HorsesAss.Org

Voters have rejected Initiatives 1100 and 1105, preserving Washington’s State Store system for now, but if not for a well-funded No campaign, and the confusion created by dueling privatization initiatives, one or the other might have passed. So this is no time for the state to sit back and relax in the expectation that its profitable liquor monopoly is safe for the foreseeable future.

There are those who are simply opposed to a state-owned liquor monopoly on ideological grounds, and there is no convincing them. Then there are those handful of business interests who seek to profit from privatization at the expense of state coffers. But there are a lot of folks who wouldn’t support privatization as strongly if the State Stores simply addressed the convenience issue.

So here are just a few ideas off the top of my head.

Step One: more stores with extended and Sunday hours. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from people complaining that they couldn’t buy the booze they wanted on a Sunday, or on a Friday or Saturday night.

Step Two: provide delivery service to bars and restaurants. This may sound a little petty, but there are a ton of restaurant owners who really resent having to pick up their booze themselves, when nearly all their other supplies are delivered. They don’t really expect a privatized system to sell them booze much cheaper, they just expect much better service. Give them that, and they won’t be so eager to put their time and money into the next initiative.

Step Three: modernize! You desperately need a brand new consumer oriented website and accompanying phone app that allows customers to remotely check out inventory at neighborhood stores, purchase their order, and then just drop by and pick it up (check out the Redbox website and app for an idea of what I’m talking about.) Customers could even use these tools to make special orders of items not normally stocked.

And that was just after five minutes of brainstorming. I’m sure if you talk to your employees, they probably have a bunch of ideas too about how to make the State Store experience more efficient and more appealing.

The point is, the worst thing a monopoly can do is behave like one; that’s what pisses everybody off. Innovate or die.

UPDATE:
I posted a link over on Slog, and folks are chiming in with their own suggested improvements. Lots of good ideas. Hey Olympia… are you listening?

Yeah, HA has been down or crawling for much of the morning, and no, I’m not exactly sure why. But I have my suspicions.

I haven’t done too much analysis yet, but it sure does look like the late voters tended to break strongly Democratic, at least around these parts.

For example, at the end of last night, Patty Murray had registered a comfortable 61.82% of King County vote. But in today’s batch of 50,148 votes, Murray scored a whopping 66.7%. Meanwhile, Rick Larsen has taken a small lead in WA-02; we’ll see if that holds up after the Snohomish County vote comes in at 7PM.

Very interesting. And encouraging.

UPDATE:
Matt Baretto of the Washington Poll has a spreadsheet up comparing county by county ballot returns reported on election night, 11/2 to those reported today, 11/3, and it’s kinda stunning. 22 counties reported new results today, and of them, only three—Franklin, Pend Oreille and Spokane—reported higher margins for Rossi. The rest moved in Murray’s direction, sometimes by substantial amounts.

For example, Island went from 51.43 for Murray on 11/2 to 54.42 in the 11/3 returns, Skagit from 47.75 to 48.57, Snohomish from 51.3 to 53.2, and Whatcom from 51.17 to 57.49. And I use these counties as examples, because they constitute the four biggest chunks of WA-02, where incumbent Democratic Rep. Rick Larsen climbed from a 1,400 vote deficit on election day to a 500+ vote lead over challenger John Koster today, based on the latest returns. And that appears to suggest that late voters didn’t just break hard for Murray, but for Democrats in general… which also helps explain a number of legislative races moving in the Dem direction today.

Will this trend hold up? Can’t think of a good reason why it wouldn’t.

California’s Proposition 19 failed at the polls last night, gaining only 46% of the vote. Here are some observations and thoughts [Thursday Updates below]:

– Despite the vote result, recreational marijuana users in California will still be able to purchase and consume high-quality marijuana. With the current system California has now, recreational users just have to visit any one of the doctors around the state who are willing to take their money in return for a medical authorization card. Technically, that makes them “medicinal” users, but the reality is that many of the people who hold medicinal authorizations are either suffering from rather superficial things or completely making it up. Once you have that card, however, you can buy marijuana at any of the state’s many dispensaries. And for those who haven’t taken the time to get a medical authorization, a sizable black market outside of the dispensary system continues to exist.

