I have been waiting for this moment for a long time. On election night incumbent freshman Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto trailed GOP Trumptard by more than 24,000 votes. I wasn’t worried. After all, Laxalt is so slimy that slugs pour salt on him. But I was still confident for one simple reason, after 20 years, I know Nevada politics and its voting patterns.

A brief overlay. When it comes to Nevada voting, you can put the voting patterns into 3 buckets. There’s the Clark County vote, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. Then there’s Washoe County, the 2nd most populous county in Nevada, home of Reno and the University of Nevada. This leans Democratic, but is closer than Clark county. And then there’s the rest of Nevada, the cow counties, which lean overwhelmingly GOP. And there lies the problem.

Nevada just instituted a new voting system, universal mail in balloting. About 5 weeks before election day, the state mailed out mail in ballots to every registered voter in Nevada. We had 3 choices. Fill out the ballot and drop it in the mail, fill out the ballot and drop it in a secured ballot box, or at a registered polling place, or show up and vote in person. Teri and I chose the latter, and voted at the Galleria Mall in Henderson the Monday after early voting opened. But it changed the paradigm of vote counting in Nevada.

True, Laxalt had significant lead of about 24,000 votes on election night. But mail in ballots would be counted as long as they were postmarked by election day, and received by Saturday. And here’s what binds the cheese.

By Wednesday night, all of the election day in person votes in Nevada had been tabulated. Which means that Laxalt’s vote tally was the best it was ever going to get. And his lead had already shrunk to just over 20,000 votes, with mail in ballots in oodles left to come from Washoe and Clark counties, both of which heavily favored Cortez-Masto.

Vut the GOP still had a prayer. Because in both Clark and Washoe counties, there were a significant number of election ay mail in ballots dropped off at drop boxes as well as polling places. And in the era of Trump, with the disdain for mail in ballots, voting day ballots tended to heavily favor the GOP. If Laxalt could clean up on those, then he might survive Cortez-Masto’s surge in uncounted mail in ballots.

But here comes the Z-factor, and quite possible Cortez-Masto’s reelection salvation. The Culinary Workers Union. They have 60,000 ebers, and are the ultimate force in Clark county Democratic politics. And in the weekend before election day, including Monday, they hit the bricks in massive numbers to turn out the Democratic vote. And every vote counts in Nevada.

But most critical, they were once again out in force on election cay. And while they were out banging on doors to turn out the vote, they most likely turned the tide. Because one of the things they did was to pick up completed mail in ballots that hadn’t been mailed in, and then putting them into secured drop boxes, or dropping them off at local polling places.

And in doing so, they likely turned the tide of the election. The GOP was putting all of their eggs into the election day drop off votes to put them over the top. But instead, the Culinary Workers Union literally flooded the drop boxes with Democratic friendly votes, likely negating any hope the GOP had. The results have already started coming in, and they’re terrible for Laxalt. In a 10,000 vote dump from Washoe county tonight, not only didn’t Cortez-Masto lose votes to Laxalt, she actually gained votes. And in a Clark county vote dump of some 24,000 votes, she trimmed Laxalt’s lead to under 800 votes. And there’s another 10,000 vite dump due tomorrow from Washoe county, along with another 24,000 coming from Clark county.

And if the present voting precedent holds true, and if Cortez-Masto continues the way she has, then she will vault past Laxalt, and build a durable lead of more than 14,000 votes. Which will leave only a uncured vote and provisional ballot total of about 7,500 hundred votes, both of which heavily favor Democrats. Laxalt has no out. If the vote dumps from Washoe county and Clark county follow precedent, we may have an official call tomorrow night from Nevada. And the Democrats will cement their control of the Senate, regardless of what happens in Georgia.

But if precedent holds true, and Catherine Cortez-Masto pulls off the upset, she’ll have the Culinary Workers Union to thank for her come-from-behind victory. But more importantly, it represents a victory for the Democrats’ most potent weapon going into 2024, a strong grassroots organization to hit the bricks at crunch time and bring home the bacon. Things just keep looking better and better.

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12 COMMENTS

  1. God, if we just had such an organization in Mississippi or Louisiana. Democrats should never be losing statewide races in Mississippi or Louisiana.

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    • They broke the unions in the South long ago, Walter. My father’s father saw that up close as a union organizer. That old WWII veteran punched out a supervisor (knowing Papaw, the latter likely deserved it), started having to carry a gun to feel safe and ultimatey got cashed out of the company a little over a year before his retirement. Only job he could get after that was janitor in one of the local nursing homes…and then just because his mom had already been put in there.

