About Last Night: CCM Wins Nevada, Democrats Keep Senate Majority
Brady-Handy Photograph Collection (Library of Congress) [Public domain]
With a runoff in Georgia still to come, the Democratic Party secures a 50th seat in the US Senate and will keep the majority with VP Harris having the tiebreaker.
The final blow to Republican hopes of retaking the chamber came in Nevada, where on Saturday Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) was projected to win reelection, edging past Adam Laxalt (R), a former state attorney general. Cortez Masto’s projected win ensures Democrats a 50th seat, with a runoff election still to come in Georgia on Dec. 6 that could pad their slim majority. With 97 percent of the vote in, Cortez Masto led by half a percentage point.
Control of the House was still up in the air on Saturday, as vote counting continued days after an election that started with Democrats expected to sustain heavy losses, since midterm elections have historically favored the party out of power. But Democrats have held their ground and even made some gains in many key contests, leaving many Republicans unnerved. In winning back control of the Senate, they dashed GOP hopes of a full takeover on Capitol Hill.
That’s welcome news for Biden, who was staring down the possibility of humbling defeats as the election neared. Now, the Senate, which oversees the confirmation of executive branch personnel and federal judges, will stay in his party’s corner. A Senate majority will also give the president and his party more say over legislative debates on domestic and foreign spending and other major issues.
“I feel good, and I’m looking forward to the next couple years,” Biden told reporters. He called Cortez Masto and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to congratulate them from Cambodia, where he is attending a summit of Asian nations, according to the White House.
Schumer called the results a “vindication” for Democrats and their agenda, and said Republicans had turned off voters with extremism and “negativity,” including some candidates’ false insistence that the 2020 election had been stolen. “America showed that we believed in our democracy,” he told reporters in New York, while praising the quality of Democratic incumbents.
Most national Republicans stayed silent on the projected result as of Saturday night, and the Laxalt campaign has not yet publicly acknowledged Cortez Masto’s projected win.
Still, a few Republicans began to express their discontent as they faced at least another another two years in the minority. “The old party is dead. Time to bury it. Build something new,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), tweeted shortly after the race was called.
Shiree Verdone, a Republican fundraiser, said Saturday night that GOP donors and activists are distraught at the election’s outcome.
“We have to examine what went wrong. There needs to be some kind of study of what happened in this election.” said Verdone, who held a fundraiser for Laxalt and acknowledged that Democrats know how to get out the vote in Nevada with the “Reid machine,” named for the late Senate majority leader Harry M. Reid.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who in October was predicting as head of the Senate GOP campaign arm that his party would hold 53 to 55 seats, had not yet made a statement as of late Saturday night.
The final count in the House of Representatives is still up in the air, but is trending towards a single digit, very thin Republican majority.
Warnock may no longer be critical, but he’s the difference between real control of the committees and another power-sharing arrangement with McConnell. People tend to forget that little is introduced directly to the floor; almost all of it goes through committees where there’s no tiebreaker.Report
I’m genuinely curious to see how hard Republicans are willing to show up for Walker with this news. I’m not making any predictions, and it’s possible they still will, but I also wonder how many people who felt like they were holding their noses will find something else to do for the run off.Report
I don’t think enough. The people who voted for the libertarian candidate were probably more right-leaning than left-leaning and will not show up. The people who voted for Kemp and held their noses to vote Walker for Senate control have no incentive to show up.Report
Yeah, this.
Everyone in the state knows what Walker is, uh, not a good choice for operating a cash register, much less a Senate seat.
Meanwhile, no one has actually been able to make any attacks stick on Warnock besides the most generic ones. It’s extremely hard to even _conceive_ of Warnock doing a fraction of the stuff everyone knows Walker did.
So a good chunk of the narrative being pushed for Walker was ‘You need to vote for him to regain the Senate from Dem control’ and ‘Don’t worry, he’ll just sit silently and vote for the party’.
That argument just stopped working.
