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Posts published in “Day: May 17, 2006”

And they are who, exactly?

May 17, 2006

Last week we e-mailed the Keith Johnson congressional campaign with a question. We haven't gotten a response to it yet. If we get one, we'll post it, but for the moment - what the with the Idaho primary election scant days away - we thought we should note the inquiry here.

Johnson's web site includes several clever "enough said" videos. One of them says this: "2 out of 3 left wing, Idaho bloggers endorsed Robert Vasquez in the Republican primary for Congress. Because he would ensure the Democrats a win in November. The third endorsed Sheila Sorensen. Enough said."

Well, not quite: Who exactly were the three "left wing, Idaho bloggers"? Or was the campaign just trying to make a satirical point, while stating it in the form of a flat, factual allegation?

Is it possible that Johnson's statement is true? Maybe . . . but we monitor the Northwest blogosphere fairly closely, and can't come up with a single "left wing" blogger endorsing either Vasquez or Sorensen. (Several of them have effectively endorsed Larry Grant, the leading Democrat in the race.) So who exactly are these bloggers? - we'd be interested to know. Or are we to be left with the speculation they don't exist outside the Johnson campaign?

UPDATE (5/18/06) The Johnson campaign has responded with three blog links. See the more recent post "A blog endorses" (above) for discussion.

Day-after and recurring patterns

May 17, 2006

There will be more as the weeks roll out, but enough numbers are in and crunchable to sketch a few preliminary notes about the contours of the just-ended Oregon gubernatorial primary, and the larger shapes and sizes it suggests.

Maybe the point most noted about the election, other than the actual results, was the low turnout, apparently the lowest for a primary in Oregon for decades. (The exact number of ballots and party designations on them aren't available yet, and we'll revisit this when they are.) A note here: The numbers for 2006 that follow are neither final nor official, but they do seem close enough to final for the statistical uses we make of them here.

The low turnout rate might have been accounted for in part by voting not keeping up with population increase. But no: The actual numbers of voters dropped. A question: Did more of that falloff occur on the Republican or Democratic side?

To judge from the votes cast for governor, the one major office up for grabs Tuesday, the falloff seemed almost perfectly split. Take the number of voters in the 2002 Republican primary for governor (332,575), compare to the 2006 combined votes (285,457), and you get 85.8% of the vote in '06 compared to with '02. Run the Democratic numbers for 2002 (354,284) and 2006 (303,350) and you get 85.6% - remarkably, almost exactly the same. If the decline in vote had to do with disinterest, which seems plausible but isn't easily provable, the malaise must have crossed party lines. Or maybe (just as plausibly) each side had its own set of issues. (more…)