Republican Honolulu councilman Charles Djou has won the usually ultra-safe Democratic HI-01 House seat in a special election, thanks to a divided Democratic vote.
The results: Djou 67,274 votes, 39.5%, Democratic state Senate President Colleen Hanabusa 52,445 votes, 30.8%, and Democratic former Rep. Ed Case 47,012 votes, 27.6%. The big surprise here is not the Dems’ loss — which had been expected, due to the unusual circumstances of the race — but instead that Case, who had been the unofficial favorite of Washington Democrats, came in third behind Hanabusa, a favorite of organized labor who had consistently polled in third place throughout this campaign.
With this result, don’t be surprised if Hanabusa has some momentum going into the September Democratic primary, to pick the nominee to go up against Djou in the regular election in November.
This Honolulu-based district is the birthplace of President Obama. and he carried it with 70% of the vote in 2008. Before that, it gave 52% of the vote to John Kerry in 2004, and 55% to Al Gore in 2000. The seat first became open when Democratic Rep. Neil Abercrombie announced in December that he would resign, in order to focus full time on his campaign for governor. Abercrombie’s resignation took effect in February.
Hawaii special elections for the House do not work like they usually do in other states, where candidates either compete in separate party primaries, or the parties select their candidates through an internal party process. Instead, a single-round election is held in which all the candidates appear together on one ballot, and whoever gets a plurality wins the election. With one strong Republican versus two strong Democrats, the result steadily became a foregone conclusion.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee pulled out of this race two weeks ago, due to the split Democratic vote. The Dems wrote off the district for the next six months, in the hopes of winning it back in November under a standard election that would pit one Democrat against one Republican.
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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