Elections 2010
Latest Entries
3 of 4 close California races settled; Cooley-Harris attorney general race still too close to call
After eight days of razor thin margins and alternating leads, three of the four California races which were too tight to call on election night have seemingly come to a close; however, the attorney general's is still too close to call.
Attorney General
The big story is the tight race between Republican Steve Cooley and Democrat Kamala Harris for the office of attorney general, and that race remains too close to call. The latest numbers from the Secretary of State's Office show Cooley leading Harris by .2% (that’s 19,357 votes), which is a narrowing lead, but there are still over a million vote-by-mail, provisional and damaged ballots to be counted throughout the state.
Timm Herdt of the Ventura County Star uses proportions to predict the distribution of the remaining votes, and predicts that Cooley will win by about 15,000 votes when it's all said and done.
U.S. House of Representatives: 11th and 20th Congressional Districts
With widening leads, Democrats declared victory today in the two tight congressional races in the 11th and 20th districts.
The 11th District sees Democratic incumbent Jerry McNerney leading Republican David Harmer by 1,685 votes, with about 11,000 ballots left to be counted.
In a statement today, Rep. McNerney's campaign manager said, “With the vast majority of votes tallied, the results are clear. Congressman McNerney now has an insurmountable lead.”
In the 20th District, Rep. Jim Costa is declaring victory over his challenger Andy Vidak, after swinging into the lead by about 1,200 votes yesterday.
The Fresno Bee writes:
In the initial vote count after the Nov. 2 election, Vidak led Costa by 1,823 votes. By Friday, that lead was down to 648 votes, and on Monday, it dropped to a razor-thin 145 votes.
Vidak's lead originally came from his strength in Kings County, where he dominated. However, as ballot counts have continued rolling in from Kern and Fresno counties, that lead has deteriorated.
However, like his counterpart in the 11th District, and with at least several thousand ballots left to be counted in the 20th, Vidak has not yet conceded defeat.
Mayor of Oakland
Jean Quan was finally announced to be mayor-elect of Oakland last night, after a nail-biting post-election episode.
The race saw an interesting turn of events due to the ranked-choice ballot system in place there. The ballots ask voters to choose first-, second- and third-choice votes for the office of mayor, unlike the traditional one-vote system.
The San Francisco Chronicle writes:
Former state Sen. Don Perata had 34 percent of first-place votes in the initial tallying of the ranked-choice balloting, while Quan was in second with 25 percent. But when eliminated candidates' second- and third-place votes were redistributed, Quan vaulted into the lead.
Perata, like Meg Whitman, outspent his opponents during the campaign. Perata cited voter confusion surrounding ranked-choice voting as being instrumental to his loss.
From Perata's concession speech today, the Chronicle reports:
"The results are pretty clear," he said. "The people of this city voted for ranked-choice voting. You play by the rules and you win or lose by the rules."Perata nonetheless suggested that ranked-choice voting was problematic. His campaign said the precincts in the flatlands where Perata did best were also where voter errors resulted in a large number of ballots being thrown out.
"I think people were confused," Perata said.
Did Facebook and Twitter help savvy candidates win?
Wired has an interesting article up noting the trend between Facebook and Twitter followers of candidates: those with more friends and/or followers usually won their race. Here's the pertinent information:
"The gubernatorial candidate with the most Twitter followers won Tuesday’s election in 22 of 34 declared races across the country, according to a Wired.com analysis.
Low youth voter turnout hurts Democrats
After the House-cleaning that took place at the polls yesterday, it can be a fun and informative exercise to take a look at these exit polls.
The big story told by the statistics is… ahem, drum roll please…
Young people didn’t vote! Surprised? Oh well, I tried. After turning out in droves in 2008, making up 18 percent of the electorate then – and actually outvoting the 65+ club – the 18-to-29-year-old demographic gave a much weaker showing of 11 percent yesterday.
No doubt, the weak youth voter turnout did little to quell the firestorm that laid waste to much of the Democratic House and, to a much lesser extent, the Senate.
The Washington Post writes:
To be sure, voters under 30 still gave Democrats a boost. Every other age group favored the GOP, including a whopping 18-point advantage for Republicans among voters over age 65. But the numbers suggested Obama's aggressive appeals to young people in the last month before the election, as well as the rally of comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert over the weekend, did little to inspire young voters.
And here in California, the change was even more dramatic:
In California, one of every five voters in 2008 was between the ages of 18 and 29, compared with about one in 10 on Tuesday.
To be fair, the young weren’t the only voting bloc that ditched the party.
Michael Tomasky of The Guardian also notes in his blog that this electorate was whiter than 2008’s, with black and Latino numbers dipping. There was also a jump in the number of voters who identify themselves as conservatives, which Tomasky surmises is due to a lower showing of liberal voters.
Tomasky writes:
Add to these figures the fact that overall turnout was down by about a third, or more, from nearly 130 million to about 82.5 million. That's at least 45 million no-shows, and the exits tell us the bulk of them were liberal, young, black, Latino. If 25 million of these no-shows had voted, Democratic losses would pretty obviously have been in the normal range, and they'd still control the House.
Environmental politics and election results
KPCC's Molly Peterson has been tracking climate policy in the U.S. Senate race, environmental politics in the Governor's race, and ballot measures of interest to the green community: Proposition 21 (the State Parks Initiative); Prop 23 (the California Jobs Initiative, which would freeze AB32 for an indefinite period of time), and Proposition 26 (which would make raising fees on polluters more challenging).
Updates from Peterson & her co-blogger, Green LA Girl Siel Ju about environmental policy and politics can be found on our sister blog here on KPCC's website, Pacific Swell.
Denver voters reject plan to track space aliens
Thank you, AP services, for catching the strange ballot measures that make us smile. The latest election oddity that likely passed under everyone's radar: voters in Denver rejected a proposal to fund a commission to search for space aliens. By 80,000 votes.
From the AP story:
"The proposal defeated soundly Tuesday night would have established a commission to track extraterrestrials. It also would have allowed residents to post their observations on Denver's city Web page and report sightings.
Early results show Denver residents voted 106,776-20,162 against the proposal. The Denver man who proposed the measure, Jeff Peckman, says the government is tracking alien sightings but refuses to make the reports public. Peckman is a meditation instructor and promoter of new technology, including something he says reduces the "chaos of electromagnetic fields." Peckman contends opponents greatly inflated the commission's projected cost. He previously proposed an unsuccessful ordinance requiring the city to offer stress-reduction measures."
| Page 1 of 14 | older entries » |
