flaw #1: the vote isn’t fully counted yet, kids. this is california

For Ruffini to cite GOP performance in these targeted districts early on the morning after the primary, in a state like California, would be like a broadcast network doing postgame analysis of the NBA Finals after the third quarter.

That’s not just a figure of speech—it’s close to a literal comparison. Looking at the returns from the California Secretary of State’s office when Ruffini tweeted out his take, the total number of votes stood right around 4 million. But voting by mail is extremely popular in California (a wide majority now uses it), and ballots are valid as long as they’re received three days after Election Day. Therefore, the total votes cast could easily increase over the coming days towards 5 million or more.

What’s more, those late absentees and provisionals, in recent history, have trended heavily toward the Democrats. Democratic margins on election night typically tend to underestimate the final margins by several points, typically. A good example: When now-Sen. Kamala Harris first won election statewide as attorney general in 2010, she trailed on election night by a margin wide enough that her opponent, Republican district attorney Steve Cooley, declared victory. A few weeks later, Cooley was forced to concede when the late ballots (over 2.3 million of them!) put Harris comfortably over the top.

Right now, in the race with the largest statewide turnout (the contest for governor), Democratic candidates combined have won 61 percent of the vote, versus 38 percent for the GOP. It’s near certain that gap will grow, and it is entirely possible that it will grow enough to put some of those races Ruffini cited as GOP-leaning into 50/50 territory, or even narrowly in favor of the Democrats.

FLAW #2: democrats typically do better in the general election than the Primary

Elections analyst Kyle Kondik penned a piece on California a couple of weeks ago that included a fascinating observation. The state of California has used the top-two primary since 2012, and the Democratic share of the vote has increased in November in two of the three elections conducted under this system.

In 2012, when GOP turnout in the June primary was goosed a little by the presidential primary (even though Mitt Romney had already clinched the GOP nod), Democrats did nearly 6 points better in November. In 2014, which was a more standard non-presidential primary year, Democrats performed 1.2 points better in November.

The lone exception was 2016, but that came with a major extenuating circumstance: Donald Trump had already locked down the GOP nomination by primary day, but the Democratic battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was still a hot ticket. This skewed primary turnout sharply. In the presidential primary, 69 percent of the votes were cast for Democrats, versus just 30 percent who cast votes for the GOP. Now, California is unquestionably blue state, but it doesn’t favor Democrats by 39 points.

FLAW #3: democratic performance in key gop districts was considerably better than 2016

Ruffini’s tweet was off-base for another reason. Looking at it, you might think, “Wow. Democrats are screwed, because they only lead in one of these seven targeted districts!” But it left out some critical context. As the chart below demonstrates, in six of the seven seats cited by Ruffini, Democrats actually have already improved on their 2016 primary performance.

Cumulative GOP vote totals in key CALIFORNIA House primaries District 2016 2018 Difference CA-10 57.9 52.1 5.8 CA-21 54.0 63.9 -9.9 CA-25 55.6 52.8 2.8 CA-39 60.5 54.1 6.4 CA-45 60.1 53.2 6.9 CA-48 56.6 53.0 3.6 CA-49 50.8 48.3 2.5

Looking even more broadly to all 14 House seats with Republican incumbents (some of which won’t be competitive this fall), Democrats improved on their 2016 performance in all but three of them. And, remember, that’s with numbers that are likely to keep improving for the Democrats over the coming days and weeks.

And there’s another important point here, too: Republicans are underperforming their 2016 numbers even though the electorate was heavily tilted toward Democrats that year, thanks to the Clinton-Sanders primary. That fact should actually make the GOP a bit nervous.

We won’t know the final results of this year’s primary for quite some time. But we already know that anyone who looks at the returns already available and sees a Democratic disappointment is being either a little naive or a little disingenuous. Right now, everything looks as expected for Democrats, and given lofty Democratic expectations for 2018, that’s bad news for Republicans.