We know you loved Nevadatics so much, that I’ll be heading to Austin to do some coverage of the Texas March 4 Primary. So, Texatics here we come! I’ll be headed down on 2/29 to experience all that is the Texas primary.

A funny thing, this is really. I lived in Texas for about 20 years, and I can’t really remember having a competitive primary there. But, I suppose this is the year.

The polling has generally given Senator Clinton a fairly large lead. However, that seems to be changing, with the race tightening. You can see in the graph from Pollster.com that the orange line (Obama) is gaining on the purple line (Clinton) in the last few weeks. To be sure, Clinton has some advantages in the state, but Obama is rapidly gaining. In fact, from Ralph Bordie at IVR polls (who, incidentally has been tremendously helpful on the 50-state Blog Roundups), we see that Obama has moved the spread from 18 down to 10 in about three weeks from 1/10->1/30.  All bets are off if Obama wins Wisconsin big.  

By the way, the polling in Texas has been very scant. So scant, in fact, that Burnt Orange Report commissioned most of the polls that are in the pollster.com graph.

Texas is an open primary, anybody can vote in any primary. In fact, I’m 99% sure from my days when I was a TX precinct chair (Go Fighting 1806!) that there is no party registration. Another thing to note about Texas is they have a very handy early voting system, where you can basically go to your local library or school anytime within a few weeks of the election and vote. It’s all quite convenient. I’m not sure of the early voting rate in Texas, but I imagine it’s slightly lower than our own Vote by mail.

One last thing, it seems much of the leadership of the Democratic Party in Texas is breaking for Obama. Or so I’m told by Matt Glazer.

I’ll be trying to produce regular dispatches from Austin when I’m there, and for between now and then, I highly recommend BOR.

The Secretary of State set up a page listing uncounted ballots from last night’s election, including provisionals, vote-by-mail, and “damaged” ballots.  It’s incomplete so far, but some things jumped out:

• San Diego County has 160,000 uncounted ballots.  That could absolutely affect CA-50 (where there’s a 100-vote split for Clinton right now) and CA-53 (200-vote split) and be a potential swing of two delegates.

• Overall, 356,000 ballots are uncounted, and that doesn’t even include LA County or absentees that were postmarked on time but haven’t arrived.  Frank Russo sez there could be up to TWO MILLION ballots out.

• There’s really no way of knowing who these benefit; last-day deciders broke for Clinton in some exit polls, and the 100,000-plus provisionals may never be counted.

Well, about 95% of the vote is in right now, and Clinton clearly will take momentum from this California victory. There are still a few remaining precincts out there, concentrating in a few districts: CA-26 through CA-26, CA-41 through CA-45, and CA-49. The rest of the districts are at or approaching 100%.

It looks like Obama will take CA-01, but will narrowly miss on CA-50 and CA-53. Hopefully we can get some delegate totals soon, but it is clear that Senator Clinton did quite well here.  I would really be interested in seeing how the early vote versus election day vote went for each candidate. The Obama momentum might just not have been enough to overcome all those early Clinton votes.

caligirl’s excellent diary computed the best estimates of the delegate split. It’s an awesome little feat of math, but as some results are yet to come, keep your eyes out for changing numbers. That being said, she computed the delegate percentages for the state to be 205(55%) for Clinton and 165(45%) for Obama.

From the other parties, it looks like Ralph Nader (again dude?) won both the Green and the Peace & Freedom Party contests over former Rep. Cynthia McKinney. On the Republican side, McCain will get the lion’s share of delegates. He’s only losing two districts right now. With their winner-take-all by district, it’s a big boost for McCain’s shot at the nomination. So, we’re pretty close to knowing our target.

On the propositions, well, it looks like the Calitics endorsements didn’t have a great night at all. Prop 92 went down quite badly, carrying only about 43% of the vote.  And all that money on the side of the four gaming tribes worked its magic, Props 94-97 all captured a bit over 55% of the vote. And, the question of the day? Who are those 42% of voters who voted for Prop 91. I’m guessing they didn’t read their ballot information where the proponents told them not to vote for it.  Or perhaps they are just big Tom McClintock (reg req’d) fans.