If anyone in California went to the polls yesterday thinking that their vote on Proposition 19 would have an impact on anyone’s ability to buy or consume marijuana, they were mistaken (the one exception to that is minors, who will still be able to purchase marijuana without having to show proof of age). What Proposition 19 would have done is to establish regulations for the overall industry. Proposition 19 was much more about the back door of the dispensary than the front door. It would have allowed for local and county governments to establish rules and regulations for production and distribution. As it stands now, dispensaries still supply themselves from unregulated growers without any oversight. For now, the DEA has backed off a bit on trying to take down these growers, but supply chains are still largely secret, and a certain percentage of the suppliers are tied to organized crime. The defeat of Proposition 19 was a very clear victory for the drug cartels in Mexico, who would have had an extremely hard time competing in a regulated marketplace.

– It’s not entirely clear how much of an impact Proposition 19 had on the rest of the ballot, but there are some strong signs that it helped California Democrats across the board. Democrats won every single statewide office in the state, from Governor to Insurance Commissioner. People tended to be focused on looking at the youth vote when assessing the effect of Proposition 19, but that was only part of the picture:

But judging by exit polling, which shows a strong conservative tide elsewhere in the country, the conservative surge did not materialize in California. This year’s electorate ended up looking a lot like 2006, according to exit poll data from both years.

Conservatives made up 33% of the California electorate this time around, according to preliminary results from this year’s California exit poll. Four years ago, the figure was 30%. Liberals made up 27% this time, compared with 25% four years ago. The percentage of self-identified moderates dropped to 40% this time, compared with 44% in 2006, the exit poll showed.

A similar pattern showed up when the exit poll asked voters what party they usually identify with. This time around, the results were 42% Democratic, 31% Republican and 27% independent. That compares with 40% Democrats, 35% Republicans and 25% independents in 2006.

While the 18-29 turnout in California was only modestly above average (13% vs. 11%), the enthusiasm of Democratic and liberal voters of all ages seems to have been greater in California than elsewhere. It may not have been enough to get Proposition 19 passed, but it appears to have helped negate the Republican wave in that state.

– One of the more interesting subplots of the initiative was the opposition coming from folks within the existing medical marijuana community. Even Dennis Peron, the man behind California’s initial medical marijuana law, opposed Proposition 19 using some rather bizarre reasoning. Other opponents of Proposition 19 were small growers who feared that legalization would lead to bigger corporations eating into their market share. In fact, the initiative got under 50% in the two rural counties notorious for growing much of the state’s marijuana, Humboldt and Mendocino. In response to this circular firing squad, one Proposition 19 supporter is now compiling a boycott list.

The sources of support and opposition for Proposition 19 were never as simple as potheads vs parents. The reason it went down had less to do with people’s moral views of pot (surveys have long shown that legalization in general has well over 50% support in California) than with discomfort over the specifics of this particular attempt at establishing regulation. Newspapers across the state, as well as the major politicians in each party, came out against the measure, finding enough gray areas (and inventing others) to defeat the measure and postpone the inevitable for a few more years. And as Kevin Drum points out here, California’s initiative-driven economic mess is only going to get worse, making it even more urgent for the state to figure out how to collect tax revenue on all that money being made by marijuana growers – many of whom were quite content to see Proposition 19 fail.

UPDATE: A few more items from Thursday:

– Matt Yglesias has some really sharp analysis here and provides a graph showing the demographic breakdown differences for all ages from 2008 to 2010.

If the demographic breakdown would have been like it was in 2008, the initiative would have still failed, but with a much closer margin (48.4% vs. 51.6%).

– Jeffrey Miron, the Harvard Professor who’s done a lot of great work on the economic impacts of drug legalization, has some self-serving concern trolling here. While I thought that Miron’s criticisms of some of the economic hyperbole of Prop 19 supporters were very valuable, anyone trying to win a statewide initiative effort should probably ignore most of what he’s saying. He gives very good advice for winning a policy debate with your wonky friends, but winning a statewide initiative campaign is a different beast altogether. Sometimes, if not most of the time, using hyperbole rather than reason is the better strategy. I don’t necessarily like this, but it’s the truth.

I think the campaign against I-1100 proved this. The fiscal reasons to vote against I-1100 were far more solid than the public safety issues, but the campaign hammered on the latter while largely ignoring the former. And that strategy appeared to work. People were largely scared at what would happen if access to alcohol was expanded, even though there’s little evidence to show that expanded access has any measurable detrimental effects. Miron believes that marijuana legalization campaigns should focus on the personal liberty aspects of legalization moreso than the public safety aspects. I think that would be a huge mistake.

– Steve Elliott has more insight into the widespread opposition to Proposition 19 from the marijuana growers themselves, who feared that they would lose their foothold in the current unregulated supply chain for the state’s dispensaries.