Now it’s a choice of ‘Who seems like they could competently represent this state and what sort of impression does our choice make?’Report
Yeah… no idea.
On the one hand Walker underperformed Kemp so we already know that enthusiasm is reduced.
On the other hand, with NV going blue… this is a now a national defensive play which should boost enthusiasm.
On the gripping hand, it isn’t for majority control, it’s for procedural negotiation over committee assignments which does what for enthusiasm?
Bottom line… Walker is an unforced error the magnitude of which we’re still assessing.Report
I don’t think the average voter is even going to follow that.They don’t even understand the closure rules. They’re going to read headlines saying ‘Democrats have majority in Senate’ and stop there.
Note this applies to _both_ sets of voters.
I think at some point we have to stop pretending ‘Republican voters picking, as candidates, the stupidest and more incoherence humans that ever existed’ is an _error_. It’s very clear they just have different requirements than Democratic voters, or Republican leadership or that matter.
And those Republican voter qualifications are…uh…’sorta famous for something, like playing football or being an attractive woman or claiming to be a billionaire or just shows up a lot on the TV’.Report
or being Beto.Report
The Dems haven’t been nominating Beto style candidates for must wing swing races though.Report
Yea. Another big question for the GOP is if they want Trump in GA stumping for him. Not sure if Kemp credibly can and I can think of a lot of reasons he might not want anything to do with it.Report
Warnock will likely have an easier time in December. Walker had a lot of people holding their noses to vote for him. I doubt they come out.Report
Saul’s bold predictions: 1. The Democrats will retain a very slim majority in the House based on the outstanding seats;
2. If the Republicans get a slim majority, Kevin McCarthy will not be speaker.Report
I can’t quite bring myself to sign onto that first prediction, but #2 is certainly true. (And if they do get a majority, it will be a slim one.)
In fact, watching the Republicans rip themselves apart if they win the House will be at least some level of consolation. I hope Trump injects himself into that.Report
If the majority is slim enough, there may not be a Speaker for weeks. McCarthy has been aiming for this for a long time and won’t give up without a struggle. He’s also unlikely to just turn the Rules Committee and agenda over to the Freedom Caucus (which seems to be their asking price).
Unlike many people, I don’t think anyone from the Freedom Caucus will actually stand for election. There is no way to avoid the fact Speaker is a whole lot of picky work, and all of them strike me as too lazy to take it on.Report
McCarthy is also too partisan to go to Democratic members for anythingReport
Are there half a dozen Republicans who would agree to join with the Democrats to elect Reasonable Republican (TM) X as Speaker in exchange for some committee or other concessions? Would the Democrats do such a deal?Report
Who knows? Suppose it is 218 R to 217 D. Maybe the Democrats can convince Dan Newhouse (WA-4) that he is a dead man walking and that they would vote for him to be speaker and he votes for himselfReport
Willie Brown did something much like this in the California Assembly in 1995.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Allen_(politician)#RecallReport
I admit it is a tough climb but last Monday everyone was predicting a red wave because of bizness and stonks and that disappeared quickly. A lot of the outstanding votes will need to break Democratic though.
Pollsters predicted that Joe Kent had a 98 percent chance of winning. Marie Gulsenkamp Perez won fairly easily.
I think the pundits and forecasters were being lazy, let themselves be convinced by flood the zone polls from Republicans, and really did think Dobbs and election denial were nothing burgers. Silver refuses to admit that Democrats were right to point out Republicans were flooding the zone with biased polls at the end. I guess being a pundit means never having to admit you were sorry thoughReport
From your lips to God(ess?)’s ears.Report
The news is certainly good and getting better so lets all take a moment to breathe and savor the win.
And then take some time to reflect on the sober reality.
What the elections results are doing is making it clear where everyone stands on democracy.
A lot of the races were very clear “Advocates of Democracy” versus “Opponents of Democracy”. The election deniers like Tim Michels in Wisconsin governor race, or the various election deniers in secretary of state races like Mark Finchem all got northward of 45% of the vote. I haven’t seen any which were blowout landslides.
