If I have this right, we will have not only not won ANY seats in CA, we will have lost the open GOP one ? Not only does this not pass the smell test, this is outrageously suspect. We had at least a half-dozen seats where the combined GOP totals in the all-party primary exceeded the Democrats. That the CA Dems have seemingly “kept counting” until their incumbents miraculously won demands an investigation by the House.
Note, too, that this also doesn’t jibe with the legislative returns, where the GOP did make gains to halt a supermajority of Dems. One doesn’t happen without the other, plus you’d think they’d be more likely to try to fix THAT from happening less so than on the federal side.
The way the congressional districts were drawn in CA, it’s not really surprising that we would hit a wall at 48% or 49% even under ideal circumstances—the RATs got liberal Democrats to register as “independents” and serve in the redistricting commission, and gerrymandered the U.S. House seats in an efficient manner. And it was to be expected that the GOP candidate on the general-election ballot would fail to receive the sum of the GOP percentages in the jungle primary: even if he consolidated the entire GOP vote, the turnout in the general election leaned more Democrat than in the jungle primary in almost all of these races because the Democrat incumbent didn’t face a strong Democrat primary challenger (the only close race where Democrats were motivated to vote in the jungle primary—the open CA-31—saw Democrats get more votes than Republicans in the jungle primary, and then basically match those percentages in the general).
I reiterate, it’s going to take more than “they won all the close ones” or “the votes that gave the RATs the lead were counted later” to convince 218 House Republicans to seat te Republican challenger instead of the Democrat that was certified by the state as the winner. Tacherra et al need to discover actual evidence of fraud, or at the very least of negligence in allowing illegal votes to be counted. A Republican House permitted Loretta Sanchez to remain seated even after Bob Dornan proved that a certain number of non-citizens were allowed to vote, because *the number of illegal votes that he discovered was smaller than Sanchez’s victory margin*. So any Republican that challenges the results needs to come up with concrete evidence that raises questions as to the out ome (and not just the margin) of the election, and if they can’t come up with anything compelling and Republicans in the House votes down their challenge it would be unfair to call them “cowards” or “RINOs.” I am as quick as anybody to point out Republican cowardice (and I would be happy if VA’s GOP Speaker were defeated in a primary next year after he ruled that the state Senate’s amendment to a redistricting cleanup bill (which completely the Senate map, when the original House bill made minor changes to correct errors) was “not germane,” thus allowing the RAT gerrymander to stay in place for the 2013 elections), but ee can’t expect Republicans to act unlawfully even if the Democrats do so when they’re in power.