House Democrats also were closely watching uncalled races in those states, as well races as Maine, Oregon, Washington and California, to determine whether they have a pathway to keep the majority. Even if they don’t, as many Democratic aides expect, there is a recognition from both parties that Democratic votes will be critical in a narrow House GOP majority.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: November 15, 2022 Filed under: 2022 Elections, Donald Trump, just because, morning reads | Tags: Adam Frisch, Arizona, California, Colorado, House of Representatives, iran, Katie Hobbs, Loren Boebert, Nancy Pelosi, Russia, Trump whisperers 27 Comments
Solitude (Loneliness), Paul Delvaux, 1956
Good Morning!!
As Daknikat wrote yesterday, it looks as if Republicans will win enough seats to control the House with a very small majority. But they won’t be able to do much. I suppose they’ll spend their time and energy investigating Hunter Biden and any other crackpot problem they can dream up. The good news is than Lauren Bobert’s seat is still undecided for now.
AP News: California wins leave GOP poised to seize US House control.
Two threatened U.S. House Republicans in California triumphed over Democratic challengers Monday, helping move the GOP within a seat of seizing control of the chamber while a string of congressional races in the state remained in play.
In a bitter fight southeast of Los Angeles, Republican Rep. Michelle Steel defeated Democrat Jay Chen in a district that was specifically drawn to give Asian Americans, who comprise the largest group in the district, a stronger voice on Capitol Hill. It includes the nation’s largest Vietnamese community.
East of Los Angeles, Republican Rep. Ken Calvert notched a win over Democrat Will Rollins. With 80% of the votes tallied, Calvert, the longest serving Republican in the California congressional delegation, established a nearly 5,500-vote edge in the contest.
Ten races in the state remained undecided as vote-counting continued, though only a handful were seen as tight enough to break either way.
It takes 218 seats to control the House. Republicans have locked down 217 seats so far, with Democrats claiming 205.
Should Democrats fail to protect their fragile majority, Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield would be in line to replace Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.
Read about the remaining undecided races at the link.
The Independent: Lauren Boebert – live: Republican under fire for ‘embarrassing’ tweet as she leads race by just 1,200 votes.
Lauren Boebert has taken aim at Nancy Pelosi and called for the House Speaker’s ousting while her own future in politics continues to hang in the balance.
“Waiting this long for election results is going to make firing Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House that much sweeter,” she wrote on Twitter on Monday.
Automat, Edward Hopper
Republicans are just one seat away from control of the House of Representatives, with the balance of power potentially hinging on th eoutcome of Ms Boebert’s race among serveral others that have not yet been decided.
Ms Boebert’s race is still too close to call and it is unlikely that the outcome will be known until the end of the week – at the soonest.
The far-right Republican is currently leading Democratic challenger Adam Frisch by just 1,122 votes in what has shaped up to be an unexpectedly close race. The race could be headed for an automatic recount if neither candidate fails to win by a margin of more than 0.5 per cent.
If only she would lose! This is from Newsweek yesterday: Lauren Boebert in Danger as Rejected Mail-in Ballot Checks Could Help Rival.
The race for Colorado’s third congressional district remains too close to be called, as Trump-endorsed Rep. Lauren Boebert is currently only slightly ahead of her rival, Democrat Adam Frisch.
But the incumbent congresswoman’s narrow lead could once again be overturned if thousands of likely rejected votes in favor of her challenger were to be “cured”, as a recount looms over the Colorado race.
Every year in Colorado, thousands of ballots are reportedly rejected for issues related to signature verification, such as a missing signature or a discrepancy in the signature. Local officials then alert voters of the issue, giving them a week to fix the problem and make their vote count. The process, which is done in 23 other state besides Colorado, is called “ballot curing.”
Boebert was widely projected to win the midterms, with polling website FiveThirtyEight giving her a 97 in 100 chance of victory in the days ahead of the vote.
As of November 14 and with nearly all of the ballots being counted, Boebert is leading with 50.1 percent of the vote (162,040 votes) against Frisch’s 49.8 percent (160,918 votes).
A recount could be called if the final margin between Boebert and Frisch is less than or equal to 0.5 percent of the leading candidate’s vote total. At the moment, the gap between the two candidates is 0.38 percent.
