Campbell Soup
As expected, John Campbell easily won Chris Cox’s seat yesterday, capturing 44.7% of the vote. It was kinda cool to see A.I.P. candidate Jim Gilchrist get 25.1% of the vote, coming dangerously close (OK, maybe just Kerry-close, but still) to beating out the Democrat, Steve Young, who garnered 28.0%, in the race for second place. It’s often been said that votes for Gilchrist were to “send a message.” One possible message is that Campbell should get serious about immigration. Another is that his seat is so friggin’ save that he needn’t bother. Time will tell.
UPDATE: Why am I not surprised that no matter how badly a Democrat does in one of the most heavily Republican districts in the country, some dweeb will convince himself that the Democrats could win here if they’d just get more serious about border control? I thought of floating that theory in my original entry, but decided against it because I thought the numbers made it so obviously silly no one would entertain the theory. Guess I was wrong.
UPDATE x2: According to Lonewacko, Gilchrist’s site, an anonymous Corner reader and a Freeper, Gilchrist actually won among non-absentee voters. I haven’t seen anything official, but have done the math and the numbers are at least consistent with the official totals.
December 8th, 2005 at 9:26 am
Amidst all the attempts by the Hewitt-o-sphere to obfuscate the issue, keep this in mind: Gilchrist won the election day votes.
The only reason Campbell won is because he got so many absentee ballots; if all the votes had gone like the election day votes, Gilchrist would be in Congress.
The corrupt WSJ wing of the GOP will learn a little bit from this, and will probably try yet a new way to fleece the voters.
And, of course, the Dems will learn the opposite lesson, perhaps with a bandolier-wearing Howard Dean promising to help Mexico send us more workers.
December 8th, 2005 at 10:51 am
Do you have a source for your claim that Gilchrist won the Election Day votes? It doesn’t pass the smell test.
December 8th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
See The Corner comment here and see the nifty chart in post #44 here. Of course, that chart could be wrong, but I don’t think that’s likely.
December 8th, 2005 at 3:37 pm
The Corner comment is “from a reader” with no indiciation that Krikorian even attempted to verify its accuracy. The comment comes from an anonymous poster who didn’t answer another Freeper’s question of where she got the figures from.
That said, the numbers do seem to add up, so if they’re phony, at least the person who did it was careful to check their math. Note also that the county posts unofficial updates every hour, which include more votes than the CA SOS totals. Assuming the newer votes are precinct votes (i.e., the absentees were counted first), the movement does seem consistent with Gilchrist having done better on Election Day, at Campbell’s expense, with Gilchrist’s percentage rising from 25.1% to 25.3%, while Campbell’s drops from 44.7% to 44.6%. However, the movement in the numbers for the other three candidates is inconsistent with calcowgirl’s chart, which shows Steve Young doing better on Election Day (32.42% vs. 25.30%) and the two minor candidates doing worse (Tiritilli garnering 0.94% on Election Day, vs. 1.58% among absentees, and Cohen getting 0.68 vs. 1.10%). The comparison between the CA figures and the current OC update shows slight movement in the opposite direction for Young (down from 28.0% to 27.7%) and Tiritilli (up to 1.4% from 1.3%), with no net change for Cohen (.9% before and after).
December 8th, 2005 at 7:40 pm
This page has results starting with absentee-only to unofficial results.
According to that, on election day Gilchrist got 274 more votes than Campbell. I’m waiting for the official tally before promulgating this far and wide, but even if that changes a little in Campbell’s favor it’s really bad news for him and the GOP leadership.