any republicans leading in any races anywhere. I don’t understand it.
. . . Banana Republican voters.)
Also too, a very real obstacle to sane governance. Sane requiring Reality-Based.
Watching the G7 build up and responses by Rep’s to the Trump Tariff War I’m hopeful that the rural agricultural set of Trump’s supporters gets the message loud and clear that Rep Congress is not standing up for them. Particularly, it would be nice in areas like Nunes CA district as well as Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ orchard country not to mention Iowa’s pork farm industry for them to finally hear the wakeup call.
If indeed the tariff issue comes to bear, for farmers this couldn’t be a worse time of year to have these tariffs, there’s no time to plan and it will translate into many bankruptcies. But by November the writing will be on their barn walls.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers isn’t going anywhere. No way she loses. Folks in her district have had hard times economically before. They see it as a badge of honor to weather the economic storms. Their culture is everything. She represents their values. They will vote for her come rain or shine.
When the apples rot on the ground as there is no one to do the harvest. Or when the truckers have no loads to move to the port. That is not hard times. That is a self inflicted wound that any dem with half of the donald’s brain should be able to use to their advantage.
To you and me, sure. But we don’t share their values. It would behoove us to learn more about how they view the world instead of projecting our views onto them. Apples rotting on the trees, going unpicked, etc. is not any worse than if a hard frost were to blast all the buds and ruin the whole crop. Growing fruit looks like that. Ask the peach growers about last year’s harvest.
But, since at least the 20th century, hasn’t the Federal/State Government always taken care of the white farm/ranch owner through the Farm Bill when it gets bad? Cause it wasn’t the orchard owners who paid for that lost peach crop last year.
For decades, fucking with the Farm Bill was as dangerous for a rural politician as fucking with Medicare and Social Security. But this year, and those to come, may prove quite a test for the believers in their personal Cultural of Resilience mythology when the Federal checks stop coming.
Liberal/Progressive/Democratic appeal, especially in California, has almost always been with Farm laborers and not the farm owners.
“Culture of Resilience” mythology…exactly. That’s what keeps ’em going.
Today morning on CNN there was a reporter in IA talking to a woman whose family has been in pig farming for generations. She said that IF the Mexico tariffs hit her farm, they would find alternatives to that market. In the short term, she said, US consumers would enjoy cheaper pork products!
I took it to mean that she was still supporting Trump, even though that was not explicitly asked of her.
. . . their own self-interest is by now a very long- and well-established phenomenon.
Also too, a problem, i.e., an obstacle to sane governance.
Reminds me of early 2008 when the CNN’s found a lot of “Don’t call me a Republican, I’m an INDEPENDENT!!” people who thought THEIR house was as safe from foreclosure as THEIR roofing job.
I say we give a big cheer for the California voters who rose to the occasion. Everyone was panicking about the possibility of not having Dems in the general. The voters did pretty darn well.
The safety/lockout arguments are now officially off the table. This is going to be like Kamala Harris versus the Feinsteinesque dem Sánchez and mark me down for predicting that the incumbent in a one-party runoff is not nearly as much of a sure thing as the conventional wisdom has it.
Californians have long memories – we remember Feinstein ramming through Roberts and Alito (which gave us Citizens United), supporting Iraq War, supporting Lieberman to the bitter end-Lieberman then single-frikkin-handedly killed Medicare for All which gave us the ACA, which gave us the backlash against the ACA in the 2010 census year, which gave us insane GOP gerrymandering … all of which ultimately gave us Trump. Diane Feinstein-in many key ways-is the root of all evil. I’ve followed her since an assassination thrust her into the mayor’s office. She’s the Dem equivalent of Lindsay Graham-a Sunday talk show diva who pretends to be responsible while she ramrods through all the evil policies the right can come up with. She needs to go and the only argument against that is the fear that a Republican could get in. Well, that ain’t a problem anymore now is it? Harris destroyed Sánchez. I voted yesterday and there were like 30 people running-brutal-now it’s going to be two names: the more familiar one has f****d us every time we needed her for 30 years. The less familiar one has a D after his name and a Spanish sounding surname. Being female will help her, but being an evil monstrous villain will hurt her and hurt her badly.
I totally agree with how you characterize War Criminal DiFi. I have loathed since moving to CA over 25 years ago and have never once voted for her. She’s an evil villain, but for some reason, voters choose to see her as supporting them. Not. At. All.
The other thing is that this battleax is 84 years old!! For heaven’s sake: time to retire, DiFi. How GREEDY can any one monster be?
This is yet another problem across the Dem party: they have no really good bench, and far too many of the “leading lights” in the D party are way too old and past their sell-by dates. Yet they’re not really truly developing a younger generation.
It’s not a good sign.
I voted for DeLeon yesterday and will vote for him in November.
Incumbency is less of an advantage in a one-party election, but it’s still an election, and Difi is only an enemy to a sub-section of the left. Her favorability is +12 so quite a few more like her than dislike her. I’d rather have De Leon, but I don’t think he will overcome a 30+ point deficit in the jungle.
It will be interesting to see how De Leon handles the next 5 months. First priority was always making the top 2. Now will come the hard part. Maybe he’ll pick up the GOP votes. Makes me wonder how many voters in CA will leave that race blank come November.
As a California voter, I am glad we dodged a bullet this time, but that jungle primary mechanism is a turd bomb just waiting to go off like the Electoral College. I hope somebody is working on a ballot measure to get rid of jungle primaries before 2020.
I have mixed emotions about them, as well, and don’t believe they really serve citizens’ interests. But I’m not counting on them going away any time soon.
Time will tell.
Shouldn’t that turd bomb be a huge incentive to move to ranked choice voting?
Our entire election system is a huge incentive to have ranked choice voting.
Mail-in and provisional ballots are generally heavily Democratic so as a rule any race where the Republican has a slim lead the day after the election is won by the Democrat. This goes back at least to Kamala Harris in the Attorney General race in 2010. My money is still on having a Democrat in the general in the 8th.
I guess from a national perspective, Democrats might be cheering that they didn’t get “locked out” in the congressional elections, but from a local perspective, the primary looked like your typical low-turnout election, which I think should give rise to some apprehension among Democrats. For one thing, I don’t think Democrats ended up with very strong candidates in most of the contested congressional races and the trend of selecting candidates by how big a check they can write their own campaign almost guarantees bad actors and is not healthy for the Democratic party, let alone our democracy.
In addition, the Republicans managed to successfully execute a bogus recall on State Senator Josh Newman and select the Republican opponent he defeated in the general election as his replacement. It also killed the Democrats super-majority in the state senate. Their success in the recall almost guarantees that they will use this tactic again in any close elections where they can count on the fact that next low turnout election like this one skew the electorate to be older and more conservative. Really, I hate seeing the recall process abused, but Democrats need to wake up to the fact that this is just another Republican norm-breaker that will go into the Republican playbook and respond with measures to increase voter participation. I swear, at my polling place, the average age was 90