Tag Archives: Washington

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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Primary Elections — Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Washington, Hawaii

By tmess2 | Published August 4, 2024

Another week, another set of primaries.  While the national media is focused on who will be the next Vice-President of the United States,  the results of these elections will determine what seats might be competitive in November, and, in some cases, the winner is all but certain to be holding office in January.  On Tuesday, there will be primaries in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, and Washington.  On Saturday, there will be primaries in Hawaii.

In Kansas, Republican engaged in extreme gerrymandering.  The Republicans’ problem in drawing lines is that half of the state’s population is in a handful of counties in Eastern Kansas covering the western suburbs of Kansas City, the state capitol in Topeka, and the University of Kansas in Lawrence.  While not deep blue, this area is definitely bluer than the rest of the state.  Under the pre-2020 lines, the Second District was a lean Republican district and the Third District was a swing district with a slight edge for the Democrats.  To try to “fix” this, the Republicans in Kansas drew some weird lines to make the First District (western Kansas) and the Second District (Topeka and Lawrence) into a weird interlocking jigsaw puzzle which allowed moving some blue areas out of the Third District (K.C. suburbs) into the Second District while adding enough red areas into the Second District to make it redder. The impact was to make the Second District relatively safe while keeping the Third District competitive but slightly favorable to the Republicans.

During the past several cycles, the Second District has been something of a revolving door.  The candidate elected in 2018 was scandal plagued and lost the primary in 2020.  The candidate who won in 2020 got tired of the shenanigans in Washington after a mere four years and opted against seeking a third term. As a result, there are five candidates seeking the Republican nomination, three of whom are roughly equal in fundraising.  The two leading candidates appear to be Jeff Kahrs who serves on the staff of the current representative and appears to have the endorsement of what passes for the Republican establishment in Kansas and former state Attorney General and failed gubernatorial candidate Derek Schmidt who has the support of the Trump wing of the Kansas party. Continue Reading...

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The Midterms-Preview (Part 5)

By tmess2 | Published November 6, 2022

Finally, we reach the end of the evening.  Five hours after the first polls closed in Kentucky and Indiana, we reach 10 p.m. Central ST.  At this time the last polls close in North Dakota and Idaho (covered in part 4).  Likewise, the remainder of the polls (representing the vast majority of the state) close in Oregon.  And, even though both states have a significant number of mail-in votes (as is true for several of the western states discussed in earlier posts), the polls will close in California and Washington.

I’ll start with Washington.  Washington has a top two primary (as does California).  Unlike Califronia, all of the races feature a Democrat against a Republican.  While there are some polls showing a potentially competitive race for Senate, I’m just not seeing it.  Washington is too blue in recent years.  Even in a red wave, Senator Patty Murray should win.  Most of the polls making this state seem close come from polls sponsored by Republican-affiliated groups.  While they may end up being right, even they are merely showing a close race.  The current split in the House is seven Democrats and three Republicans.  There are three seats that could flip.   The Third District is currently held by the Republicans, but, in the primay, the incumbent representative barely finished in third after having the integrity to vote to impeach President Trump.  Whether moderate Republicans will vote for the Democrat in the general and flip this seat — for the next two years to the Democrats — is the big question.  In a red wave, the Republicans have a chance at taking the Eighth District and the Tenth District.  The Tenth District (basically a swatch southwest of Seattle from Tacoma to Olympia) is more likely to stay Democratic.  The Eighth District (an exurban/rural district to the east of Seattle) looks more like a swing district, but Democrats are still favored.  Because of mail-in ballots, it typically takes several days to figure out who wins close races.

