That’s all true.
But when they raise the rates on me (and they should for everyone, with some reprieve for the poor folk), then I’m doing it for myself.
Oh yeah we make efforts to conserve for a number of reasons, including higher water rates. We’ve pretty much stopped watering our lawn in summer and it dies back. Probably replace it with bark or rocks at some point, at least in the front of the house.
For at least some people, as they age, cool and damp weather causes physical pain to some degree.
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This is all happening in America?
East Coast sounding better and better
I didn’t think I was in one of these areas but the ski resort I am currently at on Vancouver Island asks visitors not to shower because of the water shortage. My wife and I are only here for four days so we figured we could get by on one shower. There is lots of snow here now but they had drought conditions before winter.
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And potentially a money-saving exercise, depending on water cost!
Mid-nineties and dry is no biggie. When I went to that Diamondbacks game I mentioned in another thread, I think it was 115 outside and the stadium was air conditioned to 85, which felt fantastic.
But walking around outside in the 115 degree heat, even though it was dry, was brutal.
There’s no getting around the fact that Phoenix is ridiculously hot for several months out of the year. At those times I mostly find myself moving from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car (which, granted, takes a bit of time to get to temperature) to air-conditioned work (or wherever it is I’m going. The oppressivness of the heat is mostly an issue when I need to do something like mow the lawn (which, with the water situation, maybe I should get rid of…).
The lack of humidity does make a huge difference. Last fall (september, maybe october) we had a visiting conductor for choir who came from Dallas. It had been more humid here than normal, and some people were commenting on it. She responded with, “well, at least it’s a dry humid”.
This time of year - it is FANTASTIC outside.
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So, droughty_town_non-fan?
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65 degrees in Mid-January. Beat it!
If only we had a way to compare different temperatures at different humidity levels…
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I imagine they do out West in a lot of places. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s a watertopia.
I don’t think water usage is really a thought other than the water bill for anyone east of the 98th meridian, but that supposedly has been shifting east in recent years.
You Canadians say “we will make a small sacrifice for the greater good and use less water”.
Most Americans would say “I paid a lot of money for my ski vacation and will use as much water as I want to.”
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I thought this was an interesting analysis. It doesn’t seem like it translates to the rest of the country, otherwise we might have seen different results. Sorry, no web link bc it came from an email.
TLDR:
How bad a candidate was Kari Lake? This bad.
While the GOP had strong turnout, did relatively well down-ballot and won the state treasurer’s race by double digits, it lost campaigns for Senate, governor, attorney general and secretary of state.
…
[A] study showed that Kari Lake, Blake Masters and other statewide candidates lost a significant number of votes from voters who otherwise backed mostly Republicans. Those voters didn’t just skip those contests, mind you; they voted in large numbers for Democrats.
…
But in this case, it’s not a symptom of voters simply being registered as a Republican and voting Democratic (whether because they failed to update their registration or for any other reason). This was voters going to the polls and proactively voting for mostly Republicans, but deciding that certain Republicans were a bridge too far for them.
Summary
How bad a candidate was Kari Lake? This bad.
Bad candidates cost the Republican Party plenty in the 2022 election. But with the possible exception of Michigan, in no state did they cost their party like they did in Arizona.
And now we can apply some hard data to just how bad those candidates were.
It has been clear since election night that Arizona was a major missed opportunity for the GOP. Most of its statewide candidates ran the kind of election-denying, Trump-aligned general-election campaigns that other candidates mostly shed after their primaries. The result: While the GOP had strong turnout, did relatively well down-ballot and won the state treasurer’s race by double digits, it lost campaigns for Senate, governor, attorney general and secretary of state.
As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn noted recently, the electorate in the state tilted Republican by about nine points. That would seem to be a recipe for success. So it was easy to surmise what had happened, as Cohn wrote: Republican-leaning voters simply didn’t vote for certain Republican candidates.
There’s now compelling evidence this happened on a large scale in Arizona.
