Goldy

I spent most of the past couple days mucking around with WordPress 2.0, building a new template so that I could finally upgrade my cranky old copy of 1.2 and deal with comment spam assault I’m under. And things went pretty darn well… until I ran the 1.2 to 1.5 upgrade script late last night, and the mySQL server crashed. And then crashed again.

And I think, it’s all your fault. I’m guessing the problem is that my database is just plain huge… over 100 MB of comments alone.

So if anybody has a solution short of jettisoning the comment threads, please let me know.

In the meanwhile, I’ll delete the comment spam when I get around to deleting the comment spam. If people have a problem with that, don’t read the comments. But if I keep getting complaints about the spam via email or comment, I might as well just turn off comments altogether.

Light posting this weekend as I focus on some system maintenance. So talk amongst yourselves.

Yesterday I poked fun at my beer-buddy Stefan for posting the following paranoid fantasy:

I heard a story from an informed source that someone walked into a polling place in Bellevue and stuffed a bunch of “flood ballots” into an Accuvote. They have lawyers looking into this.

Well, KCRE has finished its investigation, and it turns out that Stefan was right: somebody did stuff a bunch of ballots into an Acuvote. Um… into the slot on the side of the cart, that is. You know, the one where you are supposed to stuff absentee and provisional ballots.

The Republican poll worker who reported the incident insisted that this was suspicious because one person shouldn’t have had more than one ballot, but of course one can easily imagine a circumstance where somebody might gather up absentee ballots from family, neighbors or co-workers, and drop them off at a polling station or a post office.

So I guess, where there’s smoke there’s, um, smoke.

I’ll be at Town Hall doing the Seattle Follies again, next Thursday:

Seattle Follies: The Brawl at Town Hall
Thursday, November 16 , 7:30 PM

Join Seattle City Councilmember Sally Clark as she hosts the post-election edition of Seattle Follies. Joining her, and providing slashing and trenchant commentary on who really won and lost in the vote are blogger and humorist David Goldstein of HorsesAss.org, speaking from the left, and John Moe, public radio personality and author of the recently published book, Conservatize Me, promoting the view from the right. “The Brawl at Town Hall” will feature these two in a verbal boxing match with timed rounds, refereed by Ms. Clark. Councilmember Richard Conlin, former chair of the Council’s transportation committee and a champion of mass transit and sustainable neighborhoods, offers his tongue-in-cheek alternatives to the current and controversial proposals for the new 520 bridge. Special guests are the great Irish musicians Dale Russ and Finn MacGinty, with Rob Jones tickling the ivories throughout the evening. As always, the audience plays, “Who Said What,” the currents events game with chocolate prizes for the winners. Beer and wine available. Downstairs at Town Hall, enter on Seneca Street.

Tickets & info
Advance tickets are $12/$10 Town Hall members, seniors & students only at www.brownpapertickets.com or 1800/838-3006. $15/$13 at the door.

FYI, I was originally supposed to go up against John Carlson, but he had a scheduling conflict. Given the outcome of Tuesday’s election, I think it would have been a lot more fun going up against a genuine conservative like Carlson than a fake one like Moe.

I seem to be having some unexplained mail server problems today, that is either delaying delivery or not delivering emails at all. So don’t expect me to be too responsive to email today.

Also, for those of you complaining in the comment threads about comment spam… shut up. I occasionally get waves of comment spam that come in faster than I can delete them, and my cranky old copy of WordPress just can’t defend itself. I need to spend some time upgrading to a new version to deal with this problem, but in the meanwhile, I’ll delete the spam when I get to it.

Back in June of 2005, before most Washington voters knew his name, Strategic Vision showed Mike McGavick trailing Sen. Maria Cantwell 50% to 36% in their first head to head poll. By August 2005, McGavick had climbed to 38%. Fifteen months and untold millions later, McGavick has finally reached the magic 39% mark.

Hmm. These are Will Baker numbers — barely a few points higher than my dog would get merely by putting an “R” next to her name on the ballot. I mean, damn… even Richard Pope managed to get 44% of the vote this year. (Keep your spirits up Richard, maybe tenth time’s the charm.)

Not that this was much of a surprise, as McGavick never managed to gain any traction. Even when a couple polls briefly showed the margin closing this summer, it was solely due to Cantwell’s numbers coming down, while McGavick continued to bump his head on the low 40’s.

Why? Well yeah, there was that big blue wave thing — but McGavick was always a sucky candidate running a sucky campaign, and a quick scan through my previous posts suggests he never really had a chance, whatever the political climate.

Take a look. I come off as a pretty smart guy:

April 19, 2005, on reports that Mike McGavick, Rick White and Chris Vance were all scrambling to get Karl Rove’s endorsement:

I’m not really concerned which of the three the voters Rove ultimately chooses, as it’s hard to take seriously a field that includes Vance as a viable candidate. I’ll be the first to admit that Cantwell is no Patty Murray, and should be vulnerable… but if these crappy candidates are the best the state GOP Karl Rove can come up with, it’s gonna be a cakewalk.

