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AZ-07: Grijalva Declares Victory

by: James L.

Wed Nov 03, 2010 at 2:43 PM EDT


He didn't have a whole lotta people in his corner, but it looks like Raul Grijalva had enough to survive last night's slaughter:

Democrat Raul Grijalva claimed victory in Arizona's District 7 congressional race Wednesday, leaving Republicans with a gain of two seats in the state's delegation.

A spokesman for Grijalva said the congressman had decided he was the winner in the southwestern Arizona district, although a number of mail-in and provisional ballots remained to be counted.

Right now, with 99.6% reporting, Grijalva leads Republican Ruth McClung by 3,586 votes, for a percentage spread of 49-46. I note that some folks raised their eyebrows when we shot this race straight from Safe D to the Tossup column. I hope you understand where we were coming from now!
James L. :: AZ-07: Grijalva Declares Victory
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AZ-07: Grijalva Declares Victory | 52 comments
Good
At least some of the good ones are coming back.

Follow the elections in Georgia at the 2010 Georgia Race Tracker.
If Paton had won the AZ-08 primary, he would have won for sure!


Ad hoc, ad loc and quid pro quo!
So little time, so much to know!
I admit it
I was wrong to doubt you, and wrong to laugh at Republican polls.  If this wasn't enough to convince a skeptic like me, soon-to-be Rep. Blake Farenthold certainly would.

I was also wrong about Cardoza trailing Costa, but then again I didn't think CA-20 would turn into what our British friends call a "rotten borough," either.  63K total votes?

Can someone like Farenthold
really be expected to hang on for that long?  

"I have never deliberately given anybody hell. I just tell the truth on the opposition-and they think it's hell."--President Harry Truman. President Obama, are you listening?
[ Parent ]
TX
How did he even win?

Is there an exit poll for the district?  I just don't get how we could lose a 70% Hispanic district.

29/D/Male/NY-01

[ Parent ]
Poor Hispanic turnout
same thing with Costa in CA-20.
[ Parent ]
The electorate is a LOT LESS than 70% Hispanic......
None of these districts or states with lots of Hispanics have Hispanic vote share anywhere close to census.  Substantial percentages of Hispanics counted in the census are either undocumented aliens or legal non-citizens.  And voter participation among citizens is lower than is the case with white voters or even other minority groups.

That said, Farenthold is one-and-done, like I imagine quite a few of the incoming freshmen.  I expect the GOP to suffer double-digit losses just among the freshmen class in 2012.

43, male, Indian-American, Democrat, VA-10

[ Parent ]
Re: I expect the GOP to suffer double-digit losses just among the freshmen class in 2012.
I hope you are right of course, I just can't help remember that the 1994 freshmen largely survived. You'd expect every landslide win to somewhat recede again in the next elections as seats that got caught up in the wave revert to form, but that doesn't seem to have happened at all last time. Why do you think that was? Was there (he asked hopefully) something specific about the GOP's 1994 wins that made it easier for them to hold on to them than it will be to hold on to the seats they won now?

FWIW, looking at other "wave" elections, the Dems did have to yield a fair chunk of Reps they won in 1958 again in 1960; but they seem to have kept all the ones they won in 1974 when the next elections came round in 1976.

38, Male, SP, NL / LMP, HU

[ Parent ]
I think a lot of Dems retired in 1996
Dems picked up 22 GOP seats but lost 13 of their own, and 10 of the Dem losses were retirements. If not for those retirement losses the Dems would likely have retaken the House.

If we can keep the retirements low this cycle (and so many would-be retirees lost anyway so I think it's doable) then I think we can pick up a lot of the seats we lost last night (provided that gerrymandering doesn't fuck us over too badly).

24, CA-14, previously DC-AL

[ Parent ]
I think a lot of Dems retired in 1996
Dems picked up 22 GOP seats but lost 13 of their own, and 10 of the Dem losses were retirements. If not for those retirement losses the Dems would likely have retaken the House.

If we can keep the retirements low this cycle (and so many would-be retirees lost anyway so I think it's doable) then I think we can pick up a lot of the seats we lost last night (provided that gerrymandering doesn't fuck us over too badly).

24, CA-14, previously DC-AL

[ Parent ]
Two things about 1996...
There was a DNC scandal in September (remember Al Gore and the Buddhist monks) that got a lot of play and tainted the Democratic party.

