In America’s Vancouver, the big talking points in the mayor’s race often wind up being about stuff the city can only control on the margins. Like jobs.

(In case the link won’t load, it’s a link to a final Columbian article where challenger Tim Leavitt and supporters accuse incumbent Royce Pollard of wishing small business and jobs and anything good would rot and die, and Pollard says “No, no,” and the simple truth that national policies are responsible for the horrendous economic disaster is not really mentioned. If nothing else, Leavitt gives good press conference.)

At any rate, it’s possible a winner will be declared tonight!

It’s also possible that things will be too close to call, and weeks and weeks will go by, as a virtually tied race is slowly, slowly updated, day after painful day, until nobody, not even the candidate’s families and pets, really cares any more. People will still be losing their homes and jobs, and since mayors are not the Federal Reserve, it will still suck.

And then it will be 2010, an even-numbered election year! Yeah! At any rate, today is “Election Day.” You’re smart enough to figure out what to do with your ballot.

A new KING-5/Survey USA poll in the Seattle Mayoral Race was released today. This race has Mike McGinn facing off against Joe Mallahan. Just last week, a Washington Poll poll had Mallahan leading McGinn by 44% to 36% with 20% undecided. The results suggested that Mallahan had an 89.9% probability of winning.

Today’s poll of 586 people (taken over the weekend) shows a tighter race with Mallahan leading McGinn by 45% to 43%. A Monte Carlo analysis (methods) consisting of 1,000,000 simulated elections using the proportions and sample size observed in this poll shows Mallahan winning 635,831 times and McGinn winning 352,638 times. Statistically, the results are a tie. But Mallahan has a small edge with a 64.3% probability of winning; McGinn has a 35.7% probability of winning.

The distribution of election outcomes from the simulation says it better than numbers:

The red bars on the left are Mallahan wins, and the blue bars on the right are McGinn wins.

There are a number of possible confounders here that make this extremely close race even more uncertain. Most obvious is the age discrepancy in support which The Stranger’s Eli Sanders points out may lead to some systematic (statistical) bias:

Remember, too, that SurveyUSA only reaches voters with land-lines, and that some of McGinn’s strongest support is among younger voters—who frequently only have cell phones.

Who knows….

Mark Griswold may be an asshole, but more significantly, he’s a really crappy muckraker. I’d throw in a link, but honestly, he doesn’t even deserve that much respect.

What a maroon.

UPDATE:
In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, Publicola explains.

The non-partisan King County executive race has proud Democrat Dow Constantine squaring off against bashful Republican non-partisan Susan Hutchison. Last week’s Washington Poll gave Constantine a 47% to 34% lead over Hutchison.

A new King-5/Survey USA poll released today essentially confirms last week’s findings. The poll of 614 likely or actual voters gives Constantine a 53% to 43% lead over Hutchison with 5% undecided.

As usual, I’ll use the poll numbers and sample size to assess the probability of each candidate winning (methods are given here). The Monte Carlo analysis of a million simulated elections gives Constantine 962,298 wins and Hutchison 35,378 wins. That is, the poll result provides evidence that Constantine will win Tuesday’s election with a 96.5% probability. Hutchison has a 3.5% probability of winning. Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulated elections:

The red bars are wins for Hutchison, and the blue bars are Constantine wins.

This is the first big test since last November’s initiative made the Executive a non-partisan position. And it sure looks like the electorate won’t be fooled by this non-partisan stuff.

This afternoon I sent the following email to TVW President and CEO Greg Lane:

Subject: Bad Faith DMCA Takedown Notices
From: david@horsesass.org
Date: November 2, 2009 2:08:55 PM PST
To: greg@tvw.org

Dear Mr. Lane,

I am writing in regard to the takedown notices TVW recently issued to YouTube and Vimeo regarding my video “Suzie Huckabee,” in the hope that we both can avoid any unnecessary legal expense.

Under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), copyright holders are required to make a good faith effort to consider Fair Use before issuing a takedown notice. Judging from your public statements and actions regarding a Dow Constantine ad which similarly makes use of TVW video, and for which TVW also issued a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube, it is apparent that TVW understands that use of your clips in this limited manner merely violate your policy, not your copyright. I do not doubt that you believe that Constantine and I are “hiding behind fair use,” but that acknowledgment in itself clearly suggests that your DMCA takedown notices were not issued in good faith.

As such I respectfully ask TVW to remedy the situation as follows:

1) Promptly communicate to YouTube and Vimeo that your DMCA takedown notices were issued in error, and formally request that the video in question be restored.

2) Promise, in writing, that TVW will refrain from issuing similar DMCA takedown notices in the future, without first making a good faith effort to consider Fair Use, as required by law.

3) Issue a formal apology for misusing the provisions of the DMCA in your efforts to enforce your own non-binding copyright policy.

If all three of these steps are fulfilled, I will accept the issue as closed. Otherwise, considering how TVW has repeatedly harassed me with bad faith DMCA takedown notices — and considering the dangerous precedent your routine abuse of the DMCA has set — I will regrettably have little choice but to seek redress through the courts, so that this issue may be settled once and for all… and well in advance of the next election season.

