Comments

1

....patiently waiting for folks (below)... who can't even vote in Seattle trash this town as 'socialist' shithole.

2

@1 I'm sure the trolls will be back any minute now. They're sturdy folk, not prone to getting the vapours and running for the smelling salts whenever their narratives need a little minor tweaking.

3

she bout to do it

5

.. she’s the one funded by folks outside of town, though.

6

There's a 0.0% chance the loser of the Sawant/Orion final tally doesn't demand a formal recount.

7

@5 maybe that’s due to the race receiving massive amounts of outside attention? Time, NYT, Newsweek, even Teen Vogue, + Warren & Saunders. Perhaps people recognize that if Amazon’s influx of spending works here, their town is next? Also, most of Amazon’s money comes from outside Seattle (and therefore, so did the bulk of the spending on Or!on).

8

Those are some interesting contortions.

$1.5 mil is a drop in the bucket, kiddos.

9

Interesting. Sawant may win. This is probably the least important city council race (since the two candidates are practically identical). But it sends another message to Amazon (which has lost most of its races, if I'm not mistaken). The other races are far more important in terms of how the city is governed. Lewis beating Pugel is huge, and it looks like it will happen. Likewise, it seems unlikely that Scott will pull an upset, but not outside the realm of possibility. He would need about 63% of the remaining vote, if my math is correct. That would be a dramatic change from Pedersen, and even if he doesn't win, it sends a nice message to the guy that everyone assumed would just walk right into the job.

10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNyP3uzgRhA

12

If she pulls it out, I'd have to take it back about her being bad at politics. The first task of a politician is to maintain a coalition of voters sufficiently large to retain office. And a win means she's been able to do that in spite of annoying the people she annoys.

Its easy to forget that the voiceless don't have a voice, what with all the noise that comes from those that do have a voice. And if that's where she's getting her votes, then excelsior Sawant.

13

Why do people keep talking about Amazon's money regarding district 3? Orion stated that he declined all contributions from the PAC. So, he didn't take any Amazon money. His contributions total 400k (not 1.5M) vs Sawant's 537k. And, the majority of Orion's contributions come from district 3 vs the 47% of Sawant's contributions that come from outside Seattle. He also used the voucher program vs Sawant who did not. Sawant's campaign seems more controversial than Orion's. What am I missing?

14

so yesterday's batch was mostly composed of early returns?

15

@13 Tell that to the 10 gigantic Egan Orion mailers I got over the weekend which were paid for by Amazon’s funded PACs.

17

Does anyone have an idea of the expected voter turn out for District 3? I was just crunching some numbers and if there are 12000+ ballots left there, that would end up being a 57% voter turn out.

18

"the first task of a politician is to maintain a coalition of voters sufficiently large to retain office."

The bucket of people who want free stuff is bottomless.

20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCldNtAzVg

21

If I recall correctly, the Sound Transit district does not precisely cover all of King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties, but let's just use those three counties as a stand-in for the Sound Transit district. As of today's latest vote counts, yes is leading only 357,715 to 357,560. What that means is the no vote is all but certain to overtake the yes vote.

So, at least the Sound Transit board can make the case (or we can make the case to them) that the Sound Transit electorate rejected any hint of a do-over of ST3. Of course, one of the many things that are so rotten about these Eyman ballot initiatives is that he always picks an off-off/odd-year election to run them.

Disclaimer. The yes vote is leading by a sizable margin in Pierce and Snohomish, but the sizable no margin in King and the large voter base of King is just about cancelling out that combined yes.

Sure, I know we have yet to see whether this is going to get struck down in the courts. And sure, I know politicians have to be signaling their willingness to abide by this abuse of direct democracy. I just hope we're not going to see elected official committing to preemptive concessions before the dust settles.

22

@14, yes. In WA, with our mail-in ballots, voters can mail in their ballots any time up through Election Day. So, some of the ballots arrive at the election office a week before the election, and some continue to arrive for several days after the election.