But, mostly, it was the fact that the GOP literally conceded the presidential race in October (feeling that Dole could never win) and had him campaign for embattled congressional incumbents.

Personally, I think we will be lucky to get 10 seats back next time around--the low hanging fruit they picked off.  The other guys will be entrenched in redistricting and most of the lost blue dogs were in places that we really will never be able to realistically compete in again.

We're never getting back Ike Skelton's seat, for example...  

[ Parent ]
Ike Skelton's seat
will probably be the one eliminated then!  :)
[ Parent ]
I'm not too worried about redistricting
While Reps will learn from their dummymanders in MI, OH and PA and refrain from spreading their strength around too much this time around, the reality is that it's hard to make significantly BETTER maps for their incumbents in most states. OH might be the exception as they're losing 2 seats and the map will be dramatically altered, but in some of these other places we'll be in good position for pickups if the national mood and turnout swing back our way a little bit. I'm not predicting another takeover - I'm just saying I need to see new maps before I tilt toward optimism or pessimism.

What gives me pause is our losing margins in so many places. I expected to lose plenty of 52-48 or 51-49 races, but all these double-digits losses are disturbing. On a micro-level we saw this in my county legislative races in 2009: we lost a briefly-held majority, going from 14-11 up to 18-7 down and three of our keeps were won by less than 100 votes. Dem turnout was terrible, Rep turnout was high, blah blah blah. What was striking, though, was that we didn't lose those 7 seats by small margins: almost all of them were 8 points or more, and several were double-digits. Sure, these are small districts (about 11K population in each) but it's remarkable to have so many blown out like that.  

29, Male, Dem, NY-20  

[ Parent ]
In addition to what Ellipsis said about retirements in 1996...
...I think this time will be different for a few reasons.

First, the GOP got about a dozen more pickups this time than in 1994, and that's a dozen more seats that are tough holds for them.  Remember the larger your majority, the more tough holds you've got, since you're cutting that much deeper into the opposition's naturally strong districts.  That's what the GOP faces in 2012.

Second, we lost a lot more Democrats in conservative districts this time than in 1994, and what we've got left are on the whole in much safer districts.  That makes retirement less appealing for our returning incumbents, since they're not running scared going forward, and also any open seats we DO have are going to be much easier holds than a lot of open seats in 1996.

Third, Obama is going to have stronger turnout in 2012 than Clinton had in 1996.  People don't remember this anymore, but 1996 was a very low turnout election, the worst Presidential turnout as a percentage of eligible voters in my lifetime.  Obama is going to get very high interest, and the demographic shift with an electorate that is roughly 10 points more nonwhite than in 1996 is going to be that much more favorable to us.

I expect a net pickup of 10-15 will be easy in 2012.  Anything more than that will be hard, and will depend on a variety of things including whether the Republicans overreach--and they just might, the pressure from teabaggers will be intense.

43, male, Indian-American, Democrat, VA-10

[ Parent ]
Simple: Hispanics did not vote
We knew that there were citizenship/registration difficulties down there which deflated the Hispanic share of the population when you got to actual voters, but Farenholt wouldn't be looking like Rep-elect unless a lot of Hispanics sat this one out. Add in the fact that Ortiz was probably past his expiration date, and you get one of the more surprising losses of the night
The bright side is that this district should be one of the easiest pickups in 2012, unless Repubs in the legislature draw Brownville out of the district.  

22, Democrat, AZ-01
Peace. Love. Gabby.
[ Parent ]
No chance, one and done. They can't redistrict...
...to protect him, there are VRA implications I'm pretty sure, and Hispanic population has exploded which is why TX is projected to get a whopping 4 extra House seats.  So the TX GOP will have to surrender a couple seats to Dems in majority-minority districts, including Farenthold certainly.

43, male, Indian-American, Democrat, VA-10
[ Parent ]
I have a feeling
he's one they are not going to get too upset throwing to the wolves.  Further, whoever is our 2012 candidate there is going to work at the campaign more than Ortiz probably did!
[ Parent ]
How do you expect
the state getting four seats to work? Will it play to one side far more than the other?

