Daily Kos

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, one of the many Florida Republicans who have benefited from weak Democratic midterm turnout

Leading Off:

• FL-Gov: With Democrats smarting badly from terrible midterm turnout, here's a truly great, outside-the-box idea: Let's move some gubernatorial races to presidential years. It's not as crazy as it sounds. As Kevin Cate, an advisor to Charlie Crist, explains, Florida's quadrennial contest for governor used to coincide with the presidential election, but segregationists grew worried that increased turnout would threaten their grip on state politics.

So they amended the state constitution to move the governor's race to the midterm cycle, which meant that the winner of the 1964 election, racist Jacksonville Mayor Haydon Burns, served only two years. But from then on, gubernatorial contests were held every four years, always during midterms.

(Incidentally, Cate says that the Dixiecrats were worried that liberals like JFK would act as "a drag on the (conservative) Democratic ticket," while scholars cited by Wikipedia elaborate that coattails from strong Republican presidential contenders where that the old political establishment feared. In any event, the gambit failed. Burns lost to a more liberal candidate in the 1966 primary, Miami Mayor Robert King High, whom he'd defeated two years previously. Burns wouldn't endorse High afterward, and the intra-party split led to Florida electing its first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Claude Kirk.)

Now, though, there's no reason why Democrats can't simply return things to the way they once were. Cate thinks that a measure to move gubernatorial races back to the presidential cycle would cost just $4 million, though that's just for signatures. Actually getting the 60 percent needed to amend the constitution would cost a lot more. But Charlie Crist spent almost $50 million this year to fall just short of beating GOP Gov. Rick Scott, and now that money is gone.

By contrast, a successful ballot measure (which would entirely bypass the Republican legislature) would pay dividends for years to come. It might also be possible to push similar shifts in states like Michigan and Ohio. Republicans will surely howl that Democrats want to "rig" the system, but all these changes would simply be aimed at increasing the voter pool for important races. That's just the right thing to do.

Charlie Crist suffered from weak midterm turnout compared to presidential years

So they amended the state constitution to move the governor's race to the midterm cycle, which meant that the winner of the 1964 election, racist Jacksonville Mayor Haydon Burns, served only two years. But from then on, gubernatorial contests were held every four years, always during midterms.

(Incidentally, Cate says that the Dixiecrats were worried that liberals like JFK would act as "a drag on the (conservative) Democratic ticket," while scholars cited by Wikipedia elaborate that coattails from strong Republican presidential contenders where that the old political establishment feared. In any event, the gambit failed. Burns lost to a more liberal candidate in the 1966 primary, Miami Mayor Robert King High, whom he'd defeated two years previously. Burns wouldn't endorse High afterward, and the intra-party split led to Florida electing its first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Claude Kirk.)

Now, though, there's no reason why Democrats can't simply return things to the way they once were. Cate thinks that a measure to move gubernatorial races back to the presidential cycle would cost just $4 million, though that's just for signatures. Actually getting the 60 percent needed to amend the constitution would cost a lot more. But Crist spent almost $50 million this year to fall just short of beating GOP Gov. Rick Scott, and now that money is gone.

By contrast, a successful ballot measure (which would entirely bypass the Republican legislature) would pay dividends for years to come—and if Crist could have run in 2012 or 2016, he'd surely have won. It might also be possible to push similar shifts in states like Michigan and Ohio. Republicans will surely howl that Democrats want to "rig" the system, but all these changes would simply be aimed at increasing the voter pool for important races. It's not a silver bullet, and there are still many other things the party has to work on, but it's still the right thing to do.

Democratic Rep. Ami Bera

• CA-07: We'll lead off with some good news for Team Blue. On Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Ami Bera took the lead for the first time. An additional 22,839 ballots (more than we believed were still out) were counted and Bera moved from a 530-vote deficit to a 711-vote edge.

There are about 19,000 ballots left in Sacramento County, which contains the entire district. About 58 percent of county voters cast a ballot in this district, so we estimate that there are 11,000 in the 7th District. On Friday more mail ballots are scheduled to be processed. However, the provisionals will take longer to verify and count: County election officials say it will be another week before all the ballots are counted.

Republican Doug Ose would need to win the remaining votes by about 7 points to pull ahead. The problem for Ose is that he's been losing ground since election night, and he'll need the remaining late ballots to be much redder than any of the other batches. Democrats shouldn't pop the Champagne just yet, but it looks like Bera may have prevailed in 2014's most expensive House race.

Head below the fold for a look to find out what races have concluded since Wednesday, and where other uncalled contests stand.

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8:33 AM PT (Jeff Singer): AZ-02: On Wednesday the final ballots (including 208 newly discovered votes) were added to the count, giving Republican Martha McSally a 161-vote lead over Democratic Rep. Ron Barber. A mandatory recount will be ordered, and we won't have a final result until December. McSally has declared victory but Barber is not conceding.

10:20 AM PT (Jeff Singer): VT-Gov: Republican Scott Milne came dangerously close to upsetting Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin on election night, losing only 46.5 to 45.3 percent. Because no one took a majority the state legislature will pick the new governor: Democrats dominate both chambers and there's really no doubt that they'll go with Shumlin, as they did in 2010. The last time the legislature chose the gubernatorial candidate who didn't get the most votes was 1853.

While Milne acknowledges that Shumlin did win a plurality, he is arguing that the legislature should break with tradition and choose him instead. Milne claims that since he won a majority of the legislative seats, he deserves to be picked. State Republican Party Chairman David Sunderland is also calling on legislators to vote the way their constituents voted and pick Milne.

On the facts Milne and Sunderland are correct: Milne did win more seats than Shumlin. Our preliminary analysis finds that Milne won 53 House seats to Shumlin's 51. House seats can have either one or two representatives each, and we found that of the 150 state representatives, 79 sit in Milne seats. Milne won eight of the 13 Senate seats. However, 15 senators represent Shumlin districts while 15 represent Milne constituencies.

