Everyone should bookmark this site monitoring the close races that haven’t been called in California.  There are four such races within 2% at the moment.  There’s Prop. 11, which is trending toward passage with a 131,000 vote lead.  There’s SD-19, which has some breathing room now, as Hannah-Beth Jackson leads by 1,203 votes.

And then there are the two Sacramento-area races.  Alyson Huber’s race in AD-10 has really tightened up.  She now trails Jack Sieglock by just 319 votes out of 154,000 counted.  That is well within the 1/2 of 1% territory that would trigger an automatic recount.  Which brings up an interesting question which perhaps some election junkie could answer.  The Secretary of State certifies the count on December 2.  But the new legislature is sworn in on December 1.  If there’s a race with no clear winner at that point, what happens?

Finally, we have CA-04, the race between Charlie Brown and Tom McClintock.  This has bounced around a bit, but we’re now looking at an 889 vote lead for McClintock.  There are anywhere between 48,000 and 55,000 votes left to count, based on this chart (which you can also bookmark) of unprocessed ballots.  This race also appeared headed to a recount, and if you believe this Daily Kos diarist, Brown has a good shot at making up ground, because there are so many outstanding votes in Nevada County, where Brown did best.

We know these counts and recounts are expensive, and now two groups have stepped up with their support of Charlie while we sort this out.  Wes Clark sent an email to his list today:

Our friend Charlie Brown needs our help. The margin in California’s 4th Congressional District is razor thin, and they’re still counting votes. After more than 300,000 ballots were cast in CA-04, the race is tied. The current difference stands at less than half of 1% (less than 500 votes).

With 40,000 vote-by-mail and provisional ballots still to be counted, the race is way too close to call. That’s why it’s critical for us to make sure all the votes are counted in CA-04.

Please contribute to Charlie Brown’s Election Protection Fund today!

Charlie’s opponent, Tom McClintock, has hired an election attorney and brought in a team of lawyers to “watch” the locations where absentee and provisional ballots are being counted. McClintock’s team is doing everything they can to challenge the votes of thousands of people who faithfully cast their ballots.

Charlie needs our help to fight back.

And DFA has done the same:

In 2000, we lost the election when the Bush campaign beat us in the legal and media fight that followed.  In 2004, we had to force a recount in the Washington State Governor’s race and we won because you delivered the resources to make it happen.

We need to raise at least $40,000 by Monday to back up these races with the resources they need right now.

CONTRIBUTE $50 TO THE DFA COUNT EVERY VOTE FUND

In 2004, we raised over $250,000 for the Washington State recount. This year, we need $40,000 right now to keep the GOP dirty tricks at bay and make sure every vote is counted fairly.

DFA’s Grassroots All-Star Charlie Brown needs resources to fend off a team of Republican lawyers who, as I write this message, are challenging every Democratic ballot before the FIRST count has even been completed. Charlie is down by less than 500 votes with over 15,000 votes still to be counted. He needs our help to make sure every vote is counted.

(Note: it’s now 889 votes with over 48,000 votes left to be counted)

Back in 2006, I and a lot of other grassroots progressives were angered that California showed little to no movement in its Congressional and legislative seats despite a wave election.  You can see some articles about that here and here, when I explained why I was running as a delegate to the state Party.  And frankly, I could rerun the entire article today, but instead I’ll excerpt.

I’ve lived in California for the last eight years.  I’m a fairly active and engaged citizen, one who has attended plenty of Democratic Club meetings, who has lived in the most heavily Democratic areas of the state in both the North and South, who has volunteered and aided the CDP and Democratic candidates from California during election time, who (you would think) would be the most likely candidate for outreach from that party to help them in their efforts to build a lasting majority.  But in actuality, the California Democratic Party means absolutely nothing to me.  Neither do its endorsements.  The amount of people who aren’t online and aren’t in grassroots meetings everyday who share this feeling, I’d peg at about 95% of the electorate.  

