02 November 2010

Early Colorado Results III

Dems are trailing in a close U.S. Senate race, are trailing or very close all of the down ticket statewide races, and trailing badly in CO-3 (Salazar (D) v. Tipton (R)).

John Morse and Cheri Jahn, two Democrats is swing districts in the state senate are leading, making a GOP takeover of the state senate unlikely. I don't see more than about three potential GOP pickups in the state house races, so there is unlikely to be a change of control in the state house either.

This means that Democrats will probably control the Congressional redistricting process based on the 2010 census. They will likely go into that process with just three House Seats. If they do, my instinct is that they will try to redistrict with an eye towards creating four more winnable seats, rather than five harder to win seats.

The only state ballot measure to pass will be the emergency relocation of the state capital amendment. State voters wouldn't even back tax breaks in cases where it costs more to collect the tax than the taxes produce in revenues.

Turnout is looking like it will be below the 1.6 million votes cast in 2006, despite some close hard fought elections in this midterm, something that is always bad for Democrats. This may support the empirical evidence that mail-in ballots and early balloting actually decrease turnout, despite making it easier to vote.

Governor Ritter released his predictably painful (especially for higher education) budget for the 2011 General Assembly to consider. One shoe that has yet to drop is whether he will make any pardons as a lame duck.

Credit where credit is due. Fox News has the best election result layout this year in Colorado. The usually good 9News website lacked any county level information this year and had very odd statistics on turnout, with some jurisdictions have more than 100% of precincts reporting and others having near complete results with just one out of seventy-eight precincts, for example. It was also hard to access information without a lot of clicks.

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