July 16, 2005:

I just don’t think defeating Cantwell will be as easy as the Republican faithful think it will. Apart from Rossi, all other GOP hopefuls trailed Cantwell by double digits in a recent Republican poll… and after a slow start, the Senator now reports a $3 million head start in her campaign account. And it doesn’t really matter who the GOP throws up against her, if she’s smart, Cantwell herself will all but ignore her opponent, choosing to run against Frist, DeLay, Rove, Bush and the right-wing Republican hegemony in DC.

It is true that Cantwell has not been the most visible of senators… mostly because she is simply a policy wonk, genuinely uncomfortable with shameless self-promotion. She is also a true moderate on most issues, and as such simply can’t generate exciting headlines like some of her more liberal (and, um… media savvy) colleagues. But her moderate politics and understated style work both ways, making her very difficult to attack. As tough as it is for Cantwell to generate real passion within some progressives, it will be equally tough for her opponent to generate passion against her, outside of the core Republican base.

Democrats will rally to Cantwell because they understand what is at stake nationally, and WA’s moderates and independents who gave both Patty Murray and John Kerry decisive victories last November, will need to be given a good reason to dump Cantwell in 2006.

I’m not sure a multimillionaire Safeco CEO can give them that reason.

July 18, 2005:

It’s hard to imagine how the Republicans are going to present a multi-millionaire insurance company executive who proudly advocates shipping jobs overseas, as a “man of the people.” But you know they’re going to try.

I hear some righties snidely claim that they’re going to force Cantwell to run on her record. Well I hate to burst their bubble, but McGavick has a record too, and it ain’t gonna look so pretty by the time November, 2006 comes around.

July 21, 2005:

I continue to wonder if McGavick, a man with a long record as an insurance industry lobbyist and executive is really the right person to run in WA state against Cantwell, a successful executive herself? Do Rove and Dole and the NRSC strategists really understand Washington state? As one Republican consultant suggests, maybe not.

“What people think in the Beltway and what goes on back home are two different things, and there’s a disconnect there.”

Hmm… the same kind of disconnect that labeled the politically diminutive George Nethercutt a “giant killer”…?

December 5, 2005:

The GOP had counted on an unpopular Cantwell being an easy target, but now it seems clear that McGavick is not only going to have to sell himself to WA voters, he’s going to have to make a strong case for tossing out Cantwell as well. And with Bush’s approval ratings in the toilet, and the GOP leadership not far behind, it’s gonna be pretty tough making the argument that we need to give the president one more Republican vote in the Senate.

Perhaps this partially explains why his fellow Republicans aren’t lining up to challenge McGavick for the nomination?

December 15, 2005, on Sen. Cantwell’s rising approval numbers:

There was a time when state R’s expected the national party to pour lavish sums into this race, but it’s beginning to look like that money would be better spent defending Representatives Dave Reichert and Cathy McMorris.

December 29, 2005:

The problem for McGavick is that contrary to popular belief, Christian conservative voter turnout can be pretty soft, especially when the Republican candidate gives them little to get excited about. And as much as McGavick needs to draw votes from Dems and independents, he also needs a strong showing from the GOP base.

March 2, 2006, on McGavick’s announcement that “civility” would be a central theme of his campaign:

Today’s event

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King and Pierce counties have now reported their latest results from WA-08. Dave Reichert’s lead over Darcy Burner has expanded slightly to 3120 votes.

However, I am now absolutely confident that the race will narrow substantially over the next few days as King County continues to tabulate over the holiday weekend… and Pierce doesn’t report again until Monday.

(Oh… and I still expect the race to narrow.)

There seems to be a lot of confusion over the vote count in WA-08 — even the utltra-reliable Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo got it wrong — so let’s clarify a few things.

First, WA-08 spans King and Pierce Counties; over the past two elections about 81 percent of the votes have come from King, about 19 percent from Pierce. Currently Darcy Burner is leading in King County by about 0.75 percent, and losing Pierce by about 13 percent. Dave Reichert has been holding about a 2,700 vote lead.

Second, when the King and Pierce County results pages say 100% of precincts have reported, they are only referring to the poll votes, which will account for only around 20 percent of the total votes cast. The vast majority of votes were cast by mail.

Things don’t get any easier from there. Pierce reports that it has 65,000 ballots left to count, and King reports 189,000, but as we learned in 2004, these are only estimates and could even now be off by the tens of thousands, while thousands more ballots are still arriving every day. To further complicate the math, we have no idea how many of the remaining ballots actually fall within the boundaries of WA-08. In 2004 WA-08 accounted for about 30 percent of all King County ballots and about 20 percent of those cast in Pierce — but the absentee ballots are counted in no particular order, so it is quite possible that WA-08 is significantly over or under represented in the current count.

So how many ballots are really left to count? Who knows? If you assume that ballots counted thus far have been evenly distributed geographically, and you go by the ballots left to count reports, there should be about 57,000 WA-08 ballots left to count in King and about 13,000 in Pierce… but that just strikes me as way too low. This would produce a total turnout in WA-08 of about 223,000, compared to 336,499 in 2004 (a presidential election year and an open seat) and 203,335 in 2002 (a year when popular incumbent Jennifer Dunn faced no serious competition.) I find it hard to believe that turnout would be closer to 2002 than to 2004. But who knows?