I mean, I’m a part of both those worlds, and I have no connection to the state party.  I should be someone that the CDP is reaching out to get involved.  They don’t.  The only time I ever know that the CDP exists is three weeks before the election when they pay for a bunch of ads.  The other 23 months of the year they are a nonentity to the vast majority of the populace […]

Only two Democrats in the entire state of California were able to defeat incumbents last November: Debra Bowen and Jerry McNerney.  Both of them harnessed the power of the grassroots and used it to carry them to victory.  They also stuck to their principles and created a real contrast with their opponents on core issues.  The only way that the California Democratic Party can retain some relevance in the state, and not remain a secretive, cloistered money factory that enriches its elected officials with lobbyist money and does nothing to build the Democratic brand, is by building from the bottom up and not the top down.  By becoming more responsive to the grassroots and more effective in its strategy, we can ensure that California stays blue, which is not a given.  This is a long-term process that is in its third year, and will not happen overnight.  But it’s crucial that we continue and keep the pressure on.

In 2008, we experienced that most anomalous of events, a SECOND wave election in a row.  Barack Obama won the biggest victory at the top of the ticket in California since WWII.  And yet, the efforts of downticket Democrats yielded only minimal success.  This is despite a decided improvement in the party in terms of online outreach and voter registration.  So something is deeply, deeply wrong with how they’re conducting campaigns.

I’m going to lay out the good, the bad and the ugly on the flip and make some suggestions as to what we must do to improve this for the future.

The Good

This wasn’t a wipeout at the downballot level.  The voters agreed with the Calitics endorsements on 8 of 11 ballot measures, with 1, Prop. 11, still too close to call.  We did manage, at this hour, a net gain of two Assembly seats, which could expand to three if Alyson Huber in AD-10 has some luck, and a gain of one Senate seat if Hannah-Beth Jackson holds off Tony Strickland in SD-19.  It is true that those numbers, 50 in the Assembly and 26 in the Senate, would be high-water marks for this decade.  And we came close in a few other seats that we can hopfully capture in the future.  In the Congress, we have thus far gained no ground, but a couple seats, CA-44 and CA-03, look well-positioned for the future, and with Bill Durston set to run for a third time, his increased name ID and the closeness of partisan affiliation in that district should make it a targeted seat at the national level.  

Voter registration was the driving factor here.  In red areas, Democrats did the leg work of registering thousands upon thousands of voters and making uncompetitive seats suddenly competitive.

The Bad

They forgot to turn those new voters out.

What shortsighted CYA masters like Steve Maviglio and Jason Kinney fail to understand, apparently, is the concept of opportunity cost.  When you have Barack Obama on the top of the ticket winning 61% of the vote, it is simply inexcusable to have gains that are this modest.  Maviglio doesn’t tell you that AD-78 and AD-80 were gerrymandered to be Democratic seats, so essentially we got back what was expected in the Assembly, and with a 106-vote lead, who knows what’s in store with SD-19.  The concept of a wave election is that such energy at the top of the ticket will necessarily trickle down.  And that’s what I based my initial projections on, that Obama would make “out-of-reach” seats suddenly competitive.  But he didn’t.  And there are two reasons for that: ticket-splitting and voters that stopped at the top, causing a significant undervote.  I don’t have numbers for Obama at the district level, so it’s hard to be sure about ticket dropping, but the ballot measures are generating about 600,000-800,000 less votes than the Presidential race or Prop. 8.

If you want a further analysis, djardin did a great analysis comparing Barbara Boxer’s share of the vote in 2004 in Assembly districts, when John Kerry was on top of the ballot, against the vote share from the Assemblymembers who were built for the district in 2008, with Obama.  The numbers are astonishing.

District Candidate       Boxer Vote      2008 AD Vote

*78 Marty Block                      57.9%               55.0%

*80 Manny Perez                   57.5%               52.9%

*15 Joan Buchanan               52.6%               52.9%

30 Fran Florez                 49.8%               48.3%

26 John Eisenhut                 48.6%              48.3%

10 Alyson Huber                 48.1%               46.2%

*pickup

In most of these races, the AD candidates are slightly underperforming the 2004 Boxer vote.  The exception is Joan Buchanan in Assembly District 15.   Buchanan may have been helped by demographic changes in the district.

It’s simply ridiculous that any district candidate would underperform the Boxer vote, after four years of incredible registration gains and a 61% performer at the top of the ticket.  It’s inexcusable, and nobody inside the party should be feeling good about missing out on the second wave election in a row.  These moments don’t happen often.  And these failures are what lead Yacht Party leaders like Mike Villines to crow about how “Republicans will still be empowered to protect Californians from higher taxes.”  He knows that he keeps dodging bullets and doesn’t have to worry about a backlash for his party’s irresponsibility.