Milne still doesn't have a particularly strong case though. As we've noted in the past, Vermont's map is a bit to the right of the state. In the 2012 presidential race the median House seat was 4 points more Republican than the state, while the median Senate seat was 9 points to the right. Vermont is normally so blue that this doesn't do the Republicans much good: Obama carried every single legislative district. However, in the gubernatorial race district-by-district results make Milne look stronger than he is. While the median Senate seat voted for Shumlin by a similar margin as the entire state, Milne won the median House seat 46.6 to 43.8: 4 points better than his statewide performance.

These lines were drawn by Democrats and signed into law by Shumlin himself, so he can't blame the GOP for leaving him with an unfavorable map. Still, it's clear that in this case, the House results aren't representative of how the state voted. It's a similar situation as the 2012 presidential race where Romney lost the national popular vote by 4 points but still took a majority of the congressional districts. It's almost impossible to imagine the legislature going with Milne's argument and breaking tradition: Shumlin's plurality win was shockingly weak but it was still a win.

11:08 AM PT: DSCC, NRSC: Democrats went with an untraditional choice for their new DSCC chief, picking Montana Sen. Jon Tester on Thursday. (Delaware Sen. Chris Coons withdrew from consideration.) Committee chairs have generally been cut from more of the establishment-insider mold and often hail from blue states in the Northeast. Tester, an organic farmer who lost three fingers in a farm accident at the age of 9, represents a decidedly red state, and with his trademark flat-top, he definitely doesn't look like central casting's idea of a senator—something he's often played to his advantage.

Tester certainly knows a lot about winning difficult races on hostile turf, and before joining the U.S. Senate, he helped Democrats win back the Montana state Senate. But as with any DSCC chair, Tester will be judged by whether he can raise money and recruit good candidates, especially since Democrats badly need to take full advantage of the favorable map they'll have in 2016. Perhaps by presenting a face that's a little less buttoned-down than that of his predecessors, he'll have success with both.

Meanwhile, on the GOP side, Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker beat out his Nevada colleague, Dean Heller, to helm the NRSC. On paper, Heller seemed to be the better option, since he, like Tester, has had to win election on less-than-friendly territory; Wicker, by contrast, has been on cruise control in conservative Mississippi. However, according to Sarah Mimms, it sounds like Wicker is more of a party loyalist, a quality Republicans always value highly.

12:50 PM PT: FL-Gov: With Democrats smarting badly from terrible midterm turnout, here's a truly great, outside-the-box idea: Let's move some gubernatorial races to presidential years. It's not as crazy as it sounds. As Kevin Cate, an advisor to Charlie Crist, explains, Florida's quadrennial contest for governor used to coincide with the presidential election, but segregationists grew worried that increased turnout would threaten their grip on state politics.

So they amended the state constitution to move the governor's race to the midterm cycle, which meant that the winner of the 1964 election, racist Jacksonville Mayor Haydon Burns, served only two years. But from then on, gubernatorial contests were held every four years, always during midterms.

(Incidentally, Cate says that the Dixiecrats were worried that liberals like JFK would act as "a drag on the (conservative) Democratic ticket," while scholars cited by Wikipedia elaborate that coattails from strong Republican presidential contenders where that the old political establishment feared. In any event, the gambit failed. Burns lost to a more liberal candidate in the 1966 primary, Miami Mayor Robert King High, whom he'd defeated two years previously. Burns wouldn't endorse High afterward, and the intra-party split led to Florida electing its first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Claude Kirk.)

Now, though, there's no reason why Democrats can't simply return things to the way they once were. Cate thinks that a measure to move gubernatorial races back to the presidential cycle would cost just $4 million, though that's just for signatures. Actually getting the 60 percent needed to amend the constitution would cost a lot more. But Charlie Crist spent almost $50 million this year to fall just short of beating GOP Gov. Rick Scott, and now that money is gone.

By contrast, a successful ballot measure (which would entirely bypass the Republican legislature) would pay dividends for years to come. It might also be possible to push similar shifts in states like Michigan and Ohio. Republicans will surely howl that Democrats want to "rig" the system, but all these changes would simply be aimed at increasing the voter pool for important races. That's just the right thing to do.

1:25 PM PT (Jeff Singer): NV-Sen: It's no secret that national Republicans are doing everything they possibly can to get popular Gov. Brian Sandoval to run against Democratic Sen. Harry Reid in 2016. Sandoval is reportedly very reluctant to run though, and on Wednesday he repeated his commitment to serving out his new four-year term. This is far from a Shermanesque statement and his party is going to keep pushing him until he either takes the plunge or makes it absolutely clear that he's not running.

Nevertheless, Reid's Republican colleague Den Heller has named a few backup candidates: Reps. Mark Amodei and Joe Heck, and Lt. Gov.-elect Mark Hutchison. Amodei ran for this seat in 2010, but dropped out when he failed to gain any traction. His profile has increased since he was elected to Congress, and he'd be a much better get for the GOP now. However, Amodei hails from a red northern Nevada seat and he doesn't have much experience winning over swing voters, though he did easily defeat a well-funded Democrat in the 2011 special election.

By contrast, Heck held his suburban Las Vegas seat by a 50-43 margin even as Obama was taking it 50-49. Hutchison also has experience winning over crossover voters in southern Nevada. He won his state Senate seat 51-49 as Obama was taking 52-47 there; Hutchison also just won his statewide race 60-34. While Reid is not the most popular guy in the world he proved in 2010 that he'll do whatever it takes to win, and all of his would-be Republicans rivals know that this will not be an easy race.

