I went to sleep ignoring the election results last night, as I didn’t want to perturb my sleep (my insomnia appears to be abating, though). But as soon as I got to work, I checked the news, expecting to see a rout of the Democrats but immensely pleased to see that it didn’t happen. Even the Senate is still up for grabs, though, as predicted, the House probably went to the GOP. But several Republicans, notably Mehmet “Anas platyrhynchos” Oz, appear to have gone down to defeat. If no Republican candidate in Georgia gets a majority, the two leading contenders (including Herschel “I didn’t pay for abortions” Walker) will have a runoff election.
Here’s the Washington Post’s headline (click to read):
As for who’s winning in the national legislative races, the NYT, as of 6:30, appears to have more up to date results (click to read):
The Senate may still stay Democratic, as Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker, both Republicans, were defeated. As Five Thirty Eight notes:
It’s early Wednesday morning and we don’t yet know which party will control the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. And based on simulations using FiveThirtyEight’s final forecast, the projections we do have suggest Democrats are now slight favorites to maintain their narrow edge in the Senate while ABC News estimates that Republicans have 207 seats to the Democrats’ 188, putting the GOP in position to win a majority. Still, it’s likely to be some time until we know whether those outcomes have actually happened and what the final numbers will be in each chamber.
. .. . Coming into Election Day, Democrats and Republicans each held 50 seats in the Senate, but Democrats held power via Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote.1 To shift the balance of power, Republicans needed to win one net seat. But as things stand, the Senate will include 48 Democrats, 47 Republicans and the occupants of five as-yet-unprojected seats in Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin.
But one race where we do have a projection from ABC News is of critical importance to the Senate math: Pennsylvania. Earlier this morning, Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman defeated Republican Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, capturing the seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey. As a result, Democrats just need to hold on to two of their three most endangered seats — Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — which significantly improves their odds of reaching 50 seats.
As for Georgia, it’s too close to call, and if there’s a runoff between Warnock or Walker, I suspect the libertarian votes will go to Warnock, ensuring a Democratic seat.
Of that trio of Democratic-held seats, Georgia’s outcome seems pretty clear at this point, too. That would be another runoff, for those who didn’t get enough of that last cycle, when Democrats won runoffs for both of Georgia’s Senate seats to capture the chamber. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker are each right at about 49 percent, with a Libertarian candidate garnering the other 2 percent — enough to force a Dec. 6 runoff by preventing either Warnock or Walker from winning an outright majority.
As for the House of Representatives, it’s very likely it will fall into Republican hands. But remember, the Senate controls all Presidential judicial appointments, so if it stays Democratic (and with Harris breaking ties), the GOP won’t get to stack the judiciary with hyper-conservatives. There will still be a legislative stalemate if the House goes Republican.
About the House:
Of that trio of Democratic-held seats, Georgia’s outcome seems pretty clear at this point, too. That would be another runoff, for those who didn’t get enough of that last cycle, when Democrats won runoffs for both of Georgia’s Senate seats to capture the chamber. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker are each right at about 49 percent, with a Libertarian candidate garnering the other 2 percent — enough to force a Dec. 6 runoff by preventing either Warnock or Walker from winning an outright majority.
. . . Republicans are in line for a majority because they gained many of the seats they were supposed to capture, and they are also well-positioned to win some toss-up races as well as seats in which they were underdogs. Florida Republicans had a banner night, particularly in the House: They picked up a couple Democratic-held seats that GOP mapmakers made redder in redistricting (the 7th and 13th districts) as well as a couple of newly drawn, Republican-leaning open seats (the 4th and 15th districts). Elsewhere, the GOP flipped slightly red-leaning seats held by Democratic incumbents in New Jersey’s 7th District and Virginia’s 2nd District while winning two reddish, Democratic-held open seats in Tennessee’s 5th District and Wisconsin’s 3rd District.
As the NYT notes, even the pistol-packing Jesus-ite Lauren Boebert may be defeated:
The election in Colorado’s Third Congressional District was surprisingly tight, with Representative Lauren Boebert, a far-right provocateur who heckled President Biden during his State of the Union speech, locked in a close contest with Adam Frisch, a Democrat. The Associated Press has not called the race.