I'm probably going to ask you a lot about this in the future because (a) you seem to know a lot about it and (b) things don't seem to be as bad as they could be. Regarding the latter, we lost a lot of seats in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, but unlike, say, upstate New York, a lot of those seats were in swing districts. Unless gerrymandering is going to be more of a problem than I realize, it looks like losing seats is going to be, at worst, a wash, or, at best, a plus, if the seats go to states where we would have a good chance of capturing them.  

"I have never deliberately given anybody hell. I just tell the truth on the opposition-and they think it's hell."--President Harry Truman. President Obama, are you listening?

[ Parent ]
we'll probably get at least two of those seats
If they're smart that is.  There will automatically be a new Hispanic majority-seat in Southern TX and Dallas will definitely need a new seat, and they may tempted to dump every bit of Dem territory here because if they don't they are rising losing most of the Dallas area Republican by the end of the the decade.

One to gerrymander into Houston for the GOP.  (Lots of growth north of TX in Republican Montgomery county.)  The last seat I have no idea where that will go, Austin?  Give Lloyd Dagget his uber liberal Austin seat and gerrymander a new GOP with left-overs maybe?

TX will get more Dem friendly over the next decade and the GOP are already in a good place Congressionally.  Shore up who you've got and be done with it.

[ Parent ]
Whoo
But my question is, did the foreclosure crisis save Grijalva? Y'all may not realize this, but there's been a ton of White exburban growth in the Pinal and Maricopa County parts of his district. I knew that both of these areas had been absolutely battered by the housing crisis, so I figured that their populations were smaller and more Hispanic than they were in 2008 (more Hispanic not only because of the voters who lived there before making up a larger share of the population, but also because of working-class Hispanic renters and middle-class Hispanic homebuyers picking up good deals among excess housing stock).

Still, though, I was shocked that Grijalva won Maricopa County 49-45, as my baseline had him losing this area by double digits at this point. The vote share there made up a notably smaller percentage of the vote than it did in 2008.

While she still lost, I take my hat off to Ruth McClung, who I frequently mocked. While she would lose this district comfortably if this election were solely on ideology, she clearly tapped into something and ran a tough and smart campaign. Maybe not in AZ-07, but she has a political future.  

22, Democrat, AZ-01
Peace. Love. Gabby.

What specifically
did she do?

And I wonder how out of step she was with the district. Was turnout for our side a lot lower than it could have been? She did come pretty close.  

"I have never deliberately given anybody hell. I just tell the truth on the opposition-and they think it's hell."--President Harry Truman. President Obama, are you listening?

[ Parent ]
Any media supporting the claim?
Or just Grijalva? I don't think he's actually going to lose, but it'd be nice to have some independent corroboration.  
Um
How many possible votes are left out there?

That's nice that "the Congressman had decided he was the winner", but he's not the decider of who wins, the voters of AZ-07 decide that.

How arrogant.

All the remaining votes are in Pima County
which he won handily. Vote-by-mail ballots dropped off at precincts on the day of plus provisionals. I wouldn't have declared victory just yet, but McClung would have to pull off a pretty big upset among the around 17K votes still outstanding to turn this around. There's nothing arrogant about that.

22, Democrat, AZ-01
Peace. Love. Gabby.
[ Parent ]
Thanks
I know nothing about that district.

I guess after the entire event with Bishop/Keown last night, I'm wary of anyone proclaiming victory when there's still quite a few votes to count :)

[ Parent ]
Bishop is your Rep., right?
Are you happy he won despite being declared the loser twice?

Ad hoc, ad loc and quid pro quo!
So little time, so much to know!
[ Parent ]
Yep
It's not his fault the AP jumped the gun. Whoever made those calls should quit declaring races.

Muscogee (Columbus) and Dougherty (Albany) are the big vote shares of the district.

Calling it before those two were anywhere close to being complete made no sense.

[ Parent ]
Can you take an educated guess
as to what he'll be facing redistricting wise?
[ Parent ]
that seat was the 2nd biggest "zomg!!!!" moment last night
Glad it didnt pan out, and NY-13 was my number one.
[ Parent ]
Not On Topic With Grijalva But.....
Our biggest mistake in the final months of this campaign was to pretend that Tip O'Neill's old adage of all politics being local still held true.  It doesn't any more.  That's why all but a couple of conservative Democrats that Nancy Pelosi tried to protect were wiped out last night.  The Democrats should have nationalized the election around defending their actions loudly and proudly.  Everybody should have done what Tom Perriello did.  It was an easily defendable record had anyone tried.  The Democrats should have hit the airwaves in the final week with a montage of all the Republican House leaders insisting their will be no compromise on anything.

