What Happens When Democrats are "Fighting Wall Street With One Hand, Unions With the Other," While Republicans are Fighting Unions With Two Hands?

Matthew Yglesias noticed something interesting in a political story today that reminds me of one of our arguments in Red State, Blue State. Yglesias quotes a Washington Post article on Blanche Lincoln returning to the U.S. Senate after surviving a primary challenge from a candidate supported by organized labor:

Lincoln was embraced by her colleagues . . . Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) held up two fists and said of her primary campaign: "Fighting Wall Street with one hand, unions with the other."

Yglesias points out a fundamental asymmetry here:

Schumer, who's become something of a national leader among Senate Democrats, celebrates this ideal [of governing in a manner that's equidistant from rival interest groups], but there's not a single member of the Republican Party--much less a leader--who'd say anything remotely similar. Schumer is basically describing polyarchy or interest-group pluralism. But the imbalance between Schumer and his rivals on the other side of the aisle reflects what Charles Lindblom ended up criticizing as the "privileged position of business in polyarchy."

Before getting to my argument about geography and voting, let me set aside the specifics of the interest groups here. For one thing, "Wall Street" is not the same as "business," and, for that matter, I imagine that many Republican senators would be happy to describe themselves as fighting Wall Street. I'm sure that a mirror-image conservative version of Yglesias could give a long list of policy dimensions in which Democrats are more consistent with Republicans being more likely to compromise.

But these details don't really affect Yglesias's point, which is that there are some asymmetries between the two parties in the Senate: it's certainly not simply pro-business Republicans vs. anti-business Democrats. And you can see this in a variety of issues, including, for example, that there's been lots of talk about cutting spending to rein in the deficit but not much about raising tax rates in the upper brackets. (Again, I'm not arguing the policies here---that's not my area of expertise (to say the least)---I'm just elaborating on Yglesias's point and attempting to detach it from specific, debatable points about Wall Street or whatever.)

I think Yglesias is on to something which relates to the different support of Democrats and Republicans in different states.

In short, Democrats win in Democratic states with the support of all the voters, while Republicans win in Republican states with the disproportionate support of upper-income voters. A Democratic senator such as Chuck Schumer of New York gets the votes of the rich and the poor in roughly equal proportions. (I haven't looked at Schumer's votes in particular, but based on general patterns, I suspect he does a bit better among the poor than the rich, but not so much.) In contrast, leading Republican senators from conservative states do not need to concern themselves so much with lower-income voters.

Again, this is more of a statement about relative than absolute positions, and it's a statement about economic more than social issues. And other things are going on too, notably that there are a lot more Democrats than Republicans in the Senate right now.

Here's the key graph:



And here's the full story (from chapter 9 of Red State, Blue State):

As a thought experiment, let's imagine some alternative scenarios in which voting patterns are different, and see how the Democrats and Republicans might react, we sketch the scenarios in figure 9.8. In each case, the Republicans win the poor states and the Democrats win the rich states, but the scenarios differ in the pattern of income and voting within states.

- In Statesworld, voting varies by state income but not at all by individual income within state. In this world, states that vote more Republican do so uniformly at all income levels.

- In Reverseworld, rich people everywhere favor the Democrats. This is the scenario that people may assume after seeing the red-state, blue-state map: a world in which the Democrats win the rich vote, and the Republicans the poor vote, in every state.

- In Votesworld, rich people tend to vote Republican, with income predicting vote choice in the same way across all states. This is how we had imagined the nation to be, after checking out the patterns of income and voting at the state and national level, but before analyzing income patterns within states.

- Finally, in the Real World, richer people vote Republican in every state, but the relation between income and vote choice is much stronger in poor states than in rich states.

How would politics play out in each of these worlds? In Statesworld, we would expect politicians to have strong geographic loyalties: Republican officeholders would fight for Mississippians of all income groups and Democrats would lobby for the richer states. There would be no particular reason for the parties to disagree on rich--poor issues, except to the extent that these intersected with states. For example, Republicans might favor higher federal transfers to the poor (who are more likely to live in low-income states), and Democrats might favor reducing the top rate of income tax (which disproportionally hits the residents of rich states).

In Reverseworld, the connection between party and income is even clearer, with Republicans dominating among low-income voters in Mississippi and other poor states, and Democrats relying on richer voters in rich states. In this world, it would make sense for the yuppie Democrats to strongly resist the graduated income tax (which takes money from high-income people in rich states) and for the middle-American Republicans to support higher taxes and income transfers.

How would this work? Politicians are motivated to give benefits to their voters. Part of this is simply the overlap between voters, political activists, and politicians themselves. Beyond this, candidates generally get into Congress from primary elections, at which point they need to appeal to the voters of their party in their state or congressional district. We have already discussed in chapter 8 how the two parties in Congress are ideologically divided; here we are relating this to divisions between high and low-income voters.

Continuing with our hypotheticals, neither the Statesworld or Reverseworld stories are plausible; it is the Democrats who favor higher transfers to the poor and Republicans who prefer lower tax rates. This makes sense in Votesworld, a scenario in which the Democrats consistently get the votes of poorer voters and Republicans win richer voters throughout the country. In Votesworld, the Republicans rely on rich votes in Mississippi and the Democrats, symmetrically, dominate among the poor in Connecticut.

Votesworld is not far from the truth, but, in the Real World, there is a much steeper income--voting divide in poor states than in rich states. What might this imply about politics? In Mississippi, the Republicans win with a coalition of middle- and upper-income voters, and as such we would expect them to support policies that directly benefit these groups. On the other hand, in richer states such as Connecticut, the Democrats are the leading party, but with the support of all income groups. Thus, unlike in Votesworld, it would not make sense for the Democrats in Connecticut to simply dismiss the concerns of high-income voters.

Add this up at the national level and there is a net benefit for the rich and middle class: they are represented in the winning coalitions in both rich and poor states, whereas lower-income voters are only supporting the winning party in the rich states. This oversimplifies---a graph of all fifty states looks much messier than the picture of Mississippi, Ohio, and Connecticut---but it captures an essential asymmetry between the patterns of support for the Democrats and the
Republicans.

P.S. David Weakliem adds the following alternative explanation:

Sometimes Republicans win predominantly Democratic states, or Democrats win predominantly Republican ones. The Republicans from Democratic states would get support pretty evenly from across income levels, so you'd expect them to try to balance their interests, and that seems to be true. But when a Democrat manages to be elected from a Republican state, most of their votes would be from low-income people. So you might expect Democrats from Republican states (like Blanche Lincoln) to be all-out supporters of the lower class. That doesn't really seem to be the case.

Here's a somewhat different way the state differences in income effects may be relevant to representation. If higher income voters are more sensitive to the candidates' ideology (or candidates believe they are) then candidates who became too closely identified with the interests of lower-income groups would lose support from the top, without gaining as much from the bottom. In effect, the people in higher income groups would be the swing voters, so candidates would pay more attention.

Of course, this is going beyond the data here--I [Weakliem] am just proposing it as a possibility.

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Yes, Virginia (and Kansas and Missouri -- but not you, Baylor), there is an Equilibrium Solution to the Great Conference Shakeout

I'd been doing a bit of background work, including some statistical analysis, on the NCAA conference realignment, planning an article or two for slow weekends and assuming that the process would play out slowly. But that's been somewhat preempted by the news this week that Nebraska will join the Big Ten, and Colorado the Pac 10. Meanwhile, Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State are widely expected to join Colorado in the Pac 10 next week, which will cripple the Big 12 and put a whole range of things in motion.

What I came to realize in doing this background work is that while surely there will be chaos in the near term -- some proud programs like Missouri and Kansas, for instance, are effectively homeless for the time being -- it isn't necessarily the case that we won't end up with a reasonably elegant solution in the long-run.

Inevitably, it seems, we are headed toward four 16-team superconferences, each one representing one of the four major regions of the country. But when you start to sort everything out, it doesn't look so bad, leaving plenty of rivalries intact and very few BCS teams without a home. Here's an example of one such scenario:



Now, how might we get there?

The key team to watch right now is Texas A&M, which could potentially give the Pac-10 its sixteenth team once the other Texas schools join. But Texas A&M seems to be wavering and might want to join the SEC instead. And why not? Texas A&M is a football school, and the SEC is the premier football conference in the country and would love to assert is presence in Texas, especially with a school like A&M that is halfway between Dallas and Houston and has fans in both markets. So let's say that A&M goes to the SEC.

As strong as the SEC already is, I can't imagine that once they've entered expansion mode, that they wouldn't also want to add a Clemson, a Florida State, a Miami or possibly a Georgia Tech -- nor or that some of these schools, especially Clemson and FSU, wouldn't jump at the chance to join them.

This, of course, should make the ACC very nervous, which would be severely weakened as a football conference. So I'd imagine that the ACC has to start talking with some of the Big East schools -- most notably, Syracuse and Pittsburgh, perhaps along with Connecticut and Rutgers -- in order to reinforce itself.

The Big Ten, meanwhile, is in an interesting position. There are five members of the former Big 12 that are still free agents. In descending order of interest to the Big Ten, they are Missouri, Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State and Baylor. But the Big Ten is also interested in some of the Big East schools, and if the ACC starts trying to poach the Big East as well, that conference could also come apart at the seams.

Let's say that the SEC is successful in claiming Clemson and Florida State but not Miami or Georgia Tech, which have proclaimed loyalty to the ACC. The ACC, meanwhile, responds by adding Syracuse, which it procures in part by promising to add Georgetown and Villanova (which are good fits academically) as basketball-only members. It also adds U-Conn, which is happy to join such a strong basketball conference and who nobody else is interested in.