2:42 PM PT (Jeff Singer): LA-Sen: Republican Bill Cassidy has released an internal poll ahead of his Dec. 6 runoff with Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, and it's about as ugly as you'd expect. Magellan Strategies finds Cassidy up 57-41: In the November jungle primary Cassidy, tea partier Rob Maness, and a Some Dude Republican led Landrieu and a few minor Democrats 56-43, so this result is unfortunately plausible.

Somewhat weirdly, the poll asks voters about Congress's priorities before the horserace number, which could influence the results. This is the first post-Nov. 4 survey to see the light of day: If Landrieu does have a poll showing her still in the fight she'll definitely want to release it soon, especially since her own party appears to have given up on her.

2:59 PM PT: VA State House: Virginia is one of just four states holding legislative elections next year, and since the others are Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Jersey, the Old Dominion is the most interesting of the quartet. As Johnny Longtorso recently explained, Democrats would need a lot of luck to take back the state Senate, but hopefully they can make some gets in the lower chamber, where they're still deep in the minority.

One state House special election is right around the corner: On Jan. 6, both sides will square off in the 34th District, which will soon be vacant because GOP Del. Barbara Comstock just won a seat in Congress. Comstock Democrat Kathleen Murphy by just 422 votes last year, and Obama even carried the 34th by about half a percentage point. Statewide Democrats who ran in 2013 did considerably better, with Mark Herring prevailing 55-45 in the ultra-tight attorney general's race (which was ultimately decided by a recount).

Murphy is running again, and it looks like she'll be the unanimous choice of party leaders at a caucus on Saturday. Republicans, meanwhile, will conduct a firehouse primary the same day to choose between consultant Allen Johnson and businessman Craig Parisot. This will still be a tough pickup for Murphy with no help at the top of the ticket, but it's still a good shot for Team Blue.

Other opportunities will have to wait until November, but another strong candidate from 2012, Jennifer Boysko, says she'll try once more, too. Boysko lost even more narrowly to Republican Del. Tom Rust, falling short just 60 votes after a recount. Rust's 86th District is solidly blue—Obama won it 60-39—and only his reputation as a longtime moderate has allowed him to hold on. But Rust is 73 and could retire, though no matter how he chooses to go, his number will come up one day soon.

3:13 PM PT (Jeff Singer): DSCC, DCCC: Senate and House Democrats have already begun considering candidates for the 2016 cycle, and their wish lists include a lot of very familiar faces.

On the Senate side, the National Journal reports that defeated incumbents Kay Hagan and Mark Begich are potential candidates against their soon-to-be former homestate colleagues Richard Burr and Lisa Murkowski respectively. Begich is also reportedly considering a run against Republican Rep. Don Young, whose ethics and behavior have gotten him in trouble more than once. There are plenty of other names on the list, but probably the most likely repeat candidate is Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania. Sestak narrowly lost the 2010 Senate race to Republican Sen. Pat Toomey and he's made it no secret that he's very interested in a rematch.

Over in the House, Roll Call reports that the DCCC is already eying five unsuccessful 2014 candidates for another run. Emily Cain narrowly lost the open Maine 2nd District so it's no surprise that she's being recruited again. Andrew Romanoff didn't get close to taking out Rep. Mike Coffman in the swingy CO-06 but he raised a boatload of money, and he should have a much better shot in a bluer year.

Three defeated incumbents are also being asked to try and get their seats back: Brad Schneider of IL-10; Steven Horsford of NV-04; and Pete Gallego of TX-23. Schneider fell 4 points short defending an ancestrally Republican seat and Gallego only narrowly lost a light red swing constituency, and it makes sense to try and get them back. Horsford is a bit more surprising, since he did lose a 55-44 Obama seat to the underfunded Cresent Hardy.

However, Horsford was largely the victim of turnout problems at the top of the ticket, and party leaders may feel he did the best he could with a bad hand. The GOP wave also did a number on the Democrat's Nevada bench, so there may not be too many other viable candidates. If Horsford isn't interested, 2014 lieutenant governor nominee Lucy Flores, who lives in the district, may be a good alternative. Flores badly lost to Republican Mark Hutchison but that also may have been due to poor turnout instead of anything she did wrong.

Democratic Rep. Ami Bera

Leading Off:

• CA-07: On Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Ami Bera took the lead for the first time. An additional 22,839 ballots (more than we believed were still out) were counted and Bera moved from a 530-vote deficit to a 711-vote edge.

There are about 19,000 ballots left in Sacramento County, which contains the entire district. About 58 percent of county voters cast a ballot in this district, so we estimate that there are 11,000 in the 7th District. On Friday more mail ballots are scheduled to be processed. However, the provisionals will take longer to verify and count: County election officials say it will be another week before all the ballots are counted.

Republican Doug Ose would need to win the remaining votes by about 7 points to pull ahead. The problem for Ose is that he's been losing ground since election night, and he'll need the remaining late ballots to be much redder than any of the other batches. Democrats shouldn't pop the Champagne just yet, but it looks like Bera may have prevailed in 2014's most expensive House race.

Republican Gov. Sean Parnell

Called Races:

• AK-Sen: On Tuesday, 17,000 additional ballots were counted statewide. Republican Dan Sullivan's lead over Democratic incumbent Mark Begich slipped only 238 votes, not nearly enough for Begich to win. Most media outlets called the race for Sullivan on Wednesday morning, though Begich has not conceded. Pretty much all the remaining ballots would need to come from Begich's stronghold in rural Alaska for him to have a shot at winning, and that looks very unlikely.

Uncalled Races:

• AK-Gov: While Republicans were clinching the Senate seat, Republican Gov. Sean Parnell's fortunes were moving in the opposite direction: Independent Bill Walker's lead over Parnell grew by 839 votes and now stands at 4,004. There are about 33,400 ballots left, though election officials say more can come in before the Friday deadline.

