Did Wisconsin re-elect what’s-his-name? Did Colorado? Did Oregon elect to smoke weed? Did Warshington DC? What in the sam hill is going on?
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Jaybird
Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com
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on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024In short, and I know that plenty of people aren't going to believe Israel on this, Israel's post-war… on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024They are racist as heck but I don't think ignoring sincere nuttery is a good idea anymore. We have t…
on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024For what it's worth, I googled "israel's plans for gaza after the war wiki" and the AI came up with.…
on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024I mean, putting aside people who've never even lived here, no. If you're here, or if you were once h…
on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024In the weeks after the attack, as a broken country searched for answers, it became clear that the ob… on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024What they believe is entirely consistent with assuming that because of economic status, political af… on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024They seem to believe some rather out there stuff sincerely.
on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024I am not going for this downplay.
on Weekend Plans Post: The SinkYeah, even when I was young and flexible, I hated having to plan every move to get into the right pl…
on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024Israel has a bunch of competing visions of the Day After. The number of Israelis that believe in the…
October 3, 2024
October 2, 2024
Movie of a Motorist getting Bawled Out by a Cop
October 1, 2024
Somebody is Always Taking the Joy out of Life
September 30, 2024
on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024
on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024 on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024 on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024 on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024
on Port Strikes and Tariff Wars
on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024 on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024
on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024 on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024
on Weekend Plans Post: The Sink on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024 on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024
on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024 on Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024
Guam legalized Medicinal. (It’s the first territory to do so.)Report
Booyah.
I think Hick is gonna win, but his really muddled stance/politically negative stance on Legalization is gonna hurt him, I think. (I still think he wins.)Report
Jaybird and Stillwater should have taken the beer bet — looks like I was wrong on two of the three. Jefferson County is going to lose its bellweather status — it’s running about six percentage points farther Democratic than the state as a whole this year.Report
I think we should move this from Off the Cuff, don’t you? Give it more visibility.
The Democratic Party had a really rough year this year because the GOP is generally more motivated than the Democratic party in midterms and the Democratic Party is defending a lot of red states that they won in 2008. Plus some states like Arkansas and West Virginia have gone more red.
McConnell easily won reelection already, this should not surprise anyone. I think Grimes started strong but imploded pretty early. The Democratic Party is still much more of a big tent party than the GOP* and this causes weird things to happen in more purple or red states where the Democratic candidates can win but they often have to distance themselves from the national party which pisses off liberals in bluer states like New York, Massachusetts, and California. I still think Grimes would have been helped more than hurt by a straight-forward defense of her party. Northern and Western Democratic politicians learned to be party proud. Southern Democrats still need to get the memo.
*Demonstrated by the Cuomo and Teachout primary fight in NY. Teachout won the northern suburbs and among the New Brooklyn set. Cuomo still easily won in NYC. I think there the middle-class professional kind of socially and economically liberal Democrat never really learned to play city politics very well. De Blasio is an exception.Report
I don’t mind if we elect Christian Democrats on the Democratic ticket, personally. Why should we ask them to be proud of being Democrats again?Report
One thing I will say is that my heart always races because rural and conservative counties tend to get their votes counted first and this always make it look like a GOP landslide even in deep blue states.Report
I made GOTV calls all afternoon; something I’ve done in many other elections.
Today, in Maine, this was the first time that nobody said they were not going to vote. When I went to the polls after, they were packed. So I’m expecting a big turnout here in Maine. Lest you think it’s because of our gaff-prone governor, think again. People want to vote on wether or not it’s okay to bait bears with Dunkin Donuts. I voted yes, which means that it is, in fact, not okay, thanks to the perverse wording of such questions. The polls close in 2- minutes; I expect results soon.Report
So you are pro-tim horton’s on the donut measure?Report
Not many Tim Horton’s around, despite our extensive cultural exchange with the Canadian Maritimes and Quebec. But there’s a DD nearby everywhere you go here.Report
I support single-payer donuts of all sorts.Report
You know, I look back at stuff like 2004 elections (SSM) and read about the DD measure and I can’t help but wonder if the Next Big Thing for voter turnout will be the ballot measure that absofreakin’ everybody has an opinion on.