Ballot measures from the NYT:
Voters in California, Michigan and Vermont chose to enshrine abortion protections in their state constitutions on Tuesday, The Associated Press said.
A vote in Kentucky on whether to amend the State Constitution to say there was no right to abortion was too close to call as of early Wednesday.
. . . Voters in Maryland and Missouri approved ballot measures on Tuesday to legalize recreational marijuana, according to The Associated Press, adding those states to a list that has swelled in recent years. But similar efforts were also shot down in Arkansas and North Dakota — a mixed result that underscored the varying public attitudes over marijuana use.
What’s wrong with North Dakota?
. . . In Iowa, voters, by a wide margin, supported an initiative enshrining gun rights in an amendment to the State Constitution that declares that residents’ ability “to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Oy.
From the WaPo on the abortion measures:
On Tuesday, both California and Vermont were on course to add abortion rights to their constitutions by an overwhelming margin, as expected. A similar measure was ahead in Michigan, 53 percent to 47 percent.
Perhaps most notably, though, a pair of red states — Kentucky and Montana — also appeared prepared to turn aside antiabortion measures such as the one in Kansas. The Kentucky measure would clarify that the state constitution contains no right to an abortion; the Montana measure would require health-care providers to try to save any infant born alive, including after attempted abortions.
While results aren’t final, the election reinforced that ballot measures are largely where this battle will be fought moving forward, and that’s not good for the antiabortion crowd.
Finally, in one gubernatorial race I followed, the result was sad: Stacey Abrams went down to defeat by incumbent Republican Brian Kemp in Georgia. From CNN:
Kemp had been seen as the favorite in the race for months, with Abrams unable to capture the momentum she experienced in 2018 and hampered by broader voter discontent with Democratic control of Washington.
The victory reasserts Republican control of the executive office in Georgia just two years removed from Democrats winning both of the state’s US Senate seats and President Joe Biden becoming the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1992.
Abrams’ defeat is a tough blow for Democrats who have long sought to elevate her in a state that, until recently, had been dominated by Republicans. After losing to Kemp by less than two percentage points in 2018, Abrams was among the women considered to run alongside Biden. She is often touted as one of the most influential Democrats in the country, despite currently holding no public office.
Kemp’s victory is a clear sign that economic arguments made by Republicans were more powerful in 2022 than Democrats’ focus on abortion.
Without a win there, her ascendancy as a future Democratic star may have ended.
There will be no end of analyses and postmortems in the days to come, but I’ll close with the Washington Post‘s explanations of why the Red Wave failed to materialize:
As for abortion’s impact on the election more broadly? The good news for Democrats on Tuesday was that lots of voters — nearly 3 in 10 — said abortion rights were their most important issue, which was nearly as large as the share of voters who named inflation, according to network exit polls.
Abortion ranking nearly as high on the list of priorities as the most significant economic issue (and the GOP’s top issue) would seem to be a good thing for Democrats, since the economy almost always tops people’s list of concerns. But voters trusted the GOP more on every other issue tested: crime, gun policy and immigration.
So how did Democrats beat expectations on Tuesday? Surely Roe v. Wade being overturned played a role, delivering the Democrats turnout fuel in an election in which they had been lacking it — and an election whose fundamentals favored the opposition party. The court decision’s effect showed up almost immediately after it came down, with Democrats suddenly overperforming in every special election.
But this election wasn’t just about the relative strengths of the parties’ bases — it was also about independents. Exit polls currently show that independent voters favored Democrats 49 percent to 47 percent. That’s not a big victory, but it is highly unusual for a midterm election. The opposition party has won independents by double digits in each of the last four midterm elections, but the GOP might lose this group when all is said and done in this one. (Exit polls get readjusted as results roll in.)
In what bizarro world is keeping the status quo a good thing? This administration has been a colossal failure by any metric. Foreign policy disasters. Border chaos. Worst economy in 40 years. Failed pandemic response. Lunatic gender ideology. Rampant crime. Baffling how voters could look around at the state of things and declare, “This is fine.”
