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Marsden Upsets In 37th District
By Greg L | 12 January 2010 | Fairfax County, Virginia Senate | 18 Comments
With 40 of 40 precincts reporting Marsden wins 51-49%…
After carpetbagging into the 37th District, Dave Marsden has managed to pull off a win against Republican Steve Hunt and flipped Ken Cuccinelli’s seat to the Democrats in the Senate of Virginia. This just about shuts off the chance to have Governor-Elect McDonnell to lure a Democrat out of the Senate and onto his cabinet in order to set up a partisan tie in that body, which would then be subject to tie-breaking votes from Lieutenant-Governor Bill Bolling. With the Senate currently at 22-18, that would require luring two Democrats to McDonnell’s cabinet, which is extremely unlikely.
About the only silver lining in this is that Kerry Bolognese is well positioned to win in a Special Election to fill Marsden’s seat should Bolgnese decide to run. That doesn’t quite make up for having someone as inept as Dave Marsden joining the Senate of Virginia, but you gotta have some hope, right?
My quick take on what happened is this: the Republican base voters that kept Ken Cuccinelli in office strangely didn’t show this time. Even though precincts that went against Cuccinelli last time he ran in this district went for Hunt, the reliably strong margins in solid Cuccinelli districts weren’t there for Hunt.
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Does this mean they have to find couches of donors for the rest of his family now?
The one thing that bothers me about these returns is the lopsided absentee ballot vote…..hmmmm….wonder what happened there?
what made this an upset? Cuccinelli durn near lost this one the last time he ran.
It looks like the absentee ballots were the big difference … a 400+ vote delta there in a race decided by fewer votes than that.
What a GREAT inauguration present for McDonnell (-1) in the Senate!
Even better news for Virginians is that Democrats have the votes to block every chicken-shit attempt McDonnell makes to put TOLLS on our roads or sell off the operating rights to the Port of Virginia to the his multinational corporate backers.
Perhaps less noticed was the Eighth District, where the Republican, Jeff McWaters, a former health insurance gatekeeper who has spent about a million dollars on this race and the primary, only got 8,051 voters to show up, in a District that typically saw 15,000 voters, even when the Republican was unopposed.
Democrat, Dr. Bill Fleming, declared his candidacy the day before the filing deadline and in just two weeks was able to mobilize a respectable 2, 184 voters to come out on a cold January day and vote for him.
Bill Fleming has reawakened the Virginia Beach Democrats. The Eighth District will not likely be described as, ” safe for Republicans” in the next regular elections.
Virginians owe a debt of gratitude to all of the candidates. It takes a great deal to run for office these days. I encourage Republicans and Democrats to nag the crap out of their Delegates and Senators to pass the following comprehensive campaign finance reforms (feel free to cut and paste into your own emails to your Reps)
If we want the voices of the citizens of each district to again be heard by elected officials, we must take the following steps:
1. Restrict contributions to come only from citizens whose PRIMARY residence is within the district. This simple, yet dramatic revision, would amplify the voices of the citizens who reside in the respective districts, and restore the representative relationship between our elected officials and the citizens who reside in their areas of representation.
2. Eliminate PAC contributions.
3. Eliminate corporate contributions. Corporations are profit-making entities whose by-laws mandate that they expend money only with the expectation of a return on that investment. Corporations, in spite of their public relations propaganda exist only to make money and are not, “corporate citizens.” Only People are citizens.
4. Cap the amount of contributions to the federal limit for an individual contribution.
Write to your Delegate and Senator and tell them that campaign finance reform will dramatically reduce corruption and will enhance the ability of the individual citizen to be heard. If they do not support reform, then work for a candidate in the next election who pledges to enact campaign finance reforms as enumerated above.
I don’t see how any special election is really an upset. Ken barely won this in 2007, and while we did much better in November, remember that Marsden ran as if he was the republican, and his commercial made Hunt sound like the democrat.