“Eh, we got John Jackson against Jack Johnson, we got the rainwater ballot issue… and an issue on whether or not to make the Macarena the Official State Dance??? KATIE! FIND MY CAR KEYS!!! I GOTTA REGISTER TO VOTE RIGHT THIS FREAKIN MINUTE!!!!”Report
@jaybird metaphysical certitude that we are just one Millennial strategist away from Cake or Pie.Report
Donuts =/= pi
e. They’re never exactly round. Except maybe for cake.ReportSo you are saying that Donuts are the Pirates of the pastry world? I could see that on a ballot initiative too.Report
Well, anybody with bird feeders would suggest bears are pirates.Report
Going by movie sales, make Marvel vs. DC a ballot measure and you’ll get your youth voter turnout.Report
Most exciting news so far is that the final Hobbit movie will be 180 minutes long. I did not vote for that.Report
@greginak
I hope you are being sarcastic.
And really? Someone needs to reign Peter Jackson in.Report
are you kidding, 180 minutes of pure peter jackson magic is just awesome!!!!!Report
@murali
I reiterate my dissent.Report
@saul-degraw , @murali
Personally, I find Sir Peter best in measured doses. He has a penchant for self-indulgence that shouldn’t be encouraged.Report
@saul-degraw Sadly no, that is what i read from a supposedly reputable source.Report
I’m with ya greg. Taking the next Hobbit on the over at 180 is money in the bank.
Also, I can’t remember an election cycle that made (MADE!) me more apathetic about politics.
Maybe those libertarians are onto something…Report
Why make pt. III three hours why not just spin one three hundred page prequel into six or seven feature films?Report
A three hour Hobbit final flick will be a perfect metaphor for the 2016 prez election season which is starting pretty much tomorrow. It will be followed and picked at by obsessive nerds ( like many of us). It will in many ways be predictable but have a few surprises, some intrigue, and some entertaining moments. In the end it will be an overly expensive waste that just barely gets the job done but leaves everybody running for the potty and exhausted at the end.Report
Actually, I have enjoyed Peter Jackson’s excesses in interpreting “The Hobbit”. But, after all three chapters are out in DVD, I look forward to a pirate-expurgated-version a la the Star Wars “Phantom edit” (“Phantom Menace” with as much Jar-jar Binks removed as possible), removing most of what was not hinted at in the book as possible. I’d estimate a final cut of not quite 4 hours.Report
I’m in WA, so we won’t know any real results for a few days (although there will be early results before tomorrow).
The only federal office I voted for was for a democrat, because the GOP contender sounded like a complete loon.Report
Oh, I did vote for a lot of local & state judges. which are non-partisan offices. Whenever there was a choice, I looked at how much experience the candidate had with criminal defense versus prosecution, as well as civil litigation. My goal is to get more judges with experience as something other than a prosecutor, with a significant preference for defense attorneys.
I think we have enough former DAs wearing robes around here.Report
We didn’t even get to vote on judges this time.
We had four choices on the ballot, which is the legal minimum (have to have competition for governor)Report
Jesus, MRS, you sound like a goddamn California hippie.Report
@patrick
I’ll have you know I’m a goddamn Washington hippie! Goddamn California hippies are just poseurs.Report
I was surprised at how lax the… supervision? oversight? whatever… was at my polling place. At one point while chasing Mayo around the room, I ended up behind the table where the people who gave out ballots sat. There were whole stacks of ballots just sitting there. I could have easily made off with one (what I would have done with it, I don’t know; our place had us fill in the circles with markers and then feed it into some fancy machine that gave me a thumbs up afterward). That was a bit concerning.
I will also report that no photo ID was required. Instead, they checked our signatures given on the spot versus those they had on record, which they linked to our home address. Seemed like a pretty good system.Report
Who is Karl Rove’s agent? The man must be a genius because darned if I didn’t just see Rove on Fox news even after his debacle in 2012.Report
Was that the “you’ve got your facts, I’ve got mine” debacle?
No.
Was Megyn Kelly part of it?Report
Re: Governorships.