The math looks pretty tough for Parnell, especially since he lost far more ground than Sullivan. The next round of counting is scheduled for Friday. It's not clear when all the ballots will be tabulated, though the state hopes they'll have the results certified by Nov. 28—two days before the gubernatorial inauguration day.

Head below the fold for a look at where other uncalled contests stand.

Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here.

7:53 AM PT: AK-Sen, Gov: After more votes were counted on Tuesday, the AP has now called Alaska's Senate race for Republican Dan Sullivan. However, Democratic Sen. Mark Begich is not conceding, saying he wants every vote to be counted. Meanwhile, in the gubernatorial race, GOP Gov. Sean Parnell made up a little ground on independent Bill Walker but he still trails by just over than 1 percent.

8:13 AM PT (Jeff Singer): Uncalled Races: Several races remain uncalled as of Wednesday morning. We recently ran through them here and here is an update for each race where we have new information. You can check who has won each key race at our uncalled races tracker.

11:08 AM PT (Jeff Singer): LA-Sen: With Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu looking like the clear underdog ahead of the Dec. 6 runoff, Senate Democrats think they have one last ace-in-the-hole that could help her. They are reportedly considering a vote on the Keystone Pipeline: Their hope is that if it passes, Landrieu can remind voters how influential she is on energy issues. It's far from guaranteed that the vote will even take place and it's very unlikely that anything will be signed into law before the runoff: The whole thing really just feels like a Hail Mary (no pun intended).

Of course, if Senate Democrats really thought Landrieu can win, they would be giving her some reinforcements on the air. Right now Republican Bill Cassidy and his allies are dominating the airwaves: For every Landrieu ad, there have been 24 Republican spots.

12:02 PM PT: DCCC: Democratic Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, who just won re-election to a second term last week, says he is "not pursuing" the chairmanship of the DCCC, reportedly despite entreaties that he consider the job. Kennedy is just 34 (dude was born in 1980!), but of course he has a legendary family name and has already proven himself a strong fundraiser. But he has a long career ahead of him, and if he wants the gig in the future, it'll be his for the taking.

12:27 PM PT: Deaths: Longtime Republican Rep. Marge Roukema died on Wednesday at the age of 85. Roukema's personal story reflects the hard-right turn her party has taken over the last several decades. Roukema was swept into office during the Reagan revolution of 1980 and represented northern New Jersey for 22 years, but even though she took office at the same time as the Gipper, she was generally a moderate.

Toward the end of her career, the ultra-conservative Scott Garrett began to challenge Roukema biennially in the GOP primary, coming very close to victory in both 1998 and 2000. But redistricting then made the 5th District even more conservative, prompting Roukema to retire. Garrett secured the Republican nomination in 2002—though Roukema refused to endorse him—and he's held the seat ever since, all the while compiling one of the most far-right voting records of any member of Congress. It's a very different party than the one Roukema once knew.

12:55 PM PT: NE-02: Brad Ashford's victory over GOP Rep. Lee Terry was one of the biggest—hell, one of the only—wins for Democrats on election night, and it's no surprise that Republicans are already painting a target on Ashford's back. Barack Obama narrowly carried the Omaha-based 2nd District in 2008 (famously winning a single electoral vote, too), but the seat reverted to form in 2012, going for Mitt Romney by a 53-46 margin.

Ashford was able to defeat Terry because of the incumbent's deep unpopularity, including shtick that pissed off average joes and fire-breathing conservatives alike. But now Ashford sits in one of the reddest districts held by a Democrat, so of course Republicans are looking for revenge. Tea partier Chip Maxwell, a former state legislator who very nearly ran as a splitter campaign as true-believer independent this year, already says he's going to seek the GOP nomination in 2016.

But other, stronger Republicans are likely to jump in as well. However, with presidential-year turnout, Ashford may not be that easy to unseat, especially if the Democratic nominee for president decides to make a play for Omaha's electoral vote just as Obama once did.

12:59 PM PT (Jeff Singer): CA-26: On Wednesday Ventura County, which makes up the vast majority of this district, counted another 20,550 ballots. Democratic Rep. Julia Brownley more than doubled her overall lead, going from a 1,030 vote edge over Republican Jeff Gorell to 2,370. There were about 40,000 uncounted ballots before this update so there are probably roughly 20,000 left. Gorell would need to win them by about 12 points: Given that he's been losing ground since Election Night, this doesn't look particularly likely.

1:18 PM PT (Jeff Singer): NY-25: Our long Upstate New York nightmare is over: On Wednesday, Republican Mark Assini conceded to Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter. The new ballots boosted Slaughter's lead from 582 to 869 votes, still an embarrassingly close finish for a longtime incumbent who was almost universally viewed as safe.

1:48 PM PT: VA-Sen: One thing we've been wondering about ever since election night is where the hell were all the GOP internals? In almost every single race, the polling averages were heavily skewed toward the Democrats, so if Republican candidates had better numbers, why weren't they sharing them to at least push back against the prevailing narratives? With a couple of rare exceptions, though (like Larry Hogan's survey in the Maryland gubernatorial race), we really didn't see any.

And that may be because there weren't any. According to the Washington Post, Ed Gillespie's final poll, conducted three weeks before the election, found him down double digits to Democratic Sen. Mark Warner. That may well have saved Warner, because if Gillespie had been able to convince national Republicans that an upset was brewing, additional resources could have tilted the 1-point final outcome in his favor.

Warner's camp, meanwhile, claims they did know the race would be a nail-biter, but they wanted to project an aura of inevitability that would keep Gillespie's erstwhile allies out. That choice, though, became a two-edged sword, because it wound up suppressing enthusiasm for Warner since everyone figured he was going to win handily.

