Up Ballot, Down Ballot

Too cheap to spring for a stamp?

If I were a real political blogger, I'd be standing on a fiscal cliff right now, looking at Gaza, but procrastination is more my style, so here goes some election analysis.

In Washington State, progressives did pretty well, winning all the statewide offices but one, throwing their lot with Obama, and approving a couple of intiatives that would make most of my native Virginian cohort shake their heads in pity or raise their voices in rage. So, it was an excellent election.

But it struck me that an interesting thing about the final numbers (these can take a while to generate in a vote by mail state. which is pleasing to pro crastinators), is that they don't just tell us who won, but maybe also what is most important to Washington voters. Take a look at this table, which compiles the results as of November 16, 2012.

Slightly over 3 million votes cast, and the presidential race, unsurprisingly, garnered the most. He  won by a healthy margin, and appears to be even more popular than legalized marijuana and gay marriage. Perhaps the only consolation to my visiting mother (Southern, Baptist, elderly, and need I add, pretty conservative) is that Washingtonians also voted in large numbers, again, to make statewide tax hikes difficult for the legislature to pass. [Two more statewide anti-tax votes, Advisory 1 and 2, also broke in comfortable margins to seek re-instatement of tax loopholes, but far fewer people overall voted on these issues, perhaps because they were confusing or, as the "advisory' label indicates, meaningless. I cannot help but wonder how much it cost taxpayers to have these ineffectual pro-corporate statements on the ballot so as to throw a couple bones to the next round of "fiscal conservatives," but I digress. Before returning to the flow, I'd like to marvel once more at the irony that while we vote against the more remote taxes that may or may not affect us, we tend to pass local levies that certainly will.]

Inslee won the governor's office after days of nail-biting, but besides earning only a thin margin, the total votes cast in that race indicate that it was less pressing than marijuana and gay marriage. The other close statewide race, for Secretary of State, proved even less compelling if you go by number of votes (which is pretty much the point of this post, so I will); it was the only GOP win at that level, and it is interesting to note that they pulled it off with a woman. As the huge margin in the Senate race shows, however, we prefer Democratic women.

Further down the ballot, we see that even in positions as important as Supreme Court Justices, unopposed candidates are 1/3 less compelling than contested races. Along with the head of OSPI, about a million voters sat these out. [At this stage, I feel compelled to say that the 100% wins listed for these offices are certainly, if minutely, exaggerated; I know for a fact that there was a write-in for OSPI.]

The last lines in the table are for a couple of congressional races in newly defined districts. Each went Democratic in about a 60-40 split. For a while, there were rumors that gerrymandered-out Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich would run in the 10th, but it did not come to pass (I love you, Dennis, but running here would have reeked of carpetbaggery). Instead, we gave Congress Heck, a guy who's poster featured a single red star, which in many parts of the country would have been interpreted as a communist or satanic badge. I'm pretty sure he is neither, and am relived to be rid of Hererra-Beutler, who was the most unresponsive elected official I have ever dealt with.