In recent years, a pattern has developed. The early ballots, the ones that get returned early, tend to be mailed by older, more conservative voters. Last minute ballots tend to be sent by younger, more liberal voters. So the first ballots counted on Election Day are the early-mailed ballots, and tend to skew a little more conservative. As they continue to count ballots in subsequent days, they're counting the last-minute mailed ballots, and the drop-box ballots, which tend to skew a bit more liberal.

So, in WA, you always want to take election-night results with a grain of salt, and know that those early counts tend to be more conservative than average. So close races are very likely to flip as later counts come in over several days.

Thus, it is very likely Sawant could make up a 5 point loss on election night if later ballots skew more liberal, which they tend to do. That is exactly what happened last time. She was losing by something like 9 points this time, if I remember, so that is a bigger deficit to make up.

The Pugel/Lewis race is not a surprise at all. That was very close on election night, and Lewis was very likely to make up several points in later ballot drops. The fact that Lewis pulled ahead of Pugel with todays count was very predictable. It would not surprise me if he widens his lead over the next day or so.

25

@22 Late voting breaks left throughout the US, not just in Seattle, and not just in mail-in systems. It's rare to find a race anywhere in which the candidate to the right trails slightly when the first precincts report, but pulls ahead as later reports roll in.

If you pay attention, you'll notice this is a factor in broadcast news in presidential years, affecting the point where a given outlet will "call" a given race.

26

I say Fuck the Billionaire's revolution.
We the 99% need to take. our. country. back.

Heck -- we'll even share it -- with You guys!
(and you don't even hafta take it!)
[stand on that principal!]

27

www.friendlydads.net

28

Without following the link, I'm going to say @27 wins this thread.

29

@28 Yeah, I didn't click either. Not sure you can count it as a win if you didn't play.

30

jackkay @23, sure, one could make the case that the Kelley Blue Book value is fairer than the current depreciation schedule, although the more I look at this, the less convinced I am of that. (It's a shame our elected leaders and the No campaign didn't do a better job explaining why we have the current schedule.) But I'll tell you what's dramatically less fair than either alternative: making the owner of a 1999 Toyota Corolla pay the same as the owner of a 2019 Tesla crossover, which is what will happen if this thing holds up in court.

Anyway, this is a bit of an academic argument at this point. The campaign is over. Now's when things really get interesting.

31

If Sawant does squeak through-we now know the outcome will be close-she will obviously learn from this and be much more attentive to constituency service.

And also-why is there always this attitude that socialism has been permanently, globally repudiated if it gets one bad election result, while the defeat of capitalist politicians by socialist ones is never treated as the death of that model? Seems like it should be the same either way, shouldn't it?

32

@29 Is it St. Patrick's Day already?

33

I'm gonna guess that the final vote share for the "Yes" side for I-976. It'll win, but it will be far short of the 65% Tim so smugly predicted when he started posting in this thread.

And it'd be one thing to put some sort of limit on the car tab price, but what's so freaking sacred about 30$ What's so important about that that it's worth driving up the cost of handicapped passes on Metro, or about forcing a mother of three who has to take the bus or the light rail to work to go to the only job she could find to feed her kids with to pay even higher fares> Why punish THOSE people when none of the things the people who voted "Yes" on this thing are made about?

34

As I meant to say in @33, I think the final vote share for the "Yes" side on 1-976 will probably be about 53%, maybe 52.5%. And it's now looking more likely that Tim's pointless anti-affirmative action initiative from the dead past may be repealed.

35

Why did Tim even DO an anti-affirmative action measure, anyway? Affirmative action has nothing to do with taxation and wasn't harming anyone in this state.

36

"... why is there always this attitude that socialism has been permanently, globally repudiated if it gets one bad election result, while the defeat of capitalist politicians by socialist ones is never treated as the death of that model? Seems like it should be the same either way, shouldn't it?" --AlaskanbnSP

Well, there's your mistake -- you're obviously thinking of a two-way-street-type situation. It doesn't quite work that way anymore, with Republicans. See: 'the Moscow Mule' McConnell and 1) Obama's one-term presidency plan 2) Merrick Garland and 3) Brett 'Kavanaughtiest Maximus,' currently installed thru a sham Senate hearing, "investigated" by the Federal Bureau of Investigating under Republican direction -- "No, don't look there; no, not there; keep trying -- nope. Try over there. No, not there. Okay that's good enough."