It looks like Brownback is going to be out but Walker and Snyder are going to remain. Corbett and LePage also look like they are going to be out.
This is called a mixed message for Tea Party politics.Report
Corbett is out! Horrible governor. Glad to see him go.Report
Yeah, Brownback is about as popular as three-day old fish around here. He basically had carte blanche to test run a far right economic agenda thanks to a basically tea party legislature and it blew up in his face. The simple truth is that right-wing, supply-side economics Just. Doesn’t. Work.
Kansas is actually reliably center right and moderate. He just got reminded of that.Report
Kansas: the reliably old-school Republican state.
(unlike Oklahoma, which is wacky in ALLL sorts of ways)Report
Well crap. That was a little premature. Where were you getting your info, Saul? Davis has conceded defeat so we get to “enjoy” four more of Brownback.
FWIW, the commentary from local poli-sci types is painting this as more of a Davis flub than an endorsement of Brownback. Keep in mind that this was a squeaker in a deep red state where it shouldn’t really be close. And a lot of money was thrown at this race from the Koch’s and outside the state as well.Report
The Republican steak on governors is amazing. Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Illinois…Report
I’ve just been refreshing the front page to the NYTimes.
@will-truman
Are Republicans a T-Bone or a Porterhouse?Report
More seriously,
Coakley is horrible at retail politics. She is a master at backroom deals and got the nomination out of the old-school playing to the top and biding your time method. Massachusetts also does not have a long history of electing women to state wide office. I think Warren is the first.
LePage seems to be helped because the third party guy took away a sizeable number of votes from the Democratic candidate and did not back out in time. He also did a mealy mouthed “you can vote for someone else” to his supporters.
A lot of the Democratic base disliked Quinn.
Brownback is a surprise. I can’t tell if he helped Roberts or Roberts helped Brownback.Report
Maine really ought to have a runoff, given their recent history with independent candidates.
No single race is super surprising. Taken as a whole, though… I wasn’t expecting it, to say the least.
They didn’t even clear a majority in Vermont.
Bad election for opponents of raising the minimum wage, bad election for labor, bad election for Democrats.
The unskewed guy was right. He just picked the wrong election. Average Dem bias this year for the senate was six (so far) , and two for governorship.Report
@will-truman
Re: Unskewed Right guy
I just wrote a huge post on this. I think saying the unskewed right guy was right is a bridge too far. Almost everyone predicted this would be a good year for the Republicans. The Six Year itch is usually a good year for the opposition. 1998 was the last time the party holding the White House did well in a six year itch. 1998 and 2002 are the only times since 1946 when the party holding the White House won House seats.
I was expecting the Democratic Party to at least win Iowa or Colorado though.
Everyone still expects the GOP to have a tough map in 2016.Report
Everyone predicted that the Republicans would have a good year, but the polls did not suggest they would have as good a year as they apparently have. For the senate, they were off by six points.
(No, I don’t think Unskewed Guy was prophetic. I do think that we should be wary of putting too much faith in polls, which two years ago made me a science-hating lunatic, even though the polls were off by a bit then, too – albeit in the opposite direction.)Report
The polls are off a bit every election. The only difference is the direction.Report
Yup. More than a bit this time, though. (For the senate, anyway.)Report
greg and will,
What does England have to say?
If you aren’t bothering to follow the money, then you really can’t say that all the polls are off.Report
@saul-degraw
You’re not equating Rick Snyder with Tea Partyism, are you?Report
@james-hanley
Not as much with him but certainly with the others.Report
You do realize Snyder’s a moderate, who only won the primary 4 years ago because the other two candidates split the conservative vote?
“Not as much with him” is still a strong overstatement of his tea partyness.Report
James.
Can we equate Rick Snyder with Bearhunting, or is that going WAAY too far?
(serious question, I don’t know jack about Michigan politics).Report
I can’t believe how close Gillespie made the US Senate race in Virginia.Report
There are a lot of really close elections. LePage seems to be narrowly up in Maine now
This is sad and I hope it changes.