Frisch could still oust the Republican incumbent, an election denier and one of Donald Trump‘s most ardent supporters, if thousands of votes likely rejected for signature verification were cast in support of the Democratic nominee.
So it’s still up in the air.
In Arizona, Katie Hobbs finally triumphed in the race for governor. AZ Central: Katie Hobbs elected Arizona’s 5th female governor, defeating election denier Kari Lake.
Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic election chief who built a national profile by standing up to false claims about the 2020 presidential election, has won the state’s race for governor.
The Associated Press, NBC News and CNN called the race for Hobbs shortly after 7 p.m. Monday, following a nail-biter week of election returns that highlighted the competitiveness of politics in the state.
The Lonely Ones, by Edvard Munch, 1935
“Democracy is worth the wait,” Hobbs posted on social media before issuing a statement thanking her family, volunteers and staff for their work.
“This was not just about an election — it was about moving this state forward and facing the challenges of our generation,” the statement read, ending: “Let’s get to work.”
Late-in-the-race polling showed her Republican opponent Kari Lake, the former television news anchor, with the momentum as Nov. 8 neared. Instead, voters offered a stunning rebuke of Lake, who was one of the nation’s most prominent election deniers.
With Hobbs’ win, Arizonans followed voters in other battleground states who rejected gubernatorial candidates who pushed false claims about election results.
As Arizona’s 24th governor, Hobbs will be the fifth female to hold the top elected office, more than in any other state.
That’s amazing. We just finally got our first female governor here in Massachusetts.
Donald Trump is supposedly announcing that he’s running for president today, and The New York Times and Washington Post can hardly wait. The NYT even hired another “Trump whisperer” to go along with their star access journalist Maggie Haberman. This is from Emptywheel: In the Wake of Trump’s Third Electoral Failure, NY Times Boasts of Hiring a Third Trump Whisperer.
…Jonathan Swan is a good reporter. Indeed, his move to the NYT, which frees him to write like a human being rather than a McKinsey consultant (AKA Axios style), will likely be a significant improvement on his coverage of DC politics.
But it is downright insane that, at a time the GOP and Fox News are at least making noise about ditching Trump, the NYT pitched this hire — and their own political reporting — in terms of Trump.
Our insightful, authoritative and addictive coverage of the election this year drove home an essential truth: The Times’s political team is simply the best in the business.
Take our coverage of Republicans and Donald J. Trump.
We have Maggie Haberman, the dominant reporter of the Trump era, whose prolific, revealing and exclusive coverage has become indispensable to millions of readers. We have Michael Bender, whom Maggie admired as her “fierce competitor” from his days at The Wall Street Journal, and who has delivered exclusives on everything from the former president’s plans to buy Greenland to examinations of how Trumpism remade the Republican party.
And today we are thrilled to tell you that Jonathan Swan, a gifted, dogged and high-impact reporter, will be joining The Times. Jonathan, a national political reporter at Axios, is one of the biggest news breakers and best-sourced reporters in Washington.
Even if you have never met Jonathan, you know his stories. He first reported that Trump would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris climate deal, that Steve Bannon would be fired and that Paul Ryan would retire from Congress.
Or perhaps you watched his riveting interview with then-President Trump in 2020, which won Jonathan an Emmy (and made his facial expressions famous.) Ben Smith, the former media columnist for The Times, wrote at the time that it was “perhaps the best interview of Mr. Trump’s term.’’
Jonathan’s nine-part written series on the final days of the Trump administration won broad acclaim, and the podcast on which it was based rose to No. 1 on the Apple charts. [my emphasis]
Weekend Retreat, by Alan Parry
Again, I think the Swan hire is a net good for reporting — but aside from the degree to which Swan is an improvement over Jonathan Martin, who just moved to become Politico’s Politics Bureau Chief — that has nothing to do with the NYT.
Particularly accompanied as it is by Maggie’s multiple efforts to suggest Trump is still The One, the pitch of Swan as a Trump-whisperer — rather than simply as a very good reporter of right wing politics — this announcement commits to keeping Trump (as a politician, rather than, for example, a criminal suspect, something none of these three are very good at reporting) the center of attention.