These expectations are not unrealistic and this is NOT about gerrymandering, regardless of what fossils like George Skelton say.  Alyson Huber, Linda Jones and John Eisenhut had virtual parity in terms of registration in their districts.  Fran Florez had a much higher Democratic share.  Obama should have carried them to victory.  Thanks to him, Democrats took multiple state houses and made gains all over the country, in far more difficult circumstances.  There are systematic barriers to a progressive wave here right now.

So what is to account for this?  It’s important to note that the problems we saw with the No on 8 campaign should not be viewed in isolation.  They are a symptom of the poor performance of the consultant class here in this state.  No ground game?  Check.  Maviglio is crowing about the fact that they had a lot of volunteers on ELECTION DAY.  That’s too late.  Based on what I’ve heard, the CDP dumped all their door-hangers on the local parties, who had no volunteers to hand them out and instead relied on the Democratic clubs to do it.  That’s dysfunctional and disorganized.  Furthermore, that makes clear that no money was put into field – door knocking, phone banking, etc.  Instead, the consultocracy again relied on slate mailers and a modicum of TV ads, hoping the IE campaigns, which spent over $10 million, would take up the slack.  There was a low-dollar donor program, and it netted something like $200,000, which doesn’t pay for two days’ worth of spots, and it didn’t start until 8 weeks out.

There’s no sense of urgency, no notion of the permanent campaign.  Did ANY CDP messaging mention the yacht tax loophole?  Did they exploit the Republican budget, which was unnecessarily cruel?  Was the drive for 2/3 used as a banner across campaigns to frame a narrative on the election?  Were any issues put to use?  No.

Part of this is what I call our political trade deficit.  We export money and volunteers and get nothing in return.  The energy and effort put into the Obama campaign locally was impressive, but it didn’t translate into anything locally.  

California is a state that was expected to vote heavily for Obama. California donors accounted for perhaps 20% of his record-setting $640 million-plus. In the final days of the election campaign, Californians provided even more for the Democratic nominee: They volunteered.

Even though California was not a swing state, Californians still mattered. Some took leaves from work to knock on doors and traveled to the battleground states of Virginia, Colorado, Ohio and others. They even have a name, “bluebirds,” people from blue states who flock to Republican strongholds and swing states to help Obama’s campaign.

Jack Gribbon, California political director for Unite Here, the unions that include hotel and restaurant workers, oversaw an independent campaign focused on the swing area of Washoe County in the battleground state of Nevada. Knowing that Las Vegas and Clark County, in which the city is located, would probably vote for Obama, Gribbon sought to help swing the more conservative Reno-Sparks area toward the Democrat.

Using multiple voter lists, Gribbon targeted 16,000 voters, most of them with Spanish surnames, many of them Democrats and some of them newly registered.

It’s incredible that Californians can be so easily motivated to contribute to a national effort, which requires a lot of work on their behalf, picking up and moving across the country, but they cannot be tapped for a local ground game.

But I don’t blame Obama on this.  He’s trying to win an election.  It’s not his fault that he’s more charismatic or more of a volunteer magnet than the California Democratic Party.  The point is that the party has to supplement this, by working in off-years and early in the year to build a grassroots base.  And there’s a blueprint for this.  It comes from Howard Dean.  This was part of his memo after the election:

Governor Dean’s first step was to assess our Party’s strengths and weaknesses and put in place a strategy to address those issues.  Dean developed a business plan to rebuild the Democratic Party, modernize our operations and expand the electoral map.  The emphasis was on lessons learned and best practices, and it included the following key components:

·  Rebuild the Infrastructure of the Party – After assessing the needs on the ground, we hired full-time permanent staff in all 50 states, trained staff and activists, introduced new measures of accountability, and developed a unified technology platform. Over the past four years we’ve held 140 trainings for candidates, campaign staff, organizers, Party leaders and activists in all 50 states.

·  Upgrade and Improve the Party’s Technology/Modernize the Way We Do Grassroots Organizing –  Over the past four years the DNC has made significant investments in technology, creating a truly national voter file, improved micro-targeting models and developed 21st century campaign tools that merged traditional organizing with new technology.