I think the main thing is that they were afraid of republicans for their continued support of The Big Lie.
Sorry, but this is a thoughtful website. Statements like we are experiencing the worst economy in 40 years disqualifies you from being taken seriously. I guess the recession and collapse of the banking and housing industries in the late 2000s slipped your mind. While inflation is rampant, unemployment is historically low and the GNP is growing. The rest of your comment is simply Fox News hyperbole.
Oh, nuts, my comment showed up in the wrong place. I concur with onionsack, I meant to say.
I concur. Not to mock the afflicted, but knowingly and willfully electing the brain damaged to high office is a sure sign of civilizational decline. Really, Pennsylvania?
Fetterman’s stroke can be recovered from. Oz the snake oil salesman is beyond redemption.
+1
Bingo
To get all Winston-Churchill-and-Lady-Astor about it: In a few months, John Fetterman will have likely recovered from his stroke; Dr. Oz will still be Dr. Oz.
That was a comment that I felt reflected badly on Churchill. Lady Astor couldn’t do anything about the way she looked and knowing what I do know about Churchill now, he probably wouldn’t have been sober in the morning.
True, but is there solid evidence that Churchill ever actually said it?
I’m not sure the two ever actually had the exchange about her giving him poison if he were her husband and, if she were his wife, his drinking it, either. But it makes for a memorable story.
Wait a minute. I think I’m conflating two Churchill quotes. The Lady Astor one was the one with poison. The one about being sober in the morning was to Bessie Braddock. This site seems to conclude that the story is apocryphal, or at least not original to Churchill
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/17/sober-tomorrow/
The tea poison one also seems t be apocryphal
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/27/drink-it/
I agree, it was rather unsettling to see this obviously impaired man run for office. Even if he still has his faculties intact, he cannot communicate in a way that is necessary for that office, and it is unlikely at this point that he will recover all the way.
The problem was, Oz was such a loathsome, meritless candidate. A bog standard Republican would have probably won this race.
Ditto for Georgia…what was the GOP thinking running Hershel Walker in a race that was ripe for the picking? In addition to being an inveterate liar and hypocrite, Herschel’s years of punishment in American football and a brief MMA career seem to have given him brain trauma that rivals Fetterman. Again, a more standard Republican candidate would have probably won outright.
What this shows is that these bizarre “Trump candidates”, basically a collection of delusional, hyperbolic incompetents, may do well in the primaries but have much less appeal among moderate Republicans and independent voters. Something to think about for the GOP.
I read here recently, but can’t remember by whom and based on what source, that the Democrats helped support bizarro Republican candidates in the primaries in a repeat of the pied piper strategy they used with Trump. Don’t know if that’s true. Maybe it’s just that within party, the extremists and crazies can succeed (one also sees this on the democratic side here and there), but not with the wider population.
Have to object here. “Brain damaged” in an unfair, overly broad term in the context of Mr. Fetterman. The term as colloquially used implies cognitive impairment as after head injury or other diffuse process like anoxia, where cognition is usually impaired. Mr. Fetterman is publicly acknowledged to have dysphasia following the focal brain injury in the territory of a blood vessel following a stroke. Cognition is almost never impaired in a single stroke. Obviously I have not examined him and don’t offer a diagnosis but even the worst clips of his debate performance. highlighted with the intent to undermine him, support only the known fact that he has language processing impairments. This makes any statement about his intellectual faculties very difficult to assess, even in a medical examination, and any assessment must respect the medical fact that people who’ve had a stroke almost always have the same intellectual capacity after it as they did before.
His communication difficulties may or may not impair his ability to perform as a U.S. Senator but that was for the voters of Pennsylvania to decide, and they will have their say again in six years.
Thanks, Leslie, for shedding a light of medical expertise on this matter.
“Dysphasia is a language disorder that results from brain injury or damage.”
https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-dysphasia-definition-causes-symptoms.html
“Aphasia is a disorder that results from damage to portions of the brain that are responsible for language.”
https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/aphasia
Are those definitions not accurate? Should one say disordered or injured instead? Do words not mean what they mean and how is that unfair?