But the Democratic Party seems to be holding onto Iowa for now! LA is going to a run-off. We are barely holding onto to the MA governorship (Coakley was a horrible candidate).Report
Coakley is a horrible human being that actively worked to kept innocent people in jail.Report
Still too close to call in the NC Senate race. I hope Hagan holds on. She’s not exactly a flaming liberal, but far better than the execrable Tom Tillis.Report
And Tillis wins. A big victory for the Koch brothers, the NRA, and Crossroads, all of which poured millions into the race, making it the most expensive race in the country. We’re screwed.Report
Terry Sanford has been the only liberalish* Senator ever re-elected in North Carolina, and he was only able to do it once.
*using the most expansive definition of liberal for Sanford, Hagan, and Edwards. (and really just distinguishing them from pre-1960 Dems)Report
Out of curiosity, where do the actual individual people who voted for Tillis figure into your conception? Are the just mindless zombies carrying out the will of the Kochs and the NRA?Report
jr,
I hope they’re just dupes. I’d rather not set myself as the enemy of large swathes of the country.
What’s your opinion on BearHunting?Report
@j-r
Negative campaign ads work and the ads Tillis and his surrogates put out were almost all negative. Many of them were downright false at worse, egregiously misleading at best. Lots of fear-mongering. Yet people are influenced by this stuff. If they weren’t, Koch and Co wouldn’t have thrown their millions into buying endless advertising.Report
That is simply not a true statement. It’s like saying “psychics must be providing value; if they weren’t, people wouldn’t being spending millions on psychics.”
It is comforting to believe that people with different political views than yours must either be evil or dumb or otherwise fooled, but it is just not true. People have different ideological worldviews and different policy preferences. Not sure why that is so hard to accept.Report
Colorado people – Udall seems to be underperforming Hickenlooper. From what I’ve heard there was a definite turn against Hickenlooper around guns and executions. So the turn against Udall must be quite something. Any sense of how Mark Udall managed to drop the ball in a particularly special way out there? Or is it not really special at all, just in keeping with the night’s larger dynamic?Report
I’m not a Colorado peep, but I’ve read a fair bit of outside analysis on his campaign and almost all of it negative. Basically that they felt if he just said “birth control!” loud and often enough he’d win.
Does the view look any different from Colorado, Colorado peeps?Report
Ezra Klein has basically the same take. One wonders what they were looking at that caused them to think such an exclusive focus on WoW was the way through rather than a broader message. The numbers among men must have just been terrifying. And from what I’ve heard, for Obama they are out there.Report
This sounds about on par with what I’ve read. He earned the nickname Senator Uterus. Gardener actually tried to be a relatively socially liberal Republican on women’s issues by advocating for over the counter birth control. The issue is whether he sticks with it once elected.
On the other hand, there was a defeated personhood amendment on the ballot in Colorado so maybe the focus on women’s issues played off for both candidates somehow.Report
For what it’s worth, over the counter birth control has appeal with some social conservatives, too. Jindal has floated the idea.Report
Ezra’s piece on it suggests the Dem push to mail-in-I’ve elections there may have just outright backfired (which I can’t say I could have told you it would but sure as hell makes sense to me in hindsight. Which is some seriously tidal a democratic Party kinda shit.
Lots of potential lessons for the Dems in this one it seems. The passing of the Obama machine makes me wonder whether Dems’ advantage going forward could be blunted by typical Dem (and Clintonian) sheer mechanical incompetence in the processes of elections. That is, after all, what cost HRC the 2008 nomination.Report
mail-in-izeReport
Saul,
All’s I can say is that the anti-Gardner ads I’ve seen/heard have been exclusively about his anti-abortion and related position. So if he loses, I guess we can chalk it up to a single issue. If he wins, it’s may be a bit more complicated.Report
Ack. Typical, not “tidal a.”
