Reichert has taken a 5000 vote lead, and is even up in King County, which was supposed to be Darcy's base. There are still votes to count, and we have no idea which votes, so it's possible that there are some very pro-Darcy blocs yet to be tallied. Each batch seems to be getting worse for Burner's totals and better for Reichert.
Darcy is currently down by around 1400 votes, around 1%, with what looks like about a third of the vote counted. It's impossible to tell what's going to happen because the uncounted and counted votes are in clumps with distinct partisan leanings. That is, the counted votes are not representative of what the uncounted votes will look like. David Goldstein has the summary of what's going on.
That said, both camps should be very nervous right now. Later today, and possibly tomorrow, after more early absentees are counted, Darcy will likely regain the lead... and then over the next few days, as the late absentees are added to the tally, that lead will likely slowly ebb away. To what degree either of these predictions hold true, if at all, depends on turnout and the partisan composition of yesterday's electorate, neither of which we know enough about yet from the ballots that have been counted in the district thus far.
There's limited context around the data we have so far, and the elongated vote-counting is very frustrating. But you can read whatever you want into the data, since the poll voters skew for Reichert and they have been counted, and the early absentees skew for Darcy, and some of them have been counted. The big clump of votes in the middle is the question.
King County results site is here. Pierce County results site is here. Pierce is far more Republican and has not reported any results. King is Darcy's base and the early votes are her voters.
Dave Reichert
16396
43.15%
Darcy Burner
21594
56.83%
The next drop of voters should be poll-voters, and will probably eliminate her lead entirely.
I think this race is going to be very, very close. Though Obama is running far ahead of McCain in this district, if you've been following this site then you've been aware of the aggressive and effective campaign to delegitimize Darcy as both a creature of the netroots and an untrustworthy liar and pump up Reichert as a 'moderate' good guy. Both concepts are absurd, but they have taken hold in certain parts of the district. Reichert, the NRCC, and centrist activist Emily Heffter of the Seattle Times have been able to plant the seeds of mistrust among voters, and we'll see tonight just how much they are going to reap. What does that mean?
Well, it's going to be tight. Additionally, King County's election processes are unbelievably dysfunctional. The county, which is both Darcy's base and provides the bulk of the vote for the district, will count only around 40% of the ballots by the end of the day. By Friday, only about 70% of the ballots should be counted in King County, with the more conservative Pierce County having tallied up its voting totals much earlier. In both counties, the poll votes will be counted today, but most of the district votes by absentee, and the nature of the voting blocs are different depending on when you vote. Like most Democrats around the country, Darcy will have a lead among early voters, but she will probably lose the poll vote that is the first bit to be counted. So she'll wind up behind tonight, even if she's going to ultimately win the seat.
Ok, so the big dollar donor match I announced earlier happened with the first $5k, and that money is being moved to candidates as we speak. Congrats, you guys unlocked a bunch of money to great Democratic women. But there's still some money left on the table, since we haven't yet hit $15k that the donors promised to match. This money will be useful for the campaigns; there are last minute cable and TV buys happening and field programs, so if you can put something in, your donations will be doubled.
You can give here. Nearly every woman on the list is in a tough fight, a close fight, and your bit of cash could possibly tip the scales.
Local Glenn Beck ripoff Ken Schram insults breast-feeding mother.
In most of the country, the wave is breaking hard against Republicans, but in Seattle, the local media, which I'm more and more convinced is and has always been nothing more than a conservative interest group (as Upton Sinclair wrote as far back as 1919), is trying its best keep Republican Dave Reichert in Congress. The Seattle PI, the 'liberal' newspaper in town, came out with its puff piece about Reichert, Reichert seasoned by 4 years in office. Obviously, the Seattle Times used its position to issue a partisan attack on Burner by exploiting a bureaucratic oddity of Harvard. Both papers are collapsing in readership and local political reporting has been decimated by a wave of buyouts and layoffs, but they are still quite powerful.
Over the past few days, the major event in the ccampaign has been Seattle Times reporter Emily Heffter's hit piece on Darcy about her degree (for more on Heffter's approach to journalism, read this comment). Reichert is up on TV with this ad, and with the illegal contribution from Media Plus, he has substantial rotation on TV behind the allegation. Burner's response from former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis is also up.