Finally, on Proposition 93, it looks like Poizner and his band of merry men squeaked out a win. Prop 93 looks headed for a tight defeat, getting just under 47%. Over…

It’s obviously a disappointment for me, considering that I worked on the campaign, but we’ll have to work on a way to create real reform in how our legislature works. We’ll need to work on clean money reform, although true reform seemingly requires a federal constitutional amendment. We’ll need to look at how we can actually allow our legislators to get the experience they need. I continue to believe 6 years is not sufficient. How we adjust that remains to be seen. Perhaps it will have to be done to exclude current legislators, but raising the money to fund that would be a nightmare. And we most certainly need to eliminate the 2/3 rule. Over the coming months I’ll be looking at some of these issues, but change will not be easy.

(Let’s keep this up top for the time being. – promoted by Julia Rosen)

I’m back.  Hung out for a while at our Drinking Liberally event here in Santa Monica.  What I’m seeing nationally is essentially a draw on the Democratic side.  A good roundup here.  Hillary got California and that’s very big.  She won huge among Latinos and Asians.  I was in Little Tokyo in LA last weekend, and all of the signs were Hillary.  I didn’t know her strength in the Asian community was that great, but maybe I should have known.  The Asian community was completely forgotten in this talk about the state.

Obama won blacks and, apparently, whites, and lost the state.  All I can say is wow.

I’ve tried to delve a little bit into the district-level races to see what I can see.  Based on the big wins in the ethnic communities I can see Clinton getting a lot more 3-1 splits in the 4-delegate districts than I expected, but we’ll see.  It’s unclear where these votes are coming from thus far.  CA-01 looks to be going Clinton.  CA-05, Clinton.  CA-29 (Schiff’s district), Clinton but it’s early.  CA-50, Clinton but it’s early.  Obama is running well in those heavily African-American districts in SoCal, except for CA-36 (Long Beach).  

I should note that almost NOTHING is in from the Bay Area yet, so this will tighten.

UPDATE: Frank Russo:

The actual vote totals available on the California Secretary of State’s site as of 9:30 p.m. are not at all representative of the state and are skewed towards the smaller counties. With 15% of the California vote in, for instance, there are no votes at all from San Francisco and from Alameda County. Los Angeles has only 8% of precincts reporting, and it is virtually impossible to tell how many of the votes shown are from vote by mail ballots versus precinct day of election ballots.

Clinton will win, but the number will not be what you’re seeing right now.  10 points would be the high end.  5 points sounds more like it, when everything is counted.  I see hillary maybe getting 10-20 delegates more than Obama out of this.  But that won’t be known for days.

[UPDATE by Julia] 10:30 PM Speaking of Alameda, I hear they kept the polls open until 10 PM, because they ran out of ballots and had to print more.  But how is a voter to know.  That has to be really rich Obama territory given the demographics of the county.

[UPDATE by Dave] 10:50 PM People need to hold up.  There aren’t a lot of districts that have massive numbers yet.  A spot check showed that only CA-01, CA-03, CA-05 (Clinton) and CA-23 (Obama) could be called.  Without most of the Bay Area in, I think we have no clue what the delegate breakdown will be.  Clinton is doing better than I expected, and looks to be able to clear the 63% threshold in some of the Latino districts.  But CA-23, on the Central coast (Santa Barbara), is an interesting bellweather.  If some of those wine track districts break for Obama we could have a delegate draw.

[UPDATE by Dave] 10:59 PM There’s a little trick in statewide California politics that San Benito County is the bellweather for how the state will go.  It’s almost all in.  And Prop 93 is down by a couple percentage points, almost totally in line with the totals as it stands right now.

For your consideration.

[UPDATE by Dave] 11:29 PM The more I look at this, the more I think that Clinton may have had a far bigger night than expected.  We’re still seeing a lot more early votes than day-of-election votes, but the margins in Orange County and the Latino districts in LA and Riverside and San Bernardino are pretty darn big.

I still think it will tighten, but I’m going to go ahead and up the win to 20-30 delegates.  Of course, we shall see.  Obama’s holding in CA-33, CA-35 and CA-37, up in CA-23 and CA-06 and CA-08, and I expect a blowout in CA-09.  But almost everywhere else he has some catching up to do.

