Talk:2018 United States House of Representatives elections in California

Accuracy of candidate list

Why isn't John Briscoe listed for CA-47? Did he somehow not qualify for the ballot? Did Joseph Schrage withdraw? Why is Jon Pelzer listed as "Joe Pelzer"? 47.151.1.140 (talk) 09:50, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

March 9 was the filing deadline for races with incumbents running. The lists are taken from the candidate lists on county voter registrar websites: in the cases of those cited, that of Los Angeles and Orange counties. As for your specific questions, Briscoe isn't listed as a qualified candidate yet; if it changes, then we can update the list. Schrage's name never showed up. Pelzer's name has been fixed. --Kurykh (talk) 10:19, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

Found new polls, but can't find a proper source to cite

I found two recent polls here. I can't find a good way to cite them. Where can I find a proper way to cite them? 47.151.1.140 (talk) 20:57, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

I've also tried to find a pdf source, but couldn't find oneVietPride10 (talk) 21:43, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

John Fitzgerald (CA-11)

Fitzgerald is listed here as a Republican, but his website says he's a Democrat. What should be done here? 47.151.1.140 (talk) 18:39, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

He was a Democrat in 2012. Contra Costa County says he's a Republican now. --Kurykh (talk) 01:51, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

Opinion polling

Is it fine to add "opinion polling" like this in the polling sections? 47.151.1.140 (talk) 01:39, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Write-in candidate list

Where can I find the certified list of write-in candidates? Kart2401real (talk) 23:04, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

[1]. --Kurykh (talk) 03:02, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

External links to campaign websites?

Who removed these and why? Nevermore27 (talk) 04:30, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

October 2018 proposal: Splitting off election articles

See #Splitting off election articles below for post-election discussion. -- RobLa (talk) 03:41, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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For many of these races which appear to be reasonably close (e.g CA-49, per FiveThirtyEight's projections, among others), we have many examples of articles about candidates which are turned into redirects to this page. It's arguable that the race gets enough mainstream attention that the challenger candidate becomes notable by proxy. It seems that what would be more useful for editors and readers is if we start splitting off those districts with notable elections (by virtue of being close and getting mainstream attention). Even if the candidate stops being notable after the election, the race itself is likely a notable event.

Here's a few of the races + non-incumbent candidates which are arguably headed toward notability status due to the closeness of the race and/or notability potentially established in draft articles:

• CA-1 - Audrey Denney - redirect, no draft in history (update 2018-10-19): article written, largely by Yesthatcsucguy
• CA-4 - Jessica Morse - redirect, initial drafts in history
• CA-10 - Josh Harder - redirect, no draft in history
• CA-25 - Katie Hill - redirect, no draft in history
• CA-39 - Gil Cisneros and Young Kim - no incumbent; both non-incumbents have articles
• CA-45 - Katie Porter - draft article started
• CA-48 - Harley Rouda - redirect, initial draft in history
• CA-49 - Mike Levin and Diane Harkey - no incumbent; both non-incumbents have articles
• CA-50 - Ammar Campa-Najjar - redirect, initial drafts in history

Questions:

1. Any problem splitting any of these off?
2. if we start spitting these off, what title format should we use? E.g. does United States House of Representatives 2018 election for California District 45 work?
3. Which article would be best to start a draft for? I suppose CA-49 might be a nice NPOV place to start since both candidates have pages already, and the ensuing chaos from Darrell Issa dropping out resulted in a lot of national coverage (as noted over in the Mike Levin article)

-- RobLa (talk) 05:22, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

There seems to be a precedent that's been set by special elections:

• California's 34th congressional district special election, 2017
• California's 36th congressional district special election, 2011
• California's 32nd congressional district special election, 2009
• California's 10th congressional district special election, 2009

That would indicate that United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2018#District 49 could be split off into California's 49th congressional district elections, 2018 (covering both the primary and general elections), and that "California's xxth congressional district elections, 2018" is the correct name. -- RobLa (talk) 04:34, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Hmm....I'm not sure I'll get around to trying this out anytime soon. I'm encouraged to see that some of the opposition candidates like Audrey Denney are getting articles now. I still think it makes sense to do this, but maybe I'll hold off until after the elections, since they will all still be notable after the election. -- RobLa (talk) 20:14, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Splitting off election articles

