Yesterday, the Associated Press called the race for Democrat Harley Rouda. Rohrabacher has not conceded yet, releasing a statement that he'll wait until all the votes are counted. But that will just prolong things, as Rouda's lead is insurmountable. And finally, after 30 years, Dana Rohrabacher will leave Congress.
Good riddance.
Source: The Guardian
The Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher would tell you he’s just a regular guy who loves his country and wishes he had more time to go surfing. But for 30 years, his southern California constituents have also dubbed him “crazy Dana”.
He’s a guy who, in the days of the Soviet Union, signed up for a week to fight alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan. A guy who, in the early 1990s, got into a drunken arm-wrestling match with a young Vladimir Putin. Putin “put me down in a millisecond”, Rohrabacher recalled years later. “His muscles are just unbelievable.”
He’s notorious for making an ill-advised link between “dinosaur flatulence” and global warming; for his open disdain of homosexuals and undocumented immigrants; for welcoming a notorious Holocaust denier to Washington; and for thinking that the Oklahoma City bombing – widely regarded as a conspiracy of homegrown far-right radicals – was an Islamist plot cooked up by Middle Eastern radicals in the Philippines.
Not even Rohrabacher’s enemies would deny he is a colorful man. After 15 terms on Capitol Hill, though, he is almost certainly about to be an ex-congressman.
Following a nail-bitingly close race – the first real contest he has faced since his original election in 1988 – Rohrabacher is lagging behind his Democratic challenger, Harley Rouda, by 4%, a margin that looks insurmountable as the last provisional and absentee ballots trickle in. On Saturday, the Associated Press called the race for Rouda.
