About Last Night

One lesson learned from Super Tuesday — one covered exclusively here, not at your CNN or your fancy East Coast paper or smart, edgy blog — is that I suck as a prognosticator. Not that I was trying to do much of that, but I was carried away oh so momentarily by a belief that an exit poll or two could lead me to some sort of interesting insight. I found it’s not true, though if you ever find yourself waiting for election returns, there are worse ways of spending your time than reading an exit poll.

Another more generally expressed lesson is that the people have spoken. I’ll just add my voice to say that Idaho, North Dakota, Kansas et cetera aside, for a Democrat to win a national election you need to win those big states where Hillary Clinton was finishing first, mostly. Just saying.

And finally: Last night I was volleying emails with my friend Pete as we watched election returns online. Perusing the count in my own county, Alameda, I checked on a whim what was happening in the Libertarian primary. With about a third of the votes counted, “Write-In” was leading a field of about a dozen identified candidates, with 67 votes. I conveyed the news to Pete, who wrote back:

“Or as Wolf Blitzer would put it: In the Libertarian contest, a highly contested contest, that contest in Alameda County, ‘Write In’ — ‘Write In’ — is leading a field of a dozen candidates. That race in Alameda County among Libertarians. 67 votes for the Libertarian candidate leading there, ‘Write In,’ besting a field of a dozen candidates right now, with a third of the precints reporting, that result right now in Alameda County among Libertarians. We’ll be watching that contest very closely throughout the night, this historic night, the biggest primary election day, now well into the night, in American history.”

I checked this morning. Write-In prevailed.

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