Betcha Bruce isn’t smiling right about now.
So, on Election Day I predicted that “several races will be left officially undecided after tonight’s ballot drop,” a prediction I apologized for the very next day, writing: “Some will likely tighten up, but I will be awfully surprised if any of last night’s top-line winners end up losing.”
Well, I apologize for my apology.
Over the past few ballot drops the races in both Districts 1 and 2 have tightened to the point where they really are too close to call. No, wait. I take that back. For although Lisa Herbold still trails Shannon Braddock by a 104-vote, 0.56% margin, I’m calling this one for Herbold. And to understand my confidence, you need understand the way our all vote-by-mail ballot counting works.
It is both an over-simplification and a generalization, but ballots tend to be tallied in the order in which they arrive. Election night results include most of those ballots that arrived through Monday; these are the “early” ballots. Most of the subsequent tallies are of “late” ballots from voters who didn’t cast their ballots until Monday or Tuesday. And as we saw two years ago with Kshama Sawant’s stunning 8-point comeback from election night to the final tally, early voters and late voters can sometimes constitute dramatically different electorates.
On election night, Braddock led Herbold 52.92% to 46.48%, but since then the margin has flipped, with Herbold winning a progressively larger share of each day’s totals. Combined, Herbold has won 52.88% of all late ballots, and 57.25% of the Friday evening drop. Assuming about 3,350 votes left to count (and that’s a complicated and iffy assumption), Herbold needs only 51.55% of the remaining votes to win. Based on my experience tracking previous elections, there’s simply no good reason to expect Herbold to fall below that threshold. I would now be surprised if Herbold didn’t win this election.
Meanwhile, in D2, where incumbent Bruce Harrell held a seemingly invincible 10-point election night lead, we have seen an even bigger late ballot swing, with unheralded challenger Tammy Morales winning an impressive 53.44% of the late vote. But unfortunately for her, Morales may have had too large a deficit to overcome: my spreadsheet suggests Morales will need 57.3% of the remaining votes to take the lead, somewhat above the 55.15% she won in the most recent ballot drop. It’s not impossible. But at this point I’d have to put my money on Harrell squeaking out an embarrassingly narrow victory. But to be clear, had Morales benefited from a Sawant-like GOTV effort, Harrell would be out of a job come January.
In any case, it sure does look like all those post-election post-mortems were way premature. The final tally will tell a much different story than the spin we heard on election night.
Districts worked, especially when you realize that district 2 and even district 4 might come down to simply could there have been enough volunteers to knock 1000 more doors respectively.
Sure an extra 10k would have worked too, but both Tammy and Michael could have pulled this thing out without the extra cash.
The last thing is that socialist alternative and their crew of really dedicated and progressive volunteers now know they can identify Democratic/Socialist and Sawant friendly candidates and have 2-3 out of 100 volunteers help those candidates and take out almost any incumbent.
I think this has proven districts to be exactly what people hoped for.
It wasn’t helpful that the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission dismissed out of hand the peculiar and possibly illegal purchase of 15 memberships in the 37th District Democrats after receiving affadavits from Bruce Harrell and one of his campaign staffers hadn’t participated in the purchase of these memberships with 15 highly suspicious, sequentially numbered money orders from the same vender. Ten of the people who purportedly purchased these memberships don’t even live in the 37th District, suggesting an effort was made to round up friends or political cronies who would deliver the desired endorsements to establishment, business-oriented politicians including Harrell, Banks and Burgess.
A recent Center for Public Integrity study of political corruption in the 50 states gave Washington a shockingly low D+ rating. SEEC’s cavalier dismissal of a formal complaint against these shenanigans in the 37th Democrats and Triad Capital Partners’ attempt to bribe District 8 candidate Jon Grant are prime examples of rotten politics in Seattle aided and abetted by SEEC.
http://www.publicintegrity.org.....estigation
If only those muckrakers at the Center for Public Integrity graded on curb then Washington would definitely be getting a B. Hey no state got more than a C.
@2 I’m not at all sure there is anything illegal about what happened with those ballots. A fool and his or her parted with their money. The voters are not easily fooled by such gamesmanship.
The potential of corruption means there is something worth stealing. And there are some folks concerned about it, and keeping some muckrakers employed., With others preferring you would not pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Only moat people grade on a curb.