Protesters support Oregon's Measure 92
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• OR Ballot: In an unusual twist, post-election get-out-the-vote activity has played a role in a presumed-defeated ballot measure rising from the dead and landing in automatic recount territory. Oregon's Measure 92, which would require labeling of so-called genetically modified organisms, was declared defeated right after Election Day, losing at the time by a margin of about 1.2 percent. As of this writing, however, that margin has dwindled to just 0.06 percent, or just 809 votes.
While the last votes to be counted in all-mail Oregon are usually a little more left-leaning than the electorate as a whole, in this case the narrowing spread was assisted by activists for the Yes on 92 campaign. A new law this year provided for the release of the names of voters whose ballots were submitted but not recognized as valid. The Yes on 92 campaign proceeded to contact those voters on the list who were likely supporters of the measure, and remind them to correct any errors (typically signature problems) that prevented their ballot from being tallied. A spokesperson for the Yes on 92 campaign said "several thousand" votes were added to the tally in this way.
The threshold for an automatic recount is a margin of less than 0.2 percent; the Secretary of State's office hopes to certify the election and call for any required recounts sometime during the first week of December. It's unlikely that a recount will change the outcome, but it's still impressive that Measure 92 supporters closed the gap in this fashion, and it heralds a new era of post-Election Day GOTV.
Senate:
• GA-Sen: Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed is one of those guys whose name always gets mentioned as a possible candidate for higher office but who never takes the plunge. No different now: Reed rather unhelpfully offered praise for GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson, who is up for re-election in 2016, saying it'll be "very difficult to attract one of the leading Democrats to take on Sen. Isakson because of the reputation that he has in the state and the affection folks have for him." Reed hastened to add that he would not run, though he's holding out the possibility of a gubernatorial bid in 2018, when Gov. Nathan Deal will be term-limited.
Meanwhile, perhaps the leadingest Democratic candidate in Georgia, Michelle Nunn, says she's still holding out the possibility of running for office again, though unsurprisingly, she's being vague about any possible plans. Jim Galloway thinks she's "unlikely" to challenge Isakson, but Nunn is only 47 and could definitely bide her time. A 2020 rematch against David Perdue, the man who just beat her 53-45 a few weeks ago, could be intriguing, especially given Georgia's blue-ward trend and presidential year turnout.
• NH-Sen: A new poll of New Hampshire conducted by Purple Insights, on behalf of the funky pairing of Bloomberg Politics and Saint Anselm College, doesn't offer any Senate horserace numbers for 2016. However, they do have favorability numbers for freshman Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who sports a healthy 47-27 score. Any Democrat worth her salt should be able to drive up Ayotte's negatives once the campaign begins in earnest, but it does show that the incumbent starts off in a pretty decent place and won't be that easy to beat.
Meanwhile, this bit of retrospective news is deeply amusing, but the headline is sufficient: "Campaign finance reform PAC accused of violating campaign finance law." Click if you want some more Larry Lessig-related hilarity.
Gubernatorial:
• MO-Gov: Back in 2012, when Missouri Republicans were still casting about for savior candidates in the state's gubernatorial contest and especially the Senate race, one name they turned to was state Auditor Tom Schweich. But Schweich said no to both—wisely, as it turned out, as the GOP lost both. But now, fresh off winning a second term as auditor unopposed, he says he is indeed considering a bid for governor, especially since the seat will be open thanks to term limits.
But the GOP primary is going to be a bloody mess. Former state House Speaker Catherine Hanaway is already running, and she's openly being bankrolled by wealthy conservative activist Rex Sinquefield. (Missouri has no donation limits, so Sinquefield just cut her campaign a $750,000 check.) Businessman John Brunner, a failed Senate candidate two years ago, is also considering a bid, and former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens (who seems to have a very high opinion of himself) could jump in as well. Rep. Blaine Leutkemeyer, who just secured a fourth term in Congress, is yet another option.
And even at this early stage, things are already getting snippy. Schweich took a shot at both Hanaway and Sinquefield in an election night speech, berating "candidates who seem almost completely bought and paid for by one donor." Sinquefield has only fueled this perception by sending additional $10,000 checks to Hanaway every week. But Schweich, too, has his own flaws—in particular, he's very awkward in person and not a natural politician.
Missouri Republicans are desperately eager to win back the governor's mansion, seeing as they've been shut out of the top spot for all but one term over the last two decades. And in theory, they should have a great shot, since the Show Me State has moved dramatically right-ward during that time. But Democrats are likely to be unified behind a single candidate, whether it's Attorney General Chris Koster or perhaps Sen. Claire McCaskill, while Republicans are sure to savage one another as they go for the top prize, so there's definitely a lot more to be written about this race.
House:
• AZ-02: In the last uncalled House race in the nation, Democratic Rep. Ron Barber, who trails Republican Martha McSally by just 161 votes, has filed a lawsuit asking a judge to require two counties to count 133 provisional ballots that were previously rejected. Barber's campaign has also Republican Secretary of State Ken Bennett to tally 156 uncounted provisional ballots, though it's not clear if there's overlap between these two piles. No matter what, though, the race will face a mandatory recount next month.
Other Races:
• Chicago Mayor: The filing deadline for the Windy City's Feb. 24 mayoral race was on Monday, and the two most prominent challengers to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Alderman Bob Fioretti and Cook County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, both filed well in excess of the 12,500 signatures needed to get on the ballot. It sounds like Rahm plans to challenge those petitions, offering the fake justification that the process requires "legitimacy," but unless there have been some major screwups, Garcia's 60,000 signatures and Fioretti's 55,000 should be enough to secure access for both candidates.