I fishing hate tablets.Report
Whoops. If *Gardener* loses we can chalk it up to a single issue….Report
He lost.Report
Oh. Well, *he* won. 😉Report
@michael-drew
The Mail-In Ballots did seem to help the GOP because of the senior citizen vote.Report
@saul-degraw
I have no independent info on that apart from Klein’s one graf at Vox, but yeah so it seems. Shocking that a clever Dem electoral scheme backfired.Report
Cory Gardner’s anti-Udall ads covered stuff like the Keystone Pipeline, Jobs, Jobs, and Jobs. Udall’s ads, until the last couple of weeks, covered birth control. Now, in the last couple of weeks, Udall’s ads did turn around…
But there’s one dynamic that I haven’t seen raised yet: this is Colorado’s first “mail-in” ballot. People have been voting for a month, mailing it in, and then waiting for election day for the stuff to be counted. If you voted a month ago, you didn’t have an opportunity to have your mind changed by the stuff that happened in the middle of October.Report
As a COpeep, I’d say that most of the anti Udall stuff results from a pretty good Gardner campaign. He didn’t go all negative (as Udall did) and he criticized Udall for being a partisan voter (99% of the time he voted for Obama!). Coloradans aint dumb, but they are just like the rest of us: waiting for someone to actually Get Some Shit Done. Udall is prolly the last person I’d vote for in that regard. (I didn’t vote for him.)
That he’s underprforming relative to Hickenlooper isn’t surprising to me. Udall has a wiff of odiousness about him that Hick lacks. Hick is pretty straight up and very intelligent (on both policy but also politics), in my view. That doesn’t me he won’t succumb to the Vote the Bums Out programme, one which we can implement in every even year fowevah.Report
What is odious about Udall?Report
Yeah. Good question.
Don’t know how to answer that. All’s I can say is that I’ve seen him speak in person a handful of times and have come outa it thinking he’s pretty odious. Career politician, from a long line of politicians, ironed jeans draping over $500 cowboy boots, no real stances on anything beyond the talking points of the day. I think Coloradans want a change. I just don’t think Gardner is gonna give em the change they wanted, even tho it might be the change they deserve.Report
Udall has been a pretty strong advocate for privacy. Multiple libertarians on my twitter feed are sorry to see him go for that reason.Report
Stillwater,
Can’t speak to what Udall wears on the campaign trail, but he is a hiker (backpacker), pretty well known for hitting the deepwoods.Report
The three interesting races were US Senate, US House District 6, and the Governor’s Office. Gardner(R) and Coffman(R) have been declared winners of the first two; Beauprez(R) is leading narrowly for Governor at the moment. All three basically ran at least implicit “I’m a conservative, but not that kind of conservative” campaigns. I trust all three of them on that about as far as I can throw them, but hope that I’m wrong (we need sane conservative voices).Report
I think I trust them too.
The problem is that even sane Conservatives need to vote with their party just like even conservative Democrats need to vote with their party. A few sane or moderate voices in a sea of Hard Right politics does not really matter.Report
Notably, one of the biggest losers tonight is the existing minimum wage. It’s getting its butt whooped in stone pretty red states.Report
“Stone pretty”. You’re talking about geography, aintcha?Report
Stonehow my autocorrect failed me.Report
Nunn shall not pass (into a runoff)Report
She was always probably a long-shot.Report
The big issue seems to be a huge GOP lead in the House.
Jon Chait doesn’t think the Democratic Party has a chance of retaking the house until 2020. Chuck Todd guesses that there is no chance of the Democratic Party winning the House until 2022. Chuck Todd’s prediction makes sense because it revolves on the census and the Democratic Party winning state legislature positions.Report
Report
mean to embed this tweet https://twitter.com/bencasselman/status/529848264204767232Report
@dand
It is like a real life version of the Josh Lyman rant from West Wing about how the American people elected a liberal President and a right-wing Congress.Report
I just feel bad for my Wisconsin people. My mom in particular is not going to take this one well. (Her sisters OTOH…) I think she thought they might turn him out this time. I shoulda been on the horn telling her while it was closer it wasn’t looking great. Hopefully she was on top of it enough to see the writing in the last two weeks.
