Day: September 16, 2016

Click the map for a larger version. Rochester dominated in Wilmington and Dover and its suburbs, and held her own downstate, even winning districts in what where three way ties. Barney won several Sussex districts where I suppose his military background was attractive. Townsend won the People's Republic of Newark, but did not win all of Greater Newark, where Rochester won. Townsend also won the the liberal enclaves of Milton and Rehoboth, and thus the 20th and 14th RDs downstate.

As you can see, the potential Mayor-Elect Mike Purzycki owes his victory to the Highlands and the West Side, though he had strong second place finishes in those areas where Eugene Young notched his victories. Interestingly though, in those areas where Kevin Kelley won in the West Side, Purzycki did not finish second, but third or worse. Further, in the north and northeast, where the color indicates that he finished in fifth place, he really finished much worse than that. Like 6th, 7th or 8th place. I just ran out of shades of pink and space in order to express that correctly. So as Purzycki admitted on election night, he has work to there and across the city in Kevin Kelley's home base. Another thing that I found interesting is that Purzycki finished third in the southern Riverfront area across the river. I would have figured the residents of Christina Landing would have put him in second at least.

James Fallows has a must-read piece on the upcoming presidential debates:

“If the sound-off image is of a calm, confident Clinton and a fuming Trump, she will have won the debates and moved that much closer to winning the election. But if Trump can seem easily rather than angrily in command, or if he can lure Clinton into joining him in an insult-for-insult exchange, or if she is beset by some new controversy for which she gives a hyper-legalistic rationalization, then the debates could be a turning point for Trump. … If he seems better than expected, either by throwing Clinton off her game or appearing calmer than a wound-up opponent who gives a dense six-point answer to every question, he might achieve something similar to Reagan’s ‘There you go again!’”

A potential strategy for Clinton:

“Most people I spoke with recommended a picador-like mocking approach, designed not to confront Trump directly but to cumulatively provoke him into an outburst. … When Comedy Central hosted a roast of Trump five years ago, he didn’t seem to object to jokes about his hair, about his weight, even about his lecherous remarks regarding his daughter Ivanka. The one subject he nixed, according to Aaron Lee, a writer for the roast, was ‘any joke that suggests Trump is not actually as wealthy as he claims to be.’ So this is a scab Hillary Clinton should deftly pick.”

In short: The Dem primary is the election in Presidential years. Team Simpler will be back in two years with the "I'm not really a Republican" theme they used to great effect last time, and will probably give Lisa Blunt Rochester a decent run for her money. Has LBR started fundraising for 2018 yet? Sad to say, but she better get on that.