Still, though, you have to wonder why Republicans couldn't come up with more favorable data—which also would have been more accurate data! You'd think that Tom Cotton would have wanted to drive a few nails into Mark Pryor's coffin with polling showing him up 15 points, but we never saw anything like that. So were GOP firms all over-correcting for their heavy Republican biases in 2012? Or did some of these races break so late that polling couldn't capture the movement in time? Unless some Republican pollsters start sharing their private data, we may never know.

2:00 PM PT (Jeff Singer): LA-Sen: Unsurprisingly the House Republican leadership is quickly moving to mitigate whatever political advantage Landrieu may be able to get. They're planning to vote on a Keystone bill... only it will be Republican Bill Cassidy's. Landrieu is hoping to use this issue to argue that she can be much more effective on energy issues than her Republican rival, but the GOP is definitely going to ensure that Cassidy gets credit if Keystone goes forward.

2:11 PM PT: IL-Sen: By all rights, GOP Sen. Mark Kirk, who defeated a weak Democratic candidate in a huge Republican year, should be a big target for Team Blue in 2016. First, though, they need to find a candidate. Rep. Tammy Duckworth, who just won re-election last week to a second term, would be an appealing option, but she's about to have her first child and apparently isn't so keen on the idea. Other alternatives include Rep. Bill Foster (who'd be great) and state Sen. Kwame Raoul, who represents Barack Obama's old seat and has grown increasingly prominent in recent years.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan is a longer-shot possibility, but she has consistently refused to take the leap to higher office, so it doesn't pay to spend a lot of time focusing on her. And Greg Hinz offers one truly out-there possibility: Gov. Pat Quinn, who was just defeated last weak by Republican Bruce Rauner. Supposedly, some unhappy Chicago aldermen want Quinn to run against Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but with the filing deadline scarcely 10 days away, that seems implausible. And given how unpopular Quinn is, another statewide bid would be quite painful. But who knows?

2:23 PM PT: VT-Gov: Republican Scott Milne, who finished about 2,500 votes behind Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, says he won't seek a recount, given how "unlikely" it would be to change the results. (He's right.) However, because neither candidate won a plurality, state legislators will choose the next governor in January. The same thing happened in 2010, and Vermont's Democratic-dominated legislature easily awarded the governorship to Shumlin, who, then as now, won a plurality of the votes.

However, Milne is making noises that suggest he might ask lawmakers to break with tradition and pick him anyway, even though the last time the legislature selected anyone other than the plurality winner for governor was 1853. (It did happen more recently in a race for lieutenant governor back in 1970, but there, the leading candidate was dogged by corruption allegations.) He's planning some sort of announcement next week, so we'll see what kind of argument, if any, he tries to make.

2:57 PM PT (Jeff Singer): CA-26: And sure enough, the Associated Press has called this for Brownley.

3:13 PM PT (Jeff Singer): MS-Gov, LG: Mississippi Democrats don't have much of a statewide bench, but one potential candidate may be making a move. Northern District Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley is holding a Washington fundraiser with big names like former Gov. William Winter and Rep. Bennie Thompson, and he's been raising his profile around the state for a while. Presley's being coy about his intentions but there is plenty of speculation that he'll run statewide in 2015, possibly for governor or lieutenant governor.

Gov. Phil Bryant and Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves are up for re-election in 2015, and neither Republican appears to have done anything to put them in jeopardy in such a conservative state. Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood has not announced if he'll seek another term yet though; if he steps aside, it'll probably be easier for Presley to take his place than to try and knock off a Republican incumbent.  

3:24 PM PT (Jeff Singer): ME-Gov, 02: Democrat Mike Michaud has been pretty silent since his loss to Republican Gov. Paul LePage last week, but there's plenty of speculation about his future. While there's always a possibility that Michaud will just close the door on elected office, there is talk of him making another run for governor in 2018 when LePage is termed out.

Interestingly, there hasn't been much chatter about him running for his old seat against Republican Rep.-elect Bruce Poliquin. It is pretty rare for former representatives to try and regain their House seats after failing to win a promotion, but it's far from unheard of: Republican Rep. Steve Pearce retook his New Mexico district in 2010 after losing a Senate bid two years before for instance.

3:35 PM PT (Jeff Singer): NV-Sen: Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid will be up for re-election in 2016 and there's no question which Republican is at the top of the NRSC wish list. Republican Sen. Dean Heller and other Senate Republicans are working hard to convince Gov. Brian Sandoval to run. Sandoval has proven to be incredibly popular in this light blue state, and Democrats couldn't even recruit a remotely credible candidate to run against him this year. Sandoval seems very reluctant to take the plunge, but national Republicans are going to do everything they possibly can to change his mind.

3:53 PM PT (Jeff Singer): CA-16: On Wednesday the Fresno County portion of the district counted another 2,589 ballots. Democratic Rep. Jim Costa was depending on Fresno to put him over the top and for now it has: After trailing by 741 ballots, Costa now leads Some Dude Republican Johnny Tacherra by 86 votes. There are reportedly 600 mail in ballots and 10,000 provisionals left in all of Fresno County: We estimate that about 2,300 of them are in the district.

It could take more than a week for all the ballots to be validated and counted, so it may be a while before we have a resolution. We know that Tacherra-friendly Madera and Merced have 722 and 1,505 ballots left to count respectively. Assuming the remaining votes break the same way the rest of their counties have, Costa should net about 240 more votes. This race should not be anywhere near as close as it is, and Costa's own complacency is largely to blame for this photo finish, but it looks like the congressman is on track to pull off a narrow win regardless.

4:27 PM PT (Jeff Singer): CA-07: After trailing since Election Day, Democratic Rep. Ami Bera took the lead for the first time on Wednesday. An additional 22,839 ballots (more than we believed were still out) were counted and Bera moved from a 530 vote deficit to a 711 vote lead.