Naughtiest's reaction? "I'm gonna Get you Libs." IN the hearing. So, yeah. Those Glory days of yesteryear are Over. And socialism MUST be condemned, at every opportunity while Capitalism must only be Revered; even while it, unbridled, destroys the Planet.

It's awful funny.

37

@31 When we start seeing elections where there are a few capitalists running for a seat here and there, but there aren't enough of them to form a majority government even if every one of them wins, well, maybe then we'll have a pundit or two saying capitalism has been repudiated when one of those candidates loses.

@33 Tim Eyman's livelihood is based on a patchwork of financial tomfoolery fronted by a never-ending succession of state ballot initiatives. it's a nice little factory, and the name stamped on the product it churns out is "$30 Car Tabs." It's a brand name. It's no more meaningful than any other goofy brand name. Just substitute "Flavor Blasted Goldfish" every time you hear "$30 Car Tabs", and everything will start making a lot more sense.

38

Go, Kshama, GO!!
I'm with Catalina---there MUST be a way that Tim Eyesore's turd of an Initiative 976 gets declared unconstitutional, thus scrapped.

39

35 You make a perfect why voters should have to pass a quiz first before they are allowed to vote to keep the dummies out. Eyman has nothing to do with the affirmative action campaign. Asian residents are behind this one. You know the ones that pursue the strange concept that family values and hard work get you somewhere. What triggered R-88 was the last second acceptance of I-1000 by the legislature. You know that lovely campaign who didn't think it needed to pay its signature gatherers. But hey, they are just working stiffs, so screw them.

40

OH YA WELL MONEY IS PRINTED AT A MINT.

THINK ABOUT IT.

42

@39 congratulations! You just failed your own hypothetical quiz (who’s a dummy now!?!). Eyman ran initiative 200, that banned affirmative action in Washington in 1998. Is that a lifetime ban on voting, or are you able to retake the quiz at a later date, like a driving test?

43

@5 Sawant got most of her money from a large number of small, personal donations from people across the country. While Orion may have received the majority of his money from withing the city, that is because of a few huge donations from PACs. If you count individual donors, Sawant actually had the majority of in-district donors.

44

AS for local elections swinging left as later ballots drop, that's a natural given that we vote by mail, and we have a long time between when we receive our ballots and election day. Older and more conservative voters would have latched-on to the 1% ticket early on, and had their ballots in the mail early. While us more thoughtful lefties were waiting to the last minute to decide some fringe race we just could not make our minds up on. We get who the early voters are; they're the people who do not fear being priced out of Seattle because the 1% bought the city council.

45

@ 44:

For my part, I'm older than all the boomers are, and I voted for all the lefties the same day my ballot arrived.

46

@1 and @2 - Amazon stopped paying them, it's like Trump crowds

47

@23 -- Yeah, Tim Eyman continued his asshole campaign only because they didn't use the Kelly Bluebook for Car Tabs. That is the stupidest thing I ever heard.

No. Tim Eyman will always be an asshole. Any funding that Seattle and the greater metropolitan area votes for will be countered by a Tim Eyman state-wide initiative. He doesn't care about the will of the voter... he wants to drown government in the bathtub, voters be damned.

Here is the initiative idea I would like to see:
Make it mandatory that taxes raised in a particular county may only be spent in that county.

That means none of our pro-maintenance and pro-transit dollars leaves the greater Puget Sound area to fund infrastructure maintenance and improvements in white nationalist counties. If they want their pot holes fixed, let them pass funding measures to pay for them.

As with all Blue vs Red areas of this country, the Blue areas are "net payers" of taxes for the things taxes are used for, and Red areas are net receivers of those benefits.

48

45 I’m older than the boomers too and I want Amazon turned into a worker’s co op. I voted for Sawant and I am against authorities. Please don’t discount the old people. Some of us are revolutionaries.

49

@23 It truly doesn't matter what the valuation scheme is. They needed a certain amount of money in order to fund the projects they put on the ballots. If they wanted to use a more aggressive depreciation table, they just would have increased the excise rate. People would be paying the exact same amount either way.


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