The definitions are accurate, Bunny. I will give you the benefit of the doubt …
if you were honestly sure that you weren’t citing “brain damage” (a lay expression) to leave the impression of intellectual impairment that should bar a person from a public office that required cognitive performance.
This is a fundamentally important point in society’s duty to the disabled. Think of the reasonable accommodations that employers must make for someone with a disability such as Mr. Fetterman’s. If with aids to communication he can function in a Senate committee deliberation and understand what he is voting on,,then his disability is not disqualifying, at least from where I sit hundreds of miles and an international border away.. His fellow Senators must meet him halfway in his efforts. If he is clearly unfit even with maximum reasonable accommodation, then removal from office would be warranted. There would be obvious political implications to his resignation but we are talking medicine here, not politics. The voters can of course vote him out of office for any reason each one chooses, reasonable accommodation be damned if that’s how they feel. Those who voted for him understood the difference between dysphasia and someone who has survived cardiac arrest but isn’t all there, or their parents who became demented.
What’s important in assessing disability and its accommodation is not the diagnosis or even the prognosis for recovery. It’s what the person can do, functionally. Mr. Fetterman has six years to show what he can do.
Even if that were accurate and not hyperbole (which is a generous description). It would still be better than alternative, which says an awful lot about the alternative.
Oh, well, this one outdoes even Sen. Fetterman.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pennsylvania-state-representative-reelected-despite-being-dead/ar-AA13VegA
Because Rep. DeLuca died too late to be removed from the ballot his ‘election’ means there can now be special election where the Democrats can field a live candidate.
Yes, interesting.
“Early voting begins 4-6 weeks in Pennsylvania. That was enough time for Tony to die even as he was cruising his way to a re-election.
70% of the over 1.4 million voters requesting mail ballots came from Democrats. The majority of those flooded in from Allegheny County and Philadelphia.
When the system is so broken that a dead man can win because voters are literally voting for the walking dead, it needs change.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/bring-back-election-day-save-america/
He was in my district. DeLuca was actually quite good. Happy to have him act as a placeholder while the find someone suitable.
Further to Mark’s reply, how do you have Foreign policy disasters. and Failed pandemic response on your laundry list? I’ll let you have Lunatic gender ideology, but that will even itself out, I think, and I don’t see it as that important for national politics anyway. I’ll leave Rampant crime for someone else.
I’ll just address those “foreign policy disasters”. If the Trump Republicans had their way, what do you think the situation would be like in Ukraine right now? I think this most important foreign policy issue of the year has been handled very well by Biden.
Poor President Zelenskyy would be running around on a backhoe trying to dig the DNC server out of someone’s backyard and making appearances on 60 Minutes to announce non-existent criminal investigations instead of leading his nation in its courageous fight against a totalitarian invader.
In the bizarro world in which a crooked business man can become president of the USA and remain so in spite of serious, if not illegal, misconduct including inciting a coup. In that bizarro world, what happened is better than at least one plausible alternative.
Here are some early observations:
• Florida is no longer a swing state because of the Latino swing to the Republicans there. Indeed, the Democrats need to work hard to regain their dwindling Latino vote.
• With an impressive win, Ron DeSantis will very likely challenge Trump for the Republican nomination for president in 2024, which can make for an interesting primary season, although as is always the case, the Party will unite behind the ultimate nominee.
• Arizona, the home of Barry Goldwater, is now a swing state.
• The Democratic achievement in this mid-term election has been remarkable considering the punditry’s prediction of doom turned out totally wrong. I am glad that I ignored the bleating of the so-called experts.
• Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois won a landslide victory over his MAGA, theocratic opponent, Darren Bailey. He gave a fiery victory speech, indicating to me that he has presidential ambitions.
• Notwithstanding the Democratic performance, Biden and the country is still in a lot of trouble if the Republicans win one or both houses of Congress, even it is by the narrowest of margins. If the Republicans control the House of Representatives, its exceedingly thin majority will still be able to do whatever it wants if the Party stays united. Pelosi showed how this can be done. In the Senate, McConnell will be able to block all Biden judicial nominees. In other words, Congress will be dysfunctional and the Republicans will attempt to blackmail Biden over such issues as the debt ceiling.
