It's taken a couple of days to digest the carnage from Tuesday. Only someone completely out of touch with reality could call it a "tremendous success" just because the Republicans managed to knock some Democratic senators out of deeply red states. The one senate race I was waiting on was Montana because we were told this one was personal. Trump went to the state repeatedly to campaign against Democrat Jon Tester, who had exposed the WH physician Ronny Jackson for the quack he is. Trump was determined to ride Tester out of the Senate. In the end, Tester held onto his seat. So, a big Fuck You to Donald J. Trump!
That's pretty much how the midterms played out. Trumplicans were able to hold onto the rural areas but suffered big losses in suburbs across the nation as women left the party in droves to vote for an unprecedented number of Democratic women candidates. The Democrats now have 83 women in the House, while the Republicans have 17. This is the largest representation of women ever in Congress, with literally 83% of them being Democrats.
It was a rough day for Republicans in state elections as well, as they lost 7 governor races and barely hung onto Florida, which should go to a recount. Florida was probably the most disappointing for Democrats as this was their best chance to retake the state in 20 years, but Andrew Gillum fell 0.6% short of Ron DeSantis. Also, Bill Nelson surprisingly lost to Rick Scott in the Senate race, similarly by a razor-thin margin, which will be recounted.
I will never understand how this slimeball keeps winning. Rick Scott came to Florida ten years ago for the easy bankruptcy laws and stayed on as governor. Floridians literally voted a carpetbagger into office and despite universally loathing him, continue to vote for him for the sole reason he is Republican. He has left the state an environmental disaster and now goes to Washington where no doubt he will continue his anti-regulatory campaign.
The one piece of good news to come out of Florida is that its citizens passed an amendment that did away with Felony Disenfranchisement, allowing 1.4 million persons to have their civil rights restored. John Oliver ran a great piece on this with Rick Scott determined to keep these persons off the voter rolls. Too little too late as far as 2018 is concerned.
In other parts of the country we saw a purging of Republicans, notably in Wisconsin and Kansas, both failed Republican economic experiments that left its citizens much poorer after eight years. Scott Walker hung on by his nails right to the end, which makes you wonder why persons keep voting for these cucks against their own personal interests. Walker was bought and paid for by the Koch Brothers, and did his level best to gut the unions in his effort to make Wisconsin a right-to-work state. The results were disastrous.
Other states couldn't quite bring themselves to part ways with their conservative leaders. Ted Cruz held on in Texas despite the huge grass roots support for Beto O'Rourke, and Georgia wasn't ready to embrace a black woman governor, going with a dirty former Secretary of State instead, although this race is being contested.
What I found interesting is that Republicans won virtually every toss-up Senate race to cling onto this chamber in Congress. This is what Trump is gloating about, as he campaigned almost exclusively for Republican senators in his late push. It's hard to believe Trump proved the difference given so many House races broke the other way, particularly in formerly red districts. Conservative PACs poured huge money into these campaigns, particularly in Texas and Florida.
However, it was a good night for Democrats overall. They regained the House. The Senate was always a stretch, given they had to defend 25 seats to the Republicans 9, but still there is something smelly in Florida and it isn't red tide.
A couple other races that caught my eye were in Virginia and Georgia, where David Brat and Karen Handel were defeated by Democratic challengers. Brat rose to Tea Party fame by beating Eric Cantor back in 2014, and Handel had won a nasty special election for Scott Pruitt's seat last year. Both went down hard, and to women no less.
We were told this election was going to be about women and we weren't disappointed. They really buoyed up the Democratic blue wave, winning the majority of flipped seats in the House. A lot of fresh faces including the first two Muslim-American women representatives from Minnesota and Michigan. Also, the first Native American woman in Congress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman to ever serve in Congress, and she did it with a resounding 78% of the vote from her New York district. Still a long way to go as women represent less than a quarter of the seats in Congress.
Nancy Pelosi appears poised to be the new House Speaker, although many Democratic candidates ran opposing her. At 78, it is time for Pelosi to step down and let someone younger lead the party. Youth was served in this election with one of the best turnouts among younger voters in history. Millennials overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates. They did so because the Democratic Party ran young candidates who better represented their interests.
The Democrats also learned it is OK to embrace liberal issues. Centrist and particularly Blue Dog Democrats didn't fair well. These are Democrats who embrace conservative values and run to the center right of the party. Some pundits see this as further straining an already strained Congress. However, I see it as a badly needed shift back to the Left after having moved too far to the center over the years since Clinton's 1992 victory.
As Obama noted on the campaign trail in 2008, Reagan changed the trajectory of politics in America, and Democrats had fallen under the Gipper's shadow. Clinton may have presented himself as a social liberal but his was a deeply conservative administration. A lot of Democrats in Congress similarly shifted to the right, seeing this as the only viable course in a post-Reagan America. It didn't do any good as Republicans retook Congress in 1994 and pretty much set the agenda the past 24 years, even when they weren't in power. As a result, we still have a porous health care system, suppressed wages, ever-rising debt, and social security under attack. 2018 may finally see the long awaited return of Democratic liberalism.
Trump and his friends in the Senate will no doubt squash any attempts by the Democratic Congress to put forward liberal legislation, but having a Democratic House pretty much saves what's left of the Affordable Care Act, and will put a hold on all further proposed tax cuts and raiding Social Security to cover them, provided the Republicans don't find a way to squeeze it all before the end of the year.
It will be a bitterly contentious two years in the lead up to the 2020 election. It is highly doubtful Democrats will give an inch to Trump as their aim is to sweep him and the Republicans in the Senate out of office. This means they will re-open investigations that stalled under the Republicans and take a thorough look at all the deregulatory measures passed by the Republican House, especially when it comes to finance. The aim here being to divert another economic crisis like the one we had in 2008.
We didn't get the blue tsunami many of us were hoping but it was a significant wave and sets the stage for a hotly contested 2020!
Comments
Post a Comment