Now that we're through the 2018 general election, I would like to revisit my October 2018 proposal to split the more notable sections of this article into its own article, and set the precedent for creating an election article for each race. Regardless of outcome, many of the close races will certainly meet notability guidelines. I've created California's 10th congressional district elections, 2018 as an example of how this should be done (see also: California's 39th congressional district election, 2018). I believe that United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2020 should actually become 54 articles (one summary article and per-district detail articles).

My October 2018 proposal is included below above. -- RobLa (talk) 21:35, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

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There are many points that I'd like to respond to in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/California's 10th congressional district election, 2018, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Audrey_Denney and in the #AfD nominations for CA-10 and CA-39 articles discussion below. I'm hoping to engage Bearcat, Muboshgu and SportingFlyer (among others) in a conversation here.

These conversations seem awfully reminiscent of the conversations that occurred shortly after I created U.S. Presidential election, 2004, particularly these conversations. In short, I allegedly jumped the gun by creating that article in January 2003, just as candidates were announcing. It didn't take a crystal ball to figure out that the U.S. Presidential election, 2004 was going to be a notable event, so I wanted to capture it as it was happening. I deeply regret not being more rigorous about capturing sources as I was building the timeline, but overall, I'm glad I got an early start on that article.

I wish I could have captured more about California's 10th congressional district election, 2018 here on Wikipedia as it was happening, but I knew there would be resistance to the idea, and I had more important things to do with my time. I'm admittedly biased, because I volunteered with Swing Left, and after the primary, I also volunteered with Josh Harder's campaign, but you'll note I said "volunteered". I was not paid to be part of the Josh Harder campaign. By volunteering, I became a lot more familiar with CA-10. I'm kicking myself for not getting a good picture of Harder with my own phone, but I'm glad Fabrice Florin wasn't bashful about taking pictures when he was out there.

I'm pretty sure that each of the elections in California are as notable as the United States House of Representatives election in Delaware, 2018 or United States House of Representatives election in Wyoming, 2018. Those elections are notable because Delaware has 961,939 citizens, and Wyoming has 579,315 citizens. It is biased and shortsighted to cram all of the elections for a state with 39,536,653 citizens into an omnibus article like this one. Each of these congressional districts has approximately 711,000 people in them. Sure, there's a slippery slope argument to make that if we allow this, then we allow every local district in every municipality all over the world. But it's not a good argument. People all over the world were interested in the outcome of these elections because of the effect they would have on United States governance. Let's argue the merits of this set of elections independently of arguing about whether each of the California State Assembly elections needs to have its own article (and no, I don't think they should).

So please, can we stop being such deletionists about articles like California's 10th congressional district election, 2018 and California's 39th congressional district election, 2018 and Audrey Denney, and instead guide new editors like Yesthatcsucguy to create good articles on U.S. congressional races they care about, even if they don't particularly care about Liz Cheney's reelection? -- RobLa (talk) 03:41, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

I don't consider myself a deletionist, but Denney is clearly non-notable. I'm not sure about the other electoral races, haven't looked closely, but on first glance they appear overly detailed. SportingFlyer talk 03:46, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

I believe there's a rational case to be made that the Audrey Denney article doesn't need to exist under that name anymore. As I said on the Audrey Denney article AfD nomination, she gained her WP:Notability via running for U.S. Representative from CA-01, so I believe that the article should be renamed to California's 1st congressional district election, 2018, and that the prose that is there should be converted into an "Audrey Denney" section, similar to the "Josh Harder" section of the CA-10 article.