I had hoped to talk to voters and find out how the attack was resonating,so I went out canvassing today. Unfortunately, nearly every knock on a door elicited no response. The weather's beautiful so people aren't home, and when someone's not home, you leave some lit squeezed in between their door knob and hope they take a glance at it and remember to vote. This is especially true with transient rental communities, where low probability voters reside. It's not clear how the race is shaping up now, with Darcy narrowly ahead in the polls but this last minute smear up on TV.
In the slideshow above, you'll see pictures from a variety of events, including a local school festival celebrating cultures from around the world (represented by their student body, whose parents immigrated from all over the world), a variety of senior centers, and a sustainability fair at a local community college.
One part of the story in Washington's eighth district I haven't touched on yet was Darcy's role in a major dispute over local media consolidation between the two papers here - the Seattle Times and the Seattle PI. In 2007, she co-chaired something called the Committee for a Two Newspaper town, which ultimately forced the owners of the Seattle Times to pay out $24M and keep the Seattle PI in business. I'll have more on that fight below, because it segues nicely into the overall conflict between the two wings of the Obama power structure - the center right moderates and the populist left progressives.
Buried in the contours of the massive shift in politics we're seeing with the collapse of the conservative movement is a burgeoning fight between center-right establishment, both locally and nationally, and populist progressives. The McCain campaign is falling apart, and the far right is basically playing for 2012, positioning that race as Palin versus Romney and grooming a new generation of right-wing populist Republicans to come at Democrats in 2010. As Sirota shows, right-wing Villagers are freaking out, while the Chris Matthews of the world are mocking McCain/Palin the way they used to call John Edwards gay. It's a stunning reversal. And it's happening on a local level as well, with newspaper endorsements all over the country - even conservative newspapers - going for Obama.
Harvard computer science professor and ex-Dean Harry Lewis went out in a big way for Darcy Burner, taping this video validating her claims about her degree. That doesn't seem to matter to the remarkably malicious media crew in Seattle, as Manuel Valdes of the AP runs uncritically with Reichert's accusations about Burner's degree, who writes that "Harvard officials say that Burner's degree doesn't "indicate anything for economics."
Apparently, ex-Dean Lewis, the official in charge of the process at the time, is not a Harvard official for the purposes of this storyline. It's important to understand the backstory here, and the cooperation between the Reichert campaign and Emily Heffter, because it's a useful illustration of this noxious ecosystem. Mike Shields, Reichert's campaign manager, emailed me the storyline his campaign is pushing: "This issue is very simple: She lied. It's devastating to her campaign, they know it, so they are trying to cover it up with a distraction." One can't really fault Shields for overtly lying; if journalists let him use lies for political advantage, he will.
What's notable is the cooperation here between GOP operatives and supposedly nonpartisan journalists. Lewis himself explains in a comment on this blog that Seattle Times reporter Emily Heffter (whose work Valdes clearly cribs) was hostile and clearly seeking a certain type of response so she could tell the story Shields fed her.
I was surprised and puzzled by the tone. It seemed a simple matter for me to verify that Darcy had an Ec specialization within her CS concentration, and as I noted above, the Registrar would not have been in a position to do that so I was glad to do it. I didn't expect that it would be the reporter's intention to try to discredit the significance of that fact, but that is how I interpreted her odd question about what that Economics specialization would qualify Darcy to do. For some reason the reporter's questions struck me as hostile, so I simply repeated myself and ended the conversation rather quickly after that. But I did explain what a specialization consisted of in terms of coursework.
Emily Heffter has a stock response she is sending to those of you who email her, a response that is as dishonest and superficial as her original reporting.
So the Seattle Times political department spent yesterday doing two things. The first part of the day involved smirking about a story 'journalist' Emily Heffter was about to publish making false claims about Burner's Harvard degree. The attitude was probably something along the lines of Boo-ya! This was Heffter's Watergate, she busted that Darcy doin' lots of exagerrating. The editors probably said something like, nice job, Emily, you sure showed that you're no liberal media. Do more of that and you may get a raise, and by that we mean your buyout package might be larger when we lay you off.
The second part involved walking that story back out of sheer embarrassment, changing the headline, and acting defensively towards the various academic, ex-students and ex-faculty who pointed out how obviously this journalist and the Seattle Times editors had been punked by Reichert. And indeed, we found out today that's what happened, from Melissa Santos of the Tacoma News Tribune (a somewhat conservative paper) in a post titled 'Reichert camp "shocked" about Burner education claim ... or are they?'
