Arizona: Democrat Wins Close Race for Congress
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 12, 2012
Kyrsten Sinema, a Democratic former state senator, has been elected to represent a new Phoenix-area Congressional district, emerging victorious after a bitterly fought race that featured millions of dollars in attack ads. She becomes the first openly bisexual member of Congress. Ms. Sinema had a narrow lead on election night, but by Monday had an edge too big for her Republican opponent, Vernon Parker, to overcome. He conceded
Elections, Still Not Over in Arizona, a Hot Topic
Joshua Lott for The New York Times
Bruce Merrill of Arizona State University led a salon on Tuesday on the Nov. 6 elections.
By FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: November 15, 2012
PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. — The question of tipping the political scales in Arizona, like anyplace, is “purely mathematical,” Bruce Merrill said. More people voting for the other side matters only if enough of them vote to overcome the power of a loyal base of voters.
Related
Races in Arizona Still Hang in the Balance (November 10, 2012)
Dr. Merrill, a senior research fellow at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University, has made a successful living dissecting and analyzing voting patterns and trends in the state and beyond. Along the way, he has helped more than 100 candidates, almost all of them Republican, use numbers to tailor their messages and assess the viability of their campaigns. He is used to addressing large forums; last month, he spoke before the Arizona Medical Association. On Tuesday, he opened the doors to his home here, a spectacular 14,000-square-foot house on the edge of a golf course, to talk to about 60 people about the Nov. 6 elections.
The audience members listened attentively, as they do whenever they attend one of the salons that Thomas Houlon has organized here for 29 years, on subjects as varied as food, architecture, legal issues, quantum physics, medicine and the Chinese economy. Patty Barnes, a New Yorker whom he married four weeks after they met 21 years ago, helps select the topics — sometimes culled from the books she voraciously reads, on paper and in a black Kindle she seems to carry wherever she goes, and largely inspired by personal interests and obsessions, like the intersection of the arts and neuroscience.
The group is open to members only, a collection of (mostly) well-off intellectuals and intellectually curious people of various political persuasions. Its name is Spirit of the Senses; Mr. Houlon created it as a student at Arizona State University in 1983, when he promoted the first salons as part of class work in a major he designed: intuition and creativity.
“We tried to create intellectual parties where there was meaningful dialogue,” said Mr. Houlon, 61.
“And we created a community out of it,” added Ms. Barnes, also 61.
Before Dr. Merrill got started on Tuesday, audience members were reminded to switch off their cellphones.
“I felt, if Romney lost the election, it was because of his selection of Paul Ryan,” Dr. Merrill said, adding that this was not because Mr. Ryan “was anything like Sarah Palin,” the former governor of Alaska who was Senator John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 election.
Mr. Ryan “is a brilliant young man,” Dr. Merrill said, but he “moved Romney so hard to the right it was hard for him to move back to the middle.”
He also had some things to say about the still-unresolved state races in Arizona, its record number of provisional ballots, the misinformation about the date of the election in Spanish-language materials and how it all smelled of voter suppression.
As he spoke, Lorita Winfield, a registered Republican from a family of Italian immigrants who said she voted for President Obama because of Mr. Romney’s stance on immigration, took notes — “O,” as in Obama, “ran a brilliant tactical campaign.”
A cellphone rang. A man searched reproachfully for the culprit, a woman who coyly slipped her hand inside her bag and mouthed an apology for the disruption.
Membership in Spirit of the Senses is cultivated the old-fashioned way: through word of mouth. The salons happen at people’s homes, which are often an attraction in themselves. Paradise Valley, after all, is a fairly fancy corner of the country.
Dr. Merrill and his wife, Janis, have been members since 2006, though he has been a presenter for much longer. This year, his salon was supposed to be a discussion about the meaning of the election results, and it was, though not for local races. That is because, by Thursday, there were still 163,482 votes to be counted in the state before Friday’s deadline.
Provisional ballots, which make up the bulk of the uncounted votes, were cast by people who showed up at the polls only to find that their names were not on voter rolls, or who said they never got the ballots they had signed up to receive at home, or who had received absentee ballots but decided to vote at the polling place after all.
Syd Golston, a self-described “left-wing Democrat,” education administrator and Spirit of the Senses member since May 2011, said that at the polling place where she worked, Saguaro High School in Scottsdale, more than 200 of the roughly 900 people who voted used provisional ballots.
“A lot of them were minorities,” Ms. Golston said.
Earlier, Dr. Merrill had noted, “I would not be surprised if provisionals would come slightly more from people of low economic status.”
“Slightly?” Ms. Winfield, an amateur historian who joined the group in 2006, asked gently.
Someone wondered if the uncounted votes could change the outcome of the Senate race, in which Representative Jeff Flake, a Republican, was ahead of his Democratic opponent, Richard H. Carmona, by 81,553 votes on Thursday afternoon, according to the tally posted by the Arizona secretary of state, Ken Bennett.