One thing I don’t want to hear anymore is that, yeah Wisconsin voted him in in 2010 & 2014, but gosh darn it in 2012 the people who voted for him were voting against the recall not for him. Please. They were voting for him.Report
Yeah. walker is a grade A moron. Corbett was at least competent, if a complete slimeball.Report
Bruce Rauner just won IllinoisReport
Looking at the exit polls republicans did much better with Asian voters than they did 2012 from 26% to 47%.Report
Now that is interesting…Report
I wonder how much of it is an age thing; Asian voters are much younger than white voters.Report
I’m kinda suspicious of aggregating ‘Asian’ voters nationally (vice in certain electoral contests). Putting aside ‘Asian’ is almost anyone with ancestry from the longitudes of Pakistan to the Japan (at the minimum), the population is still relatively small (1-2%) so the sample size for exit pollsters is small (and often immeasurable), meaning that a flip of just a couple of responses may have an outsized effect. Also, if you can get a good showing in Hawaii you can really pump the ‘Asians for Republicans’ numbers up.Report
40’s is closer to their historical average than twenties.Report
Abbott in Texas won 44% of Hispanic vote and a majority of women against Wendy Davis… but lost voters under 45.Report
Will the new majority leader of the Senate — McConnell or otherwise — kill the filibuster in January?Report
Doubt it. It isn’t worth it when you don’t have the presidency because all you can do is force vetoes (in this case, from a term limited president). Especially when losing the senate in two years is highly likely.Report
If they keep the senate and win the presidency in two years, though, all bets are off.Report
I’m wondering how much pressure they’re going to feel from the House to force Obama to veto things. Absent a change in the cloture rule, the Senate is still going to be the place that bills go to die. Except for the budget, of course. For the past few years, the House Republicans could pass budget resolutions that implied large cuts in social spending, but couldn’t pass appropriations bills implementing those cuts. With a larger House majority, they might manage that.Report
I just don’t see it. Nixing the veto is a huge bullet to fire, and one that they didn’t fire when they payoff would have been much bigger. It’s more likely that the Democrats will have the White House and Senate in 2016 than that the Republicans will, and that looms large.Report
Don’t be so sure that cloture will be the issue in this Congress that it has been. Democrats have no record of running McConnellesque lockstep resistance to major bills, nor of unity in general. They’re likely to play ball with McConnell in ways he never did with them.
That said, it’s possible that nothing that can pass this House of Representatives will ever garner a single Democratic vote in the Senate. But that will be more a function of the lower house’s majority than the upper house’s minority.Report
Nixing the filibuster, you mean.
And that’s a big bullet to be sure, though nixing the veto would be bigger still.Report
It’s probably post election bitterness but I hope Reid runs the new minority exactly how Senator Turtle ran the old one.Report
@michael-drew I think the Dems will be able to more easily vote in lockstep. One thing about this election is that pretty much all of the Democrats in red states are gone. So you have a bunch of people that will gain support for pushing against Republicans. The Ds lost the Senate, but they got a much more ideologically condense Senate chamber.Report
No, he won’t. The real question is whether he’ll resurrect the filibuster on appointees. He was hopping mad when Reid killed that through parliamentary procedural maneuvering, but he’d floated the idea himself previously. That is, he’s like nearly every other Senator who’s spoken out on the issue–fully supportive of killing the appointment filibuster when in the majority, aghast at what a radical Senate-destroying idea it is when in the minority. There are very few other issues where the essential hypocrisy and power-lust of the political class is so sharply demonstrated.
I think if he believes the GOP has a good chance to take the White House and retain control of the Senate in 2016 he won’t resurrect it. That will partly be because payback is fun, partly because the Dems gave him what he asked for in the past and so now he can have it without being responsible for it, and partly just to make things easier for a prospective president of his own party.
Whatever his motivations–which undoubtedly are not based on principle–I hope he keeps the appointment filibuster dead. It’s a bad use of the filibuster.
If he has real principle and courage–of which I’m sure he has neither–he’ll also return the Senate to the standing filibuster. I won’t hold my breath.Report
I predict the pundits will say Democrats need to support cutting social security and republicans need support more immigration despite the fact neither of these opinions are popular with the voters.Report
cutting social security and having more immigration are actually decent policy proposals in their own right. They certainly have a sort of libertarian charm to them.Report
@murali
Beltway Pundits love cutting social security because they do well enough that they do not need to rely on social security when they retire.
In other words, our pundits are merely a sham for their own preferences. I like Krugman’s sarcastic “Very serious people” accusation.Report
Kill da boomers Kill da boomers!