Now the Big East, like the Big 12, is sure to break up. Notre Dame's hand is forced, and they go to the Big Ten -- which puts the Big Ten at 13.

Meanwhile, the SEC, which is up to 15 members from A&M, Clemson and Florida State, does something aggressive adds Missouri. Why? Because the SEC is going to look down the road a bit and see that their next-best alternatives are West Virginia and Louisville, which are not terrible fits, but are much inferior to Missouri from the standpoint of television markets. The SEC is now full up at 16 teams.

The Big Ten responds by adding Kansas -- which the Pac-10, still with a slot to fill, has been flirting with -- which gives it the Kansas City market, and which reinforces it as a basketball conference. It also adds Pittsburgh, to which it probably has a more compelling pitch than the ACC, especially if rival Notre Dame is coming on board. On the other hand, the ACC locks in Rutgers, which would find it too strange to be in the same conference as a team from Kansas.

With the pickings having become pretty slim, the Big Ten also takes Kansas State to join Kansas, as Cincinnati, Lousiville and West Virginia just aren't strong enough fits academically, and Iowa State isn't a strong enough fit athletically.

The Pac-10 can pick between Baylor and Utah; it goes with Utah, which rounds it out a bit better geographically.

The ACC, at 13 teams for football and 15 for basketball after having added Rutgers, settles on West Virginia (among a series of somewhat awkward fits) to fill itself out. It has a long-term goal of getting both Villanova and Georgetown to develop Div I-A football programs to bring it up to 16 teams for that sport as well (Villanova's program is nearly Div I ready; Georgetown's is nowhere near so), but it might play as a 14-team football league in the interim, or perhaps develop a temporary affilaition with the service academies.

And everyone lives happily ever after -- except Baylor, which joins the Mountain West -- and Cincinnati, Iowa State, Louisville and South Florida, which join Conference USA.

Obviously, there are a number of close cousins of the particular scenario that I've outlined, particularly as it involves schools like Kansas, Pittsburgh, Missouri and West Virginia that several conferences might be either equally interested or disinterested in. The strongest "prediction" I'd make is that, with this process having been set in motion, I don't think you get back to any sort of equilibrium until you in fact have four large conferences, as most of the scenarios involving five conferences are very awkward.

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SC Democratic Primary Getting Weirder By The Hour

OK, so in the few hours since I published this earlier post on the bizarre South Carolina Senate Democratic primary, things have been developing rapidly, and on a variety of fronts. I've received several emails from people I trust and respect, and the Vic Rawl campaign has now issued a statement about a study conducted by a political scientist and statistician I very much respect. For lack of a better way to unpack all of this, I'll just bullet point what I've learned or read, and then try to pull it all together in a summary at the end.

1. Non-Democratic irregularities. OK, first, a very quick development which my colleague Michael McDonald of George Mason, who is one of the leading experts on American voting turnout, brought to my attention. Dr. McDonald--with whom, for full disclosure, I recently co-wrote a forthcoming book chapter about voter turnout and mobilization during the 2008 presidential race--emailed to point out that in South Carolina the weird stuff is not limited to the Democratic side of the aisle because there are "three counties with more votes cast in Republican governor's race than reported turnout in the Republican primary." He said there may be more but the GOP gubernatorial primary "is the only race I've looked at so far other than the Democratic Senate race." Those three are Darlington, Horry and Marlboro, and there are two others, Bamberg and Fairfield, with zero residual GOP votes (i.e., the total number of GOP voters in the county is identical to number cast in the GOP gubernatorial), which McDonald informs me is very, very rare.

2. Some (albeit very weak) racial pattern to Greene's vote share? "Jeffmd" at Swing State Project, which is run by DavidNYC, a blogger whose identity I know and whose site and bloggers are reliable, has a very detailed post in which he finds, at the precinct level, a stronger relationship between race and Greene's vote share. This analysis is similar to the two graphs produced by a very smart commenter on the Monkey Cage post by John Sides I linked in my previous post. The main point of both of these analyses is that the effectively zero relationship between race and Greene's performance that Sides and I independently found at the county unit of analysis is a bit less non-zero (and specifically positive) at the precinct unit of analysis--but still very weak. So, there may be a very slight racial component to the voting pattern, which brings us next to....

3. The Green(e) = Black theory. Jeffmd's post also raises the possibility of something fellow 538er Ed Kilgore mentioned to me, and which Walter Ludwig, Rawl's campaign manager, had also heard discussed by some in South Carolina: That the specific spelling of Greene, with the "e" on the end, is recognized by many to be a surname spelling common in the African American community. I'm not sure if that's universally true, although the only other person I know who has "Greene" as a surname is also black; and of course the absence of an "e" at the end does not necessarily imply white or even non-black: Texas has two Congressmen named Green, neither with the "e" on the end, and Gene Green is white but Al Green is black. Whatever the case, one can understand how this could serve as a weak clue imparting some information about an otherwise unknown candidate, just as there are certain patterns in Jewish, Hispanic, Italian, eastern European and many other surnames. It also squares the circle of the possible paradox of there being some racial pattern despite the vast majority of voters knowing nothing or next to nothing about either Greene or Rawl.

4. Revenge of Benford's Law. As regular 538 readers know, our otherwise soft-spoken leader Nate Silver carries a big statistical stick and used it earlier this year to cudgel Strategic Vision polling firm by showing that their results had unusual digit patterns which strongly suggest the results were simply made up. Similarly, the Rawl campaign has now issued a press release reporting the findings of separate inquiries performed by two respected electoral forensics experts, Dr. Walter Mebane of the UMichigan and Dr. Michael Miller of Cornell, neither of whom is affiliated with the campaign. Here are the key graphs of that press release:

Dr. Mebane performed second-digit Benford's law tests on the precinct returns from the Senate race. The test compares the second digit of actual precinct vote totals to a known numeric distribution of data that results from election returns collected under normal conditions. If votes are added or subtracted from a candidate’s total, possibly due to error or fraud, Mebane’s test will detect a deviation from this distribution.

Results from Mebane’s test showed that Rawl’s Election Day vote totals depart from the expected distribution at 90% confidence. In other words, the observed vote pattern for Rawl could be expected to occur only about 10% of the time by chance. “The results may reflect corrupted vote counts, but they may also reflect the way turnout in the election covaried with the geographic distribution of the candidates' support,” Mebane said.

Dr. Miller performed additional tests to determine whether there was a significant difference in the percentage of absentee and Election Day votes that each candidate received. The result in the Senate election is highly statistically significant: Rawl performs 11 percentage points better among absentee voters than he does among Election Day voters. “This difference is a clear contrast to the other races. Statistically speaking, the only other Democratic candidate who performed differently among the two voter groups was Robert Ford, who did better on Election Day than among absentees in the gubernatorial primary,” Miller said.

These findings concern the campaign, and should concern all of South Carolina.

Indeed: An unusual, non-random pattern in the precinct-level results suggests tampering, or at least machine malfunction, perhaps at the highest level. And Mebane is perhaps the leading expert on this very subject. Along with the anomalies between absentee ballot v. election day ballots Miller found, something smells here. (You can find out more about Mebane here, and this is a helpful paper of his about second digit Benford Law, or "2BL," voting irregularity patterns.)

5. The Republican crossover theory debunked. In addition to many smart comments from 538 readers to the previous post on the SC race, I received an email from one particularly astute reader named Harrison Brown. Complete with an excel spreadsheet to back up his conclusions, Brown basically argues that there's neither any logic to, nor statistical evidence to support, the idea of Republicans crossing over to infiltrate the Democratic primary. Here are the key sections from his email to me, verbatim:

1. Suppose people were being brought into the Democratic-primary voting pool (from unregistered voters, the Republican faithful, or wherever) for the sole purpose of voting for Greene. Imagine a variable encapsulating the proportion of primary voters in each county who are Greene partisans; this (hidden) variable ought to be strongly positively correlated with both Greene's final results and with the participation rate in each county. In particular, this implies that Greene's vote share and the participation rate, both of which we can measure, would be correlated. But this is not the case -- under either linear or rank correlation! The R-squared and rho-squared are both effectively 0.

2. Even if that effect didn't show up, there should still be other signs. For instance, we can see if there are any counties where turnout for the Democratic primary exceeded the number of votes Barack Obama received in 2008; those would be prime suspects for Republican influence. And, in fact, there are three such counties: Hampton, Lee, and Union. But these are all fairly small counties where McCain/Palin received under 30% of the vote -- hardly Republican-dominated...

A more robust analysis of turnout levels reveals similar patterns. Although I didn't collect data for Republican voters (except for the McCain vote share), I came up with a rough estimate of GOP voters in 2008 by assuming the two-party share was 100% in each county. Running a linear regression to predict the number of Democratic primary voters from the number of votes Obama and McCain received, we find that the McCain raw vote total is statistically significant--but it has a negative coefficient. If anything, this points to voter suppression (no real surprises) rather than ballot box stuffing.

3. Finally, there's the simple question of where the Republican voters would have come from! From eyeballing the GOP primary totals, it seems like turnout in that elections was almost ludicrously high, which seems more-or-less corroborated by what Google's told me. But barring widespread voter fraud and/or corruption by local election officials, high turnout in the GOP primary should be incompatible with infiltration into the Democratic primary.

