Comments

1
I'd have told her to wait a day before announcing something like this.

She's gained on Moon in percentage terms with each day's count, so far (though the press has universally reported her falling behind, based on totals). Late voters will be the last counted, and late voters trend younger and poorer.

There's a good chance this will come down to a razor-thin margin, but your campaign looks weak if you start making noise about hanging chads well before it's clear that contested ballots will determine the outcome.
2
Not true @1, Moon pulled away from Oliver in both a percentage and absolute sense since election day. it's pretty much over for Oliver.
3
@1 She's lost ground, and is behind by more votes than these challenged ones. So while it's true "all should be counted," it's a wee-bit more likely that the challenged ones will be proportionately distributed to each candidate at around the current result than nearly 100% going to Oliver.
4
My bad, the percentage lead has only decreased since yesterday. I could have sworn the difference was more than 2% on election day... gettin' old.

Aug. 1 counts: 15.56% Moon, 13.90% Oliver. Difference: 1.67%
Aug. 2 counts: 15.54% Moon, 13.81 Oliver. Difference: 1.92%
Aug. 3 counts: 16.72% Moon, 14.88% Oliver. Difference: 1.84%

Nobody reported the gap narrowing after the last results release, though.
5
@3

Oh, I'm not arguing that pinning your hopes on contested ballots is good strategy. Or that making noise about them is good politics-- quite the contrary, as I said previously.

The question is how much of a pop she gets from late voters... if The Stranger's exit polls are anything to go by, she got a hell of a boost from voters who waited until the last day to turn ballots in.
6
@1 - I'm not sure that vote percentage changes matter in a field this large, as Moon and Oliver aren't moving just in relation to one another, but against the entire cohort. Moon added about 400 votes in her total margin over Oliver on Wednesday's drop, and 600 yesterday, for a total of about 1000 votes since election day. Moon's total lead over Oliver increased from about 1500 votes on election day to 2578 as of yesterday's count.
7
@1 - The Stranger's "exit polls" weren't remotely scientific. The total cohort couldn't have been more than twenty people. If last minute votes were breaking for Oliver, that would have manifested a bit in Wednesday's data, and certainly in yesterdays. To the contrary, Moon's cumulative vote total over Oliver has grown both days.
8
@6

The entire cohort is moving, sure, but the only two candidates we need to compare are Oliver and Moon, and the percentage difference gives a better indication of who's gaining or falling behind than the totals.

@7

Yeah, I forgot to add the extra snark lines under "if they're anything to go by." But we should still expect late voters to break young and poor, just as in every other election, and that's definitely Oliver's base. So it's not unreasonable to expect the gap to close further, regardless of what you make of the exit interviews (not polls-- even The Stranger seemed to realize they couldn't be called that).
9
Can't even fill out a ballot properly. That's encouraging.
10
BYE FELICIA!
11
Aug. 4 counts: 17.38% Moon, 16.05% Oliver. Difference: 1.33%

So yes, the gap has closed again, and is narrower now than it was in the the first results report.

The bad news for Oliver is that the total of Ballots counted (170,870) is now close to the projected turnout-- i.e. there probably aren't many more new ballots to count. And the total gap between Oliver and Moon (2235) looks too big to make up via contested ballot resolution.

Count every ballot and all that, and there's still a week of official ballot handling work to be done... but I don't think anyone would second-guess Oliver if she conceded now.
12
Can anyone provide a source for the claim that poor and young people wait until the last minute to vote? Why not busy professionals with families and little time? This sounds like the kind of Fox News nonsense that our dear leader's followers eat up and endlessly repeat as a form of self-affirmation.

But I love the phrase "centering marginalized voices". It's sounds like something a psychiatrist would say to justify putting a patient on heavy anti-psychotic meds.
13
@12

The broad trends come from mostly from the many studies of early voting in states that allow it; you can easily get a long list of abstracts and papers by typing "early voting" into any academic paper search engine. There are fewer studies of elections with all-postal elections in the US (simply because there are fewer of them) but the general patterns seem to hold.

There is a lot less data about why some groups vote earlier or later; the "too busy" theory you came up with doesn't make as much sense once you work through it a bit, as you note (until retirement age, at any rate). The "real" explanation is probably the boring old "it's a mix of a lot of different things," but this, too, is speculation.
14
The Pander is strong in Moon!
15
The only people who get their panties in a bunch because Oliver is encouraging voters who have been challenged to defend their votes are geriatric alt-right racist motherfuckers. "Everyone's vote should count" is not a radical concept, fucking cretins.
16
15: Your nasty little screed is the embodiment of why the alt left will probably never hold any real power. When someone doesn't agree your ideas, even respectfully, and even within your own circle, their a geriatric (ageist much?), a motherfucker, a cretin, and if none of those insults get a reaction - a racist! That's not the way people who actually want and know how to get shit done talk to each other. It's the way petulant teens talk to their parents when they don't get their way.
17
So there are >2000 ballots without signatures or with the wrong signature. It is pretty easy fill in and mail somebody else's ballot without signing it or with a poor attempt to forge their signature, so perhaps at least some of these contested ballots are fraudulent rather than votes that need to be counted.
18
"centering marginalized voices."

Yeah you're not "marginalized". That assumes there is an agent sending you to the "margins."
Wtf does that even mean? What is "margin" a metaphor of? The fact that the black community can't pull itself together despite affirmative action; an alphabet soup of welfare programs and private charity; forced lower standards across the board in our institutions(both private and public); lax policing because it hurts their feelings; and basically the entire media/entertainment complex extolling and praising them while at the same time blaming whites for all their problems?

If that's "marginalization." Then gibs me suma dat.

Blacks, and especially black women, are the most pampered and privileged section of our society.
19
You were doing a good job of making the angry white man's case against the white supremacist society accusation - which is technically incorrect as well self-defeating and juvenile. But then this, the crown duke of Tourette's Syndrome Freudian slips:

"If that's "marginalization." Then gibs me suma dat".

And with that my friend, you have destroyed any credibility you ever had, or will ever have again, on some of the complex and unfortunate issues you raised.
20
I'm okay with the "every vote should be counted" stuff. However, as many have mentioned, basic statistics would tell us that the chance of this being a lifeline for Oliver are slim. In the BEST scenario, she gets close enough to Moon for a challenge (someone must know how that would work on here).

All the while, Durkan is making calls and stumping. IMO, if the Oliver and Moon crowd really doesn't want Jenny, they should start banding together to beat Durkan, not each other.
21
Vote chasing only makes sense in races where 100 or fewer votes separate the two candidates. Yet another political fact that's news to Oliver and her supporters.

Please wait...

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