Patterico's Pontifications

3/4/2020

Follow-up to Last Night’s Results

Filed under: General — JVW @ 2:35 pm



[guest post by JVW]

Our host took us through the big night for JoJo the Indefatigable Dog-Faced Pony Soldier Boy, so I want to focus on some other races. But first, a word about the crazy evening.

A quick perusal of Twitter looking at various trending topics will suggest that the Bernie Bros and Babes are not at all happy with last night’s developments, as a search on #BernieOrBust2020 or #RiggedPrimary will make clear. What’s even more fun is that Biden supporters are clapping-back claiming that it is only Republican trolls or Russian operatives who are pretending to be Sanders supporters threatening to sit out the fall election, but if that were true then it would mean that the devious GOP and Russians have been planning this operation for the past ten years and have been carefully cultivating Twitter accounts with tens of thousands of followers and histories of left-wing tweets. I have no idea what Joe Biden will be able to do to bring the Sanders people back in the fold, but I can’t see him being any more successful than Hillary Clinton was at that endeavor.

I kind of hope that the Green Mountain Marxist makes a comeback and beats Slow Joe in Michigan (where he beat Her Clintonic Majesty four years ago) and Ohio, thus undermining Biden’s claim that he can put the Rust Belt states back into the Democrat column. In fact, if you compare the Clinton-Sanders race back then to the Biden-Sanders race today, the same sort of voting patterns are emerging. This is as good a sign as any that Senator Stalin has not expanded his voting base one damn bit since last time around, and we already know that there has not been some magical turn-out of young voters, no matter how dominant they may be the the social media realm. But again, I would love to see this whole thing arrive unsettled in Milwaukee later this summer.
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Now for some local news:

California went for Comrade Candidate, but by what is shaping up to be a smaller margin than had been anticipated. The average of polls going in to yesterday suggested a twelve-point spread for Sanders over Biden, but the semi-final results show closer to a margin of under nine percent for the geriatric revolutionary. Voting in hyper-progressive California began in some counties as early as two weeks ago, and according to the Dog Trainer there were a quarter-million voters in Los Angeles County who cast their ballots prior to Tuesday, with some statewide estimates suggesting that over a half-million voters — not counting mail-in ballots — voted prior to our official election day. How many of these ballots were marked for candidates such as Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar who dropped out before Tuesday is uncertain, but if our state is going to fetishize early voting then this is what we are going to have to learn to accept.

For what it’s worth, the Congressional district where our host and I both reside thus far has Biden at 29.7% and Sanders at 24.5%, with Lieawatha with 15.5% and Buttigieg, Bloomberg, and Klobuchar combining for 26.9%. Patterico chose a winner as far as our neighborhood is concerned. I and 469 other hearty and patriotic souls cast votes for My Little Aloha Sweetie, and I anticipate her numbers will swell as we continue to count votes up until the April 3 deadline (you read that right; we have thirty days to count the votes).
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Proposition 13 on this year’s ballot, which had nothing to do with the famous property tax limitation Proposition 13 passed in 1978 but instead was this time a ham-handed attempt to get the state to use bond money to guarantee school repair funding so that a larger share of the general funds could go towards pension and benefit obligations, went down to glorious defeat yesterday. Close to 56% of voters voted “No,” though naturally San Francisco voters were by a ratio of 3:1 in favor of the proposition and ought to thus be disqualified from ever voting again on a tax measure. Combined with last year’s embarrassing defeat of the LAUSD parcel tax and a slew of other failed school tax initiatives on yesterday’s ballot, I am cautiously optimistic that the voters of this state are finally waking up to the idea that throwing more money at structural weaknesses in policy and the bureaucracy on behalf of “children” or “veterans” or “the homeless” is a waste of valuable resources, though it could just be a sign that California voters are happy raising someone else’s taxes, just not their own. In any case, if I were an advocate of the split-roll property tax initiative proposed for November — the first serious attempt to challenge the original Prop 13 tax protections enacted forty-two years ago — I would be seriously worried about the chances for success given what we have recently seen.
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It looks promising for Patterico’s boss, Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey, who at this writing is holding on to roughly 50.7% of the vote in a three-person race, with almost double the support of her closest challenger, former San Francisco DA George Gascón. If she can stay above the fifty percent mark and avert a fall runoff we may avoid the trendy hug-a-miscreant style of public safety policy that the wokedy-woke are trying to impose on municipalities all across the country. But with mail-in ballots left to be counted and with all sorts of problems with county elections this time around, it may be some time before we know for sure whether we have dodged the Soros-funded move to blame society for the failings of criminals.

In any case, there was lots of good news for conservatives yesterday, including a handful of California Republicans with surprisingly strong showings in Congressional and state legislative races on a night when it was Democrat races that brought out the voters. It will be interesting to see if this momentum carries over into November, and if we can at long last momentarily slow the Golden State’s massive lurch to the left.

– JVW

Biden Comes Roaring Back as Bloomberg Drops Out

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:55 am



On Saturday I said: “Biden is not to be discounted.” Always trust content from Patterico. Joe Biden won Texas and at least eight other states last night. Meanwhile, Mini Mike Bloomberg is out and will endorse Biden.

A lot has changed since three days ago, when I wrote this tweet:

(Poor Amy. She never ever merited a real Trump nickname.) The centrists are now out of the race and have cleared a path for Joementum. Can you imagine if Marco Rubio and John Kasich had gotten out in 2016 as early as Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Bloomberg have in 2020? Ah well.

One thing to note: Sanders did win Colorado and California. These are being touted as victories in western states, but the results signify something else too, as Nate Silver pointed out:

There were a lotta wasted votes out there last night on people who were either already gone by yesterday or who are gone today. Here’s an interesting graphic, with 79% of the vote counted in California:

California Primary 2020

Add up the votes cast for people who today are not candidates. In other words, imagine this race without Mini Mike. Amy No-Nickname, and Mayor Alfred E. (Go ahead and imagine the race without the irrelevant Warren (third in her home state of MA!) as well, if you like — although she seems unlikely to drop. She seems more like the diehard Marco I Will Never Give Up No Matter How Obviously Hopeless It Is Rubio or the John I Have Virtually No Delegates But People Will Coalesce Around Me Just Wait and See Kasich type to me.)

You can’t simply assume that all Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar votes would break Biden, while all Warren votes would break Bernie. But that’s useful shorthand, and it tells you what we seem to see in races time and again: Bernie may not be as strong as he once appeared.

Interesting times.


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