Fully Reporting

Elections, Policy, Law, and Maps.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

@maxtmcc It's funny because Rs in CA have won chunks of D voters by running moderates and strategic independents. The DA of LA County is a Republican. Steve Poizner and Lahnee Chen way overperformed. But the state party doesn't really do any large-scale coordination on this it seems.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

@atlanticesque No attention spans for big events, people just want the thing served up to them day of with no planning. There's no appetite for anticipation and lead up.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

Honestly, probably not. These large counties are important for Steyer, but he is *barely* hitting benchmarks and they make up about 67% of the vote. His needed numbers have almost doubled since election night.

[Nikolaj🇺🇦🇵🇸 @nikicaga]

This seems like a pretty massive overcorrection after Steyer hit good numbers in all other large counties

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

@chriswithans Just to use AL as an example again, the downballot races this year on the R side had a 10% variance in the number of votes. The lowest was about 430,000 the highest was about 474,000. That would be the equivalent of a *700,000* vote difference on current CA numbers.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

I think this is an overly myopic comparison. Other downballot races in 2022 had a similar drop-off to the Gov-AG drop off we see right now, it's just that AG was smaller. For these random downballot races there's a bunch of things that affect the cycle-over-cycle dropoff and even within states the downballot dropoff varies a ton.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

This sounds like a lot, but this is an undervote percentage of only 4.5%. For reference, the undervote percentage between the GOP primary for governor and auditor in the Iowa primaries (held the same day) was 12%. Even between governor and Senate it was 2.5%. This is not large.

[Chris @chriswithans]

Massive number of undervotes for Attorney General versus Governor in California, even though the AG election is much more simple. Just pick the one prominent dude who matches your party.

So far, 300,000 people chose a Governor but not an Attorney General.

One wonders how many ballots were marked for Steyer and no one else.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

@bdquinn Pratt will probably perform basically at baseline or maybe slightly above for an R in LA in a blue year. The state GOP has occasionally tapped into the appetite for reform (Poizner, Chen) but has never made a concerted effort to coordinate it at a large scale.

[Lillian Belle @LillianBelle2]

How is it possible to only count 6 votes when over 50 percent of the estimated votes are outstanding….?

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

Football stadiums are a difficult policy problem for urbanists. They host 8-9 games/year, so are clearly not a very good land use downtown compared to dense housing. But urbanists seem to like the vibes of them being downtown and right next to transit.

[Hayden @the_transit_guy]

Indianapolis, the largest city in a state with a metro population of 2.2 million, gets just three trains per week, yet that same state is willing to spend $1 billion on a football stadium for 8 events a year.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

Another big question is how much have the redder suburbs and exurbs already run dry. A lot of his good numbers yesterday came from big drops in places like Redding and El Dorado. But those places might be nearly out of votes.

[Zachary Donnini @ZacharyDonnini]

If the remaining California governor ballots look like yesterday’s returns, Hilton certainly holds off Steyer. If the Wed-to-Thurs shift continues linearly, Steyer likely passes him.

We expect something in between, which is why the race is tracking toward a very close finish.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

@LillianBelle2 This is why people rightfully give CA a harder time for this. The slow counting is basically a deliberate policy of not wanting to rock the boat at all with county election officials or demand any kind of better performance.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

@StatisticUrban It's interesting the degree that, despite this, old age spending is still very popular even amongst young people (France had protests about attempts to cut it). It seems like the cultural image of "grandma barely scraping by on coupons and a frugal life" is very durable.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

It's pretty obvious no one would accept this kind of opaque and sow update process for any other level of government. If the Supreme Court decided to stop deciding cases in a timely manner because it "really wanted to draft perfect opinions" everyone would rightfully be upset.

[Josh Barro @jbarro]

When Democrats act like it's unreasonable to expect the government to count votes in a day or two, how can they expect to convince voters to hand the government billions of dollars for other projects? Do we hold government to high standards or not?

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

Especially in the context of Hispanic shifts, this is very under discussed. He's sitting at 44% (will likely drop lower) in his Trump +2 seat. That's already a 14% leftward shift in a very heavily Hispanic, working class area. Later ballots will make it even bluer *and* this area usually shifts blue between now and November. Very good case this signals the 20%+ shifts in Hispanic voters we see in polls being real.

[Ryan Brune @BruneElections]

I feel like an under discussed part of the California everything is just how cooked Valadao appears to be.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

Interestingly, Pratt might be the first example of a Republican who got tons of social media hype on mainstream feeds but had no real support.

[David Shor @davidshor]

Trump got 27% of the vote in Los Angeles in 2024 - social media hype aside there’s a real chance that Pratt ends up underperforming Trump outright once all the votes are counted.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

@dilanesper It might be that they do not care *as much* about some scandals as others, that is also likely true. And sometimes both candidates have roughly equally bad scandals and it cancels out. But it is odd to die on the hill that partisans simply imagine voters care.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

@dilanesper The issue with all of this is voters pretty clearly do care. Empirically, like this is a fact. Scandal-plagued candidates routinely underperform even if they eventually win. The idea voters simply do not care is factually untrue.

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

@BruneElections He'd have to hope further drops are much bluer, almost certainly (not impossible, but needs to show up in next 2-3 drops)

[Fully Reporting @FullyReporting]

Interestingly, this precinct (75-25 Harris in 2024) is now seeing Rs get 50% of the vote in the Gov race. Pretty massive shifts right all around.

[VoteHub @VoteHub]

One of the most striking precinct-level results comes from the Palisades.

The burn line along Sunset/Chautauqua also serves as a precinct boundary. Both are typically blue, but Pratt leads 61% in the fire-devastated precinct vs. 36% in the adjacent one, which was largely spared.