Moving south to Oregon, the big race is for Governor.  And it’s a classic argument for ranked-choice voting.  Business interests have pushed a moderate Democrat to run as an independent, and this candidate may take just enough votes to allow the Republicans to win by a narrow plurality.  The race is a pure toss-up.   Senator Ron Wyden is solidly favored to be reelected which might just have enough coattails to allow the Democrat to win the open race for governor.  In the House, the current split is four Democrats to one Republican with one new seat.  In the Fifth District, the Democratic incumbent lost in the primary to a progressive challenger.  There is a risk that the progressive nominee is too progressive for the district which runs from the suburbs of Portland into a rural part of the state to the south and east of Portland.  The Sixth District is the “new” district and is a little bit geographically smaller than the Fifth, but like the Fifth it runs from the immediate suburbs of Portland into the rural areas to the south and west of Portland.    The Republicans also have outside chances in the Fourth District, an open seat, which runs along the Pacific Coast in the area to the south and west of the Fifth and Sixth.  If the Democrats get all three of the seats, they could potentially keep the House.  In a red wave, the Republicans could gain all three seats. Continue Reading...

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Redistricting — Washington

By tmess2 | Published June 29, 2021

Like New Jersey, Washington uses a bipartisan commission to draw its lines.  Unlike New Jersey, the rules for Washington provide that, to the extent possible, the lines should respect geographical boundaries and the boundaries of political subdivisions.  Additionally, the lines are required to be fair and promote competitive districts.

And in a pattern that we have seen in other states, the districts in the major metropolitan areas now have excess voters and the more rural districts are now short voters.  And in Washington, that could hurt the Republicans.  The three districts currently held by Republicans (Third District in southwest Washington, Fourth District in central Washington, and Fifth District in eastern Washington) are a combined 50,000 people short.  The Sixth District in northwestern Washington is another 32,000 people short.  Meanwhile, the most Democratic district in the state (Seventh District — Seattle) has around 40,000 excess population and the First District (north central Washington) and Eighth District (eastern King County and central Washington) have a combined 25,000 excess population.  The only district that is close to being a majority minority district is the Ninth District (part of Seattle and its eastern suburbs).

There are some maneuvers that could reduce the number of split counties.  For example, King County is large enough to contain two whole districts with some left over.  Thus, I moved the part of the Seventh District in Snomish County to the Second District.  And I exchanged some precincts in Snomish County from the First District to the Second District while giving the part of the Second District in Whatcom County to the First District.  Likewise, I gave all of the Tenth District precincts in Mason County to the Sixth (which also has to expand into Thurston County and additional Thurston County precincts to the Third District.  To bring the Fifth up to quota, I gave all of the precincts in Walla Walla County to the Fifth District along with the Eastern half of Okanogan County.  That, in turn, required the Fourth District to expand westward in Whatcom County.  An argument can be made for rearranging the Fourth and Fifth Districts to give the southeastern part of the state to the Fourth District and leaving the Fifth District to the northeastern part of the state. Continue Reading...

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Redistricting 2021 — The Numbers

By tmess2 | Published May 1, 2021

On Monday, four days ahead of its latest target date and almost four months behind the statutory date, the Census Bureau released the national and state-level results from the Census including the apportionment numbers that determine how many representatives each get.  As can be expected, there are multiple different tables summarizing the data in different ways for us number geeks.

The bottom line table shows the apportionment population (both those living in the state and those residing overseas — like military personnel — who call that state home), the number of representatives that each state is getting, and the change in representation.   We will get back to the change in a minute, but the big level number is that the apportionment population is slightly over 331 million.  As such, the average size (mean) of each congressional district is just under 761 thousand.  Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming have fewer people than the average congressional district.  While the apportionment formula does not work for calculating the population needed for the first representative, even Wyoming has enough population to be entitled to three-quarters of a representative.

If, D.C. and Puerto Rico were states, Puerto Rico would be just ahead of Utah (which has four representatives) and just behind Connecticut (which has five representatives) and D.C. would be between Vermont and Alaska.  Given that Puerto Rico is only slightly larger than Utah (which was not close to getting a fifth representative and far enough behind Connecticut, Puerto Rico would be due for four representatives.  If  both were states, the five states that would lose a representative would have been Oregon, Colorado, and Montana (all of which gained a seat), California (which lost a seat), and Minnesota (which barely avoided losing a seat).  The chart of priority values that allows us to consider the impact of adding Puerto Rico and D.C. also shows that Minnesota barely held onto its last seat and New York barely lost its seat.  Apparently, given the formula, Minnesota would have lost that seat if it had 24 fewer people, and New York would have kept its seat if it had 89 more people.  (The disparity in numbers is caused by the fact that the two states have different number of seats. Continue Reading...