As to the notability of the Audrey Denney vs Doug LaMalfa race in CA-01, it's easy enough to scoff and say it wasn't notable now. But when the Audrey Denney article was created, it was notable. Maybe Audrey Denney wasn't notable yet, but the race was absolutely notable. FiveThirtyEight estimated that she had as high as a 22.7% chance of winning, and the projected a 21.7% chance for her on election day (source: FiveThirtyEight). Whoever runs, this is likely to be a notable race in 2020, and the details of the 2018 race are going to be interesting to many Wikipedia readers.

As far as the CA-10 and CA-39 races go, those are unquestionably notable. Yes, like many Wikipedia articles, they have more detail than most people want/need, and they both could use a good copyediting pass. But it is good to capture the historical information now, and I believe we can and should err on the side of being overly inclusive for 2020. It provides a great mechanism to stop erring on the side of creating new articles for otherwise non-notable candidates, because we can instead ask editors to flesh out the election article, and have more helpful redirects in place of those candidates (e.g. Jessica Morse or Katie Porter). -- RobLa (talk) 04:59, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

I'm not having an AfD argument on a talk page, sorry. SportingFlyer talk 05:04, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

@SportingFlyer: Which page would you prefer to reply to this comment on: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/California's 10th congressional district election, 2018, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/California's 39th congressional district election, 2018, or Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Audrey_Denney? -- RobLa (talk) 20:19, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

I've previously voted on the Denney page. SportingFlyer talk 22:38, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that even if you were a volunteer rather than a paid staffer, your personal involvement in a candidate's campaign in the district still means that you're not independent enough of the race to evaluate its real-world importance objectively. You think it's special because it's personal to you — and congratulations for getting involved, by all means. But now put yourself in the shoes of a reader or editor from New Jersey or Georgia or Illinois for a minute. Do you think that person cares as much about the individual minutiae of the election in your district as much as you do, or do you think maybe they're going to think "why the fuck is that district in California getting special treatment that my district isn't getting?" (Free hint: they're going to think the latter. Trust me on this.)

And being a Canadian, trust me as well that I can also speak much more authoritatively than you can on how deeply the rest of the world actually cares. Sure, we followed the main story about which party was or wasn't going to win the House, but that doesn't mean we cared that deeply about knowing the names of every individual congressperson, or that we need or want standalone articles about every individual House district's results. Sure, we were intrigued by a couple of the governor's races (damn, I was really hoping Stacey Abrams could pull it off) — but that doesn't mean we're going out of our way to memorize the names of every state governor. And on and so forth: sure, we notice your elections, but that doesn't mean we obsess over them to the point that your elections would earn special treatment over and above everybody else's elections.

Your elections are not so critically important to the rest of the world that we need 435 standalone articles about each individual US congressional district's results more than we would need 338 standalone articles about each individual Canadian electoral district's results, or 650 standalone articles about each individual British electoral district's results. You care more, because it's personal to you — but trust me, nobody in Canada cares more deeply about the names of your congresspeople than they do about the names of our own MPs, nobody in Britain cares more about the fathomless minutiae of your congressional elections than they do about their own Brexit dramas, nobody in Australia follows your politics more obsessively than they do their own inability to ever be entirely sure who's going to be prime minister when they wake up in the morning anymore, and on and so forth. Which is why it is not a "slippery slope" fallacy to point out that what you propose scales out beyond just the United States: your congressional elections are not of such overpowering worldwide "more important than anybody else's parliamentary elections" status as to require special treatment that other countries' elections aren't also getting, and it's completely ethnocentric to think they are. They matter more to you, but that doesn't mean they're equally important to people in Toronto and Oslo and Jakarta and Johannesburg and Sydney. We care who your president is, definitely — but we don't really have much reason to care whether your local congressperson's name is Josh Harder or Jeremy Softer. And in the unlikely event we ever do actually have a reason to need to know that, Wikipedia already has plenty of articles where we can find that information as it is without needing each individual congressional district to have its own standalone results article.

