by
Nate Silver
@
8:00 PM
4:40 AM [Nate]. Miller's leading is holding with about 71 percent of the vote reported -- but Alaska is apparently done counting until the morning. Speaking of which, I need to get to bed. Thank you immensely for your patronage of FiveThirtyEight over the past two-and-a-half years.
3:33 AM [Nate]. Miller retains the lead at 52-48 in Alaska with around half the vote counted, although the speculation is that Murkowski may recover as more vote comes in from the Alaskan wilderness, which benefits significantly from federal pork. Meanwhile, Ben Quayle was declared the winner in AZ-3 -- although with only 23 percent of the vote. The Democratic Gubernatorial primary in Vermont, meanwhile, remains much too close to call.
1:21 AM [Nate]. Tuned out there for a long while (my "dinner" of two Papaya Dogs and a Red Bull didn't give me as much staying power as I thought), but Lisa Murkowski -- surprisingly -- slightly trails Joe Miller with about a quarter of the vote in from Alaska.
11:33 PM [Ed]. Back in Vermont, AP finally got hold of the Burlington results a couple hours after the Burlington Free-Press reported them, and now with over 80% of the precincts reporting, Doug Racine leads Peter Shumlin by 199 votes, and Deb Markowitz by 545 votes. Regardless of who wins, admirers of the civil tone of this primary will be pleased that turnout seems to have considerably exceeded the pre-election estimates.
11:16 PM [Nate]. It's safe to assume that John McCain will be re-nominated.
11:13 PM [Ed]. While we were preoccupied with Florida and Vermont, the two GOP congressional runoffs in OK were decided, and neither was close. Of the two underfunded and little-known challengers to Dan Boren in OK-02, the older one, veterinarian Charles Thompson, defeated Daniel Edmonds by a 2-1 margin. Now we'll wait to see if the NRCC decides to make Thompson's campaign rich and famous.
In the higher-visibility OK-05 runoff for Mary Fallin's House seat, church camp director and political neophyte James Lankford beat Club for Growth endorsee Kevin Calvey by a surprising 65-35. Calvey got perhaps a bit too nasty against Lankford, and also strained credulity by trying to create an Oklahoma version of the Islamic/Shariah Law threat.
11:12 PM [Nate]. Ben Quayle's race is interesting, with four candidates between 16 and 22 percent of the vote. Quayle is on top for now though.
11:04 PM [Nate]. Good night so far for PPP, which unlike certain of its counterparts, had the temerity to poll actual elections.
11:02 PM [Nate]. McCain 63, Hayworth 26 in very early results.
10:59 PM [Nate]. Possible we'll get some quick calls in Arizona, which has been counting ballots for an hour, but has a state law preventing them from releasing the results until just about ... now.
10:55 PM [Nate]. The AP now has called it for Scott -- and for Boyd in FL-2.
10:43 PM [Ed]. AP hasn't called it for Scott yet, but 538 can, with two-thirds of Miami-Dade now in and Scott still up by more than 40,000.
10:38 PM [Nate]. Rasmussen -- which polled the McCain-Hayworth primary eight times in a race where there was some disagreement among pollsters -- was not willing to do so during the final four weeks of the campaign. Our pollster ratings are always becoming more sophisticated and we're going to be looking at appropriate ways to punish pollsters who dodge putting their necks on the line.
10:35 PM [Ed]. If Rick Scott does win, it's a good news/bad news scenario for Alex Sink and Florida Democrats. The good news is that most of the attack lines on Scott have already been aired, and only have to be reinforced; plus it really may take an effort to get Florida Republicans off their hands to help him. The bad news is that he's the East Coast Meg Whitman, and has about $175 million in net worth that's theoretically available to spend.
10:16 PM [Ed]. The McCollum-Scott race is all coming down to South Florida. With nearly three-fourths of the precincts reporting, Scott's lead is about 40,000 votes. Of 1946 precincts still out, 1597 are in just three counties: Miami-Dade, where McCollum's winning 63-30; Palm Beach, where he's winning 48-42; and Broward, where he's winning 48-46. It will definitely tighten up, but it's unclear whether there are enough votes out for McCollum to catch up.