The Washington Post article hyping Trump’s announcement–two years ahead of the 2024 election–of courses features gossip reporters Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey: Trump campaign operation takes shape ahead of expected 2024 announcement.
Really, who the hell cares? Why don’t these newspapers cover President Biden, who is actually accomplishing plenty, while Trump is likely to be indicted before 2024? Or they could cover the fact that Russia is still working to influence our elections, which CNN reported this morning: CNN Exclusive: US intelligence suggests Russia put off announcing Kherson retreat until after midterm elections.
The US has intelligence that Russia may have delayed announcing its withdrawal from the Ukrainian city of Kherson in part to avoid giving the Biden administration a political win ahead of the midterm elections, according to four people familiar with the intelligence.
Senior Russian officials discussed the US midterms as a factor during deliberations about the withdrawal announcement, one person familiar with the intelligence said. Waiting until after the US election was always a “pre-planned condition” of Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson, a second person familiar with the intelligence told CNN.
Still, the election was far from the only consideration in Russia’s retreat, officials said. Military analysts say Russia had few other operational options and had been preparing to pull back for weeks, leading US officials to wonder when the Russians would officially acknowledge the withdrawal.
While the intelligence is not a formal assessment of Russia’s intentions, it is a sign that Russia has a continued interest in influencing the US political landscape — although the sources said Russia probably miscalculated the impact such an announcement would actually have on the elections.
“I doubt Americans would really have noticed,” said another source familiar with western intelligence.
President Joe Biden last week appeared to hint that the US believed that the timing of Russia’s announcement was more than mere coincidence.
“I find it interesting they waited until after the election to make that judgement, which we knew for some time they were going to be doing, and it’s evidence of the fact that they have some real problems – the Russian military,” Biden said at a press conference last Wednesday.
Carl Gustav Carus, Woman on the Balcony
I’m going to end with this shocking story from The New York Times about Iran: Stymied by Protests, Iran Unleashes Its Wrath on Its Youth.
One girl, a 14-year-old, was incarcerated in an adult prison alongside drug offenders. A 16-year-old boy had his nose broken in detention after a beating by security officers. A 13-year-old girl was physically attacked by plainclothes militia who raided her school.
A brutal crackdown by the authorities in Iran trying to halt protests calling for social freedom and political change that have convulsed the country for the past two months has exacted a terrible toll on the nation’s youth, according to lawyers in Iran and rights activists familiar with the cases.
Young people, including teenage girls and boys, have been at the center of the demonstrations and clashes with security forces on the streets and university campuses and at high schools. Iranian officials have said the average age of protesters is 15.
Some have been beaten and detained, others have been shot and killed on the streets, or beaten in the custody of security services, and the lives of countless others have been disrupted as the authorities raid schools in an effort to crack down on dissent.
The authorities are targeting thousands of minors, under the age of 18, for participating in the protests, according to interviews with two dozen people, including lawyers in Iran involved in cases and rights activists, as well as parents, relatives and teenagers living in the country. Rights groups say that at least 50 minors have been killed.
The lawyers and many of the individuals interviewed for this article asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
The targeting of young people comes amid a broader crackdown on protesters in which 14,000 people have been arrested, according to the United Nations. On Sunday, state media said an unidentified person had been sentenced to death for setting fire to a government building.
There’s much more at the link. Sorry to hit you with this horrifying story, but I thought it was urgent. What can the U.S. do about this? The U.N.?
Please share your thoughts and any other stories that interest you in the comment thread.
Mostly Monday Reads: The Numbers Game
Posted: November 14, 2022 Filed under: just because | Tags: Donald Trump and fascism, midterm elections 2022, Republican Extremism, Twitter Free zone 12 Comments
Transverse Line, Wassily Kandinsky, 1923
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Ballots are still being counted in the 2022 Midterms. The Senate has only one race that will go to a runoff. That is the Georgia race between Herschel Walker and incumbent Senator Ralph Warnock. The dynamics of this race may change since the majority status has been decided. Folks may decide to stay home rather than support Walker, who is definitely an odd choice for what used to be the severe and staid part of Congress. There is a general feeling that the Republicans will take the House, albeit by a very slim margin.