In conclusion, while the voting patterns in the D-Senate primary are strange and may not be totally legitimate, they don't bear the expected hallmarks that would arise in the case of a Republican plant.

With all that now added to the record, so to speak, how does the matter now stand?

Well, I think it's safe to say that the third possibility I raised in the previous post--GOP cross-primary infiltration--can be eliminated. There doesn't seem to be any direct or circumstantial evidence for that, and there were sufficient motives to participate in the very contentious GOP gubernatorial primary (especially with Nikki Haley running). So we can almost certainly eliminate the idea that there was a coordinated GOP effort to get Republican and/or conservative voters to pick up Democratic ballots with the intent of selecting Greene as DeMint's general election opponent.

That leaves what I think are now two scenarios:

A. The first is a combination of the first and second possibilities of my initial post: Greene was a nobody, but Rawl was darn near close to a nobody, and thus Greene's alphabetical ballot position, coupled with whatever signal the spelling of his surname sent to some African Americans that he might be (and in fact is) an African American, with a dash of Rawl's high disapproval among the 18 percent of survey respondents who had heard of him, combined to take what in theory might otherwise have been a 50/50 split among two broadly unknown candidates and turned it instead into a 59/41 race.

B. Somebody with access to software and machines engineered a very devious manipulation of the vote returns--but not so devious that he/she/they were unable to cover the tracks of the digit patterns in those results.


UPDATE: The second commenter to this post, along with a variety of commenters to the previous post and several analysts, have all posed this question about vote-tinkering: Why would the GOP or DeMint or conservatives bother to do so in this race? The assumption is that DeMint will cruise. And he probably will. But given that he was expected to run against a virtual unknown in Rawl, DeMint's head-to-head numbers were pretty dismal in this (presumably internal) poll, and put him not entirely out of reach even in this PPP poll taken a week or so before the primary. So I'm not entirely sure DeMint, though very safe, was a lock to win re-election.

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Something Fishy in South Carolina?

Is there something suspicious about the results in the US Senate primary victory of unknown Democrat Alvin Greene, who defeated fellow Democrat Vic Rawl, 59 percent to 41 percent? I'm not sure yet, but there is a whiff of something strange going on here.

As many of you probably know already, Greene is a candidate who seems to have mysteriously come out of nowhere to win--and rather comfortably at that--despite having not even so much as a campaign website. Of course, according to a Public Policy Polling survey conducted the final week of May, 82 percent of the state also had never heard of Rawl, and among the remaining 18 percent who knew of him Rawl's favorability was just 5 percent.

Before proceeding to explain the graphic below, I want to first share an email I received from Rawl campaign manager Walter Ludwig, and also fully disclose that Ludwig happens to be a close friend. But I would never write about a race that a friend has such a close, vested interest in--unless I had a significant reason to believe something might be amiss. And although there may be other, perfectly reasonable explanations (see below), I do think there is at least a possibility that something unusual happened Tuesday in South Carolina.


I asked Ludwig to just spell out in an email what irregularities the Rawl campaign sees as evidence that something is amiss. Following is the text of the email Ludwig sent me, verbatim, except for a few words he abbreviated that I spelled out, or the addition of first names he left out that I have inserted:

First, you need to understand that we don’t know what went on or whether the things we’re seeing in the numbers are significant. They seem like they are, but we’re not world-renowned electoral statisticians. We’d like to know, first, if there’s anything here, or if they’re within an acceptable range of “normal.”

Before specifics, some general notes:

*First of all, understand that Alvin Greene did NO campaigning, none. He showed up on filing day with a personal check for the hefty fee ($10,400), was told he had to file with a committee check, ran out and came back with a counter check with “Alvin Greene for US Senate” handwritten on the top. Then he utterly disappeared. No website, didn’t show up at any events (including a big one in his hometown), no signs, no nothing. I was tracking him, just in case, because of general paranoia, but never had any reports of activity.

*We, on the other hand, while we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on primary, we did do 220,000 robocalls (including one with Rep. John Spratt), and sent out about 250,000 emails in the five days before election. So, yes, we weren’t well known, but we had gone to 80 events around the state, and Rawl had some public profile previously, especially in Charleston County.

What’s Weird About Election Night:

*So, like I said, the consensus among a dozen or so people I talked to over the weekend, including the state Dem ED and other knowledgeable observers, was that turnout was going to be between 110,000 and 130,000. Turned out to be close to 190,000.

*It’s hard to attribute to strictly racial preference voting: 65,000 people voted for either Jim Rex or Vincent Shaheen, the two white gubernatorial candidates, and also voted for Greene. Only 33,000 people voted for Robert Ford, the black gubernatorial candidate. There was one other contested race between a white candidate and a black candidate: Superintendent of Education. Both campaigned, and Tommy Thompson, the black candidate, was very well-qualified (though originally from out-of-state). The white guy, Frank Holleman, won by 14 points, and Greene ran ahead of Thompson by 40%.

I don't have anything to say, at least not yet, about the anticipated v. actual turnout on Tuesday. But what I went ahead and did on my own was a quick, county-level analysis of the Greene-Rawl vote, comparing Greene's share of the two-candidate vote (i.e., Greene/Greene+Rawl) in each county with the non-white share of registrants countywide. (Both sets of data were taken from SC's State Election Committee.) I then plotted these two percentages against each other in the figure above.

What's stunning is that there simply is no relationship between the race of a county's registrants and Greene's performance in that county.# To be clear, there is a significant enough range in the non-white registrant share--from a low of 8.3 percent in Pickens County to a high of 75.8 percent in Allendale County--as well as in Greene's county-wide performance, from a low of 45.7 percent in Charleston County to a high 74.4 percent in Greenwood County. And yet the slope is as almost as close to zero as you can get, and the low R-squared affirms that there's no explanatory value for one variable on the other. (And what slope does appear is largely an artifact of how I cropped the chart by limiting the shown range on the y-axis between 40 percent and 80 percent; had I not done so, which would have made the plotted points and labels too small for readers to see, the zero slope would been even more visually obvious.)

More telling are specific results in a few extreme cases. As I was entering the data, I couldn't help but notice that the results in three alphabetically consecutive counties--Oconee, Orangeburg and Pickens--were odd, if not counter-intuitive. At 65.1 percent, Orangeburg--site of the infamous and tragic Orangeburg massacre of 1968--features the third-highest non-white registered population of any South Carolina county (behind only Allendale and Williamsburg). Greene won 52.5 percent of all votes cast in Orangeburg for either himself or Rawl. And at first blush, that might seem like nothing unusual--until you realize that Greene did even better in Pickens (8.3 percent non-white registrants) and Oconee (8.6 percent), the two whitest counties in the state. This seems very, very anomalous if race had any bearing at all on this contest. And lest anyone think that Democratic primaries are race-blind, I would remind them of the racialized patterns we witnessed during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama--and not just in the Palmetto State.

It seems to me one of four things could have happened here:

1. Vic Rawl and his campaign ignored the non-candidacy candidacy of Alvin Greene and so, despite Rawl's slightly higher but still low statewide name recognition--much of which was unfavorable, mind you--Democratic primary voters chose Greene as a placemarker substitute for a candidate, Rawl, they either didn't know or, if they did know, didn't like.

2. Somewhat overlapping with #1, especially for the people who knew nothing about either Greene or Rawl, there was such a low level of voter information that this race was essentially a throw-a-dart-at-the-dartboard race in which one candidate among two mostly unknown candidates, Greene, won for some set of unknown and perhaps inexplicable reasons. (Familiarity of his surname? His name's location on the ballot alphabetically?)

3. There was a coordinated, shrewd, under-the-radar whisper campaign among Republicans, who knew GOP incumbent Sen. Jim DeMint's re-nomination was a lock, to vote for Greene in the Democratic primary. If you believe them, the suggestions and rumors that somebody put Greene up to run in the first place--which none other than SC Rep. Jim Clyburn has suggested aloud--gibe with this partisan "strategery" interpretation.

4. There was systematic vote fraud or ballot manipulation by who knows who.

Ludwig informed me by phone today that the Rawl campaign now has two separate teams of experts doing a forensic voting analyses on a variety of data, including absentee ballots. They seem particularly intent on unusual turnout rates and Greene's performance levels in certain precincts of certain counties. As I learn more, I will let you know.

UPDATE: Some commenters below, including a few who voted in SC, suggest that this was simply a contest in which few people had any idea or information about the two candidates, or even that there were two candidates. In other words, Occam's razor prevails and it's simply explanation #2 above, and that we could confirm that by the share of voters who chose not to vote for either candidate--who abstained. In fact, the Democratic primary for Senate had the highest non-participation (or "roll-off") rate of any of the three statewide contests, including the governor and superintendent of education contests: Of the 197,380 total Democratic voters who showed up, there were 189,348 votes cast in the governor's primary (4.1 percent abstention rate); 173,829 for SupEd (11.9%), and 170,215 for US Senate (13.8%). (Total turnout here: see page 9.) But it should also be noted that the share of voters who skipped the Senate race was not much higher than the SupEd race, which may only serve to prove many Democrats had little to no information about either of the candidates in both of the races. However, it's not like half the voters who voted in the two state races then bailed on the Senate contest.

UPDATE2: My colleague John Sides of George Washington has an eerily-similar post about the SC race at his site, The Monkey Cage. (Neither of us knew what the other was up to, just FYI.)