10:13 PM [Nate]. There were some strong differences of opinion among pollsters in the Florida governor race, which Scott now looks increasingly likely to win.
9:54 PM [Nate]. Looks like Allen Boyd will hold on.
9:42 PM [Ed]. With a third of the precincts voting in VT, according to AP, Deb Markowitz leads Doug Racine by 14 votes, with Peter Shumlin back another 270 votes. That's with no votes in from Burlington or Chittendon County, which together normally cast about a fourth of the statewide Democratic vote.
But the Burlington Free Press is tweeting that Racine's won Burlington pretty handily, with Shumlin second and Markowitz third. So if that's right, Racine should soon pull into the strongest lead of the night.
9:36 PM [Nate]. We now have significantly more sophisticated methodology to handle three-candidate races in the Senate. Don't know that Kendrick Meek is likely to be terribly happy about the result that we'll show for him tomorrow. Even if he peels some votes off from Crist, it's going to be quite difficult for him to knock off both Crist and Rubio simultaneously. We assume super high variance in three-candidate races, but Meek's just not winning very many simulations.
9:09 PM [Nate]. Stata is almost done processing the Senate forecasting script. We're running "retro" forecasts every two weeks dating back to February 1st, so you can get a sense for how our model's sense of each race will have evolved over time.
9:04 PM [Ed]. With over half the precincts reporting in Florida, it looks to me like the thread Bill McCollum is holding onto in hoping for victory is the possibility that his buddy Jeb Bush will get him a huge win in Miami-Dade. Rick Scott has fought him to a draw in the Tampa-St. Pete area, beaten him in SW FL, and looks to be running even or better in the counties running from Melbourne down to Ft. Lauderdale. Scott is also winning Duval County handily. McCollum's Orlando base has largely already reported. There's not much in yet from the Panhandle, but Scott's winning Bay County (Panama City) easily.
Though only one precinct has reported in Miami-Dade, it looks like the early votes have been reported, and McCollum's winning better than two-to-one. He'll need that trend to continue.
8:59 PM [Nate]. Rubio's pretty good on the stump.
8:44 PM [Nate]. Blue Dog Allen Boyd and pretending-not-to-be-a-future-Blue-Dog Al Lawson locked in a tight battle in FL-2 so far. The vote is 51-49 so far, favoring Boyd, with Lawson having benefited from a strong vote in Leon County.
FL-24 is also looking very competitive on the Republican side.
8:30 PM [Ed]. AP called the Senate race for Meek because he was winning just about everywhere; better than 2-1 in Pinellas; 2-1 in Hillsboro and Sarasota; nearly 2-1 in Duval; 20 points in Brevard.
8:24 PM [Ed]. Very early returns from VT show expected close four-way race among Markowitz, Dunne, Shumlin and Racine. None of the larger towns or counties are in. Total turnout could fall under 40,000 votes.
8:22 PM. These next couple of weeks are going to be really important in the Florida general election campaign. Rubio is the one who has a good 30, 35 percent of the electorate locked away, where as Crist and Meek are probably in more direct competition for the center-left of the electorate. Crist can't afford to let Meek gain too much momentum after his convincing primary win tonight and I might expect some subtle movement toward his left. Or not-so-subtle, since Charlie Crist doesn't do subtle well.
8:17 PM. Wow, the AP has already called the race for Kendrick Meek. That was fast.
8:05 PM. No surprise based on late polling, but Kendrick Meek with a big lead over Jeff Greene, who may have had one of the more pointless candidacies this side of Fred Thompson.
8:00 PM. It's a busy night. We're just now spitting out the final run of our new-and-improved Senate model -- which will debut on NYTimes.com tomorrow. Meanwhile, I've got another 1,000 words or so to get into my editors, and we'll be at least trying to check in on the five states -- in literally every corner of the country -- which are holding some kind of primary election tonight.