• Overall, the election settled nothing. The country is still as bitterly divided as ever. Anything resembling national reconciliation is nowhere on the horizon. The Republican Party will remain fascist; their assault on democracy will continue. I dare to predict that the Democrats will move more to the center as it realizes that centrist policies is the road to victory. The 2024 presidential election will be even more acrimonious than ever (as hard as that may be to believe). Once again, the election will be decided by relatively few votes in the usual swing states. This pattern has been the case for the last quarter of a century. At this time, I don’t see it ending, but, of course, the state of the country in two years may be very different.
Thus endeth my punditry for today, which means if I turn out to be totally wrong, I’ll simply deny what I’ve written.😊
I subscribe to your last bullet point. Now begins the course to 2024.
Two questions:
I’ve been hearing that it’s a mistake to group the Latino vote into one bloc. People of Cuban descent tend to vote differently than people of Mexican descent; the former tend to be much more Republican. Do you agree?
Are you diversity of ideological trends within the Republican Party of Florida, tied to the demographic shift?
This Axios article explains the shift of Florida Latinos to the Republicans.
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/07/desantis-latino-voters-election
The generation of Cubans who came to Miami after Castro’s successful 1959 revolution tended to be extremely conservative, especially after the fiasco of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion (although their children, and their children’s children, have tended to be more moderate). But there has been a more recent influx to South Florida of Venezuelan immigrants and others fleeing leftist regimes who have become US citizens and registered voters.
Local Spanish-language talk radio, which trends ultraconservative, has for over a half century now had an outsized influence on the native Spanish-speaking population of Miami-Dade County. As the piece linked to by Historian sets out, Republicans have flooded these airwaves with right-wing disinformation ahead of the last couple of elections, and Democrats have done a piss-poor job of responding to it.
Also, we shouldn’t discount that many South Florida Hispanics, although they arrived here as Catholics, have migrated to evangelical megachurches, from which they take their political cues, especially on culture-war issues.
The Cubans in Florida have been inundated with media messages in Spanish claiming all Democrats are ‘commie-socialists” and they are terrified. I live in Chicago and went to a hairdresser from Cuba who repeated all this crap she was hearing from her family in Florida. It drove me nuts because there was no way she would even discuss the fact that these messages might be lies. I gave up and changed to another salon.
Trump has repeatedly signaled that he’s about to announce his 2024 presidential candidacy, probably almost immediately in an effort to dissuade potential opponents from challenging him. Trump likely feels he has to run, to do battle from a high-visibility platform, since he’s staring down the barrel of a potential indictment — quite possibly two or three indictments.
If DeSantis wants to challenge Trump, he better be prepared to come out swinging — if you want to challenge Caesar, you had better kill Caesar — since Trump will attempt to do to him what he’s done to every other male opponent: emasculate him completely. (When challenged by a woman, Trump’s tactic is to attack them as ugly and unfuckable — ask Carly Fiorina.) Be prepared to hear Trump claim that, when DeSantis first decided to run for Florida governor in 2018, he came to the Oval Office, got down on his knees, and offered to do anything — anything! — in return for Trump’s endorsement.
If DeSantis isn’t ready to withstand this onslaught from a man with nothing left to lose, he may as well stay home. Trump will split him from sternum to pubis, rip out his guts, and kick them around on a debate stage. He will go after not just DeSantis, but DeSantis’s wife, and DeSantis’s family (as he did with Ted Cruz in 2015-16) and anything else that pops into Trump’s largely empty head. (At his recently rally in Miami, at which he snubbed DeSantis by refusing to invite him, Trump already took out for a test drive a mocking nickname for DeSantis — “Ron DeSanctimonious” — even as DeSantis was about to stand for reelection in a couple days.)