#N.B.: White/non-white registrant shares provide an imperfect indicator of racialized voting in the Democratic primary. For one, there are some non-whites who aren't African American in South Carolina, including a small percent of Hispanics and some Native Americans mostly in the western part of the state; still, African Americans account for the vast majority (28.5%) of South Carolina's non-white (34.8%) statewide population, according to 2009 Census figures. Moreover, even if we knew a county's registrants were 50 percent black and 50 percent non-Hispanic white, the white half could be all Democratic or all Republican in their partisan orientations. South Carolina does not record registration by party, and both gubernatorial primaries were "open" in the sense than any eligible registered voter could vote in either primary--which, of course, opens up the possibility of partisan tinkering by Republicans who wanted to strategically (and perfectly legally) pick Jim DeMint's opponent.

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World Cup Simulated Odds

So, in case you've been in a cave somewhere, the World Cup starts today.

Last summer, I worked in conjunction with ESPN on a project called the Soccer Power Index (SPI), a frankly somewhat complex system to rate internal soccer teams that we hope will be superior to other metrics like FIFA and ELO. Soccer is tough to predict, so take with the usual a grain of salt, but there was a lot of thought put into SPI, as you can see here. Among other things, SPI takes into account the performance in international club play of the members of each team's roster, and looks at the rosters for each game to determine which matches teams were taking seriously and which they weren't.

One of the nice features of SPI is that it was explicitly designed to be predictive. You can take any two teams, plop in their OFF (offense/attack) and DEF (defense) ratings, and it will estimate the probability of a win, loss or draw. ESPN has a cool implementation of this called the SPI match predictor, which you can see at various locations around their World Cup site.

Obviously, if you have a tool to predict the probabilities for a given match, it doesn't take that much more work to project out the balance of the tournament, given what's happened so far. So, that's what you'll be seeing in the top right-hand corner of the website for the next month or so -- I'll be running 10,000 simulations once a day or so and updating a chart that looks like this:



I hope this will be reasonably intuitive to people; PTS is the number of points that a team is projected to accumulate during group play (3 points are earned for each win and 1 for each draw); GF and GA are their projected goals for and against; Win and Adv are the probabilities that a team wins their group, and advances to the knockout stages, respectively. The rightmost two columns look beyond the group stages to the knockout stage; Semi is the probability that a team reaches the Semifinals, and Cup is their chance of coming home with a trophy.

As the World Cup progresses, of course, we'll replace the results of simulated matches with actual ones and the probabilities will change accordingly.

Beyond this, I probably won't be writing a lot about the World Cup; I'm just going to be enjoying it from an Undisclosed Location where I'm ensconced to make hay on my book project, and running the numbers, and hopefully SPI will do pretty well for itself.

A caution: SPI does not account for injuries, of which there have been quite a few, although we're working on a fix for that.

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A Liberal Coalition, But With Whom?

Dutch voters went to the polls yesterday in the Eurozone’s first parliamentary election since the beginning of the Greek sovereign debt crisis. The contest had been hyped as a referendum on the future of immigration and national identity in Europe. Two marquee names brought two different visions for Dutch society: the confrontational Geert Wilders and his anti-immigration PVV, versus the conciliatory former Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen and his Labor Party (PvdA).

But since Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's government fell last January, fears of a Eurozone-wide economic meltdown have made concerns over immigration seem quaint. Austerity became the word from Athens to Amsterdam, and the election turned into a contest over which party could make necessary budget cuts.

So who won this election? Mark Rutte’s market-oriented Liberal Party (VVD) now holds the most seats in parliament (31), and will get the first opportunity to form a government. Wilders’ PVV also performed very well, going from 9 to 24 seats, and surpassing the CDA. Cohen’s PvdA, although it lost three seats, is now the second-largest party.

The Dutch system of proportional representation seldom gives any one party more than a quarter of the seats, and large, often-unwieldy coalition governments are the norm. 76 seats are needed for a majority, which means that Rutte must find 45 to put together a government.

And now the real jockeying to form a government begins. Rutte could try for a VVD-PVV coalition, which would have 55 seats—21 short of a majority. This is probably not the best option for the Liberals, as no one else seems to want to enter into a coalition with the PVV. Not only is Wilders highly polemical, but the PVV has little experience governing and has adopted a “my way or the highway” attitude on local councils, straining relations with the other parties.

What about a VVD-PvdA coalition? Liberal-Labor, “purple” coalitions have worked in the past in the Netherlands, but the two largest parties would still need to find 15 more votes to have a majority. Suitable coalition partners may include the progressive D66 and the GL, though the current economic climate may make the VVD uneasy about an alliance with more leftist parties. We also shouldn’t discount the possibility of the Christian Democrats (sans Balkenende) being drafted into a government.

A VVD-led government with Rutte as prime minister is almost a foregone conclusion. But in the event that he can’t cobble together a coalition, a Cohen-led government of the center-left to left remains a (small) possibility. To achieve this, the PvdA would need the participation of all left-leaning parties—plus someone else. A coalition of the PvdA, SP, D66, GL, PvdD would have 67 seats--nine short of a majority. Adding in the CDA and CU get them up to 93. An unlikely option to be sure, but it could happen to avoid having Wilders in government.(Ironically, D66 and GL seem more interested in joining a Liberal-led government than a center-left government that includes the CDA.) Wilders, for his part, will use the PVV’s terrific improvement over 2006 to demand a place in the new government.

Looking at broader trends, this election confirms the general decline of European Socialists to the benefit of more modern, activist left-wing parties. Likewise, the Christian Democrats were squeezed in between an anti-immigration right and economic liberalism (in the European sense). Because of the Netherlands’ proportional system, the election is only half the battle in forming a government. Mark Rutte’s real work lies ahead: he leads a party with ten fewer seats than Balkenende had four years ago, and faces the urgency of an economic crisis. The next week or so will test whether he is as astute a coalition-manager as his predecessor was.

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Arkansas Was Tough Target for Unions, Netroots

Was Arlen Specter or Blanche Lincoln the easier primary target?

Specter would seem to be the obvious answer. He had been a Democrat for barely a year; Lincoln has served her party in Congress since 1993. But, polls showed that Specter was actually thought more highly of by members of his own party. Rasmussen polling in April found Specter with a 64-33 favorability score among Democrats -- and in May, they found Specter with 67-31 favorability among likely voters in the Democratic primary (even though their poll showed Sestak ahead). By contrast, Rasmussen had shown Lincoln's favorability among Democrats at 55-37, in a poll also conducted in April. Public Policy Polling also had marginally worse numbers for Lincoln. A February poll found her approval at just 51 percent among Democrats, with 35 percent disapproving; Specter, in an April poll by the same firm, was a couple of notches better, at 53-30.

But Specter lost to Joe Sestak, and did so by a fairly solid 8-point margin. Lincoln survived, and actually improved her numbers somewhat between the May primary and Tuesday's runoff. Certainly, it is right to point out that this was hardly an unmitigated failure on the part of Bill Halter; a close loss should not be interepreted much differently than a narrow victory. Nevertheless, the 12-point gap in the performance of the challengers -- Sestak at a +8, and Halter at a -4 (based on last night's results) -- is not trivial and is worthy of consideration.

Some of the difference, clearly, is that Sestak ran a very strong campaign in the closing stages, whereas Specter stumbled his way to the finish line; Halter's campaign, on the other hand, sometimes had the feeling of a story with a good wind-up but lacking a punchline. But the composition of the Democratic primary electorates in both states was also very different.

Readers of major liberal blogs, who were active on behalf of both Sestak and Halter, are mostly white, college-educated, and liberal. Not all of the readers, by any means, but most -- that's the prevailing demographic for political and most any other type of blogs.

We can formulate a reasonable (although imperfect) estimation of how "bloggy" a Democratic primary electorate is by looking up its exit polls from 2008 and multiplying together the fraction of voters who were white, who were liberal, and who were college-educated. By this measure, Pennylvania ranks toward the upper half of the list, and Arkansas toward the bottom. Connecticut, where Ned LaMont was successful in his primary challenge against Joe Lieberman in 2006, also ranks highly by this metric.

But what about the unions -- which were much more active in Arkansas than they were in Pennsylvania (where, in fact, many of them endorsed Arlen Specter, although lukewarmly)? Unfortunately, they're not much help in Arkansas. In fact, Arkansas has the lowest fraction of union members from among the 50 states -- just 4.2 percent of the overall population, or 8 percent of the Democratic primary electorate, according to 2008 exit polling. In Pennsylvania, by contrast, 19 percent of Democratic primary voters in 2008 were members of unions.

The coalition of blog-friendly and union-friendly voters, in other words, had about as little influence as it possibly could in Arkansas; the degree of difficulty was much higher there. Even if Lincoln seemed like an easy target, to have pulled this off would have been really something.

I didn't follow much of the messaging that the Halter campaign used in Arkansas, and so I'm not in a position to criticize or commend it. Certainly, it is possible to use one set of messaging with your national activist base in order to raise cash and awareness for your campaign, and another with the voters back at home. But, relatively esoteric causes like EFCA or the public option were not liable to carry the day in Arkansas in the way that they might in Connecticut or Oregon. Even some red and purple states, particularly those in the Mountain West, which are fairly moderate overall, nevertheless have primary electorates with a lot of very liberal liberals.

If unions and the netroots want to find success in these more difficult environments, they will need to find coalition partners like African-American or Hispanic groups. And they'll need to keep in mind that the reasons they don't like someone like Blanche Lincoln may not coincide with critiques that local voters have.

