Update #2: Arizona is now reporting that 600,000 ballots have not yet been counted.
• 472,000 ballots still to be counted in Maricopa County, including 277,000 early ballots that were received before Election Day and 195,000 early ballots, provisional ballots and out-of-precinct ballots from Election Day.
• 90,000 votes to be counted in Pima County, said Chris Roads of the Pima County Recorder’s Office. This includes about 70,000 early ballots and 18,000 provisional votes. Not all the provisional votes will count.
These apparently are absentee ballots that were turned in on election day. I just hope the Democrats are not digging up Phoenix cemetaries to find votes.
UPDATE: A pretty good analysis from Steve Hayward early on.
Some of the Democrats gains in the House came in districts that will be hard for them to hold in 2020. We’ll have to wait until all of the west coast House races come in to know what the margin is going to be, but I suspect putative Speaker Pelosi is going to have a miserable time. At the very least, we’ll have gridlock on Capitol Hill, and as I always like to say, gridlock is the next best thing to constitutional government.
I think there will be pressure from left wing Democrats to shut the government down with each budget confrontation. That may play into Trump’s hands.
Rush Limbaugh has a good point today. The left, and the Media, has spent the two years since Trump’s election predicting a “Blue Wave” and asserting that Trump is not a legitimate President and will be rejected if not impeached. His theory is that this constant refrain scared 40 GOP Congressmen into retiring. They were convinced he would be rejected by the voters and that they would be too. Had they not retired, they might well have held the House. Forty open seats were just too many to defend.
A number of close races remain to be determined, including Martha McSally here in Arizona. My congressional district was lost to the Democrats as a professional politician named Kirkpatrick swooped down from Flagstaff and succeeded in defeating the local candidate Lia Martinez/ Peterson. Kirkpatrick seems to have no talent for anything but politics.
In 1980, she was elected as Coconino County’s first woman deputy county attorney. Kirkpatrick later served as city attorney for Sedona, Arizona. She was a member of the Flagstaff Water Commission. In 2004, she taught Business Law and Ethics at Coconino Community College.”
In 2004, Kirkpatrick was elected to represent the 2nd Legislative District and took office in January 2005. Kirkpatrick was elected to a second term in the state House in 2006. While serving in the legislature, Kirkpatrick served as the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, as well as the Education K-12 Committee and Natural Resources Committee.
I see no evidence of anything but politics in her life.
Nationally, the Republicans increased their Senate majority, which will assist in remaking the judiciary over the next two and probably six years.
The House majority was lost, in my opinion because so many anti-Trump incumbents retired (40) and those remaining were not particularly supportive of the president. Obamacare repeal largely failed due to John McCain but also to the failure of the House majority to come up with any attempt at further reform. Obamacare destroyed much of the existing infrastructure of Medicine, as corporate chains of hospitals bought doctors’ practices and converted what had been, in Teddy Kennedy’s words, “A cottage industry” of largely contented professionals into a discontented industry in which young doctors are the most highly regulated profession in the nation.
I know a fair number of young physicians, mostly in primary practice, and none is happy with their practice. Republicans have never been all that interested in health care reform but the Democrats have no useful ideas, as Obamacare showed dramatically.
I expect the next two years will show a consistent attempt to block Trump’s agenda and to try to find, with a blizzard of subpoenas, some grounds for impeachment. I expect this will lead to a blowout re-election in 2020 and not much happening for the next two years in Congress.
Tags: Democrats
Why does Arizona alone have a massive backlog of votes to be counted. California, for all of its disfunction, managed to count almost all by Wednesday morning – there are a few provisional ballots and a few absentee ballots mailed before the election but not received; they must arrive by Friday. But no massive numbers uncounted.
Good question. Arizona votes mostly by absentee and there is a law, as I understand it, that the absentee ballot must be received several days before the election. However, and this seems to be the problem, there are “emergency” rules that allow the absentee ballot to be deposited at the polling place. This seems to be the source of the problem. It is ripe for fraud.
California, where I lived for 60 years, is starting to show the same trends in the absentee votes. Several Congressional elections in Orange County flipped late after a lot of absentee ballots appeared.. Maybe it is illegals voting or maybe new immigrants flipped them but the late absentees seem to be an issue.