Oh, and incidentally, you may think nobody would ever think state legislatures were important enough to get that treatment too — but you're already wrong, standalone "results in each district" articles were attempted just last year for individual Virginia state legislature districts. They got deleted, but if congressional elections are deemed to warrant standalone articles for each individual district I can absolutely guarantee you that somebody will try again at the state level too. Bearcat (talk) 05:38, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Bearcat, do you believe that an article about any one of the districts in California (e.g. California's 1st congressional district election, 2018 or California's 10th congressional district election, 2018) is by definition less notable than United States House of Representatives election in Wyoming, 2018? If so, why? -- RobLa (talk) 20:07, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Because the number of voters in an individual district is not the notability test. Each state having one standalone article is a politically and geographically natural way to divide the overall nationwide topic up into manageable chunks, so the population of any individual state is completely irrelevant to whether "election in state" is a notable topic or not — but an individual district in a larger state happening to have a larger population than an actual smaller state also doesn't reify "election in individual district" into a standalone topic that's separately notable independently of "election in state", because voter population is not the notability test.

Population is entirely irrelevant to the question of which aspects of the national election are notable enough to have their own articles and which aspects should be handled as part of a larger one instead — it's a question of which level of division represents the most natural and equitable way to ensure that the overall election is getting covered reasonably and fairly and equitably, not of whether your own district has a larger or smaller population than the entire state of Wyoming. And even if you wanted to upmerge Wyoming's article somewhere else on the grounds that it wasn't notable enough to have its own article, given that Wyoming is its own actual state and not just a piece of another one where in the hell else would you upmerge it to? Bearcat (talk) 21:10, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

United States House of Representatives election in Wyoming, 2018 could be upmerged into Wyoming elections, 2018, if the goal was to reduce the number of election articles on Wikipedia. I don't think that's a worthwhile goal though. I believe this article (about California's 53 districts) is unmanageably large and complicated because it's dominated by tables generated via complicated templates, with little room for prose to explain what is in the table. The most logical place to split this article is along the district boundaries. -- RobLa (talk) 22:03, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

AfD nominations for CA-10 and CA-39 articles

Bearcat has proposed deleting California's 10th congressional district elections, 2018 and California's 39th congressional district election, 2018. The discussion is happening over at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/California's 10th congressional district election, 2018, though participants should also note that there was an AfD nomination for CA-39 in June, discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/California's 39th congressional district election, 2018. I agree with many of the Keep comments in the June CA-39 discussion. Additionally, I proposed "#Splitting off election articles" above because I believe that having individual articles for the races in 2020 will be a good NPOV compromise between creating new articles for otherwise non-wp:notable candidates (e.g. Audrey Denney in 2018) and only allowing an article for the incumbent in each race. -- RobLa (talk) 19:22, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

435 house districts, times elections every two years, times then we have to do the same thing for state legislatures too, times then we have to do the same thing for all 338 House of Commons districts and 762 provincial legislature seats in Canada, and all 650 House of Commons districts in the United Kingdom and all the seats in the Scottish and Welsh and Northern Ireland assemblies, and all federal and state legislative districts in Australia and Germany and France and Poland and every other country with democratic elections, is not sustainable. Bearcat (talk) 19:26, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

@Bearcat: Let me get this straight: are you saying that if we don't delete CA-10 article for 2018 and the CA-39 article for 2018, then we "have to" create articles for "for all 338 House of Commons districts and 762 provincial legislature seats in Canada" for each election? I just want to make sure I understand you claim before I offer my rebuttal. -- RobLa (talk) 20:00, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Whether it's what you intended to say or not, what you actually said in the comment immediately above mine is that the model going forward should be that each of the 435 electoral districts across the entire United States will have its own standalone "Individual Congressional District election, 2020" article — and if that's the way things go, then that approach most certainly does automatically extend to Canada as well. And if what you meant to say was that a couple of districts in California should be spun out as special cases that are treated differently than the other 400+ districts in the United States, then (a) that's not actually present in the way you phrased yourself, and (b) not automatically true just because a couple of districts took more than two hours to declare a winner. Bearcat (talk) 20:11, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

