Good morning FR readers! Wow, what a primary night. First and foremost, I want to extend a very big THANK YOU to FR’s frequent Guest Editor, Nick Romero, for getting up really early this morning to put together our comprehensive main page compendium of today’s political news stories! If you will recall, my ‘day job’ is working for Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona — a great conservative who was up for re-election yesterday. Well, we didn’t get the unofficial final results until after 3am, but my boss was re-elected to a new four year term over three opponents with 50.9% of the vote! Congratulations Sheriff Carona and to your entire campaign team! The immediate benefit to FR readers throughout the fall will be that I will be a bit less distracted since I won’t be worrying about a run-off for my boss, and will be able to put much more time into the website! Yeah! Anyways, I thought I would take a few minutes and make some general observations about election night:

One of my pet peeves with this business is that everybody’s an expert. The truth of the matter is that that having a bunch of money will always make you brilliant politically….1000 points ofTVbeatscable and 12 pieces of mail beats 5any day….but that alone doesn’t qualify anyone as an expert. I’ve railed on the so-called-revolutionaires who lost their way, but one guy never lost his way and truly deserves to be called an expert….Newt Gingrich. … Read More

Last night, Phil Angelides won his party’s nomination to face-off against the Governator this November. But typical of Steve Westly, he couldn’t quite find it in himself to concede defeat, and congratulate his primary opponent. Instead, Westly had this to say in his statement last night: "My friends, we’ve run a terrific campaign, and we’re going to be running a good campaign for another day or two it looks like. I’m here to tell you the LA Times has announced the race is too close to call. With roughly 30% of the vote in, bouncing back between three and three and a half percent, most of the counties we believe will be strongest remain – have yet to be counted."

I found this to be a hypocritical position as you need not look back too long ago to remember when Westly was singing a different tune. Westly narrowly defeated Tom McClintock for his current… Read More

Bilbray Heartens the GOP – WSJ’s Political Diary

Republicans can breathe a sigh of relief. With some 40,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted, moderate former GOP Congressman Brian Bilbray won a much-watched special election in San Diego yesterday. Mr. Bilbray won 50% of the vote to Democrat Francine Busby’s 45%. Should those numbers hold through the absentee count, it will mean that Ms. Busby won only the base Democratic vote in the district — John Kerry won 44% there in 2004.

What makes the Bilbray victory noteworthy is that he was a weak candidate, having won a divided GOP primary with only 15% of the vote and losing 5% of yesterday’s vote to right-wing third party candidates. Even the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, which spent an unheard-of $4.5 million on his behalf, noted this morning that Republicans… Read More

Today is election day! Have you remembered to vote? I’m going to go vote right after I finish up this commentary.

There is a practice within the main stream media to pretty much stop election coverage in the final couple of days before the election, with some notable exceptions. I think that the idea behind this is that at a certain point, it becomes too late for anyone to contest or disagree with the analysis of a newspaper or a TV station, and that it may just seem a bit unfair to weigh into races in the final days/hours. That said, there are a few stories on the main page worth a read, on individual races. Today we have featured a column from Sacramento Bee ace columnist Dan Weintraub, who pens a piece on what the various ‘hot spots’ are around the state, providing a ‘guide’ to follow election day results. Definitely worth a read. In the "Golden Pen" today is a must-read column from the Wall Street Journal’s Brendan Miniter on the lessons of the Congressional District 50 special election. An excerpt:… Read More

I’ve checked the parking lot a few times today at Richvale Elementary and NOBODY is showing up to vote. I’m very concerned that Nor Cal voters are not engaged. Phil and Steve are boring my voters to death! Oh, wait a minute……. er, I forgot, Richvale, Pop. 250,is now entirely a mail-in precinct as its not populated enough. Oh well,SNL’sGilda RadnerwouldhaveEmilyLitella say"Never mind!"… Read More

Deal or No Deal?… I said I would get some flak for blogging the Horn-Thompson Supe Survey a few days ago. John Nienstedt, of the very credible (unlike, perhaps, the anon numbers I posted) Competitive Edge Research & Communication, sends alongthis appropo missive:

Barry, Barry, Barry: Yeah I’ll give you some flak. Last I checkedThompson’s employment designation isn’t "businessman," its "regionalbusiness administrator." Why does that matter? Because no self-respectingpollster (or pollster who deserves respect) would screw that up.

So bear with me now: backing the unsures out of Q3, this poll is sayingthat Thompson should win with 65% of the vote. Now, the margin of samplingerror on that question for a sample size of 377 (taking into account thatwe’re backing out the unsures) is plus or minus 4.8%. That means that, if Thompson gets less than 60% of the… Read More

Today is election day! Have you remembered to vote? I’m going to go vote right after I finish up this commentary.

There is a practice within the main stream media to pretty much stop election coverage in the final couple of days before the election, with some notable exceptions. I think that the idea behind this is that at a certain point, it becomes too late for anyone to contest or disagree with the analysis of a newspaper or a TV station, and that it may just seem a bit unfair to weigh into races in the final days/hours. That said, there are a few stories on the main page worth a read, on individual races. Today we have featured a column from Sacramento Bee ace columnist Dan Weintraub, who pens a piece on what the various ‘hot spots’ are around the state, providing a ‘guide’ to follow election day results. Definitely worth a read. In the "Golden Pen" today is a must-read column from the Wall Street Journal’s Brendan Miniter on the lessons of the Congressional District 50 special election. An excerpt:… Read More