The question, Dr. Merrill said, is whether Latino voters turned out in high enough numbers to tip the scales, which he found to be unlikely — this time, at least.The lesson behind the record number of provisional ballots cast this year and the delay in tallying all of the votes, he said, “is that we have to figure out a better way to run elections.”.
Published: November 15, 2012
PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. — The question of tipping the political scales in Arizona, like anyplace, is “purely mathematical,” Bruce Merrill said. More people voting for the other side matters only if enough of them vote to overcome the power of a loyal base of voters.
Related
Races in Arizona Still Hang in the Balance (November 10, 2012)
Dr. Merrill, a senior research fellow at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University, has made a successful living dissecting and analyzing voting patterns and trends in the state and beyond. Along the way, he has helped more than 100 candidates, almost all of them Republican, use numbers to tailor their messages and assess the viability of their campaigns. He is used to addressing large forums; last month, he spoke before the Arizona Medical Association. On Tuesday, he opened the doors to his home here, a spectacular 14,000-square-foot house on the edge of a golf course, to talk to about 60 people about the Nov. 6 elections.
The audience members listened attentively, as they do whenever they attend one of the salons that Thomas Houlon has organized here for 29 years, on subjects as varied as food, architecture, legal issues, quantum physics, medicine and the Chinese economy. Patty Barnes, a New Yorker whom he married four weeks after they met 21 years ago, helps select the topics — sometimes culled from the books she voraciously reads, on paper and in a black Kindle she seems to carry wherever she goes, and largely inspired by personal interests and obsessions, like the intersection of the arts and neuroscience.
The group is open to members only, a collection of (mostly) well-off intellectuals and intellectually curious people of various political persuasions. Its name is Spirit of the Senses; Mr. Houlon created it as a student at Arizona State University in 1983, when he promoted the first salons as part of class work in a major he designed: intuition and creativity.
“We tried to create intellectual parties where there was meaningful dialogue,” said Mr. Houlon, 61.
“And we created a community out of it,” added Ms. Barnes, also 61.
Before Dr. Merrill got started on Tuesday, audience members were reminded to switch off their cellphones.
“I felt, if Romney lost the election, it was because of his selection of Paul Ryan,” Dr. Merrill said, adding that this was not because Mr. Ryan “was anything like Sarah Palin,” the former governor of Alaska who was Senator John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 election.
Mr. Ryan “is a brilliant young man,” Dr. Merrill said, but he “moved Romney so hard to the right it was hard for him to move back to the middle.”
He also had some things to say about the still-unresolved state races in Arizona, its record number of provisional ballots, the misinformation about the date of the election in Spanish-language materials and how it all smelled of voter suppression.
As he spoke, Lorita Winfield, a registered Republican from a family of Italian immigrants who said she voted for President Obama because of Mr. Romney’s stance on immigration, took notes — “O,” as in Obama, “ran a brilliant tactical campaign.”
A cellphone rang. A man searched reproachfully for the culprit, a woman who coyly slipped her hand inside her bag and mouthed an apology for the disruption.
Membership in Spirit of the Senses is cultivated the old-fashioned way: through word of mouth. The salons happen at people’s homes, which are often an attraction in themselves. Paradise Valley, after all, is a fairly fancy corner of the country.
Dr. Merrill and his wife, Janis, have been members since 2006, though he has been a presenter for much longer. This year, his salon was supposed to be a discussion about the meaning of the election results, and it was, though not for local races. That is because, by Thursday, there were still 163,482 votes to be counted in the state before Friday’s deadline.
Provisional ballots, which make up the bulk of the uncounted votes, were cast by people who showed up at the polls only to find that their names were not on voter rolls, or who said they never got the ballots they had signed up to receive at home, or who had received absentee ballots but decided to vote at the polling place after all.
Syd Golston, a self-described “left-wing Democrat,” education administrator and Spirit of the Senses member since May 2011, said that at the polling place where she worked, Saguaro High School in Scottsdale, more than 200 of the roughly 900 people who voted used provisional ballots.
“A lot of them were minorities,” Ms. Golston said.
Earlier, Dr. Merrill had noted, “I would not be surprised if provisionals would come slightly more from people of low economic status.”
“Slightly?” Ms. Winfield, an amateur historian who joined the group in 2006, asked gently.
Someone wondered if the uncounted votes could change the outcome of the Senate race, in which Representative Jeff Flake, a Republican, was ahead of his Democratic opponent, Richard H. Carmona, by 81,553 votes on Thursday afternoon, according to the tally posted by the Arizona secretary of state, Ken Bennett.
The question, Dr. Merrill said, is whether Latino voters turned out in high enough numbers to tip the scales, which he found to be unlikely — this time, at least.The lesson behind the record number of provisional ballots cast this year and the delay in tallying all of the votes, he said, “is that we have to figure out a better way to run elections.”.
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