Well, the emails are working. The Seattle Times changed the headline from:
Darcy Burner's claims of a Harvard degree in economics aren't true
To:
Darcy Burner's Harvard econ degree an exaggeration
The Seattle Times also updated the story twice. Many of you have contacted the editor or Emily Heffter at eheffter@seattletimes.com and the emails I've seen have been polite and well-reasoned. Meanwhile, former Harvard faculty and students are posting about how stupid the article is.
I just saw that King 5 TV reported a new Survey USA poll, Darcy is up 50-46 over Reichert. The ad which pointed out that he's ineffective really knocked him down, the first time his reputation has been damaged in any serious way. Reichert's even set up a site, http://www.davereichertdelivers.com, to rebut the claims.
He has $725k of TV on the air right now just this week, in all likelihood thanks to an illegal corporate contribution from Republican media buying firm Media Plus.
As someone who has been on faculty at Harvard, I can attest that this is simply twisting words for political opportunism. Harvard doesn't have "majors". They only have concentrations. And they don't have "minors" -- so to gain other credentialed experience, someone gathers coursework in joint, or dual concentrations. However only one department can appear on any transcript. Period. Even if you had major coursework across three departments (say your joint major area was "Molecular Biochemistry", you would Biology, Chemistry and Molecular Biology courses) but you would have to designate ONLY one of those as the primary department and thus folks might think you had only biology OR chemistry OR molecular biology work.
Ms. Burner's description is accurate if you understand the Harvard system (which also until recently had a 14 pt GPA scale -- I don't hear folks calling Ms. Burner a 'liar' about any 12.76 GPA average that she likely had). You just need to understand the Harvard system and its terminology which is quite different from most University systems.
This person is writing under the pseudonym 'JK465', but if they are willing to speak out under your own name, contact me at stoller at gmail.com.
Emily Heffter at the Seattle Times just published a story falsely alleging that Darcy Burner's claims of a Harvard degree in economics aren't true. The story is literally made up out of whole cloth. Burner has a degree in computer science and economics from Harvard, as her website says. Having gone to Harvard, I know how this works. You get a degree under one department, take classes in another, write a thesis joining the two, and that thesis is reviewed by professors from both departments. It's actually much harder to get a joint degree, but the registrar shows a degree only from one department because Harvard doesn't have minors. In fact, economics is a fairly easy degree to get, while computer science and economics takes a lot more work.
Heffter took this to mean that Burner made up her Harvard degree, and misquotes Harvard officials to prove the story. Heffter quotes Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis, who supervised the computer science students when Burner attended Harvard.
"She doesn't have a degree in economics," he said. "It's a specialty within the computer science degree that she has."
Here's Harry Lewis's recounting of the conversation.
Talked to her and told her you had a degree in CS with a specialization in Ec. She said you were claiming to have a degree in Ec and I just repeated myself. She asked me what that consisted of and I said a block of Ec courses. She started to ask me if that would make you qualified ... and I cut her off, saying I couldn't judge economics qualifications. She thanked me and said that was helpful.
Heffter is the only journalist covering this race, and is simply making things up and pressuring sources to say what she wants them to say. It's a travesty. Heffter should be pulled off this race and fired, but of course, since it's her editor who made up the headline, she won't be.
I talked to Mike Shields, Reichert's campaign manager, and he told me "Apparently, after basing her entire economic message on Harvard, that turns out to have been a big lie. She didn't get a degree in economics."
This came from the Reichert campaign and the NRCC, and the Seattle Times printed the press release. This is what we're running against, a conservative propaganda machine and their willing. Unbelievable; well quite believable, actually.
You can help out here. Heffter, incidentally, has a history of superficial reporting in her career, upsetting readers with facile stories full of false choices and misleading information. I talked to her, and she was just set on telling this story the way she wanted to, without actually trying to understand anything about how Harvard awards degrees.
Heffter's email is here: eheffter@seattletimes.com
Be polite, and let me know if you get a response.
Update: Oh Jesus, it's getting worse. The Burner campaign provided the Seattle Times with information about this. Here's her bio page on the Seattle Times website.
Education: Harvard University, B.A. in computer science with a special field of economics, 1996.