We'll keep this slow-paced and sort of open-ended -- a necessity when polls don't close in Alaska until midnight. Perhaps later on in the evening, I can grab a tasty beverage and even take a few questions from the comments section. There's a lot of stuff that we're very excited to roll out for you over the next week or so.
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by
Ed Kilgore
@
3:00 PM
Today's Florida primary features two marquee statewide races, one in each party, and a host of congressional contests. The overall atmosphere, however, is one of jaded cynicism and much-expressed contempt for the cost and negativity of this year's campaigns. Turnout may not reach 20%.
There's little doubt this mood is being driven by the Republican gubernatorial and Democratic senatorial races, both of which pit "establishment" candidates against wildly free-spending "outsiders" in campaigns dominated by bitterly personal attacks and counter-attacks. The "insiders," Republican Attorney General Bill McCollum and Democratic Rep. Kendrick Meek, are the best bet to win today, though McCollum's not a safe bet. Largely overshadowed by these slugfests, and by the general election rivalry between Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio and incumbent Gov. Charlie Crist, running for the Senate as an independent, are many down-ballot races, which I will not get into in this post. But certainly House candidates have made a bid for attention; one's being called
mentally ill by her opponents, while another was
robbed at gunpoint while waiting to campaign at a church.
Without question, this election year in Florida was transformed by the late entry of Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott, a former hospital executive and anti-"ObamaCare" lobbyist, and Democratic Senate candidate Jeff Greene, the king of credit default swaps.
Scott has shattered every Florida campaign spending record by a sizable margin, spending $39 million of his own money and benefitting from a family trust that channeled another $11 million into a 527 organization that's bought ads attacking McCollum. Until Scott appeared, McCollum was slowly drifting towards the nomination after a long career of party service in Congress, as a two-time Senate candidate, and as Attorney General. Scott immediately ran ads calling McCollum a relic of politics-as-usual, and identified himself with the Tea Party movement. Overwhelmed by Scott's spending and facing political extinction, McCollum (with the backing of most of the state's GOP establishment, including former Gov. Jeb Bush, along with 2008 presidential rivals Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee) fought back with ads drawing attention to the huge Medicare fraud fines paid out by Scott's Columbia-HCA hospital chain. The back-and-forth has definitely eroded both candidates' approval ratings, to the tangible benefit of likely Democratic gubernatorial nominee Alex Sink, who's held a narrow lead in recent polls over both Republicans in a three-way match that also includes independent Bud Chiles.
Polls have shown Scott doing better than McCollum among self-identified conservatives, and among younger voters, so turnout patterns will matter, with a higher turnout probably benefitting the "outsider" in this closed primary. Overall, McCollum led by a 45-36 margin in the final pre-primary poll from Mason-Dixon; and by 39-35 in a Quinnipiac poll released about the same time. Scott led 47-40 in a late poll from PPP.
McCollum's regional base is in the Orlando area; Scott's a recent transplant to Florida, but lives on the Gulf Coast in Naples.
In the Democratic Senate race, Jeff Greene, who is reportedly a billionaire (mainly from profits made in successful anticipation of a housing market collapse), has spent $23 million of his own money, roughly four times the pre-primary budget of Meek, who, like McCollum, was the presumptive nominee in the early going. As with Scott, Greene's heavy spending initially vaulted him into a lead in the polls, but then counter-attacks from Meek, and bad publicity about his past in the news media, brought him back to earth. In the latter category, reports about his relationship with former boxing champ Mike Tyson, and Tyson's behavior during a long cruise on Greene's yacht, has been a perpetual headache, compounded by another report that the yacht had actually docked in Cuba (a definite no-no for someone running for office in Florida).
While Greene's tried to shift attention to alleged corruption involving Meek and his mother, former congresswoman Carrie Meek--and more recently, accusing Meek of insufficient sympathy for Israel in a bid for South Florida Jewish voters--he's been sinking in recent polls. He trailed Meek 42-30 in an August 17-19 Mason-Dixon poll; 29-39 in a Quinnipiac survey this weekend; and 27-51 in the final PPP poll. PPP showed Meek leading Greene 70-9 among African-Americans and 47-37 among white voters. Contributing to Meek's popularity among "regular" Democrats has been endorsements from President Obama and former President Clinton.
