The Next Congress

By tmess2 | Published December 8, 2024

By the end of this week, the states will have completed the canvassing process, but we have all of the results from the local election authorities.  In the Senate, we knew going into the year that this would be a difficult map.  The last several cycles for this Senate class (2018, 2012, and 2006) have been generally favorable for the Democrats allowing us to keep seats in several states (Ohio, Montana, and West Virginia) that have been trending Republican.  While we hoped to keep those seats, it was always going to be an uphill battle.  The only swing state that we lost was Pennsylvania and that was a close one.  There will be a couple of vacancies due to people taking positions in the Trump Administration, but these vacancies are in Republican states and the governors should fill the vacancies rather quickly.  (It is my understanding that, in both states, the special elections for the remainder of the term will be in November 2026.)

The House was essentially a wash.  Seventeen seats changed hands with Democrats picking up a net of one seats.  Right now, the House is nominally 220-215.  However, Matt Gaetz opted against returning to avoid the release of an ethics committee report that would kill his hopes of becoming governor of Florida in 2026.  Thus, when the House convenes on January 3 to elect a speaker, the margin will be 219-215.  Shortly after January 20, there will be two more resignations by people who will be sacrificing their futures working in the Trump Administration.  That will bring the margin down to 217-215 through, at least, mid-April, when Florida will fill its two seats.  Even assuming, as seems likely given the seats, that Republicans win all of the special elections, a five-vote majority only allows the Republicans to lose two votes on a bill.

Let’s start with the bad news, it only takes a simple majority in the Senate to fill judicial vacancies.  If Trump continues to work with the Federalist Society, he should be able to get most of his nominees confirmed.  However, there are Republican judges who could have taken senior status in the first Trump Administration but didn’t.  Likewise, the presumption is that a president should get to fill his administration with whatever qualified people that he wants.  Of course, Trump like naming unqualified people to posts.  Republican Senators will have to choose which nominees to fight (or at least slow down in the hopes that they withdraw).  Right now, there are at least three nominees for cabinet level positions that the Senate should reject — Hegseth for Defense, Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, and Kennedy for Health and Human Services.  In recent years, the tendency has been for doomed nominees to withdraw rather than forcing the Senate to officially reject them but Trump might want the fight. Continue Reading...

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Immigration

By tmess2 | Published November 24, 2024

The Republicans have made immigration a big issue in the past several election cycles.  When Democrats were in the White House, Democrats had an incentive to reach a global agreement with Republicans to try to fix a broken system.  Trump, however, has zero interest in fixing the system.  He wants mass deportations.  Democrats have no incentive to cooperate with this concept of a plan.

The important thing to understand is that there is not a single immigration problem.  There are multiple immigration problems.

The one of least concern to Republicans is with the legal immigration system.  Depending on job skills and country of origin, a potential immigrant can be on a waiting list for several years.  People who think they would be better off in the U.S. but are being told to wait six or seven years are likely to try other, not legal, methods to get to the U.S. Continue Reading...

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Remaining Races and Recounts (UPDATED 11-23)

By tmess2 | Published November 17, 2024

Votes are still being counted, particularly out west where mail-in ballots are the predominate form of voting.  But we are down to a handful of races that are still too close to call.

There are three things to consider at this point.  The first is how many ballots remain to be processed and where those ballots are.  The second is that Alaska uses ranked-choice voting.  While the U.S. does not have much experience with ranked-choice voting, Australia does.  The Australian experience has taught us is that second and third choices tend to be for the candidate closest to the first choice but there will be some drop off and a minority will go to the “non-similar” candidate.  As such, it is hard for a trailing candidate to close the gap much, and the trailing candidate usually wins only if the original margin is small, there are a significant number of votes for the “also-ran” candidates.  Third, the vote counting machines are very accurate.  There will be some voter errors that are only caught by visual inspection, but recounts rarely change the final count by much.  Closing a 1,000 vote margin in a recount is almost impossible.

Turning to what is still outstanding, depending on the media site that you use, the only outstanding Senate race is Pennsylvania.  The real issue in Pennsylvania is provisional ballots.  The current margin is 18,000.  Senator Bob Casey is receiving about 60% of the vote from provisional ballots so far, and most of the remaining provisional ballots are in areas that favor Senator Casey.  There will be a recount, but, as noted above, it is unlikely that the recount will change the vote total by more than 1,000.  Senator Casey’s chances depend entirely on how many additional provisional ballots are counted. Continue Reading...