So now it is a matter of historical record, the number of American voters who are willing to vote to overturn democracy and install minority rule. On average across the country it can fairly be said to be around 45% or so. And that 45% has the advantage of a friendly SCOTUS.
And since democracy needs to win every time while anti-democracy needs to only win once, we are not going to be out of the woods for a long time yet.Report
My take is that elections are going to be very close for the next several years in many districts with razor thin victory margins. Just enough voters are turned off by full frontal fascism to reject it but plenty support it. There seems to have been a big swing towards Republicans in Asian-American communities this election, with something like 46% going Republican.Report
As long as the Democrats are perceived as sympathetic to what I think is best described as an anti-educational excellence and anti-aspirational agenda they’re going to punch below their weight with voters they should win handily. They’re going to have a great opportunity to pivot in the near future when SCOTUS holds race-based affirmative action in higher ed to violate the constitution. The question is whether they can take that as the favor it’s going to be.Report
I can only hope the Court will decide that way. But how do you see that being a positive for the Democratic Party?Report
It isn’t guaranteed to be a positive. What it (probably) will present is a convenient opportunity to drop a high visibility political loser from which many other high visibility political losers spring. There will be an opening to recalibrate to more mainstream, reasonable positions without officially conceding the principle, if they want to take it.Report
So your thinking is that the plank is a drag, not that there’s a policy opportunity?Report
No, not quite. I think losing the dragging plank by decision of a conservative Supreme Court is great cover to revisit preferred policy, hopefully to something both better and more defensible. That is what I hope they do.Report
I thinkhope that the average voter is more like you than Chip, but the average Democratic voter is going to take this as a call to storm the Supreme Court building again.Report
Sadly my crystal ball is at the shop but I struggle envisioning that kind of reaction. We’re talking about something that couldn’t even win a referendum in California, not loss of a broadly popular individual right.
The real risk is that the small constituency committed to the policy refuses to give up on it in the cultural and activist spaces where they have influence.Report
“Are perceived”.
This is weasel wording.
If you don’t like affirmative action, make a case for ending it. Using “a bunch of people who aren’t here and who I have never spoken to but let me describe how they feel” isn’t persuasive.
Especially when you hide it behind an invented buzz phrase like “anti-educational excellence”.
I assert that over the past half century, affirmative action has vastly improved the quality and quantity of American higher education.
Use that as your starting point, and make a case against it.Report
I don’t know how many schools we had without a single student proficient in math or reading in 1972 but I can’t help but feel like it was fewer.Report
For any other commenters who feel like responding, I’d prefer to just ignore this comment since it has nothing to do with the topic and is useful only for threadjacking.
Thanks.Report
It’s like arguing that “American Unions are stronger than they’ve ever been!” and pointing at Police Unions as your evidence.Report
Interestingly you’d be wrong about math, and probably sort of wrong about reading:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cnj/reading-math-score-trends
Also note that in 1972 many southern public schools were still openly segregated, which has a long established data set on outcomes – none of which is good.Report
Part of Chip’s main point is that the schools in the good part of town are better than the good schools in 1972.
Hey, I got a world-class high school education. My argument isn’t that the schools in the fat side of the tail on the right aren’t better. They are.
Were the schools on the left side of the tail worse when it came to proficiency? Specifically, the “not a single student being proficient” thing?
I’m open to the argument that the average was lower and now it’s higher (that’s what the data shows, after all)… but it also strikes me that the left side and the right side of the curve are fatter.Report
There’s no evidence to support that. Or at least not any that anyone was able to articulate in oral arguments.