Meek's next challenge, of course, is to convince Florida Democrats--not to mention wealthy donors and the party poohbahs in Washington--to support him rather than independent candidate Charlie Crist. Right now Meek is running a dangerously poor third in three-way polls. And he probably can't count on Marco Rubio or Charlie Crist helping him by hanging out with Mike Tyson on a yacht.
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by
Ed Kilgore
@
6:44 PM
It's a bit hard to understand why multiple states would decide to call voters to the polls in the depths of the Dogs Days, but they are: Florida, Arizona, Alaska and Vermont are holding primaries tomorrow, while Oklahoma is staging a runoff for nominations not resolved in its July 27 primary.
We'll be covering Florida, which has attracted the most national attention lately, in a separate post tomorrow. In this roundup, we'll take a look at AZ, where there are several very competitive GOP House primaries; VT, where the Democratic gubernatorial contest is a multi-candidate scrum; AK, where a long-shot challenger to Sen. Lisa Murkowski will meet his fate; and OK, where two Republican House runoffs are occurring.
Not that long ago, national observers were licking their chops at AZ's statewide Republican primaries, with John McCain looking potentially vulnerable against former congressman and talk-show host J.D. Hayworth, and an unelected and little-known governor named Jan Brewer appearing poised for a return to obscurity.
That's all obviously changed. According to virtually all observers McCain is on the brink of a landslide win, benefitting from a huge financial advantage, some serious strategic respositioning to the Right on key issues, and several misteps by Hayworth. McCain will be a heavy favorite over the likely Democratic candidate, former Tucson city councilman Rodney Glassman. Meanwhile, the immigration issue has transformed Brewer from an accidental governor unpopular in her own party to a national conservative star whose endorsement is craved in other states, and a certain winner tomorrow. Brewer also has opened up a big lead in the polls over likely Democratic nominee, Attorney General Terry Goddard.
But AZ's crowded Republican House primaries feature three contests in districts where GOPers think they have a chance of beating incumbent Democrats, and one for an open Republican seat.
The race that's attracted the most national attention is probably in AZ-08, a Tucson-based district represented by two-term Democrat Gabby Giffords. A classic Establishment-Tea Party matchup involving former state senator Jonathan Paton, the early frontrunner, and Tea Party activist Jesse Kelley, is considered very close. Giffords is a veteran of two close races, and is building up her campaign treasury as Republicans squabble, but her opposition to the new AZ immigration law and votes for key Obama legislation have made her appear vulnerable.
In Phoenix-suburban AZ-03, where Republican John Shadegg is retiring, the early frontrunner was Ben Quayle, son of the former Veep from Indiana, but he is fighting to hold off self-funder Steve Moak. It's been a battle of self-inflicted wounds, with Quayle hurt by association with an off-color internet site (to which he occasionally made posts under a pseudonym inspired by a porn-star character in Boogie Nights), and Moak battling claims of conflicts of interest between non-profit and for-profit businesses.
In AZ-05, another Phoenix-area district, former Maricopa County Treasurer David Schweikert is so confident of victory that he's saving money for a general election against Democratic incumbent Harry Mitchell, but businessman Jim Ward remains financially competitive down the stretch.
And in the huge, largely rural AZ-01, dentist Paul Gosar is in a close race with 2008 nominee Sydney Hay for the right to take on freshman Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick. The incumbent beat Hay by a 56-40 margin two years ago.
Up in Alaska, the Republican Senate primary has drawn national attention as a surrogate grudge match between Sarah Palin and incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, daughter (and appointee) of the incumbent whom Palin beat en route to becoming governor in 2006. Murkowski's actual opponent is former judge Joe Miller, something of a conservative protest candidate (he's been endorsed by anti-abortion groups and the Tea Party Express) against the incumbent. But Palin's gone after Murkowski avidly in the stretch run of the primary, not only attacking the incumbent in one of her famous Facebook posts, but recording robocalls for Miller. Murkowski has a vast financial advantage, and a loss would be a major upset.
