Hawaii Special Election

Not much on tap election-wise at the moment. Illinois is having it's primaries tomorrow and here in Ohio, there is a special election in my county to float a school levy. It will probably fail and the explosion in that school district will probably be very nasty.

However, there is another election coming around the bend that might be interesting. Back in December, the representative for Hawaii's first district (Neil Abercrombie-D) announced that he will resign from his seat to run for governor of Hawaii. Hawaii law stipulates that the seat will remain vacant for 70 days and at some point after that, a special election will be held. This election is open entry and the candidate with plurality will be declared the winner.

This has triggered a little bit of interest as the Republicans already had coalesced around a candidate who they had planned to run against Mr. Abercrombie, Charles Djou. On the Democratic side, there are two principle candidates: Ed Case (a blue dog) and Colleen Hanabusa (a more traditional liberal). Under normal circumstances, one would expect the Democrat to win this race (HI-1 is mostly the city of Honolulu and the surrounding suburbs). However, the inclusion of two Democrats with dissimilar views against one Republican has created an inverse NY-23 race. That doesn't mean that the Republican will win, but it gives him an even better chance.

Despite his announcement in December, Mr. Abercrombie has not actually resigned yet so there is still the 70-day waiting period to go through. One would assume that he's working out something with the governor about when would be a good time for the election to be held. But, once he does, it'll give us another race to follow and read more things into it that are most certainly wrong.