DeSantis’s main problem is that although Trump is eminently attackable, DeSantis has already given up all his best ammunition by excusing all of the gross, vile, illegal, and damfool things Trump has done for the last seven years, including his post-presidential purloining of top-secret documents and his fomenting of an attack on our nation’s Capitol. Plus, were DeSantis to get down in the mud with Trump, he risks permanently alienating Trump’s hardcore, dead-end supporters — a portion of the Republican electoral base no Republican presidential candidate can afford to have stay home in a general election (given that Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight such elections, dating back to 1988).
What’s more, once DeSantis and Trump get into the primary season, if Trump starts losing he will scream bloody murder that the system is rigged and the primaries are being stolen from him — as he did with the first contest of the 2016 season (the Iowa caucuses), as he announced he was prepared to do if he lost the 2016 general election, and has he did beginning election night after his loss in 2020. Trump will not go gracefully. Never has, never will.
The entire process bids fair to tear the GOP apart.
They did. But that didn’t work out for the conspirators 🙂
“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones[.]”
In which case (to lift lines not just from Billy the Shakes, but the Hitch), the Donald could be interred in a matchbox.
One of those mini match boxes!
“The entire process bids fair to tear the GOP apart.”
Indeed it shall. I am stocking up on popcorn
Just remember: the mechanisms and dynamics the New Right embraces, the New Left embraces ~20 years later … and the New Right has been playing these games since the GWB days. I shudder to see how the New Left applies the same tactics.
Yep, I heard about the deSanctimonious epithet for the first time this morning on Swedish radio, which I’m able to listen to here in Greater Braddock (home of the next Sen from PA) thanks to my darling Alexa.
An Orange Julius / deS rift could make things interesting for the Jan 6 hearings – R’s backing deS might become motivated to support the investigations.
But Trump was slammed by many right-wingers for his DeSantis insult, and at the next rally gave him a lukewarm endorsement and didn’t mention the new nickname (do you actually think Trump knows what sanctimonious means?). And I’m sure you’ve heard the ad where DeSantis says he was created by g*d on the 8th day. As a protector! That was one of the most f’d-up ads I’ve ever heard. The Xtians I used to know would have been horrified by a political candidate anointing themselves as the 8th creation of g*d. How far the idiots have fallen…
That particular insult had Roger Stone’s fingerprints all over it.
DeSantis plainly has a powerful appetite to be president. But I’m not sure he’s prepared for the primetime of the national spotlight or for an ugly alley fight with Trump. Maybe he goes for it, and maybe he steps back to let the Big Dog eat, figuring he’ll be more ripe for it himself after two terms in the governorship. We shall see.
All those Republicans who Trump took by surprise as he went through them like a hot knife through butter, better pray DeSantis does great. Their spineless and cowardice will look even more distasteful the second time around.
Yeah, sanctimonious has WAY too many syllables for the moron to handle.
Excuse me, the Donald knows words; he knows the best words.
After all, he told us so himself.
😩😵💫 He says he “went” to an Ivy League school, but did he study there?
Ha ha, oh, please. Lighten up. It’s a takeoff of Paul Harvey’s “God Made a Farmer.”
Ha, ha, lighten up. The ad is a takeoff of Paul Harvey’s “God Made a Farmer.”
Speaking of Jesus-ites, there is no Jesus-ite like unto Jesus-ite Kathy Hochul.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8TDi3v6uS8
> with a Libertarian candidate garnering the other 2 percent
Woohoo! We can make a difference! I’d love to see how many of us vote that way if we had a proportional system, like many other countries. We have too many people voting strategically because they think their true vote would be wasted. I’d love to see one of the two houses become proportional, but don’t see any permutation of the two parties in power supporting a Constitutional amendment. Go figure.
I do favor a viable 3rd party here with political power, such that it splits the voting 3 ways at times. The essentially two-party system has led to too much extreme-ness.
Here in Michigan Democrats flipped the House and Senate blue as well as returning Gretchen Whitmer to Governor. This is the first time in 40 years that Dems control all three branches in Michigan. Also, Prop 3, the Reproductive Rights proposal that was the subject of a really nasty campaign waged by churches and Republican Governor candidate Tudor Dixon (backed big time by Betsy DeVos money) passed by a substantial margin.
