Very interesting numbers breakdown on the midterm. Most interesting to me, good reasons to think new seats are more durable than the ones Dems picked up in 2006 and 2008.
How much danger does Matt Whitaker pose to Robert Mueller’s investigation? Tierney Sneed looks at the details.
It’s a simple point. Democrats are concentrated in large urban counties. Almost everywhere in the country, these counties take longer to count the vote than more sparsely populated exurban and rural areas. That’s hardly surprising. It’s not new. We’re seeing it in Arizona and Florida. In fact, we’re seeing it across the country. It’s just that those are states with Senate and governors races that remain undecided. If you stop counting the votes before the blue regions are done counting, that obviously helps the Republican candidates quite a lot. That’s exactly what Rick Scott is trying to do as of last night, just much more openly and brazenly than even Republican candidates have done in the past. Read More
Things are getting ugly fast in Florida. Rick Scott, clearly thinking he’s going to fall behind in the vote count and lose his campaign for Senate, is both filing lawsuits to stop the vote counting in South Florida and using his police powers as governor to do so. As in Georgia, having the candidate oversee the election has real shortcomings.
Rick Scott accuses liberals in Broward of “trying to steal this election” from him, and orders FDLE to launch an investigation of Brenda Snipes pic.twitter.com/ckWZRDGT3N
— Steve Bousquet (@stevebousquet) November 9, 2018
Scott actually said this …
“Late Tuesday night our win was projected about 57,000 votes. By Wednesday morning that lead dropped to 38,000 votes. By Wednesday evening, it was around 30,000 votes. This morning, it was around 21,000. Now, it is 15,000,.”
And then this.
“Every Floridan should be concerned that their could be rampant fraud happening in Broward and Palm Beach Counties.”
It looks like I’m going to lose … ergo there must be ‘rampant fraud’ … ergo I’m ordering the state police to investigate the election administrators.
Sinema moves into the lead in Arizona senate race.
Needless to say this is an on-going tabulation of votes. So it could shift back. But pretty clear this is still very much a contest.
We now know that Democrats picked up between 35 and 40 House seats. They flipped at least 7 governorships. They had painful losses in Indiana, North Dakota and Missouri – and votes are still coming in in Florida and Arizona. But what about state legislative races – not as sexy or visible but hugely important? It turns out they did pretty well. We dig into the deals in a special episode of the podcast: listen to it here.
We need to zero in on this critical point. “Acting” cabinet secretaries are commonplace. They’re standard when someone resigns or leaves office without a confirmed replacement. Presidents have not infrequently used so-called recess appointments to install cabinet secretaries who could not get Senate confirmation or couldn’t even receive a vote — though the courts have now greatly restricted that power. Indeed, the Vacancies Act does give the President the power under certain circumstances to sidestep the ordinary order of succession in a department to make other people the “acting” secretary. But what happened yesterday is different from all those cases. This is perhaps the first time when a President has installed a cabinet secretary without senate confirmation for the specific purpose of committing a corrupt act. Read More
We’re holding an Inside Q&A today at 4 PM to discuss the results of the election and Jeff Sessions firing.
Just to catch you up, after President Trump’s tantrum performance yesterday and the exchange with Jim Acosta, Sarah Sanders last night accused Acosta of inappropriately touching a young female intern, as a way of upping the ante in another of the White House’s victim gambits. This was followed by revoking Acosta’s access to the White House. Half in jest I put together a close up of the video to illustrate how preposterous the whole thing was. Sanders later shared a doctored clip of the incident which was apparently produced by Infowars, the white supremacist conspiracy site, to further the smear. At a minimum, the doctored video was shared by Infowars a couple hours before it was distributed by the White House. Read More