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      • They did, and from the young child I was to the old woman I am today, it still makes me sick. I spent a lot of my young years working in hotels: reservations, front desk, mostly night audit (it paid a little better than the rest). We all used to talk about it, it’s an easy thing to get into once you have experience. And we used to talk about how “you know, this is a good job up North, with good pay and benefits”. Down here, not so much. i’ve lived all my life in the South, but still hate that “union” is a dirty word around here.

  2. I want to congratulate Murph and Ursula and Michael Moore for their recognition that the polls were hinky for this election. Everyone is saying trump is the big loser in all this, but he was a loser before so nothing new. The other big losers are poll agregators like Cook and 538. They came in with flawed knowledge for like the 3 of the last four elections. 538 sells itself on poll agregations to supposedly come up with a more predictable outcome. They crashed and burned in 2016, 2020 and now 2022. I really hope they go back and really challenge their assertions based on polling, polling is very important, but they really need to figure out how to do it in an age when no body including me, ever answers my phone.

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    • Thank you for your kind words. The polls were nuts and unfortunately, it wasn’t just them. It was the media. The press was predicting dire outcomes — based on polls, of course — but the press should have been challenging the polls. If Murf and myself, and Michael Moore, and a legion of other people can figure out that something was up, are we to believe that Axios and the New York Times and outlets of that caliber couldn’t figure it out?

      Political reporting needs to come of age. I wrote a piece here on November 3 that I think explains it all. Here’s the link, if you missed it. https://politizoom.com/the-press-has-to-rise-to-this-moment-in-history-or-perish-this-election-may-be-the-sea-change/

      I pretty much hit the wall the day I wrote that. I couldn’t BELIEVE the doomsday articles I was reading when I knew that abortion was a major issue and young women were registering in droves.

      This gaslighting of America has to stop. And the ethics of journalism demand it.

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      • When you apply Ocaam’s Razor to the question of “cui bono” (who benefits) here, Ursula, tell me it doesn’t make a perverted sort of sense. Recall that the Trump years were some of the most profitable years for journalism this century, same as with the W years. But when both went away, so did the profits, leading to closures, layoffs and other unlovely things. The rise of online news helped add fuel to both the fires of misinformation and lack of eyeballs.

        Put all that together and why WOULDN’T they have done this? If it seems petty, mundane and just outright pathetic as a motive…well, that’s because it is.

      • I think laziness is part of the problem. It is too easy to rely on precedent, history, as though the way it has been done is the way it will be done no matter what changes in between.

        But I am also happier when Dems are nervous about their chances because as Hillary learned when they are confident they too are lazy; they stay home. So I’m okay with GOP exuberance and it makes the result sweeter somehow too.

        And just as there were indeed a lot of silent Trump voters in 2016 (along with all the voter influence and intimidation etc), who lied to pollsters, there were a lot of Roe voters this year who probably also lied to pollsters.

        The big problem is still the same: what is wrong in America that HALF the country will vote not just against their interest but FOR their own destruction!? IMHO, one of the things we need desperately is a requirement of media to be honest, not to report “alternative facts” and not to spread them! Just basic honesty! We don’t even have THAT!

    • Extend your congratulations to Bill Palmer of Palmer Report as well. He saw the same and never stopped a) calling the polls out and b) highlighting the critical races to put resources into. Sadly, because he refuses to play the game of panic-stoking, he will accrue no large benefit for being this right.

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    • Thank you… The funny thing is I believe this is one of the reasons ther slobs at FUX News feel so betrayed…To find out that the GOP itself skewed the polls to get results to back up their assurances of an upcoming wave…

      • I don’t think betrayal is the emotion they are displaying. It’s disappointment. They were all-in on what was a coordinated attempt at voter suppression. As in funding and promoting their own and other polls that were skewed to show the GOP entering the election stronger than it actually was. The concept was to discourage Democrats from bothering to vote. It probably worked to some degree, but not nearly as well as they’d hoped. There was never going to be a red wave this year and they knew it. I also think some of the jail sentences now being handed down to J6 rioters got the attention of Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and others & they thought better of being too blatant in overtly threatening voters at polling stations so it wasn’t nearly as widespread as many of us thought it would be. It stands to reason Fox would KNOW what was being said behind the scenes and that those groups would have told their GANG members to ease off. So in addition to the various laws that had been passed to make it harder to vote, this fall the GOP came up with the “skew the polling” scheme to discourage our side.

        It didn’t work. At least not well enough. Odds are they failed to get the Senate, will barely take the House and even that might not be a sure thing at this point, and lost some stuff at the state level not many folks are talking about but will matter in 2024. So they are bummed the fuck out. Add in Trump’s high profile picks going down in flames and word of the proverbial memo coming down from on high that Old Man Murdoch and his son were going to be dictating some changes that would lead to them having to choose between their fat paychecks or continuing to kiss Trump’s fat ass yeah, I can see why it’s clear they are having a major “sad.”

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