Preliminary Primary Elections Results

Ah, the good ol' election night results crawl - you get news, tiny tiny bits of news at a time. Even more difficult now given that there will be thousands of last minute absentee ballots to count yet, but unless those last minute absentee voters prove to be of a significantly different stock, the trends that are being reported tonight ought to give us a good feel for how things fare. You can get the best results directly from the Secretary of State's Primary Elections Results page. From there, you can break down the data in many, many, many different ways. I'll give you my quick and dirty synopsis tonight and hopefully something a bit more detailed once I have more information.

State Supreme Court, Pos. 2 - No Winner

Unless something drastic happens, Susan Owens and Stephen Johnson will be headed for the general election. Owens has about 45% of the vote to Johnson's 32%. Assuming the numbers for Richard Smith and Norman Ericson represent the random votes in this race and that Michael Johnson is the random vote plus those who confused him with the other Johnson (and this ought to be fair since none of the three campaigned in any way), Owens would have won outright without them in the race. If Owens encouraged them to run, as has been suggested (and strikes me as credible) she cost herself a primary victory and I think it's safe to assume millions will be poured into defeating her in November. But I get ahead of myself.

State Supreme Court, Pos. 2 - Gerry Alexander?

Gerry Alexander is currently leading by about 45,000 votes. Many of the unreported votes thus far are from King County, which is currently trending 70% - 30% towrard Alexander. Suspecting this race might be coming down along party lines, I compared the number of Democratic/Republican Ballots to the number of votes for Alexander/Groen by county. The correlation was surprisingly small (though exceptions, such as King County did exist). Take Adams County Republicans had more ballots than Democrats by a margin of 3:1, but Groen leads only by 58%-42%. Or take Cowlitz County where Democratic ballots outnumbered Republican ballots by 5:2, but Alexander leads only by 55%-45%. Indeed, considering the $1.5 million spent on Groen's behalf to the the $500,000 spent on Alexander's behalf, there are suprisingly few counties where Groen leads by more than 20% (exceptions being Garfield, Lincoln, Pend Oreille, and Stevens). Combine that with several counties resoundingly voting for Alexander (King, Thurston, San Juan, Mason, Lewis, and Jefferson) and you have the makings of a strong rebuke to those seeking to buy our State Supreme Court. Of course, this race is far from over.

State Supreme Court, Pos. 2 - Tom Chambers

Up 58.5% to Burrage's 41.5% (with a gap of 85,000 votes), Chambers appears poised to win this race and appear alone on the ballot in the General Election.

State Representative, Dist. 43 - Too Close to Call

Jamie Pedersen currently leads, but his lead has eroded significantly through the night with Jim Street making strong gains. This will be a precinct by precinct battle (at one point, 2 precincts were added with Pedersen receiving only FOUR votes to the roughly 400 of Stephanie Pure and hundreds to other candidates). Surprisingly Dick Kelley is holding steady toward the bottom of the pack. Unfortunately, we'll never know who the majority of voters wanted - the winner will be lucky to end up with 25-30% of the total vote since there are 6 strong candidates. Oh IRV, where art thou?