And then there are the provisional ballots. Probably numbering in excess of 10,000 in King County alone. Just like in recounts, provisionals tend to favor Democrats, because let’s face it… on average, we simply have more trouble voting. These will be the last ballots to be counted, and could produce a several hundred vote surge for Burner at the very end.

So here’s my not very bold guess: only 40 to 60 percent of ballots have already been counted. That leaves plenty of room for Burner to erase a 2,700 vote deficit.

As I wrote in the previous post, I wouldn’t be surprised if WA-08 ends up in a recount. And we all know what happened the last time we had one of those.

So I’m particularly wary about allowing the conspiracy theorists to get their frame established before the rest of us realize there’s anything to theorize about. Take for example this little paranoid fantasy my new beer buddy Stefan tossed off late election night, almost as an aside:

I heard a story from an informed source that someone walked into a polling place in Bellevue and stuffed a bunch of “flood ballots” into an Accuvote. They have lawyers looking into this.

Hmm. Stefan doesn’t tell us exactly what his source is informed by, but it doesn’t seem to be reality. As KCRE spokesperson Bobbie Egan points out in Stefan’s own comment thread, a so-called “flood ballot” is merely a plain paper printout of a sample ballot on King County’s web page, and as such:

There is no way for ballot tabulation equipment to count a simple Web page. Only a ballot, properly programmed for the specific election by King County Elections could be read by the equipment.

I’d wager that a slight majority of Washingtonians still believe that Democrats likely stole the governor’s mansion from Dino Rossi, a bullshit misconception built entirely of tiny little turd pellets of untruth like this one. Left unrefuted, public opinion gets shaped by a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” mentality. Two years ago the PR war was pretty much over before most of us knew it had started, but KCRE seems to have learned its lesson — it is very heartening to see Egan proactively refuting even the stupidest rumors.

Both King and Pierce Counties updated their returns for WA-08, and while the margins have started to tighten, Dave Reichert continues to maintain about a 2,700 vote lead.

That said, there are many more ballots left to count in King than in Pierce, which historically only accounts for about 19 percent of the district’s total vote, and if this race follows the usual pattern, we should expect to see the margin continue to tighten as the votes come in, with Burner gradually eating away at Reichert’s lead. Whether she gains enough to overtake Reichert, well… that’s where the drama is.

You’ll notice that both campaigns have been pretty quiet today, not wanting to play the expectations game. I’m guessing that’s because neither campaign really knows which way this one’s going. Provisional ballots tend to substantially favor Democrats, and those will be the last to be counted, so don’t be surprised to see a sudden swing of several hundred votes towards Burner during the final days of the count.

I’m smelling a recount.

UPDATE:
Just to clarify: we don’t know exactly, because ballots are still coming in, but we’ve only counted about 60 percent of the ballots thus far, maybe less. So this thing is far from over.

UPDATE: (5:39 PM)
Not that we didn’t already know the Dems took control of the Senate, but the AP just officially called Virginia for Webb.

Okay, let’s be honest, yesterday’s election was a certifiable, big blue blowout. No, we didn’t get everything we want, but that’s only because we wanted everything. Instead, all we got was Democratic control of the House, Democratic control of the Senate, huge pick-ups in the state legislature, and every single statewide initiative and Supreme Court race going our way. If Darcy Burner and Peter Goldmark had declared victory last night, I would have personally considered the election a clean sweep.

As it is, Peter lost a tough, closely contested race in a district with a huge Republican advantage, and Darcy’s race is still too close to call. Although the numbers admittedly look better for the other side (you’d always rather be up than down,) there are still a lot of ballots left to count, and I’ve heard conflicting analyses about Darcy’s chances, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. If I sound a little sanguine it’s only because nothing that happened last night was a surprise (except, perhaps this,) and because I was so emotionally invested in Darcy’s race that nothing short of a victory party would have made last night complete.

I guess I’m just greedy, because of course I understand that both WA-08 and WA-05 were amazing victories for the local netroots, long before election night. We weren’t supposed to win either of these races — in fact, we weren’t even supposed to make them close. That was the storyline the local media adopted heading into the election year, and that was the storyline we worked so hard to rewrite. Of course the candidates deserve most of the credit, but the netroots played a huge role in making them both viable.

And win or lose, Darcy and Peter both played a necessary role in helping the Democrats retake the House. The 50-state strategy was a team effort, and yesterday’s 30-plus seat pick-up was a team win. Darcy in particular drew an enormous amount of Republican resources into a seat they hadn’t expected to seriously defend. The NRCC made the decision that WA-08 was a priority, and as a result resources were shifted from races that Democrats went on to win.

So before I go on to do any more analysis and gloating I just want to take a moment to thank all of you for your contribution towards changing the face of politics national and locally. This was a historic election for the Democrats and for the nation. And it’s just a hint of what’s to come.

Too little, too late.

Meanwhile, the John McCain death-watch begins.