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Election Night Preview — Part 5 (11 PM EST to Sunrise)

By tmess2 | Published October 31, 2020

Recent elections have been so close that between the inability to call states and the large number of electoral votes on the West Coast, the news media has been unable to call the presidential election before 11 PM EST.

Before going into the states that will be closing at 11 p.m. or later, some words about the process of projecting a winner.  Each network has a team that makes the decision on when to project.   For all intents and purposes, this team is in a sealed room with no knowledge about what the talking heads or saying or whether other networks have made a projection.   There are lots of data that these teams look at: 1) election day exit polls; 2) early vote exit polls; 3) polls of those who voted by mail; 4) the reported early vote; 4) how many mail-in ballots remain to be counted; 5) “key” precincts (key in the sense that the team knows the typical vote in those precincts and can judge the swing in those precincts); 6) which precincts (and counties) have not yet reported.  Basically, while the margin of error in exit polls makes it difficult to call a close (52-48) race based on exit polls, you can call a landslide (60-40) based on exit polls.  For those in which exit polls show a close race, you need enough votes to make a call.  And if the early results are consistent with a close race, you can’t make a call into the outstanding vote is too small to realistically swing the race (i.e. the remaining precincts are in areas that favor candidate X who is ahead or candidate Y would need 95% of the remaining vote and has been getting 80% of the vote in similar precincts).  One fact that could hinder making projections and lead to a state being uncalled on election night is a large number of uncounted absentee ballots (due to a state not being able to count before election day) or a large number of absentee ballots not yet returned in states that have a post-election day deadline for receipt of absentee ballots if postmarked by election day.

At 11 p.m., we will have partial closings in the remaining parts of Idaho, North Dakota, and Oregon.  Of these three states, most of the voters Idaho and North Dakota are in the part that closed at 10 p.m. EST.  However, in Oregon, most of the voters live in the Pacific time zone which will close at 11 p.m.  The entirety of the state also closes for California and Washington,  At midnight, the polls close in part of Alaska and in all of Hawaii.  Finally at 1:00 a.m., polls close in the remainder of Alaska. Continue Reading...

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August 4 Primaries — Arizona, Michigan, and Washington

By tmess2 | Published July 25, 2020

As the calendar flips around to August, we are about to hit a rush of state and congressional primaries.  Some states (e.g., California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois) hold their state and congressional primaries on the same day as the presidential primary.  Others (e.g., Florida) hold a separate presidential primary with the state and congressional primaries occurring later in the year.  And most of the states with separate primaries will hold them between August 1 and mid-September.  (In addition, there is the postponed Connecticut primary.)

Earlier this week, I discussed the  two states holding primaries on August 4 that I am most familiar with (Kansas and Missouri).  (And if I hear another ad attacking a hardcore pro-life Republican for saying something even slightly pro-choice fifteen years ago, I may get physically ill.)  The other three states holding primaries on August 4 are Arizona, Michigan, and Washington.

In Arizona, the biggest race is the special election for the remaining two years of the Senator John McCain’s term.  Mark Kelly is the only candidate on the ballot on the Democratic side.  It is likely that interim Senator Martha McSally will be the Republican nominee.  She does, however, have primary opposition.  Her opponent has some money, but not really enough to run a successful campaign.  So unless there is a lot of silent opposition to her among Arizona Republicans, she should win the primary.  (There was one poll that compared Kelly against both McSally and her primary opponent, and the primary opponent did a little bit better but not much better against Kelly.)  In 2018, the Democrats won 5 of the 9 congressional seats and none of the races was particularly close.  At this point, I am not hearing anything out of Arizona that points to any of the primaries being interesting. Continue Reading...