At the other end of the country, in Vermont, no fewer than five viable candidates--four rated as even bets for a win, though there has been no public polling in this contest--are competing for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in this blue state where four-term (terms are still just two years in VT) Republican governor Jim Douglas is retiring. Early in the contest (before Douglas announced his retirement) the clear front-runners were former Lt. Gov. Doug Racine (who lost to Douglas back in 2002) and six-term Secretary of State Deb Markowitz, with Racine considered the more traditional liberal and Markowitz the moderate. Douglas' retirement drew other strong candidates into the race, including state senate president pro tem Peter Shumlin, credited with a key role in passage of Vermont's landmark gay marriage statute; former state senator Matt Dunne, a tech entrepreneur who also ran the national VISTA program; and state senator Susan Bartlett.
All five candidates have taken similar issue stands in a very civil primary with many debates. A key factor is that Vermont's well-established left-bent Progressive Party has decided against running its own candidate for governor, greatly improving the chances of the ultimate Democratic nominee. Though under-funded, Racine has the bulk of union endorsements, and appears to be splitting Progressive Party support with Shumlin. Markowitz has been in the race the longest, and has high name ID. Like Markowitz, Dunne is relatively well-funded. Shumlin is generally thought to have late momentum. And Bartlett will get enough votes to affect the outcome.
Perhaps the biggest X-factor in Vermont is turnout: this primary is in traditional vacation-time, and early voting levels have been very low. Vermont is an open primary state, with no party registration.
The winner will face Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, a professional airline pilot with light official duties and a folksy, anodyne image as Douglas' deputy the last eight years. Dubie has positioned himself somewhat to the right of Douglas on cultural issues, opposing both gay marriage and abortion rights while disclaiming any interest in making such issues a priority as governor. In late June, Rasmussen showed Dubie holding a 47-40 lead over Markowitz, with much bigger, majority leads over the other four Democratic candidates.
Finally, in Oklahoma, there are two GOP congressional runoffs. The one with the most fireworks has been OK-05, for the seat of Republican gubernatorial nominee Mary Fallin. Political neophyte and church camp director James Lankford surprisingly led the primary, but former state legislator Kevin Calvey has been on the offensive in the runoff, trying to play off the national conservative focus on alleged domestic Islamic threats by attacking Lankford for saying he'd talk with representatives of CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations). Calvey enjoys backing from the Club for Growth, and has also significantly self-financed his campaign, but Lankford has strong evangelical Protestant support and has reportedly been very effective in the utilization of social media.
By contrast, the Republican runoff in OK-02, where Charles Thompson and Daniel Edmonds are competing for a shot at Blue Dog incumbent Dan Boren, has been pretty quiet with very low spending. Thompson ran ahead in the primary, but Edmonds seems to have a slight advantage among Oklahoma's "true conservative"/tea party activists, so it could go either way. The battle-hardened and well-financed Boren will be the favorite in November in a contest that will serve as a good test of the strength of any Republican "wave."
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by
Nate Silver
@
11:52 AM
It's pretty weird having a desk to go into in a big office building after having worked at home for the better part of six years, but here I am, trying to make sure that everything us up to speed for our upcoming launch at the
New York Times, and that we'll have the highest possible probability of launching on schedule and with a fully functional site tomorrow. Thus, I can't promise that we'll have much in the way of substantive posts for you here at FiveThirtyEight.com today.
The work that my colleagues on the interactive team have done at nytimes.com is terrific and I hope that you'll be really impressed. I've also given the Senate model a relatively thorough statistical makeover and it will now be much more sophisticated in how it estimates the amount of error associated with each forecast (for instance, the more the polling tends to diverge in a given race, the higher the margin of error associated with the prediction), and in how it handles incumbent vis-à-vis open seat races. Plus, we should have our gubernatorial forecasts to launch for you later this week, and our House forecasts soon afterward.
In the meantime, suggestions on good lunch places near 40th & 8th are appreciated, because right now I'm projected to gain about 7 pound a month due to the recent opening of a
Shake Shack near the office.
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