It isn't fun to report on bad news, much less on a weekend night after a big victory. However, there are two sad items to report:
Darcy concedes: Darcy Burner has conceded in Washington's 8th congressional district. Darcy writes over email:
"It is likely at this point that Congressman Reichert has won re-election, and while we will certainly ensure that every valid vote is counted, we accept the decision of the voters.
"I would like to thank the thousands of people who put so much time and effort into the campaign, as well as the countless thousands more who went beyond voting to actively participate in our democratic process this year. The election of Barack Obama as our new President will ensure that the change to the direction of our country called for in this campaign is realized in the new year."
This is a victory for local media hit jobs over people power and smart, young leaders. And it is just really, really frakking sad. Darcy's insight, strength and organizing ability will always hold real meaning to me. And she is just a great person, too. It is very rare that I feel a connection with a congressional candidate.
Fifty-state strategy on hold: The DNC organizers who actually form the core of the 50-state strategy at the DNC are being laid off:
A rumor at this point (or rather, someone unwilling to go on record) but what I'm hearing is that the DNC organizers who implement the 50 state strategy are about to be let go. Apparently they will be laid off at the end of the month, and the new DNC chair will decide whether he or she wants to continue the 50 state policy.
Hopefully, the new DNC chair will decide to keep the fifty-state strategy alive. However, I'm not optimistic:
It is worth noting, however, that the 50 state strategy's biggest opponent, for years has been Rahm Emanuel. Rahm's new job? Chief of Staff. Wonder if Obama's ok with this?
I'll guess we will find out. If the organizers get re-hired after Obama selects the new DNC chair, then he believes in the fifty state strategy. If they don't get re-hired, then the only fifty state strategy Obama believed in was the one for his own campaign. I'm strongly hoping it is the former, but Emanuel really was the strongest opponent of the fifty-state strategy.
I'm sorry to be the bring of bad news tonight. However, the fifty-state strategy and Darcy Burner were two big netroots campaigns over the past four years, and these reports needed to be made.
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.
Washington's eighth district vote counting is even slower than usual. Right now, Burner is up by 50.39% to Reichert's 49.61%, a very slender 46,068 to 45,347 lead. This one's too close to call, and won't be resolved until Friday at the earliest.
Dino Rossi just came on TV, losing 51-49, and talked about how his campaign will go on throughout the week. Only, King County, Gregoire's base county, hasn't really come in yet. That means that Rossi has a few days of vote counting before he concedes. The trends were good in that race and these results bear that out.
In Washington's eighth, Darcy Burner is ahead by 5100 votes, but the count has not moved for hours and the counting machines are really slow and three hours behind. The trend at the end was against Darcy Burner in this one, and my guess is she'll wind up behind by the end of the night as the more Republican poll voters are counted. Still, with these initial results she's definitely in a good position to take the seat.
... Pierce absentees are coming in, and Darcy lost 1000 votes. That's a really good result.
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.
Reichert just switched up his ad traffic, substituting this ad for his earlier Harvard Hoax ads. His Harvard Hoax ads were a clear attack on Burner's trustworthiness as a candidate, but this ad, titled 'Denise', is entirely different. It's a female union leader named Denise Spencer saying that she's scared of Darcy Burner and only slightly alluding to the Harvard hoax line of criticism. It is, in short, a change of message three days before the election and after a good number of ballots have come in.
We're in the very last stretch of a marathon. The finish line is just there, in front of us - we're almost there.
Today, Tonia is making phone calls in my office in Bellevue asking people to vote. Today, Nick is calling donors asking them to help with another contribution - and many of you are. Steve is out going door-to-door getting out the vote. I called one of my donors earlier (between meet-and-greets and canvassing of my own) and the housesitter told me she was in Ohio; I left a message wishing her all my best getting out the vote there.
All over this country, we are working to change it. And I believe we are going to succeed.
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.
I spent the evening doing some phone-banking. Reichert sends his best.
Musgrove in Mississippi looks out of reach, but Martin in Georgia is still within the margin of error. Like Sirota, I'm in a writing malaise. I have nothing to say. It's about a week until the world changes.
With only seven days until the polls close, most campaigns have already made their final media purchases for this cycle. However, even though campaigns are winding down their paid media purchases, there is still plenty of time for you to run a low-cost, easily changed, personalized paid advertising campaign for whatever swing state or whatever congressional campaign you wish.
It is time to ramp up the Personal Paid Media campaign. Between now and the election, I will personally run at least 15 of these, and probably closer to 30. In the last twenty-four hours alone, I started three new Google Ad campaigns, all targeted at key congressional races. Check them out in the extended entry.
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.
The new House Forecast is up. The current projection is a net Democratic gain of 23-29 seats, up slightly from Sunday's projection of 22-28 seats. If my numbers are correct, the next Congress will feature a partisan breakdown of anywhere from D 259-176 R to D 265-170 R. Here are the category changes:
FL-08 upgraded to "Lean Dem" from "Toss-up"
FL-18 upgraded to "Lean Rep" from "Likely Rep"
ID-01 upgraded to "Toss-up" from "Lean Rep"
MN-06 upgraded to "Toss-up" from "Lean Rep"
PA-12 downgraded to "Lean Dem" from "uncompetitive"
I was very tempted to upgrade Darcy's campaign to "Lean Dem," but the various smear campaigns being run against her, together with the NRCC's decision to hang in the district, kept it at a toss-up. I say, we help blow through that barrier, by throwing a few bucks her way. Daily Kos has already raised nearly $100K for Darcy in the last 24 hours-let's join in the fun!
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.
For those who have been following the story of the Seattle times hitpiece on Darcy Burner (for full backstory, check out this, this, this and this):
Last night, I wrote Emily Heffter a letter about the full piece, which you can read here. I received the following reply from Emily:
Hi Dante:
Thanks for your note. Even Darcy Burner doesn't claim that she actually has a degree in economics. I spent quite a bit of time yesterday talking to officials at Harvard about Burner's degree, and they all agreed she does not have a degree in economics. So for me, it comes down to the claim Darcy Burner made in her debates, which you can see on the video. Did she claim to have a degree in economics? Yes. Does she have one? No.
Reasonable people can disagree about the way we played the story or the way I wrote it, but in the context of the national economic crisis, the way Burner characterizes her expertise in economics matters. That's why I wrote the story.
As for the headline, we changed it later on yesterday and in today's paper. I think the new one more accurately reflects the content of the story I wrote.
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?'