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Election Recap

By tmess2 | Published November 10, 2024

Needless to say, the election did not go the way that many had hoped.  But it’s important to take a clear look at the numbers.  It is always hard to tell for sure, and it varies from state-to-state, but it looks like in the swing states, the issue is more voters who were willing to vote for Joe Biden in 2020 were not willing to vote for Kamala Harris.  How much of that is based on inflation and myopic hindsight (thinking the Trump years were better than they actually were) and how much on other factors is unclear.

Looking at the individual states, in Georgia, there were 243,000 additional votes this year.  In Michigan, it looks like something on the order of 71,000 more votes were cast this year than in 2020.  In Nevada, there were about 28,000 more votes this year.  In North Carolina, there were about 177,000 more votes this year.  In Pennsylvania, there were about 5,000 additional votes.  In Wisconsin, there were about 86,000 additional votes.  While we do not have the final numbers from Arizona, the reports seem to suggest that the final count will end up with around the same number of votes.  Even if we end up with fewer votes, it looks like it will be within 100,000 of the 2020 totals.  In short, in the swing states, while almost certainly some people who voted in 2020 did not vote in 2024, they were more than replaced by additional voters.  Admittedly, within the states, we had some shortfall in the areas where we are strongest, the loss is not entirely due to Democrats not voting.

But people who are saying that the Democrats need major changes are missing the story of this election.  There is a lot of economic pain in the country even though, at the general level, the economy is in decent shape.  Since the Republicans do not have a sound economic plan, we are likely to see several elections in which the White House keeps flipping back and forth. Continue Reading...

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Electoral College Anachronism

By tmess2 | Published November 5, 2024

As the final day of this election dawns, we are looking at the real probability that Democrats will win the popular vote for the eighth time in the last nine elections.  There is also a significant chance that, once again, the Republicans are going to win the electoral college vote despite losing the popular vote.  Since the end of Reconstruction, this only happened one time before the election of 2000.

When discussions of how the electoral college is flawed comes up, the defenders of the status quo like to spout about how the current system is what was designed by the Framers to avoid the big states having too much power.  The problem is that argument is wrong in three basic ways.  First, the original concept behind the electoral college and the belief about how elections would operate ended up being wrong.  Which is why the Framers had to amend the Constitution after 1800 to fix the electoral college.  Second, there were multiple other reasons for having an electoral college and for the final structure of the electoral college beyond helping the small states counteract the big states.  Third, most of those reasons are no longer valid which leaves the question about why should what was ultimately a compromise rather than the core reason for the electoral college still justify keeping what for most of its history has been like the tonsils, wisdom teeth, or appendix of our electoral system.

Let’s turn back to how things were in 1787 when the Constitutional Convention met.  There was no television, no radio, no internet, no telephones, no telegraph, no railroad, no cars, no planes.  The continent had been organized at the colony level with little or no connections between the colonies before the First Continental Congress.  After the Declaration of Independence, the colonies became states, but states were still the basic organizing unit of government.  Newspapers were more like your small town local paper is today with nothing like USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or the Washington Post.  The primary form of transportation was horseback, and it could take several days to travel across a state.  It could take weeks for a letter to get from New York to Charleston.  In short, politics were local and or state-based.  There was no national politics, and it was difficult for the average voter to get information about what was happening in other states. Continue Reading...

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Election Security

By tmess2 | Published November 4, 2024

Depending on the results over the next seventy-two hours, sore loser Donald Trump and his supporters will probably complain about problems with the machines that count the vote and other election security issues.  While every state is different in the exact means that they use to secure the election, most have roughly similar processes that pretty much guarantee that what Trump will be saying is pure fiction (which has never stopped him in the past and will not stop him this year).

One thing that you may hear is the vote counting machines can be hacked.  This claim is a half-truth.  The machines are computers, and, in theory, any computer can be hacked.  The people who raise this claim may even note that the internal security in the programming of the machines is weak.  They may be right about that, but that argument misses that the external security is very strong, and there are checks in the process to detect if a machine has been compromised.  The biggest external security is that the actual counting machines are not connected to the internet — either by cord or by wireless.  The results are manually uploaded from the precinct machines to the county’s machine and the results are then distributed.    Hacking these machines requires having physical access to the machine (which only a limited number of people do) or the virus has to be installed at the company that does the programming for the machine.