·  Diversify the Donor Base – Shifting the emphasis of Party fundraising to include both small donors and large donors, the DNC brought in more than 1.1 million new donors and raised more than $330 million from ’05 – ’08. The average contribution over the last three years was $63.88.

·  Amplify Democratic Message and Improved Outreach – Created a national communications infrastructure to amplify the Democratic message and reach out to groups we haven’t always talked to and expand the map to regions where Democrats have not traditionally been competitive – including the South and the West.

·  Professionalize Voter Protection Efforts – Created a year-round national, state and local effort to ensure that every eligible voter has the opportunity to vote.  

Those are the bullet points, but the details are important.  Training and deploying full-time staffers throughout the state is very desperately needed.  They could implement a version of the Neighbor-to-Neighbor program that proved so successful nationwide.  The DNC voter file is an amazing tool that I have had the opportunity to use.  California, a leader in technology, ought to have the most comprehensive online database of its voters in the country, which we can use for micro-targeting and outreach to distinct communities.  And finally, this is about PERSONAL CONTACT AT THE STREET LEVEL.  Two years after I campaigned for delegate on a platform of making the party present in people’s lives year-round, not just at election time, that is still not a part of the picture.  This is why everybody walks away to go volunteer and donate elsewhere.  They have no connection to the state party, no interest in the state’s issues, and are in many ways contemptuous of the efforts of state politicians.  They haven’t been drilled on why the government is unmanageable thanks to the 2/3 rule, and they haven’t internalized the urgency of why that must be dealt with.

The silver lining is that these thousands of California-based volunteers, who learned organizing on the Obama campaign, could actually be channeled and put to use by the CDP if they chose to do so.  The role of the next state party chair in this effort is crucial.

Quite simply, what has been tried isn’t working.  In two election cycles with massive gains at the national level, in California we have crumbs.  Something is deeply wrong.  Something is broken.  And that must be fixed.  

A couple weeks ago I wrote about three looming battles that we had to think about after the election.  Two of them have already fizzled.  The open primary ballot initiative filed with the state has been withdrawn.  That’s probably because the Governor wanted to present it himself, so we’ll see where that goes, and a lot of it might have to do with whether or not Prop. 11 actually passes.  Second, Bush Republican and rich developer Rick Caruso decided against running for Mayor of Los Angeles against Antonio Villaraigosa.  There is now no credible candidate running against the incumbent.  Caruso may figure that Villaraigosa is primed for bigger and better things (he’s in Washington today with President-Elect Obama’s council of economic advisers), and if Villaraigosa vacates the seat he’d have a better shot of capturing it.

However, there are a couple other looming battles that are out there.  First, Jane Harman, Congresswoman from the 36th Congressional District, is in line for a top intelligence post with the Obama Administration, and the odds are extremely likely that she’d take it.  Laura Rozen has a profile here.  After a tough primary against Marcy Winograd in 2006, Harman has been a moderately better vote in Congress, but this represents a real opportunity to put a progressive in that seat.  Winograd has recently moved into the district, and would certainly be my first choice if it comes open (or if it doesn’t – Harman voted for the FISA bill this year).

The other major news is that Henry Waxman, my Congressman, is looking to oust John Dingell from his post atop the Energy and Commerce Committee.  This is a long time coming, and I don’t think Waxman would go for it without the support of the Speaker.  The Dingellsaurus, while a decent liberal on most issues (and also a former representative of mine in Ann Arbor, MI), has blocked progress on climate change and modernizing the auto industry for years.  We were finally able to get a modest increase in CAFE standards last year, but Waxman, who wrote the Clean Air Act of 1990, would obviously be a major step up.  And with the auto industry on life support and asking for handouts as a result of the old ways of doing business, it’s clearly time for a Democratic committee chair who isn’t protecting their interests at the expense of the planet.  Waxman’s “Safe Climate Act” introduced last year would mandate a cut in greenhouse gases of 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.  That’s exactly the right attitude from the committee chair, and with energy issues obviously so crucial in an Obama Administration, we need someone in that post who recognizes the scope of the problem.  It should also be clear that the committee has likely jurisdiction over health care reform.  