Would this have avoided a shellacking?  No.  The economy's in the toilet and the party in charge was gonna be punished for it no matter what.  But I've never known a situation where a party that hides from its accomplishments, however controversial, avoids a drubbing.  And from the tone of Obama's speech a couple hours ago, it sounds like our party's response will be to go along with borrowing a trillion dollars from the Chinese to give massive tax cuts to millionaires for the rest of eternity.  Wouldn't we be in a better bargaining position if we had campaigned on a nationalized theme on this issue?  As I've said before, if the Democrats don't even have the stones to draw a line in the sand on this, then they're absolutely useless.

Anyway, back to the monthslong Tea Party victory parade....

But Perriello ultimately lost. And so did John Spratt, who also voted "yes" on almost everything.
Ultimately I agree with you (a rare thing) that members needed to proactively brag about their legislative records rather than run from them.

But we lost a whole lot of Democrats from conservative districts who were going to kill us no matter what.

And as for the rest, in purple districts in the suburbs or based in small cities, some of them did talk up their records, and others ran......and I'm not sure there's any difference in electoral performance between them.

Sometimes the right thing to do is just not popular, and voters cannot be persuaded in time for the next election.  Claire McCaskill said presciently not long after health care reform passed that this law would not be popular for the midterms, it will not be popular in 2012, it will be popular only a decade from now.

That's just how it is sometimes.

Hell, we lost much of the South for becoming unambiguously pro-civil rights in the 60s and beyond, and that's been a long-term electoral liability in that region.  But no one would do anything differently.

43, male, Indian-American, Democrat, VA-10

[ Parent ]
But he lost in a district
that he probably wouldn't have won had Obama not done so well in Virginia in 2008, no? And he lost by a smaller margin than Nye and Boucher, right?  

"I have never deliberately given anybody hell. I just tell the truth on the opposition-and they think it's hell."--President Harry Truman. President Obama, are you listening?
[ Parent ]
God bless John Spratt
He was considered endangered in 2006, I believe, so his position was always tenuous. He must've known that voting "yes" so often was gonna hurt him, and he did so anyway. He deserves a Profile in Political Courage award.

24, CA-14, previously DC-AL
[ Parent ]
Since Spratt needs a job,
let him go to Pentagon when Gates retires early next year.
[ Parent ]
You are getting close to what I think is the problem
We saw both examples, but neither works when the party as a whole isn't viewed for having positive positions.  It didnt really matter how they voted, because we as a party couldnt be united behind our accomplishments.  It made it so that everything was seemed as some leftist ploy where even 40 of their own people voted against!  It doenst instill any confidence in us that we know what we are doing.

We're shitty leaders, the Republicans have shitty ideas.

[ Parent ]
This also implies
that most of the Blue Dogs are only moderate for political expediency, which I don't think is true. You can only nationalize an election if you have nationally consistent representatives, which is not the case with the Democratic party, nor should it be.
[ Parent ]
Well
After last night, I'd say the party's ideological variety got a bit slimmer, considering the Blue God losses. The GOP's got wider, just not in the direction we would like to see if they actually wanted to work with the administration to get something done.

24, male, Democrat, VA-06 (currently in Italy), went to school in VA-05
[ Parent ]
Blue Dog*
Wow, nice moment of dyslexia.

24, male, Democrat, VA-06 (currently in Italy), went to school in VA-05
[ Parent ]
Freudian slip?

[ Parent ]
Ha!
Blue god, is that like Aquabuddha? ;)

38, Male, SP, NL / LMP, HU
[ Parent ]
Perriello as a model
The facts:

1. Tom Perriello won in 2008 by one of the smallest margins of any Democrat
2. Tom Perriello sits in a historically conservative and Republican district
3. Tom Perriello is a fairly liberal Democrat who voted his conscience and defended his votes
4. Tom Perriello was genuinely honest and principled
5. Tom Perriello lost by 4%, by less than many, many other Democrats who had better districts, were more entrenched and/or had more conservative records
6. Tom Perriello probably would have won had this been a normal year or had black and student turnout been at presidential levels.

Thus, memo to Republican freshmen: whether you are conservative or moderate, whether you are in a tough or favorable district, be like Tom Perriello. You'll have a better chance of being re-elected, and more importantly, you'll win respect.