Really. Buoyed by almost winning yet another statewide election (and he would have gotten away with it too, if not for King County and that nosey dog), I think that Dino Rossi should immediately set his sights on the 2012 gubernatorial race.

You know… fourth time’s the charm, and all that. Or something.

Come on Dino… that’s your governor’s mansion… you can almost taste it. So you’re not gonna let Rob McKenna just waltz right in there and claim the Republican nomination because he thinks it’s his turn or something, are you? I mean, you should hear the things he says about you behind your back.

So, think about it.

Dear Stupid Fucking Trolls,

Thank you for being so fucking stupid. I counted on you providing a much needed laugh the day after the election, and you didn’t disappoint. In the words of Tea Party darling Sharron Angle:

“You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.

… [T]he nation is arming. What are they arming for if it isn’t that they are so distrustful of government? They’re afraid they’ll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways … If we don’t win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?”

Sound familiar? Yeah, I didn’t just ape the violent, right-wing, teahadist bullshit… I pretty much block-quoted Sharron Angle. Funny, huh? How the words of a Republican nominee for US Senate suddenly becomes all crazy and dangerous and unhinged when typed through the keyboard of a lowly, local liberal blogger?

No doubt my post, and your predictable, satire-impaired reaction, would have been funnier had Angle actually defeated Harry Reid last night, but… well… I’m willing to make that tradeoff.

Anyway, thanks, as always, for being so fucking stupid. You were a ray of sunshine on an otherwise cloudy day.

Love,

Goldy

I just got an email back from King County Elections regarding some discrepancies in reports on ballots received. The update: 114,000 new ballots arrived in the mail this morning, for a running total of about 675,000 ballots received thus far. And since King County reported results last night on 373,941 ballots, that leaves approximately 300,000 remaining on hand.

I emphasize the word “approximately” because there is some discrepancy between the numbers online, the numbers I was given yesterday, and the numbers I’m being given today, and because the ballots received number is always just an estimate. These numbers are also approximate because they represent the total number of ballots received, not the total that will ultimately be found valid; in 2009, our first all vote-by-mail general election, about two percent of received ballots were found invalid.

That said, King County is still projecting total ballot returns of about 720,000. They expect to report results on an additional 45,000 ballots by 4:30 PM this afternoon, with a significantly larger drop scheduled for Thursday.

UPDATE:
King County Elections tells me that the official ballot totals do not yet include any of those collected yesterday from drop boxes. So that’s should add tens of thousands more to the total.

Just before the first polls started closing out East yesterday, I made my predictions:

Patty Murray beats Dino Rossi by five-plus points, Dems lose WA-03, but incumbents hold on in all the other WA congressional districts. Meanwhile Dems hold control of both houses of the Washington state legislature, though R’s make a game of it with the state Senate. Initiatives 1053 and 1107 win, all others lose, but 1100 staggers around in a drunken daze for a week before we know the final outcome.

Nationally, Dems hold Senate with 52 or 53 seats, but lose control of the House, giving up about 50.

So how’d I do? Not bad.

Once all the ballots are in, Patty Murray will go on to beat Dino Rossi by almost three points, not the five-plus I predicted, but that’s what I get for being too specific. It also looks like I nailed the US Senate, the state legislature and the ballot measures. My biggest miss looks like the US House, where Rep. Rick Larsen seems likely to lose, if barely, in WA-02, and the R’s will pick up a handful more seats nationally than I expected.

Otherwise, election night unfolded pretty much as I expected.

Yesterday’s election was not the worst political disaster to befall the Democratic Party and the American people in recent decades. No, the worst political disaster to befall our nation, and the one whose consequences from which we might never recover, occurred December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court of the United States usurped the right of the state of Florida to conduct its own elections, and appointed George W. Bush as President.

Two failed wars, a collapsed economy and a host of far-right, proto-fascist, corporatist judicial appointments later, our nation is on its way to becoming an authoritarian plutocracy. And if there’s one thing the recent violent outbursts of teahadists should teach us, it’s that if we truly love the Constitution and what it stands for, then sometimes, politics just isn’t enough.

Our Founding Fathers put the Second Amendment in there for a reason, and that was to enable the People to protect themselves against tyranny. In fact, it was Thomas Jefferson who said that it’s good for a country to have a revolution every twenty years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if the Republicans take our nation the way they promise to take it, my fellow patriots on the left are going to start looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and ask ourselves, what can we do to turn this country around? And I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take some Supreme Court justices out.