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2020 Delegate Math — March 10

By tmess2 | Published March 6, 2020

There is just a little bit of room between Super Tuesday and March 10 for everyone to catch their breath.  Over the past seven days, over half of the candidates have dropped out, and we are left with three candidates (Joe Biden, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bernie Sanders.)

While we are down to three candidates, one word of warning is appropriate.  As we saw on Super Tuesday, some states have no excuse early voting or mail-in ballots.  On Super Tuesday, we saw some significant differences between the early vote count and the “election day” count.  Simply put, people who voted early may have voted for a candidate who was no longer actively running.  It is unclear if any of these candidates will ultimately win a delegate, but some of these candidates did get a significant number of votes in some states.  The extra seven days should lessen this effect, but there could be — depending on the state — a significant number of voters who voted before February 28th, and some of these voters went with one of the five candidates who are no longer running.

There are seven contests which will conclude on March 10.  (I use the term conclude because one of them — Democrats Abroad — is a party-run primary in which the polls are open for almost one week and others allow early voting.)  Besides Democrats Abroad, the other six contests are Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Washington.  While nominally styled as a caucus, North Dakota is a party-run primary.  Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, and Washington are state-run primaries.  (Washington like California relies heavily on mail-in ballots which can cause a delay in getting final results.)  Under the rules of the Democratic Party, all of these contests are binding and delegates will be allocated based on the votes cast for each candidate. Continue Reading...

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Delegate Selection Plans — Wyoming and Update

By tmess2 | Published April 13, 2019

As more delegate selection plans are posted on-line, we have two states that have confirmed that they are switching from a caucus to a state-run primary.  The first is Minnesota.  Previously, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party had informed the Minnesota Secretary of State that it would be participating in the state-run primary, but we now have the draft plan which bases delegate allocation on the results of the primary.  The other state is Washington.  When we looked at the draft plan for Washington last month, the Washington Democrats had submitted two plans — one based on the caucus and one based on the primary.    Since then, the state of Washington finalized the scheduling of the primary for March (moving it up from May) and, at last weekend’s state committee meeting, the Washington Democrats opted for the primary-based plan.

With these two changes, we were down to a handful of states.  Yesterday, Wyoming released their draft plan for 2020.  Wyoming is keeping with a caucus system using, as in the past, a county caucus as the first step.  While there is not a specific set date in the plan, it does indicate an intent to hold the county caucuses on a weekend in March which would be earlier than the mid-April date from 2016.  To meet the goals of making access to the caucuses easier for voters, Wyoming is tentatively calling for allowing those who are unable to attend the county caucuses to participate by submitting a “surrogate affidavit.”  The exact details of how this will work is still being discussed and is not clear from the current draft.  (The name suggests a proxy vote, but my hunch is that — either at the final plan approved by the state or the final plan as amended in response to the national Rules and By-laws committee requests — it will be more like a typical absentee ballot.) 

The Wyoming plan uses the preference vote at the county caucuses to elect state convention delegates.  It uses a separate preference vote at the state convention to allocate the national convention delegates.  This part of the plan is clearly contrary to the national party rules.  In relevant part, Rule 2.K.5 requires that the delegate allocation be locked in based on the final preference vote at the first determining step.  In Wyoming’s plan, the first determining step is the county caucuses.   As such, assuming that Wyoming does not correct this part of the plan in the final draft, it is likely that the Rules and By-laws Committee will require a change prior to approving Wyoming’s plan.  Given what the other states are doing, Wyoming will probably be given the option of using either the raw vote totals (which they have used in the past) or the state convention delegates won.  As noted in previous posts, using state convention delegates won eliminate the effect of high turnout in some parts of the state but can also penalize candidates who are get just over 15% of the raw vote state-wide (as those candidates are likely to miss the threshold in some of the counties converting 13% of the vote in those counties into 0% of the delegates potentially causing the candidate to slip beneath 15% if the delegates won state-wide).  Continue Reading...

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