Even if you could get to the machine, setting up the software to manipulate the results is not easy because it has to defeat the checks.  The basic checks are:  1) a pre-election “logic” or “accuracy” test on every machine; 2) a post-election “logic” or “accuracy” test on every machine; 3) a hand count audit on random races from random precincts; and 4) the voter logs from the election.  The logic or accuracy test is using a test deck featuring a known number of votes for each candidate including various different weird ways that people can vote (overvotes, skipping races, voting a straight party ticket by marking the bubble for the party, voting a straight party ticket and then marking the bubble for that party in each race, voting a split ballot by marking the party box and then voting for the other party in individual races, etc.).  The test is whether the machine gives the known result.  If it doesn’t there is something wrong with the programming.  And here is where the difficulty for the hack comes in.  The person doing the hack does not know when the tests will be done.  If the hack takes effect immediately, the machine will fail.  The hack has to take effect after the first test and then revert back before the second test — a much more complex hack.  Even if that effort succeeds, the hack has to be on only the machines that are not used in the audit.  If the hack is on the machines used in the audit, the error will be caught, and the audit will expand to other precincts.  And lastly, the hack has to merely switch votes.  The voting logs will detect if a precinct has too many votes recorded.  In short, it is almost impossible in practice to successfully hack the counting process. Continue Reading...

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Election Night Preview — Part Six (Post-Midnight Eastern)

By tmess2 | Published November 3, 2024

Prior to Midnight, the polls will have closed in forty-eight states and the District of Columbia.  All that is left to close are Hawaii and Alaska.  Hawaii closes at midnight Eastern (7;00 p.m. local).  Polls close at 8:00 p.m. local time in Alaska.  For most of the state, that is midnight Eastern.  But the Aleutian Islands are in a separate time zone and will close at 1:00 a.m. Eastern.

In Hawaii, the first big chunk of returns will be the early votes, but those are not reported until all polling places have actually closed.  As such, it may be an hour or more before results are released.  The release of results will be a little bit slower than Alaska.

The biggest race out of these two states is the congressional seat for Alaska, currently held by Democrat Mary Peltola.  One factor that will delay a projection in this race is that Alaska uses ranked-choice voting.  The Republicans in Alaska have pretty well demonstrated that they do not know how to run a race with ranked choice voting.  Thus, rather than running two strong candidates and having the candidates encourage their supporters to rank the other candidate second, the Republicans have had their second candidate withdraw.  Not having two candidates attacking Representative Peltola is a strategic mistake.  But because the Republicans have cleared the field, it is unlikely that there will be many votes for the remaining candidates on the ballot.  A good rule of thumb for ranked choice voting is that a candidate who finishes in second on first preferences is unlikely to have a net gain more than 1% for every 2% of the vote that went to the eliminated candidates.  Representative Peltola received a majority of the vote in the primary, but that is now guarantee that she will get a majority of the first preference votes in the general election.  It is entirely possible that we will not know the winner until after all counts are voted and preferences are applied, but the history of ranked choice voting in Australia is that, in most races, there is a clear winner with a sufficiently large margin in first preferences that the second-placed candidate can’t realistically catch-up. Continue Reading...

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Election Night Preview — Part Five — The Local News and the West Coast (11:00 To 11:59 P.M. Eastern)

By tmess2 | Published November 2, 2024

Typically, in the Eastern and Central Time Zones, 11:00 p.m. EDT is when the local affiliates of the “big three” broadcast networks have their local newscasts.  Election night is a little bit different.  Most of the networks give their affiliate a five minute or so slot at the top and/or bottom of the hour to give an update on the local races.  At 11:00 p.m., after doing a quick run down along with any quick projections that can be made, the networks will give an extended break for a short (fifteen minute or so local newscast).

During this hour, we have three states in which the remaining polls close and two states in which the polls close entirely.  But, in talking about the West Coast states, there is a heavy reliance on mail-in vote.  So vote counting in these states takes days.  The partial closings are 8:00 p.m. local (Pacific) time in the majority of Oregon and the northwest part of Idaho and 9:00 p.m. local (Mountain) time in North Dakota.  North Dakota and Idaho are covered in yesterday’s post, but Oregon is covered below.  The two full closings are in California and Washington.

The result in the presidential race is not in doubt in any of the three states closing this hour.  Kamala Harris should sweep all three states.  Given how many electoral votes are available in California, it is almost impossible for Vice-President Harris to be projected as the national winner before 11:00 p.m.  Similarly, if Adam Schiff is not the new Senator from California and Senator Maria Cantwell is not reelected in Washington, we are looking at a red wave that could get Republicans a filibuster proof majority.  In other words, these five contests should be projected for Democrats during the hour.  The races to follow in these states are the House races. Continue Reading...

