Posts published in “notes”

And a happy Thanksgiving Day!
 

It's election day. If you haven't already, you know what to do.
 

Wandering around election stats today, I stopped in at Cook's report on partisan indexes but congressional district, and thought it would be interesting to compare the rankings for the Northwest.

A note or two for those not conversant with the PVI (partisan voter index): It uses a set of statistical measures, including but not limited to recent votes for president and congressional seats, to establish a statistical figure to demonstrate how Democratic or Republican a congressional district is.

It's full national map is well worth the time if the subject is of interest. But for those in the Northwest, the rankings by district should give some perspective as to how parts of the region fit together.

Here's how the districts in the Northwest, and some adjacent districts as well, stack up against each other. They're listed in order from most Republican to most Democratic, and those in the middle are those which at least theoretically should be the most competitive.

-25.59 Utah 1 - Rob Bishop (R)
-24.97 Wyoming AL - Liz Cheney (R)
-20.71 Idaho 1 - Raul Labrador (R)
-16.85 Idaho 2 - Mike Simpson (R)
-13.27 Washington 4 - Dan Newhouse (R)
-11.14 Oregon 2 - Greg Walden (R)
-11.04 California 1 - Doug La Malfa (R)
-10.61 Montana AL - Greg Gianforte (R)
-7.63 Washington 5 - Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R)
-6.97 Nevada 2 - Mark Amodei (R)
-3.96 Washington 3 - Jaime Herrera Beutler (R)
-0.31 Washington 8 - Dave Reichert (R)
0.25 Oregon 4 - Peter DeFazio (D)
0.48 Oregon 5 - Kurt Schrader (D)
5.47 Washington 10 - Denny Heck (D)
5.69 Washington 1 - Suzane DelBene (D)
5.70 Washington 6 - Derek Kilmer (D)
9.10 Oregon 1 - Suzanne Bonamici (D)
9.93 Washington 2 - Rick Larsen (D)
20.90 Washington 9 - Adam Smith (D)
23.66 Oregon 3 - Earl Blumenauer (D)
32.69 Washington 7 - Pramila Jayapal (D)

The actual division is pretty clean - that is, districts leaning in the direction of one party do tend to elect people from that party. Where you see a really high PVI for either party, that means the opposition party needs something close to a miracle to win the seat. It happens, but such lightning strikes are rare.

But if 2018 turns into a Democratic wave year, you can see which districts are most worth watching. If this were a Republican wave year, districts like Oregon 4 and 5 and Washington 10 and 1 would be worth watching. In this year, however, two Washington districts - 3 and 8 - are at the top of the list. Dave Reichert in 8 is retiring, and a ferocious campaign may develop there, but we won't know for sure until after Washington's primary election next month. Washington 3 may be safer for Jaime Herrera Beutler partly because she has organized well and partly because Democrats seem not to have put strong enough campaign together there, but that district too should not be ignored.

Not far up the list above them, though, is Washington 5, a district not as firmly Republican as many people think, though Cathy McMorris Rodgers has held it solidly. She has her strongest ever opponent this year, though, and this is definitely a district to watch.

A bit of perspective as we head into campaign season. - rs

Mail by voting is going to go national. The evidence of how well it works keeps adding up.

That's no news to us in Oregon, of course, where it's worked extremely well for more two two decades. It's been picked up in a growing number of places, notably Washington state to the north, and it's been doing well everywhere.

The latest evidence comes from Alaska.

State 49 held local election this week, and Anchorage was experimenting with mail-in voting. Election officials there said they were hoping for a modest boost in turnout.

We don't yet know what the final tally will be, but the boost is likely to be a lot more than modest.

Election day was Tuesday. The Anchorage Daily News reported, "About 80,000 ballots had been received by elections officials at the end of the day Wednesday. More were still on the way. Until now, the most ballots the city had ever received in a local race was 71,099 votes in 2012."

But that's only the beginning. As the paper noted, Alaskans tend to be last-minute people, and a further deluge of ballots is expected to come in over the next few days.

They're voting a lot up there. And more and more states will catch on to this. - rs
 

Sometimes it's the audience that prompts some reflection.

That's not a comment on Representative Suzanne Bonamici, from Oregon's first congressional district, and who held one of her twice-yearly (two series of them annually in the district's counties) town hall meetings in McMinnville this evening. Her discussion was a straightforward report, from her eye view, of what's happening in Congress at present. There's a lot of caution, watching and questioning, by her description, which sounds about right.

When an audience member asked whether Congress is as dysfunctional as it seems to be, she gave her most noteworthy answer: No, probably not. Yes, there are a string of problems, which have gotten a lot of attention. But while the bigfoot stories clump around, lots of smaller-scale activity goes on, to little notice, underneath. She cited a string of measures she's working on with Republicans, on subjects ranging from job training to tsunami preparation.

That seemed to be of a piece with the audience.

Sometimes, in these town halls, some people get overheated and start stomping out of their proclamations rather than coolly asking questions. Sometimes someone will start to take over the proceedings by going really long-winded, delivering their own speech rather than a concise question.

Didn't happen tonight. Everyone was courteous and to the point, and emotions were dialed down.

That may or may not be typical, of course. And you can speculate over the various possible reasons for a quieter, calmer town hall. It was a mostly Democratic-friendly audience, by all appearances; was the thinking, in part, that we've now just a few months to go to changing the political world in D.C.? (That change might include a subcommittee chair for Bonamici if the House changes partisan control with the next election.)

Whatever the reason, something feels a little different. - rs