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On Transparency, Hypocrisy, and Research 2000

Taegan Goddard has an article up entitled "Where's the Transparency in Pollster Ratings?". It's a short item so I'm going to post it in full:

Nate Silver's pollster scorecard is an interesting experiment in trying to hold the political polling industry to a higher standard. It's long overdue and could prove very useful to consumers of this information.

In explaining his methodology, Silver found that "the scores of polling firms which have made a public commitment to disclosure and transparency hold up better over time. If they were strong before, they were more likely to remain strong; if they were weak before, they were more likely to improve."

But when I talk with pollsters about the latest scorecard, they're universally puzzled as to why Silver doesn't hold himself to the same level of transparency and release his database of polls. In fact, some even claim he's using faulty data in putting together his rankings.

While Silver's efforts are admirable -- and even caused one of the more controversial firms to vanish from the scene -- it's a point worth considering before giving his pollster rankings too much weight.

Where's the transparency? Well, it's here, in an article that contains 4,807 words and 18 footnotes. Literally every detail of how the pollster ratings are calculated is explained. It's also here, in the form our Pollster Scorecards, a feature which we'll continue to roll out over the coming weeks for each of the major polling firms, and which will explain in some detail how we arrive at the particular rating that we did for each one.

Taegan does ask a good question about why the complete polling database has not been released publicly. The principal reason because I don't know that I'm legally entitled to do so. The polling database was compiled from approximately eight or ten distinct data sources, which were disclosed in a comment which I posted shortly after the pollster ratings were released, and which are detailed again at the end of this article.* These include some subscription services, and others from websites that are direct competitors of this one. Although polls contained in these databases are ultimately a matter of the public record and clearly we feel as though we have every right to use them for research purposes, I don't know what rights we might have to re-publish their data in full. Nor do I know whether doing so would be fair or wise-- it is certainly not my intention to undermine PollingReport.com's business model, for instance. But essentially, the database is something which, albeit with considerable time and effort, and a small out-of-pocket expenditure, anybody could re-create for themselves.

***

I understand that people don't like to have the quality their work judged. I'm sure that the first newspaper which printed a summary of batting averages took a lot of heat for it too.

It is pretty ironic, however, that the vehicle for criticisms about openness and transparency was an anonymously-sourced item in Taegan's newsletter.

Tagean, who were your sources?

Pollsters, which of you talked to Taegan? Which of you left Taegan with the impression that I'm using "faulty data in putting together [my] rankings", and what did you mean by that?

***

Whether coincidentally or not, the tone of the criticisms in Taegan's note mirrors those which Del Ali of Research 2000 has made to me in a series of e-mails and phone calls. Research 2000 was dismissed today as the polling firm for Daily Kos.

Markos Moulitsas is a friend -- readers with long memories will recall that I got my start in political writing as a diarist on the Daily Kos website, originally under the pseudonym "poblano" -- and I consulted him about his decision.

There were two "bursts" of communications between Markos and I, one obviously having come in the last week or so and surrounding the publication of the pollster ratings. The other came in early February of this year, and followed the publication of the Research 2000's headline-grabbing poll of registered Republicans. Although the nature of the poll was unusual, I and others found that it contained results that were inconsistent with those released by other pollsters on similar questions and it led me to start treating Research 2000 polling with more scrutiny.

I also pointed out to Markos that Research 2000 polling has a significant Democratic-leaning house effect, something which is problematic for any pollster, and one which someone should arguably be especially sensitive toward when one runs a Demoratic website. I have certainly posed plenty of questions to Rasmussen, whose polls have had similarly had a Republican-leaning house effect.

I discussed with Markos that Research 2000 had made some poor choices in areas like question wording for some of their other clients.

I pointed out to Markos that Research 2000's polls has been, from a quantitative perspective, on a downward trajectory, and shared with him an advanced copy of Research 2000's Pollster Scorecard, which is reproduced below.



The Scorecard finds that Research 2000's polls were slightly above-average in 2000 and 2002, slightly worse than average in 2004 and 2006, but then distinctly worse than average in 2008 and thus far in 2010, with the exception of the Presidential general election, where they did fine. The Scorecard does not include any results from last night's primary contests, in which Research 2000 generally did poorly.

Finally, I pointed out to Markos that, while it was admirable that Research 2000 has made the habit of publishing their demographic cross-tabs, the cross-tabs sometimes did not give one more confidence in their results. At the time I in February when I first became more skeptical about Research 2000, they were consistently finding, for instance, that Barack Obama's favorability rating was in the mid-60's among voters aged 45-59, but in the low-40's among voters aged 30-44. And they were repeating this finding week after week after week, even though it was wildly inconsistent with what other pollsters like Gallup had found. In March, when Research 2000 changed the methodology on its tracking poll from a sample of adults to one of registered voters, many of the cross-tabs changed dramatically and they are now more consistent with those produced by other pollsters.

I should be clear that most of these problems are recent. Research 2000 has done polling on behalf of many newspapers for as long as a decade. The quality of their work had generally been fine, although our May 2008 version of the pollster ratings -- which rated them as being about average or even slightly better than average -- had not looked at their polling of House races, which has always been spotty, nor could it have anticipated the deterioration in quality that they have undergone since then. It's not especially easy to go from publishing 30 polls per year, in eight or ten states, to a couple hundred per year in every state across the country.

And last but not least, here is a chart containing every poll that I have in my database for Research 2000.



As stipulated above, I do not know that I'm going to able to release my data in full for other pollsters, but I've certainly taken the suggestion under advisement.

Principal Sources for Polling Database
--------------------------------------
-- Pollster.com (2006-)
-- RealClearPolitics.com (2000-)
-- PollingReport.com (1998-)
-- FiveThirtyEight.com electoral forecasting database (2008-)
-- CNN/AllPolitics (1998)
-- SurveyUSA Interactive Electoral Scorecard, unlocked version, provided to FiveThirtyEight by Jay Leve (1998-2004)
-- Google News, including some paid Archive searches, especially for 2000 and 2004 primaries.
-- Harris Interactive press release containing 2000 results, provided to FiveThirtyEight by Harris Interactive (2000-)
-- Various live versions of pollster websites (1998-)
-- Various archived versions of pollster websites, via Internet Archives (1998-)

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Belgium: Making Afghan Politics Seem Straightforward

Earlier this year, I attended a high level meeting among international organizations in Geneva regarding state-building and peacebuilding in the tough, entrenched conflicts around the world. After spending nearly three hours discussing experiences and lessons from Afghanistan, (D.R.) Congo, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Sudan, Zimbabwe and others, a long-time researcher on peace and conflict raised his placard to make a final observation.

"While we sit here in Europe, looking for answers to failing states, perhaps we should look closer to home," he suggested. "After all, as it was put by the German media several years ago, Belgium is the most successful 'failed state' of all time."

In April of this year the embattled government of Belgium received its final blow -- a key member of the governing coalition of five parties, the Flemish center-right "Open VLD," left the government over a long-standing political language debate. In short, the issue revolves around whether to split the now multi-lingual electoral constituency of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde, the details and vagaries of which would defy even experienced negotiators of the Palestine/Israel mess.

The fall of Prime Minister Yves Leterme's second government, which had only been around for five months, ended a period of turmoil since the 2007 where the Belgians had seen no less than four governments, under three Prime Ministers, following a period of six months of no government at all from June to December 2007.


The maddening process of stitching together a viable government after the 2007 general election illustrates many of the fundamental fault-lines in Belgian society and politics.

No single party received more than 20 percent of the seats in the Parliament, while even among the two language communities there were major ideological differences among the parties.

That said, in most continental European countries, there is a natural center-right coalition to be made between Christian Democrats and Liberal parties -- as has been seen in Germany, and with some strong similarities to the French UMP and the British Conservative-Lib Dem governments. In the Belgium 2007 case, an ideological government could have been patched together from the two Christian Democratic parties (together worth 40 seats) and the two Liberal parties (41 seats), for a combined 81 Members of Parliament.

Instead, Belgium launched into a ten month period of upheaval where rounds and rounds of negotiation and attempted formation led the King of Belgium, Albert II, to request an interim government led by the outgoing Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt to govern until a coalition could be formed.

Belgium (among other Parliamentary states) even has specific names for the individuals who try to negotiate a governing coalition. The formateur is requested by the King to try to form a government -- a role that also exists in Dutch and Israeli politics -- ostensibly with the chance to become Prime Minister. When it looks like negotiations might be rough, this person can be preceded by an informateur, who lays the groundwork for an agreement.

In Belgium, however, things got so entrenched that they had to add an additional layer: the explorator, who would act as royal mediator ahead of the informateur and formateur.

One would expect that this falls quite hard on the Belgian population. Without a stable government to make decisions, and questions still pending as to whether constitutional change may someday partition the country, politics has become somewhat of a farce.

A close Belgian friend of mine explained to me in this way: "When the government falls, it is part of the Belgian humor. Of course the people are upset, but they say 'This is Belgium; it's another Belgian joke."

Belgian culture has grown to encompass many elements of the contradiction, as should be expected from a country that was established in the wake of the end of the Napoleonic Wars as an independent, Catholic state that aimed to avoid both French and Dutch imperial control. While today the Francophone community tends to look to France for cultural connection and the Flemish to the Dutch north, the binding elements of dry, dark, absurdist humor and excellent beer have managed keep things relatively together.

This coming Sunday, when the Belgians go to the polls, the Flemish and the Walloons will elect their representatives from separate lists from separate parties, to send to a separate capital: the legal island of Brussels. Often called the 'capital of Europe', Brussels has both a cosmopolitan flair and the doldrums of a government town.