[UPDATE by Julia] 11:32 PM Following up on Dave’s point about the delegates.  Chuck Todd on the TeeVee tells me that Clinton is hoping for a 32 delegate lead based on the numbers they are seeing.  Obama says it is more like +18 lead for her.  That is right in Dave’s range.  National delegate lead for her will be less than 100, most likely around 60.  This is close big picture wise.

[UPDATE by Julia] 11:45 Facebook tells me that my friend “Debra Bowen says: if the SOS website is slow for you, close your browser and start it again. We solved the problem an hour ago, but you may have to restart your browser.”  Good to know.

[UPDATE by Dave] 11:55 Holy crap!  I hadn’t been looking in on this, and I don’t know if this is being reported on the teevee, but John McCain is winning EVERY Congressional district right now.  Every one, except the two in Alameda that haven’t been counted yet.  Only a few are even that close right now.

Every Congressional district on the Republican side is winner-take-all.  McCain may SWEEP California.  That should give him what he needs to take the nomination, no?

[UPDATE by Dave] 12:10 Obama is catching up in a lot of key districts.  Keep an eye on CA-04 (now an 8-point spread), CA-30, CA-36, and the San Diego County districts.  Obama is starting to move there, but he has a long way to go.  He’s still getting buried in those Latino districts in SoCal.

(full disclosure: I work for the Courage Campaign)

Here is the short story, if you are just coming to it right now. Chron:

The Los Angeles system requires that decline-to-state voters not only ask specifically for a Democratic ballot – but also fill in a special bubble on the ballot specifically indicating their desire to vote on the Democratic presidential ticket. Failure to fill in the bubble voids their presidential ballot.

The Courage Campaign has contacted Los Angeles County election officials “demanding that they count the votes and that they inform voters of this ‘bubble trouble,”‘ said Jacobs. “They finally agreed they didn’t know how to count the votes.”

Our lawyer Steve Reyes caught this over the weekend.  This problem has existed for several cycles and was caught late.  The Obama campaign held a conference call with reporters about this earlier today and one of our lawyers Steve Kauffman was on it.  They are very much concerned, as we are that voter intent will not be determined.  The law is pretty clear on this.

The Clinton Campaign on the other hand…

But Averell “Ace” Smith, campaign manager for California campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, said he is mystified by the Election Day complaints from the Obama team, since the rules for decline to state voters – specifically the requirement that request Democratic ballots – have been a matter of public record posted on the California Secretary of State’s web site for months.

“Every California campaign has known the ground rules on this for three months,” he said. “I can’t imagine why they waited until 2 pm. on Election Day to wake up … it strikes me as strange. If you wait until the last minute to complain, they must really be worried we’re going to win.”

“We’ve certainly worked with our voters for months and months” to educate them on the process, he said. “They’re blaming other people for not having done their homework…this is nothing more than a cynical attempt to create confusion.”

This is extremely disappointing.  All the Courage Campaign has been asking for all along is that the Los Angeles County ROV finds a way to limit this from happening in the first place and then to make sure these votes are counted, if the word does not get out.  That is all the Obama campaign is doing at this point.  This is a localized problem to Los Angeles, but there are a lot of voters there who may have been effected.

This is all about determining voter intent.  It is pretty clear when someone asks for a Democratic ballot and then votes for that person that they intended to vote for a Democrat.  The second bubble is not necessary to determine intent.  The ballot was designed this way to make vote tabulation faster, but the side effect is that voters are disenfranchised.

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Federation, a nonpartisan voter watchdog organization, said she believed that the LA County procedures represent “an unnecessary extra step” for voters.

“I understand why LA County does is, but I think there is the possibility that some voters will be unwittingly disenfranchised,” though the county has chosen the system because it is more economical and enables them to count ballots faster, Alexander said.

And she said it could have major implications.

“It is a big deal in this election because California voters finally have a say in a presidential primary and LA is the state’s largest voting district” encompassing all or parts of 12 Congressional Districts, she said. In California delegates are awarded to the candidates based on how well they do in the popular vote in a congressional district, and “if there is a big undercount, it could change the delegate count.”

They need to count all of the votes.