Watch for Whitmer to make a bid for national office in 2024.
I know! I am very pleased about my state.
The anti-proposition 3 ads were a constant bombardment of outright lies, weren’t they?
What strikes me about this election and recent ones is the extent to which politicians can talk like total idiots and still win. What are people thinking? Watching an election is like attending a convention of folks with abnormal psychology. Get me out of this place!
I think women’s reproductive rights (to have an abortion) proved to be more important than the “experts” had been thinking, and Trump’s involvement doesn’t seem to have helped Republican candidates or himself.
According to The Hill:
https://thehill.com/homenews/3726972-fox-newss-marc-thiessen-says-midterms-a-disaster-for-gop/
They don’t have to look far. The problem with the GOP is they sold their souls (metaphorically speaking, of course) to Trump and this election showed that he can’t deliver. Every candidate he endorsed either lost outright or won by slim margins. DeSantis, in comparison, won by 19 percentage points.
Now would be a very good time for the Republican leadership to retire Trump, if they only had the political courage and integrity to do so.
Oh you didn’t hear? Trump claimed an 80 to 3 win/loss for those he backed.
Trump’s never had much acuity for (or interest in) numbers that aren’t preceded by dollar signs.
The actual tally claimed by Trump on his Truth Social was 174 seats won, 9 lost. Of course many of the wins would have won anyway and several high-profile losses were by candidates whom he helped win their primaries over GOP candidates who might have had a better chance in the general election against competitive Democrats.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/11/big-day-trump-endorsed-candidates-fake-news-media-will-not-report-9-losses-174-wins-far/
This right-wing site quotes Trump on the 174:9 but spends most of its post detailing the primary wins Trump contributed to, who mostly then lost!
Of course this wasn’t all his doing. The Democratic Party’s strategy supporting unelectable GOP candidates during their primaries also paid off.
Its sad about Stacey Abrams, but I am not surprised. But now she can be very effective helping the outcome of any run-off in Georgia, as there was in 2020.
And that can give a rebirth to her prospects in the national eye.
My view from Colorado is a little less cynical than yesterday’s:
The Mega-MAGA candidate for governor was defeated by the biggest margin in the last 20 years – nearly 20 points
Our moderate [in my opinion] Democrat Senator was reelected
Moderate incumbents, both Democrat and Republican, were re-elected
The no-abortion-under-any-circumstances candidate for Congress from a new district was defeated
Most heartening, the Trump-loving, gun-toting attention whore Congress-gal looks to be going down the tubes
Yeah, Boebert getting ousted will be my favorite House loss of the election.
Always been hugely impressed with Michael Bennet.
I think that Bennet can be most effective if he focusses his time and energy on his Senate duties and doesn’t again drift into Presidential aspirations. I also think that Representative Jason Crow has many of the personal and professional qualities to someday make him a viable Presidential contender.
Missouri may have legalized recreational marijuana, but Kansas voters must have been high; they elected that odorous turd Kris Kobach as AG.
Billion$ of Dollar$ spent, and we’re pretty much where we started (which is fine by me). But what a colossal waste! GET MONEY OUT OF POLITICS!!!
And I’m very happy that the political ads, phone calls and mailers will finally stop.
As long as you don’t live in Georgia. Imagine what that will be like in the coming weeks!
Blame Walker for that. He had every opportunity to withdraw and endorse Libertarian Chase Oliver, but selfishly chose to force a runoff.
Good one, Patrick; I needed that laugh.
If the Dems can pull out the senate race in Nevada and hang on to the one in Arizona, a Georgia run-off will be naught but red-eye gravy. In that case, I think Warnock defeats Walker handily. I can’t imagine Georgia Republicans running back to the polls because they think Herschel Walker would make such a great addition to the US senate, without the majorityship riding on the line.
‘Course that’s a big, fat Rudyard-Kipling-style majuscule IF. 🙂
Georgia is still undecided, the Republicans still have a good chance to elect their own brain damaged candidate to the Senate…
It’s not undecided, it’s non-50%ed.
Too bad third parties have no impact in the US, they’d make it more interesting over these two catchalls.