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Election Night Preview — Part Four — Prime Time Hour Three (10:00 to 10:59 P.M. Eastern)

By tmess2 | Published November 1, 2024

After the heavy numbers of the previous two hours of prime time, the final hour of prime time represents a slight slowing of polls closing.  Of course, that will be made up for as several of the close states will either be projected or turn into all night counts.

There are three partial closings and three full closings this hour.  On the partial closing, we have the second of two 9:00 p.m. local time closings with the eastern (Central Time Zone) part of North Dakota.  You also have all but the panhandle of Idaho closing at 8:00 p.m. local time (Mountain Time Zone).  For both of these states, the part closing represents the majority of the state.  The last partial closing is the one exception to the general trend.  Oregon is the one start in which the majority of the state is in the western part of the state.  So this post will only cover the partial closing in Idaho and North Dakota with Oregon in the next post.  The three full closings are Montana and Utah at 8:00 p.m. local time and Nevada at 7:00 p.m. local time.

Idaho, like Wyoming in the previous post, is solidly red.  If Democrats are competitive at either the presidential level or for either of the congressional seats, then it will have been a very good night for Democrats.   The one contest of interest is a ballot proposition seeking to go to a top four primary with ranked choice voting.   While Idaho is not likely to turn blue anytime soon, a top four primary with ranked choice voting might mean more moderate Republicans representing Idaho in the future. Continue Reading...

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Election Night Preview — Part Three — Prime Time Hour Two (9:00 To 9:59 P.M. Eastern)

By tmess2 | Published October 31, 2024

As the major networks into the second hour of coverage, the focus begins to move from exit polls to actual returns.  Counting the split states in their main time zone, polls have now closed in the overwhelming majority of states.  For the first group of states (the ten that closed before 8:00 p.m. Eastern), you now have a good chunk of the returns from rural counties and you will have most of them by the end of this hour).  For the second group of states (the twenty that closed between 8:00 p.m. and 8:59 p.m. Eastern), those returns are just starting to come in.  In both cases, the people doing the math are comparing those returns to the results from 2016 and 2020 to see what, if anything has changed (percentages, margins, turnout).  And while you tend to have good exit polls for the statewide races, many congressional districts need these early returns to confirm the anticipated results.

This hour will see the remaining polls close in Michigan, Kansas, South Dakota, and Texas.  We will also see the polls close in Nebraska, which like Tennessee in the previous hour, opts to close all polls at the same time even though the state has two time zones (so the eastern part of the state closes at 8:00 p.m. local time and the western part of the state closes at 9:00 p.m. local time).  You have the last of the Eastern Time Zone states, New York, close its polls at 9:00 p.m. local time.  You have four Central Time Zone states — Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, and most significantly Wisconsin — close at 8:00 p.m. local time along with the eastern half of North Dakota.  Finally, polls close at 7:00 p.m. local time in four states located in the Mountain Time Zone of which the most significant is Arizona but also includes Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming.  At the end of this hour, we will only be waiting on polls to close in ten states.

Arizona is one of the two big states closing this hour.  While the easiest way for Kamala Harris to win the election is by sweeping the northern blue belt states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), winning in Arizona would allow Vice-President Harris to win if she loses Wisconsin.  At the Senate level, the unpredictable Kyrsten Sinema read the writing on the wall and decided to call it at one term.  Representative Ruben Gallego is favored to keep the Senate seat in Democratic hands but chief election denier Kari Lake will make it closer than it should be and will fight in court for the next three years if she does not win.  The Democrats are favored to keep the three seats that they currently hold in the House, but have fighting chances in three of the six seats held by Republicans.  The first district is a toss-up district (R+1) in which the Democrats have a well-funded challenger.  But we have seen this story before and Representative David Schweikert always seems to find a way to survive.  The second district is a little more of a longshot as it is a lean Republican district (R+6).   While the Democratic candidate has enough funding to run a strong campaign, unlike the first district, Republican Eli Crane has more money than his opponent.  The second is only likely to fall in a Democratic wave.  The last close district in Arizona in the sixth district.  Representative Juan Ciscomani narrowly won in 2022 and is facing a rematch this year.  The fundraising total for both candidates is approximately even. Continue Reading...

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