There are about 19,000 ballots left to be counted in Sacramento County, which contains the entire district. About 58 percent of county voters cast a ballot in this district, so we estimate that there are 11,000 left in the 7th District. Republican Doug Ose would need to win them by about 5 points to pull ahead. The problem for Ose is that he's been losing ground since Election Night, and he'll need the remaining late ballots to be much redder than any of the other batches. Democrats shouldn't pop the champaign just yet, but it looks like Bera may have prevailed in 2014's most expensive House race.

4:39 PM PT (Jeff Singer): CA-07: Ose's math is actually a little steeper. He'd need to win the remaining ballots by a little less than 7 points.

4:51 PM PT (Jeff Singer): CA-07: On Friday more mail ballots are scheduled to be processed. However, the provisionals will take longer to verify and count: County election officials say it will be another week before all the ballots are counted.

5:18 PM PT (Jeff Singer): LA-Sen: The Senate will vote on Landrieu's bill next week.

Good news... for Martha McSally!

Leading Off:

• AZ-02: On Tuesday most of the remaining ballots were counted in this swing district, and it appears that Republican Martha McSally has unseated Democratic Rep. Ron Barber. McSally currently leads Barber by 133 votes, with only about 200 to 250 ballots remaining countywide. Unless there's been a major error somewhere, this is a GOP pickup.

Because the margin between the two candidates is less than 0.1 percent, a mandatory recount will take place, but Team Blue shouldn't get its hopes up that the result will change. It will be a while before we have a final official result though. Arizona Public Media lays out what we're in for:

A congressional race in Arizona is subject to recount if the margin is fewer than 200 votes after the official secretary of state's canvass and certification, scheduled for Dec. 1.

The secretary then would go to Maricopa County Superior Court, where a judge would issue an order for the recount, which would be conducted electronically by the secretary of state. Following a hand count of a small number of randomly selected precincts and comparison of that with the electronic count.

If the count is within a predesignated margin, the results will be declared final, and the judge will issue an order to that effect.

Victorious Democrat Erin Oban

Not only did Measure 1 implode, its chief proponent, Republican state Sen. Margaret Sitte, also lost, and by a big spread as well: Democrat Erin Oban, pictured above, ousted Sitte with a crushing 58-41 victory. In addition to her fanatically anti-choice activism, it certainly helped that Sitte is bugnuts crazy. As community member by Rashaverak detailed last year, Sitte opposed a bill that would require caretakers to notify the authorities if a child goes missing or dies. Why?

I affectionately call this bill the "Make Mary and Joseph Felons Bill," because Jesus was missing for three days.

What makes Sitte's defeat even more amazing is that her 35th District is very, very red—in fact, it went for Mitt Romney 60-38 in 2012. The means Oban out-performed Barack Obama by an astounding 39 points despite the massive GOP wave. There may not be any other Democrat in the nation who can lay claim to a feat like that. In a year with very few positive developments for Team Blue, this surely counts as welcome news.

Democratic Rep. Ami Bera is down but not out

• CA-07: On Monday, Republican Doug Ose's lead over Democratic Rep. Ami Bera fell from 2,183 votes to 530. There are about 30,000 ballots left in Sacramento County, and we estimate that about 18,300 of them are in the district. Bera needs to win them by about 3 points, which looks quite possible; he won the ballots counted on Monday by 6. More ballots are scheduled to be counted on Wednesday at 7:00 PM Eastern.

Head below the fold for a look at where other uncalled contests stand.

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8:25 AM PT (Jeff Singer): Uncalled Races: Several races remain uncalled as of Tuesday morning. We recently ran through them here and here is a roundup of what we know for each race. You can check who has won each key race at our race tracker here, and you can also keep an eye on our continuously updated list of uncalled races.

9:20 AM PT (Jeff Singer): Uncalled Races: To help keep track of where all the uncalled races are, we've put together a tracker with current vote totals from each race. We'll be updating it as new ballots are counted.

12:04 PM PT: IL Treasurer: Outside of Alaska, the only remaining uncalled statewide race from last week is the battle for state treasurer in Illinois. The post was open this year because Republican incumbent Dan Rutherford made a disastrous bid for governor that crashed and burned in the GOP primary. That set up a fight between Republican Tom Cross and Democrat Mike Frerichs, and man is it ever close. According to Scott Kennedy, who runs the aptly named website Illinois Election Data, Cross now leads by just 492 votes out of almost 3.5 million cast, or barely one hundredth of a percent.

That's down from a 22,000-vote edge for Cross on election night, so of course Republicans are now hollering about voter fraud!!!11!. It's not clear how many votes remain to be counted statewide, and we probably won't have clarity until on or after Nov. 18 (when election officials will stop accepting mailed-in ballots). But stick with Kennedy, who has stayed on top of this contest very closely.

12:23 PM PT: GA-Sen: Unlike this year, the Peach State won't see another open Senate race in 2016: GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson says he'll seek a third term, sparing his party the need to defend a potentially vulnerable seat in a year when Democratic turnout is likely to be stronger. With Isakson running again, it's unlikely Democrats will try to make a serious effort here. But if Georgia somehow winds up in play on the presidential level, a capable challenger could find this race suddenly competitive, so the party should prepare for that possibility, even if it's a longshot.

P.S. Kudos to Isakson for announcing so early. He'll be 71 by Election Day, so it wasn't unreasonable to imagine he might retire. But instead of dragging things out as so many senators have done so many times, often to the detriment of their own parties, Isakson wasted no time in in making his plans perfectly clear. Anyone else considering retirement should follow suit and announce before the year is over.