But anyway I don’t understand why speaking with some nuance is called ‘weasel words’ whatever those even are. To be clearer I am saying is that it is an obvious political loser based on its polling and electoral history and I don’t think the rank and file lean D or gettable D voters necessary to win are particularly invested in it. Not as currently conceived and operationalized anyway. And the downstream of the concept is even more toxic where it results in elimination of testing, elimination of advanced placement, and dumbing down curricula, not because students aren’t capable, but because some bureaucrat somewhere is embarrassed by demographic appearances. That is the anti-excellence agenda I am referring to and people are right to oppose it.Report
Does it ever occur to you that many of those bureaucrats – who are by and large trained educators no longer teaching in class rooms – are perhaps trying to increase equality of both opportunity and outcome with the limited tools they have at their disposal?Report
I think most people believe they are doing good. But I also know enough about how people work to understand that when it comes to difficult problems they’d rather find ways to rig a superficial outcome making it look like they’ve solved something when they haven’t, including at the expense of others and the larger mission. It’s not a coincidence that universities and other educational systems try to keep their efforts on these matters under wraps. It’s also not a coincidence that every once in awhile when something leaks we get a glimpse into crude, reductive, racial gerrymandering all for the sake of appearances over substance.Report
Affirmative action doesn’t need to be strict quotas, but any range of actions which affirmatively reach out and offer redress to victims of discrimination.
This is necessary because there was, and still is, affirmative actions that are taken to oppress and discriminate against racial minorities and prevent them from advancing in society.
And as for results, there is a large body of scholarship today that wouldn’t exist without black scholars. Our understanding of history and culture is different due to the inclusion of minority voices.Report
To your initial point, I think that we need to approach the subject specifically instead of in the abstract. The question in this case is not going to be whether schools can pursue diversity, it’s whether they can continue to use race as a factor in those considerations.
There’s no similar constiutional question about say, stating that every student in the top 10% of his or her high school will be accepted to a state university, or additional points for people from a household below the federal poverty line.Report
When race is a powerful factor in every other political decision made, yes race absolutely must be taken into account when considering college admissions.
Because “Who applies for college in the first place” is itself the result of affirmative action, for white people. Jaybird has done a pretty good job of illustrating how segregated American schools have become, and thus the resulting imbalance of educational outcomes.
If its constitutionality you’re worried about, we could take a page from the Republican playbook and reverse it- just say that 10% of all incoming freshman be from inner city zip codes.
No racism, just, privileging people from inner city neighborhoods.
Or legally outlawing legacy admissions, or any of a dozen different facially neutral but essentially race-based mechanisms.Report
Throwing woefully underprepared students into college and calling it “justice” seems like a good way to make sure that the underprepared get stuck in a bad feedback loop.
I’m sure that the very rightmost of the tail will do well (maybe even thrive) but… what’s the goal?Report
Which is why we must ban legacy admissions and sports scholarships.
We can also take affirmative steps to improve education at all levels, beginning with daycare and pre-K programs.
But it needs to start with an acknowledgement that some affirmative action is needed and desired.Report
I’d be fine with banning legacy admissions and sports scholarships.
(Though I would be interested in seeing what both of those do to diversity numbers. Probably end up being a wash.)
Daycare and pre-K would probably give people a nice head start. But if we have 10 years of various schools having students in the single digits for proficiency, we’re going to find that “affirmative action” ain’t gonna fix the problem.
Wait, maybe it will… what’s the problem again?Report
“Daycare and pre-K would probably give people a nice head start.”
I see what you did there. I was one of those kids in the ’60s.Report
None of those last proposals you reference are race-based, and they aren’t at issue in the case in question.
And to my larger point none of them inherently lead to a place where we’re talking about ending blind testing or GT programs or loosening basic standards of rigor in k-12 because we don’t like the way the demographics look, none of which is actually solved by the kinds of affirmative action at issue anyway, so much as it is swept under the rug. That is the issue that is anti-excellence and where I think the pivot should happen. The goal should be excellent public services for all, not muddling up processes just for the sake of sensitivities about superficial appearances.Report
When you have few, and shrinking, resources to address that issue, you make the choices you can. Eliminating things that create differential opportunities and differential outcomes keeps costs down.Report
The means may be unjust, but they’re necessary for the end goal of research into critical race theory.Report