Discussion: Want To Know If Dems Will Get Skunked In California? Watch The Early Vote

Not sure about that. This law certainly hasn’t been kind to the GOP until this year.

Hubby and I sat down for 2 hours and went over the ballot this week. We still have 3 races we are not sure about. Kindof waiting to see what happens in the next week. And the question isn’t Republican or Democrat, it is how we can get 2 Dems on the ballot for November in certain races, and which 2 would be best.

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I agree. I haven’t even opened my ballot up yet - I’ve been planning on dealing with it after Memorial Day weekend.

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Calm down—it’s not even June. Even the most motivated Dems need a break before the real election season begins.

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Democrats are assuming that people are clamoring to get back to a status quo that didn’t work for them in the first place. Big mistake. Being the lesser of two evils doesn’t cut it.

The concern largely comes from the pattern of primary voting in California. Midterm participation keeps dropping, though I’ll be surprised if it’s as low as 2014’s 25% turnout of registered voters. Registered Republicans are more likely to turn out than Democrats in a primary, though more Democrats in total will end up voting. In 2014, Republican congressional candidates got nearly 41.7% of the statewide primary vote, and 39.5% of the general election vote. This compares to only 28.4% of the voters being registered as Republican vs. 43.4% as Democrats in that year.

The bad news for Republicans is that their registration has dropped to 25.3%, while Democrats are at 44.6%

Early vote numbers matter in California, as 2/3rds of all primary ballots will likely be absentee, though many will be dropped off or mailed on election day.

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I have a better idea: Wait until the votes are counted.

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Didn’t your prof cover the perils of doing multiple tests on the same dataset ? And the use of the Bonferoni correction to account for it?

The truth of the quote depends on the quantitative definition of “likely” and “unlikely” events , of course. But generally speaking the probability that an event will happen at least once in a set of n independent trials is the sum of the probabilities of the event happening in each trial.

EDIT: it’s the bonferoni corrrection, not the Bernoulli.

We like to take our ballots over to the local polling place, which is also our community center, and take advantage of the free day of swimming, working out, etc. they offer on election day.

Like yourself, our ballots are sitting on the dining room table, waiting to be read and worked on this weekend.

Talk about depressing the vote, articles like this do as much to do that as anything does. Doom and fucking gloom, I’m sick of watching us scare ourselves!

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At a time when voters are trying to figure out who would best represent them in all kinds of offices, a naive insistence that they must pay attention only to National Issues, seems…naive.

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I’m so tired of hearing the jungle primary isn’t a good idea. These are specific instances where it may be an issue due to party discipline. There should NOT be this many candidates in these pick up opportunity districts. There should be two and the Democrats should strategically vote for them, so they are the top two, shutting republicans out. How long has it been since a republican occupied a state constitutional office in CA. So long I can’t remember. For the most part, the jungle primary has benefited Democrats. I blame the party for not planning better not the system.

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“it is how we can get 2 Dems on the ballot for November in certain races, and which 2 would be best.”

This is where the party would be helpful, telling voters these two are our top choice.

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He’s right, it’s just a poor description. What’s the probability of winning a given race…say 80%? What are the odds of winning all five races then: 32%. Even though each result is very likely, stringing a chain of them together is a very unlikely result.

There’s nothing undemocratic about them. Certainly not more so than having a liberal and a conservative Democrat in a primary getting a combined 65% of the vote, the liberal winning, and then losing to a Republican in the general, which is what would happen often before. And a lot more democratic than a regular 17-person primary ballot where someone can win with 10% of the vote.

You know that this is what caused California to go from a bare-majority D state to D supermajorities, right? It hurts Dems in these two or three races but it hurts the GOP in almost every other one. Republicans likely won’t even have a candidate for governor in the general election.

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America is primarily a two party based political system. Maybe the jungle primary is not the solution first thought to be.

Unfortunately, although it makes all the sense in the world, the backlash would be overwhelming and might cause some Dems to “send a message” or cast a protest vote. The party has to tread carefully so as not to offend some of our voters. That has created a really stupid situation where they can’t go all in behind certain candidates even where it only makes sense to do so.

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At least where we live in California, there looks to be unprecedented levels of involvement, activism, and energy from Democrats. This includes folks getting actively involved with get-out-the-vote efforts (including making calls and text messages to other states) who haven’t done anything political (in some cases, since the Vietnam protest era). I’ve not talked with anyone I know, living in either end of the state, who isn’t deeply and unusually concerned and fearful about where Trump has been taking the country, and deeply angry with the irresponsiblility of the republicans in helping him to get there.

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This is a little too Chicken Little, but if it serves to get us to the polls that’s ok.

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There’s not much that can be made based on a single study, and a rather overdrawn one, at that…

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