The Belgian voters -- and there are many of them; in 2007, there was 91 percent turnout -- will vote in 11 electoral arrondissements, five from the Flemish region, five from the Francophone region, and one from the multi-lingual Brussels region (the contentious Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde electoral district).


This time, the center-right in Belgium is likely to do fairly well. In Flanders, the insurgent NVA (Flemish center-right, independent-ist) is running on its own, as opposed to being grouped with the Christian Democrats, as they were in 2007. Between the NVA and the traditional secessionist VB (Vlaams Belang), polls are showing about 35 percent of the Flemish vote for independence camp (though NVA is centrists and VB pretty far right), which depending on its distribution could mean between 30 and 35 MPs (20 to 23 percent).

In Francophone Wallonia, it is the left that is ascendant, with the Socialist party leading the polls with over 30 percent, followed by the Liberals with around 20 percent, and the lefty Greens with between 17 and 20 percent. If distributed proportionally (not by district), this would result in about 15, 10 and 8 MPs respectively. Polling in Brussels, where the municipalities indicate the 22 seats are broken into 13 French language area MPs and 9 Flemish language area representatives, has not been done separately -- often bleeding into the polling of the Flanders and Wallonia voters. Brussels city voters tend to be more to left, while suburban and exurban voters to the liberal center-right.

Projecting the vote shares, or the ensuring government, would be nearly impossible, based on minimal polling data, and cross-cutting ideological and identity politics at play. Perhaps a more pragmatic approach would be to instead to guess how long it will take to form the next government, and how long it might last. Three months? A year?

"Why bother?" my friend retorts before pausing. "I don't really know anything about Belgian politics. I'm from Brussels. "

---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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California Gleanings

As a service to readers in time zones where prudence dictated a date with the sandman before West Coast returns were in, here are some gleanings from yesterday's California primary, which didn't make much national news beyond the inclusion of Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in various Women's Night stories.

Befitting a jurisdiction where unhappiness with the political status quo is extraordinary even by 2010 standards, turnout in California for the primary failed to meet even low expectations; less than a fourth of the state's 17 million registered voters bothered to cast ballots (more than half, it is estimated, by mail). And while there was little drama in the top-line contests--Whitman and Fiorina easily won the once-competitive Republican gubernatorial and Senate primaries, while Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer won the Democratic nods with only token opposition--there was a lot going on down-ballot.

First of all, California's rich tradition of troublesome ballot initiatives was burnished yesterday as voters approved Proposition 14, which essentially abolishes party primaries in favor of a "jungle primary" system where all candidates compete without partisan ballot lines and the top two finishers compete in the general election. Prop 14 is just the latest in a series of efforts--all previously overriden by the courts or defeated by voters--to deal with perceived partisan polarization and gridlock in the state. It was the brainchild of then-state-senator, now Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, who made its submission to voters the condition for a tie-breaking budget vote that enraged many of his fellow-Republicans.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenneger made approval of Prop 14 a personal project, and his PAC was the largest contributor to the campaign (which also drew support from the Chamber of Commerce and several corporate figures). The opposition, composed of Democratic Party and union activists, plus members of minor parties who would lose their general election ballot lines under a jungle primary system, didn't spend much money or gain much attention, presumably because polls convinced them Prop 14 was sure to pass easily. In retrospect, this may have been a major strategic error, since Prop 14 was approved by a relatively narrow 54-46 margin, and won in counties (e.g., LA, Marin, Santa Clara) where a more energetic liberal opposition might have made a big difference. And even as voters approved Prop 14, they rejected Prop 15, which would have created a small public campaign financing pilot project.

California's expertly gerrymandered U.S. House districts have always reduced the number of competitive contests, so most of the action yesterday involved intra-party challenges for relatively safe seats. An exception was CA-11, where Democrat Jerry McNerny is thought to be vulnerable. The GOP nomination was won by establishment figure Dave Harmer, who turned back outspoken conservative Brad Goehring. In CA-19, the retirement of Rep. George Radanovich produced a competitive GOP primary, with his protege, Jeff Denhman, edging former Fresno mayor (and Club for Growth favorite) Jim Patterson. And in CA-42, incumbent Republican Garry Miller struggled against self-financed Tea Party activist Phil Liberatore, but narrowly prevailed.

In the one notable Democratic House primary, Rep. Jane Harman easily beat progressive activist Marcy Winograd in a rematch from 2006.

The down-ballot statewide contests produced a lot of interesting results. Most surprisingly, the above-mentioned Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado (appointed by Schwarzenneger to the post when Democrat John Garamendi was elected to Congress in a special election), routinely reviled as the worst of RINOs by California conservatives, beat conservative standard-bearer Sam Aanestad by 20 points, carrying not only northern and central coast areas but also several SoCal and Central Valley counties where you'd figure his name would be mud. Maldonado will face an even more famous name in November, as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (who dropped a gubernatorial bid earlier this year) easily bested LA political power Janice Hahn in the Democratic primary.

The Democratic primary for Attorney General featured a self-funded campaign by former Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly, who ran some pretty abrasive attack ads against front-runner Kamala Harris deploring her record as a DA in San Francisco. Harris responded with her own ads blasting Kelly for his privacy-maintenance record at Facebook. Harris won the multi-candidate primary handily, beating Kelly 33-16.

In a possible glimpse of California's political future in a "jungle primary" system, the non-partisan primary for state Superintendent of Public Instruction featured a twelve-candidate free-for-all in which the two candidates with most polarized views, retired school superintendent Larry Aceves and Democratic legislator Tom Torlakson, will apparently meet in a runoff (Torlakson barely edged another Democratic legislator, Gloria Romero, and there's a chance provisional ballots and late-counted mail ballots could change the results). Aceves has called for legislation allowing his office to override collective bargaining agreements with teachers' unions, while Torlakson is a down-the-line supporter of teachers' unions. This could get interesting in the general election.

California invariably generates a few exotic "celebrity" candidacies, and aficionados of political theater were disappointed when "Birther" activist Orly Taitz lost 3-1 to former NFL player Damon Dunn in the Republican primary for Secretary of State. Contrarion blogger (or, as his Spanish-language ballot ID called him, a redactor de blogs) and would-be scourge of the public-sector unions, Mickey Kaus, did even worse in his quixotic challenge to Barbara Boxer, pulling only 5%.

They should have taken a lesson from the far more typical contemporary California pol, Meg Whitman, whose Death Star of a campaign spent close to $80 a vote, with lots more where that came from.

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Sharron's Rural Angle

Sharron Angle convincingly won yesterday's Republican US Senate primary by 14 points, 40 percent to 26 percent, over her next closest pursuer, Sue Lowden. For Lowden to win, she needed big support in Clark County, home to Las Vegas and easily the state's biggest county. But Angle even beat Lowden there, 38 percent to 30 percent, by a vote margin of 7,347 votes.

But even if Angle had lost Clark to Lowden by 7,347 votes--a net swing of 14,694 votes in a primary in which a total of 175,671 votes were cast--Angle still would have held off Lowden by about 10,000 votes statewide. And that's because not only did Lowden lose Clark, and also lose all but one of Nevada's other 16 counties to Angle,* but Clark County had a rather dismal turnout relative to the state's mostly small, rural counties. (*Lowden nudged out Angle in Eureka County, 134 to 111.)

The figure above compares the share of total votes cast yesterday by county with the shares of active registered Republican voters and total Republican registered voters, as reported by the Nevada Board of Elections after the the close in May of registration for the June primary. Though Clark County is home to 62 percent of all Republicans and 59 percent of active Republicans, yesterday Clark County produced just 52 percent of votes in the Republican primary. Put another way, the scandal- and blunder-plagued Lowden not only fared poorly in Clark, but Clark countians did not keep up with the Republican turnout in the state's smaller counties.

Washoe County, by far the second-largest county with about 20 percent of total and 22 percent of active Republican registrants, cast 24 percent of votes yesterday, accounting for part of the difference the Clark/non-Clark disparity. But it was the smaller counties that provided most of the difference. In absolute terms those 15 counties accounted for 24 percent of the statewide vote, despite being home to only 20 percent of active and just 18 percent of all Republican registrants statewide.

This fact helps explain why the results in Clark could have been reversed between Angle and Lowden and Angle still would have won: She racked up sometimes huge margins in 15 of the other 16 counties. Holding aside Clark and the eight really small Nevada counties--Esmeralda, Eureka, Lander, Lincoln, Mineral, Nye, Storey and White Plain, in which Republicans cast a total of fewer than 1,000 votes--Angle's head-to-head vote shares in Washoe and what we might call Nevada's remaining seven "medium-sized" jurisdictions were quite impressive. Take a look:

As you can see, in all but Humboldt and Elko counties Angle outperformed (and thus pulled up) her statewide 40 percent share. And her 21-point victory in Washoe--the second largest jurisdiction and home to Reno, which Angle represented in the state assembly--proved to be huge for her. In short, this win has the hallmarks of a tea party victory, with those Republicans from outside the population centers in particular turning out and contributing significantly to Angle's victory.

Looking ahead to the general, Angle has called for dumping Harry Reid; meanwhile, the Senate Majority has drawn the general election match-up he wanted. This is going to be one fun race to watch, folks.

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Primary Night in America / 6.8.2010

1:39 AM [Ed]. Sorry, fans of exotic politics: Birther Queen Orly Taitz is getting crushed by Damon Dunn for the Republican Secretary of State nomination in California.