The right is arming. What are they arming for if it isn’t that they are so distrustful of us? They’re afraid that we’ll fight for our liberty in Second Amendment kind of ways, and so we must be prepared to do exactly that. It is too soon to give up completely on politics, but given what is at stake, if we don’t win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?

I, for one, know my rights, and I will never lay down and give my country freely to the corporatist plutocrats and the army of teahadist brownshirts in their employ. At least… not without a fight.

UPDATE

I suppose it’s possible that I-1100 could ultimately pass once the final ballots are counted, though at this point, it doesn’t look likely. While there’re still a ton more ballots left to count in the counties where it’s passing, it’s only barely passing in those counties… which brings me to one of my most self-amusing observations of the evening: apparently, I’m more in touch with the sensibilities of voters in the red parts of the state than initiative author Stefan Sharkansky.

Huh. I guess all those years Stefan spent in the Bay Area must have warped his values.

But then, really, how can you expect a Pelosi-Republican like Stefan to understand the real Americans who live outside his posh, Green Lake neighborhood?

You heard it here first.

UPDATE:
So, let me explain. Patty Murray is winning King County with about 62% of the vote, yet still represents a disproportionate number of the outstanding ballots to be counted. So even though she’ll go to bed tonight leading by only about 15,000 votes, her margin will surely grow as the ballots are counted over the coming days. Yeah, the media will try to spin drama out of this, but there really isn’t any. Patty wins.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Contrary to the numbers on the SOS website, King County Elections tells me that they have received about 675,000 ballots so far (114,000 arrived Wednesday morning). Which means that there are currently about 300,000 uncounted ballots on hand, with maybe as many as another 50,000 more yet to arrive. More here.

Markos hasn’t told me what to think yet, but NBC tells me that Republicans have taken control of the House. Anyway, I’ll use this post for blogging my observations until I feel like doing something else.

6:11 PM
Here’s a question: who’s crazier, KY Senator Elect Rand Paul, or outgoing KY Sen. Jim Bunning? I’d say it’s a toss up.

6:22 PM
Carl and I disagree, on what really ails Democrats. I say that the key to winning is lying, and he says that we just need to do a better job of selling that we’re the party of truth. But my analysis is pithier, so I win.

6:31 PM
Palin-Rubio, 2012!

6:50 PM
More evidence of voter high turnout (and/or low vote handling capacity) in King County, with two-hour lines at the accessible voting centers, and over-stuffed ballot drop boxes. We’ll see.

7:15 PM
I wish I actually did drink liberally. That would make tonight more fun. Or at least, less not-fun.

7:22 PM

Via Slog, that’s a three-hour wait to vote at Union Station in Seattle. King County Elections has said that everybody who is in line to vote at 8 PM will be allowed to vote, so there’s still time to run on over to the accessible voting centers in Bellevue, Tukwila and Seattle. Or, if you’re somewhere else in state, particularly red country, well, fuck you and figure it out for yourself.

7:42 PM
Fuck Wisconsin. Really. Fuck ’em.

7:51 PM
So, if you’ve got nothing better to do, why not head out to Union Station with coffee and donuts or something, and try to encourage folks there to stay in line and vote.

8:05 PM
Money can’t buy you love. And apparently, it can’t buy you the California governor’s mansion either.

Election day is here! So vote. And then join us for an evening of election returns under the influence. We meet at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Some of us will be there much earlier to watch election returns over dinner.

The Move On folks will be joining us tonight. No doubt their RepubliCorp friends will tag along and cheer for the best candidates money can buy.

My Girl’s a Republican from jeff on Vimeo.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 250 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

Feisty and I had a nice walk. Ran into Knute Berger at Seward Park. We both think Patty Murray will win.

Speaking of which, predictions. Nothing scientific here, and I don’t have access to any inside information, just the same polling data everybody else has plus my gut reaction that there’s just something wrong with it.

Patty Murray beats Dino Rossi by five-plus points, Dems lose WA-03, but incumbents hold on in all the other WA congressional districts. Meanwhile Dems hold control of both houses of the Washington state legislature, though R’s make a game of it with the state Senate. Initiatives 1053 and 1107 win, all others lose, but 1100 staggers around in a drunken daze for a week before we know the final outcome.

Nationally, Dems hold Senate with 52 or 53 seats, but lose control of the House, giving up about 50.

And no, I don’t see a mandate in any of this, except that folks really don’t like the economy.

Looking for place to drop-off your ballot? Or looking for an accessible voting center?

Here is a map for King County.

Start here to find ’em in the rest of the state.