The Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, despite the Republican gerrymandering advantage: good. The Repugs increased their margin in the Senate, by picking up Democratic seats in Florida (bad), North Dakota (not surprising), Indiana (disappointing), and Missouri (bad, that state has moved further to the right in the last twenty years), but they did forfeit Nevada (yeah!) to a rather lackluster Democrat, but a Democrat nonetheless. (Her Republican opponent was Trump-endorsed.) Many Governorships flipped to Democrats (7 in total), which will help with the 2020 round of gerrymandering.
Although RealClearPolitics is a right-leaning site (boo!), I like their way of listing election results since they highlight "pickups" very clearly.
Let's start with the state Governor races. First, two bits of happy news: that reactionary, union-busting moron Scott Walker lost to the Democratic challenger in Wisconsin--that means hope for labor and for universities in Wisconsin; and the Trump-endorsed immigrant-bashing lunatic Kris Kobach lost to a Democrat in the deep red state of Kansas. (Illinois sent Repug Bruce Rauner back to his country club, as expected, and replaced him with a Democratic billionaire, which is better, but still indicative of the depths of pathology in these benighted states of America.) Second, one very bad bit of news: Andrew Gillum, an African-American who led in all the polls in Florida, lost to the Republican. Since Florida is a big state, with lots of house seats, this is bad news vis-a-vis redistricting in 2020. Third, bad news but with a silver lining: an African-American woman in Georgia--a state rife with voter suppression efforts--performed consistently with the polls and appears to have lost by only 2 percentage points to the Republican--and this in the heart of the deep South!
Moving now to the Senate, it was mostly bad news, as already noted, and not unexpected given the seats in play. The 2020 map will favor the Democrats in the Senate, this one did not. Given the composition of the new Senate, impeaching Trump in the House will be particularly pointless, since there is no chance as things stand now of getting 2/3rds of the Senate to convict. One notable fact: the loathsome Ted Cruz beat his Democratic opponents by only 2.5 percentage points in the still-benighted-but-less-so state of Texas. He is vulnerable.
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