The Arizona Republic this weekend highlighted a study of voting in all-important Maricopa County, which accounts for about 60 percent of the state’s electorate. It’s from a group called the “Audit Guys,” which includes a data analyst for the state Republican Party. The study showed that Kari Lake, Blake Masters and other statewide candidates lost a significant number of votes from voters who otherwise backed mostly Republicans. Those voters didn’t just skip those contests, mind you; they voted in large numbers for Democrats.
In Lake’s case, nearly 40,000 voters, who otherwise mostly voted Republican across 14 other contests, didn’t vote for her. And about 33,000 of them voted for now-Gov. Katie Hobbs (D). (Some didn’t vote or cast ballots for write-in candidates.)
That crossover vote is about double Lake’s overall, 17,000-vote margin of defeat. Hobbs suffered many fewer defections — only about 8,000 mostly Democratic voters didn’t vote for her, and only about 6,000 voted for Lake — which suggests that the imbalance was decisive.
Lake won about 750,000 votes in Maricopa County, which suggests she squandered about 5 percent of voters who were predisposed to vote for her party, compared to less than 1 percent in Hobbs’s case.
The other race in which this appears to have been decisive was the razor-thin attorney general race. There, the numbers were very similar: GOP nominee Abe Hamadeh lost about 41,000 voters who otherwise cast their ballots for mostly Republicans, and 33,000 of them voted for his Democratic opponent. That’s compared to now-Attorney General Kris Mayes’s (D) loss of 11,000 mostly Democratic voters, 6,000 of whom voted for the Hamadeh. Given that Hamadeh lost by just 280 votes, this — among many other factors — apparently flipped the race.
But those weren’t even the worst cases of a GOP candidate forfeiting such votes in Arizona.
In the Senate race, nearly 48,000 Maricopa County voters who otherwise mostly voted Republican voted for Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly over Masters, according to the study. That’s compared to fewer than 2,000 mostly Democratic voters who cast ballots for Masters. That suggests that Masters lost the votes of more than 6 percent of voters who otherwise mostly voted Republican.
In the worst case of all, the secretary of state race, Finchem lost nearly 63,000 votes from voters who mostly voted Republican but cast ballots for now-Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D). Compared to Finchem’s 700,000 votes in the county, that suggests he forfeited about 8 percent of the votes that were readily available to him as the Republican nominee. In neither Masters’s nor Finchem’s case was this evidently decisive, but that’s largely because they lost by such large margins overall.
It’s difficult to say with certainty how unusual this is, given the available election data varies by state. It’s true we often see a certain number of crossover voters in a given election.
But in this case, it’s not a symptom of voters simply being registered as a Republican and voting Democratic (whether because they failed to update their registration or for any other reason). This was voters going to the polls and proactively voting for mostly Republicans, but deciding that certain Republicans were a bridge too far for them.
The same group, the “Audit Guys,” ran the same study on the 2020 election and found that a similar number of otherwise mostly Republican voters voted for President Biden over Donald Trump: 39,000. But in that election, the crossover effect was much closer to being offset by Democratic defections, as nearly 22,000 mostly Democratic voters picked Trump over Biden. Trump suffered a much-smaller actual crossover effect than each of Lake, Masters, Finchem and Hamadeh. (Though it’s not as if Trump was a particularly strong candidate in his own right.)
There was, though, one 2022 race in which those reverse defections did materialize. It was in the aforementioned state treasurer’s race, where GOP incumbent Kimberly Yee won by double digits (12 points) overall. That was in large part thanks to more than 52,000 mostly Democratic voters in Maricopa County who voted for her, while she lost fewer than 7,000 mostly GOP voters to her Democratic opponent.
Yee, the only major statewide Arizona GOP candidate not endorsed by Trump, showed it was more than possible to keep those voters in the GOP camp and even appeal across the aisle.
Of course, the state GOP wasn’t much interested in giving Yee a promotion last year. She dropped out of the governor’s primary in January 2022, as Lake was looking like the early favorite.
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Just more “proof” that people’s votes were changed!!
(/red, cuz too lazy to make red)
Yep… slightly restoring my faith in humanity. Slightly.
Yes, that will probably be the spin.