The biggest surprise to me in the California results so far is that Republican Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado looks to be on his way to a relatively easy renomination. Maldonado has been called a RINO so many times that it ought to be his middle name. Yet he's running ahead of conservative Sam Aanestad in places like San Diego and Riveside Counties, and currently leads overall by 47-27. It's certainly a good night for the Monterey County pol: he's also the author of Prop 14. Maybe he and Arnold will share a cigar.

On the other hand, Maldonado will be the underdog in November. Gavin Newsom seems to have the Democratic LG nomination in hand, though it hasn't been called yet, probably because Janice Hahn's LA County base is still largely out.

12:57 AM [Ed]. It's official: according to AP, California has passed Prop 14, which will make today's party primaries the state's last, unless it is repealed. It was an easy call for AP, since Prop 14 is ahead in every single county with returns. The overall margin at present is 61-39.

12:56 AM [Tom]. If either Sharron Angle loses this November, letting a vulnerable and high-prized target for Republicans like Harry Reid slip through, or if Rand Paul gums up the race so much he loses what otherwise should have been a surefire Republican hold in Kentucky--and certainly if both lose--there is a going to be a major reassessment of the value of the tea party to the Republican Party a la what Marc Ambinder wrote about a week ago.

12:41 AM [Ed]. One California self-funder isn't having a great night so far: former Facebook privacy officer Chris Kelly, who ran a relatively expensive campaign for the Democratic nomination for Attorney General, is trailing San Francisco DA Kamala Harris 33-18 with most of the Frisco vote still out.

12:37 AM [Nate]. The AP has called the Nevada Senate race for Sharon Angle. Nevada has gone full circle and looks like a toss-up again.

12:31 AM [Ed]. A potential barnburner heating up in California's 19th congressional district, a GOP bastion where George Radanovich is retiring. His hand-picked successor, Jeff Denham, is leading former Fresno mayor Jim Patterson, a Club for Growth favorite, 40-27, but the Fresno vote hasn't come in at all, so it could tighten up significantly. Former Rep. Richard Pombo is running third at 20%.

12:19 AM [Tom D.] Deep Thought: I think Blanche Lincoln should consider herself lucky that Arkansas wasn't using IRV last month. Having a real second round certainly does change the dynamics of a race, and offers the chance for a completely new electorate.

12:18 AM [Ed]. A final note on Iowa: aside from its implications for pollster accuracy, Branstad's surprisingly narrow winning margin should be a warning sign about the strength of the hard-core social conservative wing of the Iowa GOP going into 2012. Vander Plaats was heavily outspent, ran a clumsy campaign, and got kicked in the teeth by the idol of his base voters, Sarah Palin, just a few days out. But he came within 10 points of a guy with universal name ID and everything in the world going for him. In a caucus, the Vander Plaats Vote is going to be formidable.

What surprised me most about the returns in this race is that Vander Plaats seems to have done better in Des Moines than he did in much of western Iowa, Steve King country.

12:14 AM [Nate]. Harry Enten found a more updated version of the Clark County numbers and they show Angle winning even there. With her reasonably big margins upstate, she now looks quite safe.

12:08 AM [Nate]. Carly Fiorina called the winner by the AP; she'll face Barbara Boxer.

12:04 AM [Nate]. Although Angle is clearly the favorite in Nevada -- her lead is now about 6 points -- think people are jumping the gun a bit until we learn more about Clark County, where there's very little vote in.

Midnight [Ed]. California's Prop 14, creating a "jungle primary" system, is winning 60-40 in early returns, but it's gaining almost that exact percentage in every county, regardless of geography or ideology.

Meanwhile, the much-less-known Prop 15, which would repeal and existing ban on public financing of campaigns and create a pilot project for publicly financing the Secretary of State's election, is trailing 57-43.

11:58 PM [Tom]. Though still only about one-fifth of the precincts in Montana reported, in the primary for the state's at-large House seat, with 40 percent Dennis McDonald has opened up about a 20-point lead over three competitors who are more or less splitting the remaining 60 percent of the vote. Winner faces safe Republican incumbent Denny Rehberg

11:54 PM [Nate]. The White House is being really daft, but it's also silly to think that Halter could have won the general in Arkansas. If you don't trust Rasmussen and Research 2000 polling because of their extreme house effects, the only other poll of that race was from Mason-Dixon, and it showed Halter losing to Boozman by 24 points.

11:49 PM [Ed]. Fiorina is clearly winning big; she's carrying Marin County, which ought to be Campbell Country for sure.

11:47 PM [Nate]. The White House is really ripping into Labor for backing Halter to the tune of $10 million.

11:44 PM. [Nate]. Per some smart person on Twitter, Meg Whitman will be the GOP's gubernatorial nominee in California.

11:39 PM. [Nate] Lowden has a small lead in Clark County (Vegas) so far, so she's not out of the running against Angle, whom she trails by 5 points statewide so far.

11:34 PM [Tom Schaller]. On a night when my states don't have many interesting storylines, a good story developing in NV GOP senate primary. Just 20 percent of precincts in as of 11:21 EST, but tea party favorite Sharron Angle, with 35 percent, leads a crowded field including Sue Lowden (33 percent) and Danny Tarkanian (21 percent).

11:33 PM [Tom Schaller]. A little over 100 of nearly 800 Montana precincts in and it's too early to call the House at-large democratic primary for right to face Republican incumbent Denny Rehberg, who is cruising along to re-nomination.

11:26 PM [Nate]. On the Democratic side, "none of these" is in second place so far in Nevada.

11:24 PM [Nate]. Newswires project that Brian Sandoval will be the Republicans' gubernatorial nominee in Nevada; he's beating unpopualar incumbent Jim Gibbons.

11:21 PM [Nate]. In California, Fiorina leads Campbell 58-22 so far, confirming late polls that showed her continuing to surge.

11:17 PM [Nate]. Although only 1.2% of the vote is in, it is safe to say that Mickey Kaus will not be the Democratic Senate nominee in California.

11:14 PM [Nate]. As expected, Roxanne Conlin will be the Democratic nominee in the Iowa Senate race, where she's a significant underdog to Chuck Grassley.

11:13 PM [Nate]. A extremely rare screw-up by the Selzer poll in Iowa, which was calling for a big (26-point) Branstad win; in fact, he's leading Vander Plaats by just 10.

11:04 PM [Nate]. Underrated (?) dynamic: did Lincoln become the underdog (and therefore more sympathetic) once the media CW was that she had "lost" the election in May?

11:03 PM [Nate]. Painfully slow to get many returns in from Nevada. What happens there stays there, apparently.

11:01 PM [Nate]. And just like that, the AP has called it for Blanche Lincoln.

11:00 PM [Nate]. Don't know that Halter can come back. A lot of the outstanding vote is in Benton and Pulaski Counties, and those are essentially his weakest areas.

10:42 PM [Nate]. Here's that Halter-Lincoln chart again. You can see that the county votes are following a VERY consistent pattern, and one which most likely points toward a narrow Blanche Lincoln escape.



10:41 PM [Ed]. In the first returns from Iowa, Terry Branstad has an eleven-point lead over Bob Vander Plaats with 17% of the precincts in. But to my surprise, in Polk County (Des Moines), where 87% of the precincts are in, Branstad's barely ahead of Vander Plaats, who is also leading in early returns from suburban Dallas County. Ironically, the first returns from Vander Plaats' own county, Woodbury, show Branstad with a comfortable lead.

In the 3d congressional district Republican primary, nationally-handpicked candidate Jim Gibbons is currently getting crushed by state senator Brad Zaun, 51-22, with half the vote in.

10:40 PM [Nate]. Oops, something funny was going on with the AP's vote counting there. Halter now losing by 20 in Pulaski country. BAD news for him.

10:28 PM [Nate]. Whoa, Halter leading by 18 points in Pulaski County (Little Rock) so far. He lost it by 12 in May. If that holds up, that's a TOTAL game-changer.

10:16 PM [Nate]. Here's a chart comparing Halter's performance in May to today in counties that have actually tallied most of their vote. He's overperforming in counties where he did well before -- that's the good news -- but lagging behind in the swing counties and doing a fair amount worse in the big, urban counties where Lincoln racked up significant margins last time around. Overall, seems to point to a 3-4 point loss, but there's a big margin for error still.



10:02 PM [Ed]. AP's called the SC gubernatorial primary as headed for a Haley-Barrett runoff. Haley will fall just a few thousand votes short of a clean (if that's a word you can use for SC politics) kill. Now we get to wait again to see what gets said about her between now and June 22.

10:01 PM [Nate]. Jefferson County has counted nearly all of its vote, and Halter is losing by 18 points there. He lost by 13 in May. He's in trouble.

9:57 PM [Dan]. For Maine on the Democratic side, AG Steve Rowe narrowly leads Senate President Elizabeth Mitchell, but given the closeness of the race, that lead likely will not survive the night, though its a bit early to make a clear call. The big news is still the GOP primary, in the sense that the Tea Party Movement has now demonstrated its ability to win a major primary in blue territory, albeit in the Republican Primary. While LePage will have an enormous amount of work if he wishes to avoid the fate of 2006 nominee Chandler Woodcock, him winning the general would be a sign that the Tea Party has appeal that extends beyond Conservatives, and even Conservative-leaning Independents.