Rahm's got more money than Satan, but a recent Lake Research poll, conducted for unions friendly to Garcia, gave him with a sucktastic 37-61 job approval rating. Lake also found Rahm unable to clear the 50 percent mark he'd need to avoid an April runoff, so even though neither Fioretti nor Garcia will have the financial resources to match Rahm's, he could very well get pushed to the brink.
• MN State House: On Friday, we briefly discussed Minnesota's state House elections, where Republicans flipped the chamber—but they did so by picking up rural seats, not seats in their former suburban strongholds, which have grown increasingly diverse.
However, a sharp reader wrote in to point out something interesting about one of those rural seats that flipped: District 17B, in Willmar, isn't the stereotypically all-white district that you might envision when you think of rural Minnesota; rather, in the last few decades, it's grown to nearly 20 percent Hispanic and 5 percent black (mostly Somalis). But despite that diversity, the Democratic freshman in that district still lost. In fact, Willmar's diversity hasn't made it more Democratic: Kandiyohi County, where the town is, located, was 46 percent Obama in 2012, less than Michael Dukakis's 50 percent in 1988.
That fits with some broader trends, though. Midwestern towns like Willmar aren't that unusual; there are a number of isolated towns in Iowa and Kansas (Garden City, Kansas, is often the go-to location for stories on the topic) that have seen an explosion in diversity but have remained red, politically, because new immigrants aren't voting yet. The common thread among these towns is always large meat-packing plants, which tend to attract immigrant labor.
But Willmar and District 17B, which only gave 47 percent of its vote to Obama, have plenty in common with almost all of the other seats where Democrats lost. They were generally in rural areas that were once ancestrally Democratic but have now turned red: District 2A (46 percent Obama), 10A (43 percent), 10B (45 percent), 11B (47 percent), 12A (46 percent), 14B (53 percent, but a freshman), 17A (47 percent), 17B (47 percent), 24B (47 percent), 27A (56 percent, but a freshman), and 56B (49 percent). The only Romney seat Team Blue has have left in the MN House is 4B (47 percent). On the flipside, there are also only a few older Republicans in Obama districts: 21A (51 percent), 28B (52 percent), 54B (49 percent), and 57A (51 percent). It was very much what you'd call a realigning election.
The Minnesota Post has more on the rural roots of the GOP's chamber flip; in particular, the article has a terrific data viz that helps you identify where the losses took place.
Grab Bag:
• Ballot Measures: Over the weekend, David Jarman rounded up the results in state-level ballot measures from around the nation. Given that voters passed many Democratic action items like minimum wage hikes and marijuana legalization, even in red states where Democratic incumbents were sent down to defeat, he also suggests some future projects for using the initiative process for moving the progressive agenda forward.
• Deaths: Democrat Marion Barry, who served many tumultuous terms as mayor and city councilor in Washington, DC, proved time and again that his political career could never be killed. But illness took him on Sunday, as he died of cardiovascular disease at the age of 78. Barry's electoral immortality was confounding to many outside observers and white voters alike, but Jeff Smith offers a clarifying analysis that explains the Barry phenomenon and puts it in proper context:
How did a politician with repeated cases of womanizing, crack addiction and ethical lapses manage to recover so many times? The answer actually lies further back in the past than many of the journalists who have made careers investigating Barry have ever dug. Barry, a Mississippi sharecropper's son whose leadership in the Freedom Riders first brought him into the public eye, was the head of D.C.'s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the mid-1960s, organizing a boycott to protest bus fare increases, leading the movement for district home rule and co-founding a program providing job training and entry-level work to unemployed black men. After the city's 1968 riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Barry started a program of free food distribution for those in devastated neighborhoods, convincing a supermarket chain to donate food and personally delivering it to city housing projects.
His subsequent efforts as a school board member, city councilman and mayor—when Congress martyred him by stripping him of executive powers and cutting federal funding—gave Barry credibility that sustained him throughout his struggles. It's important to recognize the long history of majority-black Washington as the seat of a federal government that first enslaved blacks, then oppressed and segregated them, and finally stripped local voters of power after they had democratically elected one of their own as leader. While most whites viewed Barry as a self-serving, drug-addled charlatan, most blacks saw him as a prodigal son. Of course, it didn't hurt that the federal government, given its modern history of uneasy, colonial-style relations with the District's government, conducted the sting operation that, in the eyes of many, entrapped Barry.
Smith's piece (for which David Nir is credited with contributing research) is
worth reading in full.
• Ganja Break: "Vape" may be the Oxford Dictionaries word of the year, but while it's come to the fore thanks to e-cigarettes, the term really owes its origins to the world of weed—or as they say now, "cannabusiness":
Yet when it comes to pot, the new terminology goes beyond describing the high (though, indeed, "green out" is the new "black out"). There are now terms for the business (pot entrepreneurs are "ganjapreneurs") and its sociology (bias against stoners is "cannabigotry"). The act of disliking a person who vapes is called "vape vitriol"; "cannasseur" refers to a pot connoisseur.
So when results invariably trickle to a crawl on election night, don't engage in cannabigotry. We may just have some serious cannaseurs on our hands.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir and Jeff Singer, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Taniel, and Dreaminonempty.