12:35 PM PT: WATN?: Philip Bump takes a look

12:36 PM PT: WATN?: Philip Bump takes a look at the 29 Democrats who captured House seats from the GOP during the 2006 wave that returned control of the chamber to the blue team after a 12-year sojourn in the wilderness. Only six still remain: Jerry McNerney (CA-09), Ed Perlmutter (CO-07), Joe Courtney (CT-02), Dave Loebsack (IA-02), John Yarmuth (KY-03), and Tim Walz (MN-01). (Bump also lists VT-AL's Peter Welch, but he picked up a seat from independent Bernie Sanders, who always caucused with the Democrats.)

The rest either ran for higher office, some successfully (e.g., Chris Murphy), and some not (e.g., Bruce Braley); lost to Republicans (like Carol Shea-Porter, twice); or just flat-out retired (Heath Shuler and Gabby Giffords). Former Pennsylvania Rep. Jason Altmire has the unique distinction of losing in a primary to a colleague, Mark Critz, after the two were thrown together by Republicans in redistricting, though Critz went on to lose in the November general election.

1:07 PM PT: ND State Senate: Here's another one for the silver linings pile: As you may know, North Dakota's insidious fetal personhood amendment went down to defeat last week, and it didn't just fail, it got destroyed by a decisive 64-36 margin. That's pretty impressive loss for such a red state in such a red year, but it gets better. Not only did Measure 1 implode, its chief proponent, Republican state Sen. Margaret Sitte, also lost, and by a big spread as well: Democrat Erin Oban ousted Sitte with a crushing 58-41 victory.

Even more amazing, Sitte's 35th District is very red—it went for Mitt Romney 60-38 in 2012. The means Oban out-performed Barack Obama by an astounding 39 points despite the massive GOP wave. There may not be any other Democrat in the nation who can lay claim to a feat like that. In a year with very few positive developments for Team Blue, this surely counts as welcome news.

2:00 PM PT (Jeff Singer): CA Assembly: Since Friday, it's been clear that Democrats have lost their supermajority in the state Assembly. Team Blue also fell one seat short in the state Senate. The two-thirds supermajority would have allowed Democrats to raise taxes and place constitutional amendments on the ballot without Republican votes. However, GOP's victory was more symbolic than anything else: Republicans wanted to show donors and potential recruits that they could still win tough races in the Golden State. Democrats may be able to get the Assembly supermajority back in 2016, but they don't have any good Senate targets next cycle.

2:04 PM PT (Jeff Singer): State Legislatures: Several state legislative seats still remain uncalled, and Ballotpedia has created a tracker to keep an eye on them. No chambers are at stake, but the Democratic supermajority in the Illinois House depends on them holding HD-79. Democrats also want to hold the two remaining Colorado Senate seats, which would give them an easier path back to the majority in 2016.

2:08 PM PT (Jeff Singer): San Jose: Despite trailing in the few publicly released polls, City Councilmember Sam Liccardo has been elected as San Jose's new mayor. On Monday, fellow Democrat and Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese conceded, ending this close race. Liccardo's win is a disappointment for labor, who hoped that Cortese could roll back some of outgoing Mayor Chuck Reed's pension reforms; several labor-backed city council candidates also lost.

2:15 PM PT (Jeff Singer): WA-04: Even though multiple media outlets have called this contest for Dan Newhouse, intra-party rival Clint Didier declared on Wednesday that he wasn't conceding.  Newhouse currently leads by 2,614 votes with only about 3,240 votes left. Didier says he wants every vote to be counted which is noble but not a particularly good reason to hold out hope for an upset: Didier would need to win the remaining ballots with about an 81 point margin to win.

2:18 PM PT (Jeff Singer): LA-Sen: Did you miss watching GOP ads tying Democratic candidates to Obama? If you did you're in luck, because the NRSC returns to the Pelican State with a new spot linking Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu to the president.

2:25 PM PT (Jeff Singer): VA State Senate: The entire Virginia legislature will be up in 2015, and Daily Kos Elections community member Johnny Longtorso takes a look at the state of play in the state Senate. While Democrats only need one seat to take back the majority, they're almost entirely on the defensive this time: It may be a while before the chamber returns to Team Blue.

2:26 PM PT (David Jarman): Psychographics: If you're interested in the nexus of politics and retail (not retail politics, but actual retail), no doubt you're aware of the Starbucks vs. WalMart ratio that Nate Silver pioneered in 2008, then followed a few years later by Dave Wasserman's more refined and precise Whole Foods vs. Cracker Barrel ratio. However, thanks to a new app created for Time Magazine by AggData, we can now pinpoint the most polarized retail duo: the American Apparel vs. Belk ratio! (In case you're not familiar with them, American Apparel mostly targets 20-somethings in major cities, while Belk is a mid-range department store mostly in malls in southern suburbs.)

This is only based on real estate, i.e. which congressional district their stores are located in, not the more rigorous personal data that aggregators like Experian collect. And, of course, this is only vague correlation, not causation (in other words, putting Waffle House food into your body doesn't change your brain chemistry in a way that makes you more Republican, it only shows that Waffle House is likeliest to put locations in places where people are demographically likelier to be Republican already live). Interestingly, sheer ubiquity tends to push chains more toward the middle; Starbucks and WalMart are close to the center, almost to the same extent as McDonalds, simply because they're everywhere. There's also a feature where you can type in pretty much any chain you can think of, and see what percentage of their locations are in Democratic or GOP districts.

2:32 PM PT (Jeff Singer): AZ-02: On Tuesday most of the remaining ballots were counted, and it appears that Republican Martha McSally has unseated Democratic Rep. Ron Barber. McSally currently leads Barber by 133 votes, with only about 200 to 250 ballots remaining. Unless Barber does exceptionally well among those voters, this is over. Because the margin between the two candidates is less than 200 votes a mandatory recount will take place, but Team Blue shouldn't get its hopes up that the result will be overturned.