I would prefer to respond to this example of the slippery slope fallacy up on the #Splitting off election articles thread, so I'd prefer you respond to me up there. If your real concern is with the precedent of having 435 new articles for 2020, could you express your concern up there? In the meantime, I would prefer to keep this thread focused on the CA-10 article for 2018 and the CA-39 article for 2018, rather than conflating this discussion with my #Splitting off election articles proposal. For this thread, I'll repeat my earlier question: are you saying that if we don't delete CA-10 article for 2018 and the CA-39 article for 2018, then we "have to" create articles for "for all 338 House of Commons districts and 762 provincial legislature seats in Canada" for each election? -- RobLa (talk) 21:19, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Firstly, the thread above this one is a closed thread with a "please do not modify it" disclaimer on it. Which means nobody's allowed to edit it for any reason anymore, and even if somebody wanted to respond to it now they would have to do so in a new thread.

Sorry about that. I've fixed it now -- RobLa (talk) 04:11, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Secondly, I'm not talking about that thread, I'm talking about what you said in the first post of this thread: in the very first comment of this thread, you explicitly stated that you believe we should move to "separate article for each individual district" from now on.

Still, I said: "Additionally, I proposed "#Splitting off election articles" above because...", with the implication that I would prefer to have the conversation up there. -- RobLa (talk) 04:11, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Thirdly, it's no sort of "slippery slope" fallacy to say that if we go that route for the US now and into the future, then we have to go that same route in Canada and the UK and Australia and Germany too — unless you're proposing that the United States should get special treatment that's denied all other countries with competitive democratic elections, the plainly logical outcome of an "each district gets its own standalone election article" approach is that it scales out to other democratic countries too. And if you do want to propose a reason why the US should get special treatment in that regard, you'd damn well better have the best reason for anything I've ever heard in my life — our job on here is to minimize cultural bias by treating all countries as equally as we possibly can, not to make up one rule for the United States and a different one for everybody else.

Clearly, I'm not going to convince you if you insist that I need to give you "the best reason for anything I've ever heard in my life", but I'll take a shot at convincing other people reading this that may not have such impossible standards. Whether we like it or not, the makeup of the United States House of Representatives affects everyone all over the world. I wish the stakes weren't so high for us, but they are. Moreover, as I said up in #Splitting off election articles, each U.S. congressional district in California has approximately 711,000 people in them. What is the average size of the districts for the 762 provincial legislature seats in Canada? -- RobLa (talk) 04:11, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

But the bottom line is that I'm responding to exactly what you said in the first post of this thread, while you're trying to move the goalposts around to make me look like my points are patently ridiculous. That's not on. Bearcat (talk) 01:46, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

I'm not trying to move the goalposts. I'm trying to have a constructive conversation, in spite of the fact that you're proposing to delete articles that I strongly believe should exist. -- RobLa (talk) 04:11, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

This is one of the most U.S.-centric opinions I have read on this site, which isn't swaying me. If a particular election was notable, no reason not to have an article on it, but most aren't notable - nor do they "affect everyone all over the world." SportingFlyer talk 04:16, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

RfCs: uncalled races, open seats, "seats before"/"seat change"

Please comment:

• RfC: When has a candidate won an election? RfC closed. Result: "There is a clear consensus for option 3: an article should state that a candidate has won an election when the election is called by reliable sources (All sources? Most sources? A particular source?) for United States elections. Some editors expressed support for requiring that more than one source call the election. There is no consensus owing to the lack of discussion by a number of the RfC participants on this, so there is no prejudice against opening a new RfC to discuss this further."
• RfC: Definition of "open election" or "open seat"
• RfC: "Seats before" and "seat change"

Thank you. Levivich (talk) 01:00, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Separation of primary and general elections

Propose the separation of the primary and general elections into different boxes. This will format the California House elections with House elections in other states, along with the California Senate election the same year. TheCodeman4 (talk) 03:25, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

I oppose as California has a unique system, where it is a Top Two primary unlike other House elections in other states. It is redundant to add two election boxes when the election box template in place condenses everything into a single election box. VietPride10 (talk) 06:10, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

"Andrew Janz" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Andrew Janz. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 July 3#Andrew Janz until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Elli (talk | contribs) 21:07, 3 July 2021 (UTC)