20, CD MA-03/NH-01/MA-08

[ Parent ]
The one reservation on that
would be that the next election will be a presidential cycle with full-force turnout; slightly different playing field than the midterms, where base voters matter most.
[ Parent ]
Surprises
Hard to believe the election is over, what will I do?  Maybe some work...

Dems beat the spread in the senate. I was disappointed with nv and co, but I won't let it get me down--especially after sitting through 06 and 08. House basically what I expected:  heavy losses that fell in not predictable ways.  Biggest surprise in the house was the lack of surprise survivors out of the first tier--no "dead men walking" came back from the dead.  

Two final surprises (to me): 1. atdleft was right about nv, I was going with the public polling and not buying what I thought was the spin of a true believer. I was wrong.  2.  Apparently We Ask America seems to have their finger on the pulse of IL house races: foster and hare were DOA and walsh and dold showed some quite unexpected strength. I thought those polls were a bit too good to be true--if only MRG were the WAA of CT...      

Very civil
We respect that. Congrats.
[ Parent ]
Lessons learned
1. Whatever they do, The GOP should not declare any sort of permanent majority or game-changing victory, those seem to be followed by epic debacles.

2.  Things change fast.  The rug could get yanked out from under us too.  HavIng it happen (twice in as many cycles), ought to tone down any triumphalism.  

3.  The tough thing after 2006 wasn't the electoral losses, which were expected. It was that things didn't bounce back to "normal," they just got worse.  Who knows what will happen next.  That said, the health care bill is a major problem and voters are very skeptical that its benefits are worth the costs. How thing play out could hinge on the extent to which: dems can come to terms with that and honestly evaluate its role in their recent setback.  And republicans can avoid overplaying their hand and focus on pragmatic concerns of centrists that are concerned about costs, quality, and it's affects on businesses' ability to hire rather than ideological concerns about the size and role of government targeted at the base.

           

[ Parent ]
I also was very surprised to not see very many miraculous saves
Not a single nail biter close one for an incumbent who should have gone down.  They all did, and then moved onto the next column into Lean Dem.
[ Parent ]
McNerney is the exception
...hopefully, but he's still leading and everyone thought he'd be going down in flames.

Going down Nate Silver's list, there are only two races he pegged as greater than a 60% chance of flipping but didn't flip: CA-11 (yet) and IL-10 (why that one of all seats?!)

24, CA-14, previously DC-AL

[ Parent ]
Agree
The top 44 most in danger on my list all have red ticks next to them. Then Bill Owens then four more red ticks...
[ Parent ]
Any updates on Giffords/Kelly in AZ-08?
I know Giffords leads by a percent or so with plenty of Pima County still uncounted; is there any word on when we'll know final results? Or if the outstanding vote is from precincts conservative enough to change the result at all?

20, CD MA-03/NH-01/MA-08
It's not precincts
It's provisionals and vote-by-mail ballots that were turned in at the polling place on election day, and there'sa lot of them, even more than I reported earlier. No word on when we'll get new numbers here or how they'll break, but Kelly would have to turn around Giffords advantage with vote-by-mail ballots (the Pima County Democratic party and the Giffords campaign really pushed vote-by-mail, and it paid off, as she won the ones that have been counted so far).  I'd rather by in Giffords' shoes than Kelly's right now, but there's enough votes still out there that things could go either way.

22, Democrat, AZ-01
Peace. Love. Gabby.
[ Parent ]
And we have some sort of timeline
The remaining vote-by-mail ballots are going to be turned over to the Elections Division tonight, so hopefully those will be counted late tonight or tomorrow. If Kelly closes the margin there some, then this is going to be really close. If Giffords increases her margin (which is probably the more likely possibility), especially by more than several hundred votes, than it's probably over.

Provisionals will be slowly processed over the next ten days. If Kelly tightens things up with mail-in ballots, then this is going to drag.

22, Democrat, AZ-01
Peace. Love. Gabby.

[ Parent ]
Oh, and for what's it worth
The Giffords camp seems more optimistic than the Kelly camp. We'll see though. After all, Kelly's right: there's still plenty more votes to count.

22, Democrat, AZ-01
Peace. Love. Gabby.
[ Parent ]
AZ-07: Grijalva Declares Victory | 52 comments

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