9:45 PM [Nate]. Halter's now losing population-heavy Jefferson County by 14 percent and a lot of the vote is in. Not one of his stronger areas -- he lost it by 13 points in May -- but it's consistent with a pattern of his underperforming his margins by a point or so. And since Lincoln beat Halter by 2 points in May, that might point to her doing so by 3 or 4 points tonight. But, this is crude, and it's early ... it's certainly going to be close ... but I think Lincoln is about a 7:2 favorite at this stage.

9:38 PM [Tom Schaller]. With more than a third of the precincts now reported (all, presumably, from the eastern portion of the state where polls are now closed), Dennis Dauguaard has opened up a sizable lead over Dave Knudson in the Republican primary for South Dakota governor, 52 percent to 16 percent. Winner faces Democrat Scott Heidepriem in November.

9:36 PM [Nate]. A few more Arkansas counties ... these are a bit better for Halter.

Bradley: lost by 6 in May, losing by 10 tonight.
Howard: lost by 1 in May, winning by 2 tonight.
Jefferson: lost by 13 in May, losing by 110 tonight.
Marion: won by 13 in May, winning by 18 tonight.

9:29 PM [Nate]. Bill Halter is in serious trouble. If you look at the counties where a decent number of precincts are reporting and compare his performance to three weeks ago... he's usually doing worse.

Columbia: won by 17 in May, leads by 12 tonight.
Conway: won by 5 in May, leads by 2 tonight.
Ouchita: tied the country in May, trailing by 8 points tonight
Saline: lost by 2 points in May, losing by 6 tonight
Baxter: here's some better news for Halter ... won by 2 in May, winning by 12 tonight
Calhoun: won by 17 points in May, leads by 16 points tonight.
Scott: won by 12 in may, leading by 4 tonight.

9:27 PM [Tom Dollar]. If Halter does manage to come back and take down Lincoln, I'm sure we'll hear some CW tomorrow about the death of the centrist senator. This will be coupled with some mandatory equivalency: the "MoveOn-backed" Halter on the left vs. the Tea Party on the right. What it shows me, though, is that Obama has done a poor job at staving off primary challenges for "his" senators. Perhaps it was the fact that he ran an anti-establishment campaign himself, but he's been a lousy Machine Boss.


9:23 PM [Ed]. With over half the precincts reporting in SC, Nikki Haley is, at 48%, tantalizingly close to the possibility of winning the GOP gubernatorial nomination without a runoff (as Democrat Vincent Sheheen has already done). She's predictably doing well in the Midlands region--though Henry McMaster, who is from Columbia, is holding her to 44% in Richland County--but she's also doing amazingly well in the Low Country. She's currently winning 58% in Charleston County, while her bitterest rival, Andre Bauer, a Charleston native, is getting a mere 7% in the county. Haley is also doing well in Upcountry counties outside Barrett's base: viz, Spartanburg, where she has 54%.

It still looks like Barrett, with 22%, is the likeliest candidate to make a runoff against Haley if she doesn't win outright; McMaster is at 18%, but his best county, Richland, is already in.

9:20 PM [Dan]. In Maine, with very limited results, Paul LePage, Mayor of Waterville, and newly-minted tea party candidate is leading. Now while only limited numbers are in, the AP report has him leading in Portland, with the moderates, Mills, and Abbott splitting the vote. In fact though, the vote splitting doesn't seem to matter. Mills who is a state senator, and Abbott, who as Collins' COS was the closest thing to an establishment candidate are sitting at around 24% of the vote combined. Now moderates usually gain in GOP primaries in the late reports, but indications are of a very low-turnout in Portland and Cumberland county generally, which is quite bad for them. Abbott at least has northern Maine, but Mills is in serious trouble.

9:15 PM [Nate]. Although it's really early, Lincoln's numbers are pretty consistent across different counties.

9:07 PM [Ed]. While we were obsessing about SC, three GOP congressional primaries in VA have been called. In VA-2 (Hampton Roads), front-runner and McDonnell endorsee Scott Rigell has beaten two strong opponents, and will face freshman Democrat Glenn Nye in this very marginal district.

In VA-5 (Central-Southside VA), another GOP establishment figure, state senator Robert Hurt, has won the nomination to face another freshman Democrat, Tom Perriello. But Hurt has aroused threats of a third-party Tea Party candidacy, so it could get interesting.

And in VA-11, in NoVa, 2008 nominee and self-funder Keith Fimian has won a rematch with still another freshman Dem, Gerry Connolly, in a district that's a little more Democrat-friendly than the other two VA battlegrounds.

9:01 PM [Nate]. It looks like it may just be absentees or whatever, but Lincoln leads Halter 54-46 so far out of about 30,000 votes counted.

8:58 PM [Nate]. The AP called the #SCGOV Democratic primary for Sheheen (not Sheehan, sorry), who is leading 58-24.

8:57 PM [Tom Schaller]. With 16 total votes -- not counties, not precincts -- 538 calls the North Dakota Republican Senate primary for Gov. John Hoeven. He's running unopposed.

8:45 PM [Ed]. AP called Georgia-9 for Tom Graves at 8:22 EDT, about 30 minutes after I reached that conclusion following the first glimpse of Lumpkin County's vote. Just sayin'.

8:44 PM [Nate]. Ed is looking prescient, as Haley is now up to 48 percent. And Sheheen cruising on the Democratic side.

8:42 PM [Ed]. In one of the featured House races today, it looks like 4th district incumbent U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis of SC is going to be forced into a runoff with Tea Party favorite Trey Gowdy. In this Greenville-Spartanburg district, Inglis is narrowly leading in Greenville, but Gowdy is crushing the incumbent in his Spartanburg base. Looks like Gowdy will finish first, perhaps by a sizable margin, but with three other candidates in the race, he won't get to 50%.

8:24 PM [Ed]. It's too early to say much, but the first smattering of SC precincts was mostly from Gresham Barrett's Upcountry base. A big chunk of the vote is from Pickens County, a suburb of Greenville, where Haley is leading Barrett 39-37. In the more representative Aiken County (home of Strom Thurmond), Haley has 53% at present. But in Horry County (Myrtle Beach), she's down below 40%. She is most definitely going to run first, and I still think she has a chance to win without a runoff, but it will require a very strong vote in the Columbia area.

8:01 PM [Nate]. Now we're starting to get a few votes in from the Palmetto state. Sheheen is clobbering Rex so far in the Democratic gubernatorial primary; polling had him favored, but not by this margin. Haley has 42 percent of the vote so far -- well ahead, but not enough to avoid a run-off.

7:53 PM [Nate]. Please don't count your votes any faster, South Carolina! You want to milk your moment in the sun, seeing how that strategy worked so well for Nikki Haley's accuser!

7:51 PM [Ed]. In GA-9, Lumpkin County, next door to Hawkins' base in Hall County, just came in with a narrow margin for Graves. I have no doubt now that Graves is going to win.

7:45 PM [Dan Berman]. Worth noting that it is technically not true that no Republican has won statewide since 1994 in California. Bill Jones won the Secretary of State's office in 1998, the only Republican to win that year, and Steven Poizner of course won the Insurance Commissioner race in 2006.

7:38 PM [Ed]. It's not a big focus tonight, but the first votes are trickling in for the special election runoff in GA-9, an all-Republican contest to choose a replacement for gubernatorial candidate Nathan Deal. The mystery here is whether primary leader and Club for Growth/FreedomWorks endorsee Tom Graves will be fatally damaged by a financial scandal (he was sued by a bank for defaulting on a large commercial loan). The first votes coming in are from Graves' base in NW Georgia; his opponent, Lee Hawkins, is counting on a big vote from his base in the eastern and central parts of this North Georgia district.

7:28 PM [Ed]. California polls show the "jungle primary" proposition (Prop 14) winning handily. It's telling that the state Democratic Party and the unions who oppose it didn't come up with serious money to fight it, which to me indicates they figured it would easily pass in the current hate-everybody political environment. The most vociferous opponents, the minor parties, who will lose their general election ballot lines, don't have money, of course.

7:17 PM [Ed]. According to PPP's recent breakdown of SC Republican gubernatorial primary preferances by area code (there are three, roughly corresponding to the Upcountry, Midlands, and Low Country regions of the state), Nikki Haley's popularity is pretty evenly distributed around the state. So we should get some early indications of how she's doing, and particularly of whether she has a chance to win without a runoff.

7:15 PM [Tom D]. What interests me most is whether CA adopts the Jungle Primary. Louisiana had it and got rid of it. CA is a liberal state, but unlike say, NY and MA, it has a very conservative Republican party. The result is that their primaries tend to nominate GOP candidates who can't win. (None has won statewide office since Pete Wilson in '94--except Arnold who came in initially under very special circumstances.) I've got to think that a Jungle Primary might revive the viable Republican in CA.

7:07 PM [Nate]. I don't have a clear hunch about Arkansas, which is maybe the most interesting race of the night. There are three polls of the race, but they're all from the same polling firm, Research 2000, and their work has been iffy lately.

7:06 PM [Nate]. Some hunches ... don't take these very seriously ... Tarkanian may be overlooked in NV-SEN. Nikki Haley will do really well. Chuck DeVore will do better than his polling in California.

7:03 PM [Nate]. One thing I'm really looking forward to at the Times: they have some sweet new liveblogging software that they just debuted. This might be the last liveblog ever at the FiveThirtyEight.com URL!

7:00 PM [Nate]. Polls just closed in South Carolina and Virginia. You can see South Carolina results as they come in here. We'll be liveblogging tonight, of course, although I imagine that things will be fairly slow-paced, especially at first.

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