Posted on 11/04/2010 6:04:41 PM PDT by TonyInOhio
Sen. Patty Murray has won a fourth term, riding a wave of strong Democratic support in King County to defeat Republican challenger Dino Rossi.
As of Thursday evening, Murray was leading Rossi by more than 45,000 votes, taking 51 percent to Rossi's 49 percent. That's up from a 14,000-vote lead on Election Day.
According to a Seattle Times analysis, Rossi would need to get about 54 percent of the estimated 591,000 uncounted ballots statewide to overcome Murray's lead.
But nearly 264,000 of those ballots are in King County. Murray's already commanding lead there has only expanded since Election Day. She took 68 percent of the 69,000 King County ballots counted Thursday.
To overcome King County's heavy support for Murray, Rossi would have to take about two-thirds of the remaining ballots in the rest of the state. So far he's received 53.2 percent of those non-King County votes.
That makes Rossi's task virtually impossible, even though hundreds of thousands of ballots remain to be counted statewide.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
Naturally, there’s been a lot of what-ifs going around FR in the last two days.
I’ve seen many threads where this or that factor was blamed for the loss of a Senate seat, for example, that Karl Rove single-handedly ruined the sure victory of Christine O’Donnell and that if only Buck hadn’t said . . . whatever.
The fact is that when you look at the losing candidates, they represented the full political spectrum — all the way from straight Tea Party picks (Angle) to straight establishment GOP picks (Rossi). Some lost big, some lost in squeakers.
But what this says to me is that these losses really were more about the dynamics of winning Senate races than they were about whether the candidates were sourced from the Tea Party or the Establishment GOP.
Senate races are just a lot harder to win than House races. One reason is that Senate races are a lot less representative of the voters; rather they represent (at best) something more of an amalgamation of the voters’ views or (at worst) the views of a segment of the voters that vote basically as a bloc and are easily turned out to the polls.
This is the way the Founders designed it. The House was meant to be more of bellweather, to be able to change quickly to adapt to events and so on. The Senate was to be slow and steady and not so subject to political winds.
Because the Rats have taken bloc voting to extreme levels and become expert in machine politics, it is much easier for them to affect a Senate race than a House race in most cases. They don’t have to fight the Senate battle in the entire state; in most cases, they just have to get out “their” voters in one major city to win.
My point is that I’m thinking it didn’t matter so much how our candidate came to run (TP or GOP, etc.), both types of candidates lost and both types won.
That leads me to believe the real issue is just how hard it is to win Senate races when the state has entrenched Rat machines with bloc voters.
King County told the story. Even if Rossi carried every other county in the state, King always delivers for a Democrat.
:)
Sad, ain’t it?!?
Funny how King Co. always is counted last in those elections up there. Funny how it always puts the rat over the top. Funny how pubs NEVER do anything about rat fraud.
Depends on the part of King Co. Only I-5 West is reliably leftist. It’s precinct by precinct. The East part of the county has had some attempts to split and form a new county.
The bottom line though is King Co. is reliably late, and reliably delivers just enough votes. They are claiming 68% turnout. Close to, if not greater, than 2008. I think that alone is telling..
BTW, anyone else wonder why ACORN declared bankruptcy the night of the election?
dims just keep printing and counting until they win.
LLS
It doesn’t seem to be the case, does it? Very disappointing.
If I’m not mistaken, this is exactly why Karl Rove voiced some consternation about Christine O’Donnell’s candidacy — he said she had been a “perennial candidate in DE” and, well, we all know how that comes off to voters.
Anyway. It looks like establishment and Tea Party candidates lost races and won races. I think it’s just hard to win Senate races and, therefore, I think we did very well all things considered.
They can be as Socialist as they want, as far as I’m concerned. What I object to is them getting the rest of us to pay for their Socialism.
We need a robust interpretation of the Tenth Amendment to allow today’s Free STates to have an amiable political divorce from the Socialist States. If they can pay for their programs, knockyerselfout. But stop with the federal wealth transfer payments already.
Civil War II
This is exactly why our union was envisioned as a federation of states with rights that kept them mostly in control of their own destiny WITHIN the union. Once the federal government starting taking money from one state and giving it to another, of course states would end up helping to pay for programs and cultures that they had little in common with.
It's not supposed to work that way. This is one of the greatest harms done by federal wealth transfer payments. Those payments actually weaken the Union over time because people become less and less tolerant of the states that use our money in ways we don't agree with.
No argument here as WA has attracted GAY’s for years.
“can there be at least one single time when a close race goes our way??? EVER??”
We won Illinois and PA, Dems win CO and WA. That makes it 2-2.
NV and WV were not close in the end.
This is why it's so hard to win Senate races in states that have even one area where the Rats have a highly entrenched bloc of voters and where they have various machines (unions, etc.) to get those voters to the polls.
The Senate races don't really represent the entire electorate.
The people in Washington get deserve everything they vote for.
There have been, despite the Rats attempts at cheating. Florida, Bush 2000 for one.
All of our conservative “no more taxes” state initiatives won handily, yet we still sent the dullest knive in the Senate drawer back for more years. If those of you outside WA state are frustrated, just imagine how frustrated and disappointed we are. It is very very disheartening.
Dino Rossi got into the race late. There were 2 other “unknown” Republican candidates in the primary race. Both of those 2 were conservative and had a lot of passion. But, Rossi was the GOP establishment pick. When will they ever learn?
Some here were arguing that the enthusiasm gap was not reflected in the polls, but obviously the opposite was true. The enthusiasm gap was overestimated by about 3%
This is true for the generic ballot (12% vs 9%) and most of the Senate races as well.
The lesson is, don’t trust the likely voter screens if they are 10%+ different from the registered voters
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