Sincerely,

David Goldstein
HorsesAss.org
“Politics as unusual.”

So there.

The details have yet to be released, but the latest KING-5/Survey USA poll shows Democrat Dow Constantine surging to a 10 point lead over Republican Susan Hutchison in the race for King County Executive.

The poll, conducted over the weekend, shows Constantine leading 53-43; that’s a fifteen point swing from KING-5’s 10/13/09 poll, which showed Hutchison leading 47-42, and is consistent with other public and private polls I’ve seen over the past week and a half. Furthermore, with Constantine leading by 12 points amongst voters who had already cast their ballot, Hutchison would need to carry late voters by a better than 14-point margin in order to win.

What accounts for this stunning reversal of fortune?

Women give a 3-to-2 margin to Constantine over Hutchison. The last poll had the candidates split in that category.

Hutchison has an overwhelming edge among Republicans and conservatives in the non-partisan race, while Constantine leads overwhelmingly among Democrats and liberals.

As it should be.  As Democrats in general and women in particular learned more about the candidates, their positions, and their values, traditional Democratic voters came home to Constantine.

That in the end is the fatal flaw in the Rossi-esque tabula rasa strategy Hutchison pursued. Refusing to define yourself can only work if your opponent fails to define you for you.

Update: Here is a link to the current poll results.

I’m not much into the idea of publishing endorsements, because anybody who reads me regularly should already know where I stand on the races I cover, but I thought I’d make an exception to mention a race I haven’t written much about:  the Seattle City Council contest between Robert Rosencrantz and Mike O’Brien.

Vote for O’Brien.

In the end, it really comes down to values. O’Brien is a progressive Democrat and Rosencrantz isn’t. And while I don’t object to having a couple Republicans on the council to mix things up, it’s not like the council is currently a haven for radical lefties… and it won’t get any more so with the imminent election of Sally Bagshaw.

I’m just sayin’…

Ted Van Dyk makes my job as a snarky blogger so much easier.

Susan Hutchison, through her role as a board member of the conservative Stewardship Foundation, has helped steer nearly $600,000 to anti-choice groups over the past few years. But since she refuses to actually answer Yes or No to questions regarding reproductive choice, I guess that’s something voters don’t need to hear about.

(Most dishonest campaign ever.)

That’s what Susan Hutchison has been running… the most dishonest local campaign ever.  And to a large extent, the local media has been somewhat complicit.

Hutchison is a Republican, and Dow Constantine is a Democrat. That is obvious and indisputable. And yet when Hutchison denies her party identity she large goes unchallenged — this is a nonpartisan race, we’re told, so what does it matter? Meanwhile, when Constantine proudly claims his party identity, he’s abused by the likes of the Seattle Times editorial board.

The ironic thing is, despite all the grandstanding about this being a nonpartisan race, should Hutchison win, the Times and everybody else will trumpet this as a huge victory for Republicans and an even bigger defeat Democrats.

Like I said… the most dishonest campaign ever.

I think the Post Globe has been the best thing to rise out of the former P-I. And I generally like this piece on McGinn’s final town halls (incidentally, I’ve been making calls for McGinn, and the last time I did, we were pushing undecided voters to one of the town halls). Still, this piece of conventional wisdom repeating was a little disappointing.

Surprisingly, McGinn wasn’t asked about what Mallahan in particular has been describing as his flip flop over the viaduct.

Why are you surprised? First off, these are undecided voters. The people who are passionate about the tunnel one way or the other, who would ask that as their only question at a town hall (even in West Seattle) have made up their mind about the mayor’s race. They’ve got better things to do on a Saturday.

More important though, nobody outside of the political class thinks that the tunnel is the issue of the campaign. Sure it’s important, and it’s where one of the biggest distinctions can be drawn. But people are more concerned with, for example, crime and education than they are about a few miles of a state highway.

But of course, reporters who drive into Belltown from all across the region and leave before the crackheads come out probably put a higher emphasis on traffic on 99 than on crime in the city. And if they’re sending their children to Bellevue or Edmonds public schools, they probably don’t care as much about education as a parent worried about the quality of their neighborhood school. In fact, they’re more likely to laugh off McGinn’s education plans as unrealistic or someone else’s job.

Still, reporters, in these last few days of the campaign, please don’t be surprised that people care about more than just the tunnel. Don’t be surprised that Seattle voters care about rising crime, or that we care about the cultural institutions of the city, and dealing with the dropout problem. Please consider that whoever we support, we might care about parks and neighborhoods. Please also understand that we think transportation is more than just the Viaduct: that we want improved bike lanes, better mass transit, and a road system that works throughout the city.

Last week’s contest was a tough one, but it was eventually solved by wes.in.wa. It was the Greeley Independence Stampede Grounds in Greeley, Colorado.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

This should satisfy a frightening need for an open thread….

(And there are plenty more media clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

KING-5/SurveyUSA have one last poll in the field regarding the county executive race, and this time they’re asking about party identity… whether we identify Susan Hutchison as a Democrat or a Republican, and whether party affiliation makes a difference in determining our choice.

It’ll be interesting to see the results.