Grist has a lot more on this story.

Lots of people are angry about the passage of Prop. 8 and they are just channeling that anger organically.  One of the results has been street protests, and today’s blocked Santa Monica Boulevard.

Hundreds of people protesting California’s new ban on gay marriage demonstrated outside a Mormon temple in Westwood on Thursday, blocking traffic on a major boulevard.

The protesters claim the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spent millions to air deceptive advertisements in support of Proposition 8, which passed on Tuesday with 52 percent of voters casting their ballots to define marriage as a heterosexual union.

If you’re unfamiliar with LA, that is a HUGE temple.  

There is other talk of boycotting Utah and Marriott hotels, and further street actions.  This is how civil rights movements typically mature.  And many are correct in the previous thread in saying that rights are not usually put to a vote.  This is all being done haphazardly.  Will a leader emerge from this movement?

…Pam Spaulding at Pandagon has more.

UPDATE by Brian: From the comments, some folks are organizing a similar protest in SF for tomorrow. Protest8 Blog has the information. It begins at 5:30  and goes from Civic Center down to Dolores Park.  

Earlier, I mentioned that the CA-04 race is not over.  This bit of news reinforces that fact:

Truckee Town Council is one race that hangs in the balance.

“Four years ago I got 3,700 votes, and Josh [Susman] got 3,300, and this year so far we both have about 2,200,” said current Mayor and candidate Barbara Green.

“Something is not quite right.”

She said she figures about 1,000 to 2,000 votes are still unaccounted for in Truckee.

The missing votes could have repercussions as far reaching as the tightly-contested 4th Congressional District race between Republican Tom McClintock and Democrat Charlie Brown, Green said.

The spokeswoman for a local ballot measure makes this sound more like a mystery of missing ballots rather than votes that are simply uncounted:

Proponents of the Tahoe Truckee Unified School District Measure U hoped the outstanding ballots may make the difference.

“Clearly there’s been a major administrative error. We are hopefully those

outstanding ballots will push Measure U over the top,” said Alison Elder, Measure U chair.

Administrative error?  What does that mean, exactly.

This could be especially important because Brown won Nevada County, the county in question, by a substantial margin (57-43).  If there are potentially 2,000 votes there, that would make up a lot of that difference if the margin holds.

…by the way, Bill Hedrick in CA-44 might be getting into recount territory, incredibly.  It’s down to a spread of just 2.8% between Hedrick and Rep. Ken Calvert, a difference of only 4,600 votes.  It’s the closest Congressional race outside of CA-04.  I am sorry I didn’t pay enough attention to it.  Go Bill!

I would really like to get to the post-mortem and the ritual hacking of limbs to answer for the disconnect between a resounding victory at the top of the ticket and barely a ripple below it, but that would be assuming that the votes are all in.  And they have not.  There are maybe 3 MILLION ballots, in the form of late absentees and provisionals, still outstanding throughout the state.  Now, this may not swing any of the statewide numbers with the exception of Prop. 11, but there are plenty of local races close enough that we have to make sure every vote is properly and accurately counted.

In particular, there’s the closest race of the night, the battle between Charlie Brown and Tom McClintock in CA-04.  Right now, the lead for McClintock on the Secretary of State’s website is 451 votes.  I’m told that lead is smaller, inside 400 votes.  And furthermore, there are FORTY THOUSAND VOTES yet to be counted.  These are the late-arriving permanent absentee votes, the ones that people bring to the polls on Election Day, which are always the last to be counted.  There are also provisional ballots out there.

This race is not over.  40,000 votes must be counted and they must be counted fairly.  Nobody should concede this race, least of all us.  Here’s a historical reminder – in 2002 Steve Westly was behind in his State Controller race by 10,000 votes once all the precincts returned.  But provisional ballots broke for him 60-40, and he was elected.

His opponent that year was Tom McClintock.

Charlie Brown can win this race, but he needs your help.  Hiring lawyers to ensure accurate counting is expensive.  Maintaining a staff beyond Election Day is expensive.  Going through to a recount, which is probable, is expensive.

If neither candidate emerges with a lead exceeding 1/2 of 1 percent of the vote, the race will automatically go to a partial manual recount, according to the secretary of state’s office. That was the outcome the Brown campaign anticipated as the upset Brown aimed for still seemed in reach.

