Looks like we’ll hold it, knock on wood.
Gianforte up 5.6% with 55% of the precincts in. In most counties Quist is running appreciably behind the numbers the rat Governor got in his successful 2016 run.
Liartarian getting almost 6%.
Update: 5/25/2017 11:24PM
Flathead County (normally a mildly GOP leaning county) is the first county where Gianforte is running behind his Governor’s numbers last year.
With 98% of precincts in, Gianforte’s lead is 6.1% The only precints still out are in overwhelmingly Democrat Glacier County (got to be an Indian reservation), and my estimate is that Gianforte will end up with 50.1% and a 5.8% victory margin.
If Gianforte won the early vote by over 10% (as appears likely from polling), then he lost to that freak Quist among votes cast on election day itself. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Gianforte would have lost had everyone voted yesterday (perhaps the last-day vote was skewed towards Democrats), but it’s clear that body-slamming and beating up a reporter, whether or not he deserved it, is not a wise thing for a candidate to do on the day prior to the election. So, no, the incident with the reporter didn’t help Gianforte (even in Montana); and it’s also clear that Montana voters did not reject the agenda of President Trump and the GOP Congress.
The events leading up to yesterday’s election, and the election-day vote favoring a candidate who was trounced in early voting, actually could be a blessing in disguise for conservatives. Hopefully, the narrative that “Montanans wouldn’t have voted for Gianforte for Congress had they voted after his assault of a reporter” will lead to a national reconsideration of the abomination that are early voting and mail-in elections. We should have a single Election Day, with everyone voting with the same set of facts before them. It is ridiculous that some people vote in early October and others in early November for the same election; who knows how many people voted for Hillary when her e-mails scandal had long before been swept under the rug, and it almost got her elected. And early voting and mail-in voting are much harder to police against voter fraud than having a single day of in-person voting (with limited exceptions for absentee voting by mail, which I would require be postmarked on Election Day).
While I’m happy that early voting actually helped us for once, let’s not waste this “crisis” (as Rahm Emanuel would say). We need to body-slam early voting and mail-in voting and send them out for the count. If liberal moonbats want to rally around Gianforte’s election to go back to a single Election Day, by all means let’s help them do it. After we have done that, we can go after those other abominations: Motor Voter Law registration and same-day registration.