Yeah, there's someone trying to mislead voters, alright.
A beautiful set of berries in Bellevue from earlier this year
One of the biggest competitive disadvantages for Democrats is our unwillingness to break the law for our own benefit. Where law is weak and meaningless, like election law, the Republicans go nuts. And that's what Dave Reichert is doing, as he somehow found a corporate media firm (Media Plus) to give him $500K to help him down the stretch. Basically, instead of getting a bank loan, which he can't get because banks won't lend to political campaigns without collateral, Reichert's campaign is getting a loan from his media firm, which is buying TV ad time on credit from four corporate TV stations and extending his campaign credit. This is basically a corporate campaign contribution, and corporate money in politics is ostensibly illegal (ha ha, tell the US Chamber of Commerce that). The Federal Election Commission is obviously toothless and irrelevant these days, totally unwilling to do anything about lawbreaking during elections, when it actually matters. And the press doesn't care, since one FEC complaint looks like another.
While this is an issue ad pointing out Dave Reichert's vet record to WA-08 voters, you can help out Darcy here. She just hit $5000 even on Better Democrats. Some Better Democrats with ugly candidate totals that need to be topped off are Tom Perriello ($1,979), Jeff Merkley ($6,975) Annette Taddeo ($1,808), Debbie Cook ($828), and Jim Martin ($1,475).
For those of you who are slightly OCD, kick in a few to make these totals nice and even. I can't stand uneven totals.
Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.
"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.
Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.
"I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me," he said.
I can see why Reichert would want to attack Darcy on this. Then again, I can also see why he might support illegal eavesdropping on phone sex from US soldiers.
Despite Reichert campaign manager Mike Shields's attempt to unlock right-wing money for Reichert through a savvy PR campaign (including this Amy Sullivan article in Time titled Will the Netroots Sink a Microsoft Dem?), the wave has caught up in the Northwest. Darcy's up 47-40 over Reichert in the latest Lake Research polling, with Reichert's reelect number at just 36%.
The full polling memo is on the flip, but the key here is that Reichert's floor of 52 has been cracked, and he's now in the low 40s. That means that his main asset, his image of a hard charging sheriff is no longer working in the district. Lake is Darcy's pollster, but there are reasons to think this confirmation of yesterday's DCCC poll is on target. Her message is getting out there, as even sportsbloggers are complaining about how many commerials they are seeing.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee today released a new Bennett, Petts & Normington poll that shows Democrat Darcy Burner leading Republican Congressman Dave Reichert by 5 percent. In the initial head-to-head in the race for Washington State's 8th congressional district, Burner leads Reichert 49 to 44 percent. Conducted October 8-9, the poll surveyed 400 likely voters and has a 4.9 percent margin of error.
This is the first poll that has shown Darcy Burner leading Dave Reichert. While she's been on TV unopposed by his campaign directly, the US Chamber of Commerce and the NFIB have been going at her on taxes. The DCCC is up as well, tying Reichert to Bush, and the NRCC has yet to play. The NRCC has publicly budgeted a little more than a million on behalf of Reichert, but they are canceling media buys left and right and this is one expensive media market. And frankly, if the US Chamber and NFIB ads aren't making a difference, why throw more down this hole? Obama is popular in this district, and the undercounts are starting to swing to Darcy.
About a third of the entire construction crane capacity in North America is between Bellevue and Seattle.
I've been traveling around over the past few days throughout the unbelievably beautiful and ridiculously wet Northwest, and I'm struck by the commitment of this new generation of organizers, both on the Obama campaign and the campaigns of both Darcy Burner and Jeff Merkley. Merkley's race in particular has really heated up in the last few weeks, concurrently with the financial meltdown. They are progressive, they work extremely hard, and they are dedicated to a new way of doing politics. It's fascinating and inspiring.
I spent this beautiful crisp afternoon canvassing in Sammamish for the Obama-Gregoire-Burner coordinated campaign. Sammamish is a wealthy suburban area full of software types, progressive but with strong bias towards sprawl. For instance, one woman told me she's voting for Obama and Burner but doesn't like Gregoire because Gregoire doesn't want to address transportation problems by widening the highways as much as Rossi does. There are many wealthy immigrants, and a lot of Obama voters who are undecided about the lower ticket races.
The main takeaway from talking to lots of random voters is that basically no one is paying attention to the Congressional race.