Charlie Brown is still in this race.  You can support him at the Calitics ActBlue page.

UPDATE: Charlie Brown’s statement:

“I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to every single voter who participated in yesterday’s historic election. It appears we are headed for a record turnout. We understand that there are still more than 40,000 ballots remaining to be processed, and we will not know the outcome of this election until all of those votes are counted.

Our priority today is to support a fair and accurate count of every ballot. I want to thank the election department staffs and directors of all of the counties who are working so hard and so well to assure an accurate count.

I want to thank my wife Jan, my entire family and my entire campaign team for all of their tremendous work during these past many months.  I am proud of the campaign we ran-one focused on putting patriotism before partisanship and solving problems. While I remain very confident that we will prevail once all the ballots are counted, I know that this team has already won important battles for veterans, for families facing tough economic times and for so many other important priorities.”

It looks like Barack Obama will take at least a 24-point victory in California, and a 7-point win nationwide, and around 364 electoral votes in becoming the 44th President of the United States of America.

I want to focus on California and this tremendous disconnect we’re all feeling between the joy of the national moment and the indifference for the local one.  But that can wait for a minute.  Let’s consider what we’ve done here, and more important, what we must do.

Sometime this month, there’s going to be a day when Obama gets a briefing that would turn anyone’s hair white.  The extent to which this country has been fucked up by eight years of misrule is still not known to us.  Republicans lost because they failed to produce anything substantive for the country, and indeed degraded much of it.  And it’s going to be tossed on Obama to clean up.  And he won’t get any help from conservatives, who consider it their duty to fight this guy tooth and nail, the country be damned.  They will obstruct as they have been obstructing, they think it’s a principled stand to let greedy realtors stay greedy and allow corporations to destroy the planet and reap profit.

The question then will be what Obama does when he comes out of that briefing room.  Will he rise to the historical moment?  Or will he offer a measured agenda that fails to meet the needs of the American people?  I think he has an army behind him of supporters who have worked their communities, met neighbors, and forged a grassroots movement unlike few in American politics.  Will he put them to work?  America may begin to be liked again globally.  Will he leverage it?

This will play out pretty quickly over the next several months.  But I also want to focus on the enormity of this moment, with an ethnic minority leading a nation of immigrants, a man who looks like a new image of America leading America, a man of the world in a nation where the world comes together, rejecting fear, rejecting anxiousness, and proud to lead.  Here’s the best example I can find of this phenomenon, a shocking statement on where we’ve come from and where we’re going:

Gertrude Baines’ 114-year-old fingers wrapped lightly over the ballpoint pen as she bubbled in No. 18 on her ballot Tuesday. Her mouth curled up in a smile. A laugh escaped. The deed was done.

A daughter of former slaves, Baines had just voted for a black man to be president of the United States. “What’s his name? I can’t say it,” she said shyly afterward. Those who helped her fill out the absentee ballot at a convalescent facility west of USC chimed in: “Barack Obama.”

Baines is the world’s oldest person of African descent, according to the Gerontology Research Group, which validates claims of extreme old age. She is the third-oldest person in the world, and the second-oldest in the United States after Edna Parker of Indiana, who is 115.

When Baines was born, Grover Cleveland was president and the U.S. flag had 44 stars. She grew up in Georgia during a time when black people were prevented from voting, discriminated against and subject to violent racism. In her lifetime, she has seen women gain the right to vote, and drastic changes to federal voting laws and to the Constitution — and now, this.

“No, I didn’t never think I’d live this long.” she said.

Yes, that’s a big deal.  

I’ll have a much larger roundup later.  But it looks to me like there was a significant undervote in the election.  So far, 10.04 million votes have been counted in the Presidential race.  Yet on Prop. 8 we have about 9.9 million votes counted.  The difference there is 79,000 votes.  But that’s the smallest discrepancy.  Most of the other statewide ballot measures had undervotes of around 600,000-800,000 votes.  And there are maybe 1 million votes yet to be counted, so this spread could be much higher.

And if you look at the Congressional and state legislature ballots, the spread is just as high.

A lot of people stopped at the top, probably because they didn’t have enough information and didn’t feel comfortable about voting.