I don’t know if commercials by Hunt would have helped or not. Northern Virginia has trended democrat, and in my mind was the only negative of Ken winning the AG race, that we would likely lose his seat.
Now Marsden gets to be the deficit-hawk tax-cutter that he promised to be in his commercials.
Congratulations Senator-elect Marsden! Does he have to move his house now or can he continue living in his rented basement?
Special elections, particularly in January, are always a wild card. Damn near impossible to forecast who will show up.
Hard to see this as an upset in any event. It is a Democratic district that had only remained in Republican hands because of Ken Cuccinelli’s very formidable political skills. And he only held the seat in 2007 by 100 votes against a poor Democratic candidate who ran a less than stellar campaign. He could quite easily have lost in 2007.
If any outcome could have been called an upset it would have been Hunt winning.
https://www.voterinfo.sbe.virginia.gov/election/DATA/2010/818D5A26-7936-4A79-B1B3-C8553FEE5DD5/Unofficial/00_p_059_BC62E6EF-3282-4721-857B-565BCD48D5B3.shtml
So the overall margin is 51% to 49% and largest precinct delta is 924 - LONDON TOWNE WEST, 64% to 36%, yet the Abstenee votes break %66 to %33% (~1% write in).
Does anyone else smell something fishy or is this normal?
Jeff…..
You are on to something. I seriously question the validity of the absentee ballot count. I have never seen anything like this in any NOVA election. Something ACORN-esque happened here.
The only plus is that Marsden will only serve for two years, as the Senate is up in 2011. Now is the time to recruit and nurthre the appropriate, clean candidate who lives in the district to knock Marsden out.
OK, people, get to work.
Wait a minute! Jeff Hunter is on to something. The website shows that Marsden won by 327 votes. Absentee voting was in his favor by 405 votes. That made the difference. Furthermore, exactly 800 absentee votes were counted for Marsden. Very fishy.
I’ve noted absentee votes are usually split more evenly along party lines. An even number of 800 absentee votes for one candidate, and only 395 votes for the other leads me to believe some of those absentee voters might be absentee for a reason - like maybe they don’t even live in the district, or even exist.
Smells like Illinois to me.
The whole country smells like Illinois and the stench comes from the White House.
This shows you the folly of having three GOP candidates try to run to the right of each other to get the nomination in a Dem leaning district. Hard conservative doesn’t work everywhere, people. Cooch kept that seat due to his considerable political skills. Hunt was a dud.
I hope Brown is paying attention in Mass. Absentee Ballots are the easiest way to overcome voter apathy. When you are at the door, you get them to vote. Simple as that, you hand them the ballot, they fill it out, you give them the stamp, they place it in their mailbox, you move on.
Don’t have to worry about voter apathy, because people who otherwise could care less won’t find it a bother if they are “democrat” to sign their name to a form handed to them by democrats.
Absentee ballots are no longer restricted to people who can’t make it to the polls, regardless of what the law states. My guess is that if you had called every house that submitted an absentee ballot on Tuesday, over half the people would have been in their homes, available to vote.
I don’t know, and we’ll probably never know, if there was any actual fraud, although absentee ballots certainly have the possibility for fraud.
On another question — the special election was really a rushed thing. How hard was it for military folks to get ballots and vote them for an election like this? Is it possible there were simply a lot fewer republican absentee military votes than usual?
There were problems in the GOP campaign. Many supporters were left out in the cold. There was little effort to reach out to grassroot conservatives. Maybe for the next election they will try to do a little more.
The Marsden campaign sent out a flyer showing a sofa and saying something to the affect…”you can be sitting on your sofa on Tuesday if you vote absentee”.
He encouraged his supporters to commit fraud by falsely signing their reasons for the absentee votes. My question is where was his sofa located? In his home of residence outside the 37th or his rented room in the 37th?
What a guy!!! Must be nice to be above the law!!!
I don’t know how much they spent on TV, but the GOP sure forgot about GOTV and volunteer outreach. That is usually where the battles are won and lost.