2:50 PM PT (David Jarman): Turnout: Talking about turnout in a midterm election is kind of a misleading mixed bag, because without a presidential election at the top of the ticket, you get a lot of variation between states depending on whether there are hotly contested races or not. If you look, for instance, at Michael McDonald's latest state-by-state turnout data, you'll see that Maine (with its crazy gubernatorial race) is the state with the highest turnout this year, at 59.3 percent. That's very unusual; I don't think I've ever seen Maine on top of that list before.

Usually it's one of the Northwest's vote-by-mail states or the Upper Midwest, but this year, Minnesota (51.3) and Oregon (52.0) didn't have especially competitive gubernatorial or Senate races, and Washington (38.6) didn't have gubernatorial or Senate races, period. Wisconsin (56.9) did have a competitive race, good for second place, followed by Alaska (55.3) with super-competitive races, and Colorado (53.0) with not just pivotal races but also the full switch to vote-by-mail.

Who's in last place? Indiana, with no gubernatorial or Senate race at all, fared worst (28.0), but only slightly ahead of Texas (28.5), whose turnout problems are constant, and New York (28.8), where Andrew Cuomo's lack of coattails killed several Dem House members downballot. NPR puts a different spin on that chart, looking at the biggest gainers and losers compared with 2012: Missouri (32.3, down from 44.5), with no Senate or gubernatorial race either, was the biggest drop, followed by Washington. Louisiana (43.9, up from 38.9 in 2012, thanks to a very competitive Senate race) was the big gainer.

That state-to-state variation also explains why it's futile to try and read deeper meanings into shifts in thin-sliced demographic groups from 2012 to 2014, as explained by the Monkey Cage. They focused on Asian-Americans, who appear to have voted much more Republican (49 percent in 2014, instead of 23 percent in 2012). That can partly be explained simply by sample size issues (Asians are only a few percent of the nation's electorate, so the Asian slice of the exit polls are going to have a huge margin of error), but also because so many of those Asian voters were voting in Texas, where the barely-competitive gubernatorial race there inflates the overall GOP numbers.

Finally, rather than keeping on dwelling on 2014, here are some optimistic-looking projections about 2016 turnout, courtesy of the NYT's Nate Cohn. The Republicans continue to fight a losing battle against the increasing diversity of the electorate, as more and more non-white citizens age into the electorate. Even if the Republicans manage to hold turnout down to 2004 levels (instead of the higher turnout of 2008 and 2012), essentially a best-case scenario for them, the white share of the electorate will still be only the same as it was in 2012 (73.8 percent in 2016 based on 2004 turnout; 73.7 was the actual 2012 share). If the Democrats manage to keep 2012-level turnout in 2016, the white share of the electorate falls to 71.6.

3:10 PM PT (David Jarman): Election Outlook: Last week we at Daily Kos Elections experienced the shameful joy of being the most correct about how poorly the Democrats would do in the 2014 Senate races, in terms of the Brier score for our Election Outlook, compared with other major model-makers. We started wondering about whether that would also apply to our model for gubernatorial races, even though there's a limited data set there (only Huffington Post and FiveThirtyEight bothered to calculate individual odds in these races, which remain unsexy compared to the Senate despite the fact that the state houses, not the completed gridlocked Congress, is where any action is going to occur in the next couple years).

3:27 PM PT (Jeff Singer): AZ-02: Barber is not conceding and is preparing for the recount.

3:34 PM PT (Jeff Singer): AZ-02: Arizona Public Media describes the recount procedure:

A congressional race in Arizona is subject to recount if the margin is fewer than 200 votes after the official secretary of state's canvass and certification, scheduled for Dec. 1.

The secretary then would go to Maricopa County Superior Court, where a judge would issue an order for the recount, which would be conducted electronically by the secretary of state. Following a hand count of a small number of randomly selected precincts and comparison of that with the electronic count.

If the count is within a predesignated margin, the results will be declared final, and the judge will issue an order to that effect.

Retiring Republican Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick

Leading Off:

• PA-08: Woohoo! We already have our first retirement in a competitive House district for the 2016 elections—and it's good news for the blue team. GOP Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick had long promised to limit himself to four terms in Congress, and shortly after winning re-election last week, he reaffirmed his pledge. That opens up the swingy 8th District, which Barack Obama carried 53-46 in 2008 but lost by just one tenth of one percent in 2012, 49.4 to 49.3.

Republicans tried to shore up this suburban Philadelphia seat during the last round of redistricting, but they didn't make dramatic changes; under the old lines, Obama won in 2008 by a slightly wider 54-45 spread. That means this district will be hotly contested in two years' time, especially when Democrats can expect to receive a boost from presidential-year turnout.

So who can we expect to show up here? For Democrats, one intriguing option would be ex-Rep. Patrick Murphy (aka Patrick Murphy 1.0), who unseated Fitzpatrick in 2006 but lost to him in 2010. However, Murphy also lost a primary in the state attorney general's race in 2012, so with two straight losses, he may prefer to stick with his current gig as an attorney/MSNBC commentator for a while, especially since he's only 41.

Other possibilities include state Rep. Steve Santarsiero and 2014 candidate Shaughnessy Naughton. Naughton narrowly lost in the primary to Iraq vet Kevin Strouse, but Pennsylvania Democrats seem more excited about her future than his, especially after the 62-38 drubbing Strouse took at Fitzpatrick's hands on election night. As for Republicans, their most prominent potential candidate is outgoing Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley, who just got turned out of office along with Gov. Tom Corbett. Other potential GOP candidates include: Bucks County Commissioner Rob Loughery, state Rep. Scott Petri, and Sen. Chuck McIlhinney, who wouldn't have to give up his seat in order to run.

This is definitely going to be a top-tier race, so stay tuned to Daily Kos Elections as we cover this and every other competitive contest around the nation throughout the 2016 election cycle.