Surgency of OC’s Blue Surge Surges with Less Urgency

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These updates still seem to be pretty popular, so we’ll continue with them.  So far as I can tell, the next OCROV report will be out at 5 p.m. Saturday; then on Monday.  It’s beginning to look like things will have wrapped up before Thanksgiving — and I say that just to tempt fate, because I hope that they don’t.

We’ll start with the Registrar of Voters “What’s Left to Count” info:

(1) Total Ballots Left to Count

Vote-by-Mail Returned at Polling Places Left to Count

Eligible Vote-by-Mail Ballots received after Election Day Left to Count

As you can see, about 7/8 of the ballots out there are provisional. That last 1/8 is about 3/5 vote-by-mails (left alone for reasons that have never been clear to me, but that’s how Neal Kelley likes to do it), 1/5 Election Day paper ballots, and 1/5 Conditional Voters Registrations (which to me sound like more provisionals.)  Each of those ballots is a fight waiting to happen — and if those wanting to deny them can push them out past the deadline for counting, this process will take a long time, with the pace slowing to a trickle.

(2) Congressed Up in Blue

All seven of the members of Congress representing even an inch of Orange County come January will be Democrats.  I have to admit that I couldn’t imagine this really happening — wasn’t it just half a year ago that we worried about being shut out of the Top Two in several districts?  For those many conservatives who think that this is something other than a highly educated county rejecting Trump — well, I was going to say “go on thinking that,” but I would prefer to see the GOP crawl back from the Ledge of Crazy before it turns into something worse.

We’ve already gone through Linda Sanchez, Lou Correa, and Alan Lowenthal (never in doubt), through Levin, then Rouda, then Porter — and now Gil Cisneros closes things off.

Just for the sake of completeness, here are Rouda’s and Porter’s numbers today:

They’re settling into wins of about seven points and three points respectively.  Close — but not really that close.

Here’s what the numbers look for CA-39 this evening — showing results firsst from Orange County and then from Los Angeles County, with each showing the same state returns:

All I can say here is that, if Marggie can come back and win, she’s going to have to do it without help from OC, because that help doesn’t seem to be on its way.  A 16.600 gap is quite large, but not necessarily impossible in one of our huge State Senate districts — if the surge is coming on hard in San Diego.

If you’re keeping track, that’s probably 2 Republican wins in the State Senate — both of them closer than they should have been.  That’s evidence of a blue wave — but not of a blue county.

Now on to the Assembly races, which are mostly over:

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I owe Michelle Duman an apology: she did a lot better in this district than I ever thought she could — enough, in fact, to make incumbent Steve Choi look like a chump.

Could she still win this race?  Let’s put the last few days’ results — latest to earliest — below to see how it’s been progressing.

Well … no.  She’s not making much progress and she’s not going to win.  But she put up a credible fight — and might even hit 48%!  That’s a pretty serious accomplishment.

AD-69

Who’s the Democrat here?  Oh yeah….

I’ll just put up Tuesday’s results so that we can get a sense of how this race progressed:

Daly is the one who got the benefit of a Democratic surge — but a very, very small benefit.  Hopefully some Democrat can run against him next year and test the theory of whether he is functionally as Republican as his critical votes and his endorsements.

AD-72

This is the race that is still undecided.  Let’s look at the results from the three previous days.

In three days of counting, Josh (or, as I call him to distinguish him from once-and-future Senator Newman, “J-Low”) has gained one percentage point on Diep.  More importantly, he has gained 11,642 votes to Diep’s 10,061 — a margin of 1,581.  In the last day, though, he gained only 300 votes — but it was a slow day all around.  He needs to make up a gap of another 6,005 votes to win — which, if he can make up 500/day, is twelve days — possibly doable; if 300/day, that’s 20 days of counting, so … no.

Here’s why I think that he might be able to pull it off.

I’m getting emails from the Democratic Party inviting me to go to the ROV’s office and watch the counting of the provisional ballots, where legions of Republican attorneys have supposedly already been dispatched to challenge signature matches on provisional ballots.  OK, not really surprising but … why are they still bothering to do so?  They’ve already lost all of the Congressional races.  Are they out here to protect Tim Shaw from Doug Chaffee?  Probably not.  Are they out here to protect Anaheim from a living wage ordinance and a smart and not necessarily compliant Mayor?  That seems like more a Disney production than a partisan one.

There are two races in the county that I expect would rouse the state Republican Party — and they are Janet Nguyen vs. Tom Umberg in SD-34 and Tyler Diep vs. Josh Lowenthal in AD-72.  And they very largely overlap: if Orange County is the center of the political universe this year, western coastal and inland OC is the center of that center.  So my bet — and I haven’t spoken about this to anyone who would know — is that they are going in there and challenging every freaking provisional ballot that doesn’t either have Vietnamese-surname or belong to someone whom they know is an HB, Seal Beach, or Los Alamitos white-power activist.

Doing so without reasonable suspicion violates the rules — but is it really going to get prosecuted? Meanwhile, Democrats are not likely to retaliate, despite years and years of stories of ballot fraud by the Jabet Nguyen faction in particular, both because we’re too delicate to do so and because of certain affiliations of certain party leaders into which I shall not delve here and now.

So we may well face a situation in which Josh actually IS picking up 500 votes a day but only 300 of them show up on the tally.  If they can’t get through all of the provisionals by certain deadlines (I’m not sure how the possibility of a recount fits into those 30 days allotted for counting), then — as in Florida — some perfectly valid ballots won’t get counted.  It’s just a hunch, but I think that whatever has been (and continues to be) gumming up the operation of the ROV — which can be seen from its drop in productivity — has to do with this race and SD-34.  I think that someone may be trying to run out the clock.  And it’s scandalous.

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It’s wonderful that Scott did even this well, but I don’t see him picking up 25,000 votes.  For one thing, my guess is that provisional ballots are simply less common in South County than most other places — which means that their counting is pretty much done.

The late trend goes towards Democrats, not away from them!

More on other races tomorrow (or so).  MAKE THIS YOUR OPEN THREAD TOO!