Regarding Democratic gains in local elections, a reader writes:
That’s an enormous change in only five months. Also last week, a lot of little municipal elections in traditionally Republican places in Illinois flipped the majority to Democrats. I live in hope.
I, too, hope that there’s a mass of upsets which will persuade the Independents of the GOP extremism. With only about 30% of the electorate swearing fealty, losing in GOP strongholds might be enough to shake out the bad apples and start the GOP on the long road back to responsibility and partnership in governance – a balance we desperately need.
The next election is either today or tomorrow, depending on when I choose to publish this post [4/18/2017], in Georgia’s 6th district, featuring Jon Ossoff, lone Democrat, against a bevy of GOP contenders in a two stage open election. If no one wins more than 50% in the first stage, then the second stage, consisting of the top two finishers in the first stage, takes place June 20. FiveThirtyEight‘s Nate Silver summarizes the situation:
Ossoff has polled at a raw 42 percent on average between these polls, but he gets up to 46 percent given his portion of the undecided vote. Handel is the top Republican, at 18 percent after allocating undecideds, with Gray following her at 13 percent. Republicans combined have 51 percent of the vote, however, whereas Democrats have 48 percent.4
If Tuesday’s results wound up exactly like this — with Republicans winning the aggregate party vote by 3 percentage points, but Ossoff winning the top-two margin by 28 points over Handel — then what would the outlook be for the second round?
With help from my colleague Aaron Bycoffe, I found 181 elections to Congress (either the House or the Senate) since 2008 in California, Louisiana and Washington, which used the two-stage format and in which a Republican squared off against a Democrat in the runoff.5 Then I ran a regression to predict the runoff margin based on the aggregate party margin and the top-two margin. It came up with the following formula:
Runoff margin = .66 * Aggregate party margin + .22 * Top-two margin
Note that the coefficient is larger on the aggregate party margin than top-two margin — that’s the regression’s way of saying that the aggregate party margin is the more important indicator. However, the top-two margin — that is, who actually won the first round — shouldn’t be overlooked. Out of 21 races in our database where a candidate won the plurality in the first round but her party lost the aggregate party vote, the candidate nevertheless won the runoff 11 times. For instance, Republicans combined got more of the vote in Washington’s U.S. Senate primary in 2010, but Democratic incumbent Patty Murray got the plurality of the vote. Murray went on to win the second round over Republican Dino Rossi.
Plugging Ossoff’s numbers into the formula above, we come up with a projection that he’d win the runoff by 4 percentage points. So that sounds pretty good for him, right? Well, yes … it would be pretty good. But not more than pretty good, because he has some other things to worry about. For one thing, the margin of error in the calculation is quite high. Specifically, it’s about 8 percentage points for projecting one candidate’s vote share in the runoff, or 16 percentage points (!) for projecting the margin between the candidates. First-round results only tell you so much in these cases.
And then Nate goes on to note the partisanship factor; he is very cautious if Ossoff isn’t the outright victor, and he doesn’t believe he will be. But for all of Nate’s factoring in of intangibles, I have to wonder if he missed one.
That would be former Representative Tom Price. Although he won the 2016 seat 61.7% to 38.3%, Price’s nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services has served to focus a light on a number of nascent scandals, such as his misuse of his position in Congress to buy stocks of companies favored by his own legislation. How aware are 6th district voters of these alleged misdeeds? How much do they blame this on Price, and how much do they blame this on the current makeup of the Republican Party?
I guess we’ll find out. (I do actually have an uncle living near Atlanta. I should give him a call.)
And, finally, don’t forget this memorable Democratic victory from back in March. Via NBC10:
Democratic write-in candidate Emilio Vazquez pulled off a surprise victory in a North Philadelphia special election to replace disgraced state Rep. Leslie Acosta, who gave up her seat following a corruption conviction.
His victory was announced Friday morning after the city Election Board hand tallied all 2,483 write-in votes.
Vazquez became an improbable winner in a race that saw the Democrat originally slated for the ballot knocked off following a residency challenge.
That left only Republican candidate Lucinda Little on the ballot for a district — the 197th — that is 85 percent Democrat and 5 percent Republican. Little received only 198 votes on Tuesday.
A quick look at Google headlines suggest this is not without controversy. But it still makes me laugh.