(sorry, my reference to bearhunting above has me on a bit of a kick…)Report
It seems like strong night for the R’s. So who thinks impeachment isn’t far off. I think there is at least a 50% chance the House goes for it. Of course it fails but that is irrelevant.Report
If Obama tries to do anything substantive by executive order, you can probably count on it. More likely, endless investigations every time the president so much as scratches his ass.Report
Yeah, executive orders are a biggie. Particularly regarding immigration. That’s honestly the only way I see it happening in any substantive way (above and beyond the here and there we’ve had so far).Report
That’s one of the big hopes if it’s a disaster – that maybe the rump right-wing will be emboldened to try impeachment, ensuring a return to normalcy in 2016.Report
Impeachment is a good way for them to taint 2016.Report
Please let them try to impeach! That would be wonderful!Report
I got my flannel shirt and Cranberries CD ready to go!Report
Bruce Rauner made a strong to reach out to African American voters: he won 6% of the black vote.Report
No exit poll data from Maryland.Report
Sam Bronback got 51% of white voters and 47% of hispanic voters.Report
Well, marijuana legalization has been popular this election. If Alaska passes it too, then BC will be the conservative portion of the Pacific coast in that regard, which is unusual (Canada’s typically more liberal than the US, and BC is typically fairly liberal even for Canada on social/behavioural issues).
Of course, given the construction of Canadian criminal law, we won’t have legalization until we have it federally. In general I think having a consistent criminal law nationwide is sensible, but this is one situation where it has a downside. It’s useful than American states can test-drive the policy chance for us.Report
Republican Hogan Wins Race For Maryland Governor
WTF?!!
Maryland!!!Report
Murali November 4, 2014 at 10:18 pm
“are you kidding, 180 minutes of pure peter jackson magic is just awesome!!!!!”
Especially if they put in lots of scenes which seem to be ads for upcoming Disney rides, and drag out every frikkin’ thing until the wonder has been dead for 10,000 years… 🙁Report
Yeah, pretty much this.
In other words, its going to be at least another decade before I can reread any Tolkien.Report
Michael Drew November 5, 2014 at 2:01 am
“Don’t be so sure that cloture will be the issue in this Congress that it has been. Democrats have no record of running McConnellesque lockstep resistance to major bills, nor of unity in general. They’re likely to play ball with McConnell in ways he never did with them.”
The Republicans had no such record, either, until 2009 (at least, since Truman).
In terms of ordinary, tit for tat, compromise politics, the Senate Dems are in a place where they both can rretalitate and should retaliate.Report
Well, shoot.Report
According to some Googling:
Mark Warner seems to be narrowly holding on to his Senate seat.
The Democratic Party seems to also be narrowly holding onto the Governorship but lost the Colorado state Senate. They might still control the Colorado State House but by a less firm majority.Report
Voter suppression works.Report
You can’t blame Maryland governor on voter suppression.Report
For highly sensitive people (perhaps even moderately sensitive,) campaign ads on TV seem to be a form of voter suppression.Report
ITYM ‘suppository’Report
Well, I’m going to go celebrate by purchasing Dunkin Donuts. A dozen less to sell to the bear baiters once they’ve gone stale.Report
Two more years of sweet, sweet gridlock. Since mass democracy has rendered good government politically infeasible, the next best thing is homeostatic government.Report
The homeostatic agenda strikes again.Report
Pardon me if anyone’s already addressed this, but had anyone seen bite totals yet? That is, did Dems once again cast more votes for House candidates than Repubs and yet lose, or did the GOP truly outpoll them thus time?Report
I think D’s are certain yesterday totally bit.Report
For the record, I got yelled at today by co-workers for being the reason that so many democrats won yesterday *AND* that I threw my vote away.
So there are republicans out there disappointed by yesterday’s outcomes too.Report
They’ll feel better if they pick up one or both houses of the General Assembly. Looks like that’s going to go on for a long time.Report
I thought I saw 50-47 R, but that might have been not exactly the number you’re asking about. I’m pretty sure R’s outpolled them, though. They did in 2010, too, but not in 2008 or 2012. 2010 was 51.7-44.9 R.Report