California-36 Special Election

I've been volunteering for Craig Huey in his battle with Janice Hahn in the CA-36 special election. One of the first misconceptions is that Hahn will win because of a heavy Democratic registration advantage. Just like in NY-26 this'll be a low turn-out election. Smaller electorates are all about GOTV campaigns to get high interest voters. Republicans can turn out the voters. Fein got 66.706 voters in 2010 and there were less total votes in the primary than that.

I see Huey yard signs everywhere and it wasn't until yesterday that I saw a Hahn yard sign. All a yard sign tells you is that the candidate has a vote or two, but they may be indicative of other voters. Huey has bussed in people from all over California to walk precincts and did more than 125 over the weekend. Hahn's weekend goal was only 30 and they hadn't walked that many by Sunday at noon.

People see knowledgable and enthusiastic about the election. Early predictions were that there'd only be 41,000 votes in the election, but there were already 25,858 absentee votes by June 27. In the 2010 election 48% of the ballots were returned by mail. This number is often lower in Los Angeles County. So the total should be at least as high as the primary. Republicans are more likely to mail in ballots than Democrats, so the closeness of the mail-ins may not be indicative of the final vote.