Fordham Professor Jed Shugerman, writing on mastodon, believes that 3 Roberts court’s decisions had much to do with the House outcome.
Some reasons why GOP will win the House:
1. Roberts Court decision Rucho allowing partisan gerrymandering.
2. Roberts Court decision Shelby County striking down preclearance in the Voting Rights Act.
3. Roberts Court shadow docket blocking Black districts in AL & LA (@mcpli)
The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood, 1907, Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
The Louisiana case definitely helped since the non-gerrymandered congressional districts would’ve added an additional black Congressman who would undoubtedly be a Democratic Party member. This would have been a pick-up. Currently, 205 seats have been called for the Democratic Party and 212 for Republicans. The Guardian characterizes the status this way: “US midterms 2022: Democrats’ hope of keeping House fades as counting continues – live.” The New York Times lists those elections left to call here.
Many of the states with a large share of outstanding votes conduct elections primarily or entirely by mail. It may still be days until news organizations can project which party will control the House next session, but Republicans appear to be on track to reach a majority of seats if the latest trends continue.
In California, where several competitive House races are not yet called, about 65 percent of the expected vote has been tallied statewide. Ballots there have until Tuesday to arrive. In 2020 it took the state 11 days to report 95 percent of its votes.
In Arizona, a substantial number of voters did not return their ballots until Election Day. Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, is not expected to finish counting until early this week.
In Oregon and Washington State, all or most ballots are expected by Tuesday.
Results continue to be reported.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to hold rallies before his supposed Tuesday announcement of his next Presidential bid. He continues to attack the Jewish community in the United States for not adequately supporting Israel. This is from Haaretz. “At ZOA Event, Trump Again Attacks U.S. Jews for Supporting Democrats. The former U.S. President says too many Jewish people ‘are not doing the right thing for Israel’ by voting for the party that just won the Senate in last week’s midterm election.” Trump seems to misunderstand the diversity of Jewish Congregations in the United and that the Zionism faction is not a universally held Jewish belief.
Former President Donald Trump blasted American Jews for failing to vote for Republicans in sufficient numbers after he accepted the Theodor Herzl Medallion from the Zionist Organization of America, at the right-wing group’s annual gala on Sunday.
“You do have people in this country that happen to be Jewish that are not doing the right thing for Israel – too many,” Trump said, echoing a post he made on social media last month that drew heavy criticism from the American-Jewish community. ”The Democrats get 75 percent of the [Jewish] vote, which is hard to believe. We can’t let that continue,” he said.
Barack Hussein Obama … and then it’s 75 percent of the vote.” He then turned to ZOA President Morton Klein in mock confusion, exclaiming, “What the hell is going on here, Mort?”
Speaking at the sold-out event at New York City’s Pier 60, Trump proceeded to attack the “people in Congress who hate Israel,” contrasting the situation with the past when “you couldn’t touch Israel and couldn’t say a bad thing about it.”
Paul Klee, The Twittering Machine, 1922
Maybe he should learn a little more about the various traditions in the United States, like those practiced in the Reform Judaism congregations.
The Supreme Court continues to reject attempts at gun safety laws. This is from the AP: “Supreme Court rejects another bump stock ban case.” We will live with the nutcases Trump appointed for a very long time.
The Supreme Court on Monday again declined to hear a lawsuit involving a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, the gun attachments that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.
The justices’ decision not to hear the case leaves in place a lower court decision that rejected bump stock owners’ efforts to be compensated for bump stocks they lawfully purchased, but were required to to give up after the administration ruled they were illegal. Lower courts had said the case should be dismissed.
As is typical, the justices made no comments in declining to hear the case, and it was among many the court rejected Monday.
Last month, the justices rejected two other challenges involving the ban. Gun rights advocates, however, scored a big win at the court earlier this year, when the justices by a 6-3 vote expanded gun-possession rights, weakening states’ ability to limit the carrying of guns in public.
In the tradition of Uncle Clarence Thomas, more of the Right Wing Justices are taking part in clear Political Events, further eroding any confidence that they may be the least bit impartial. This is from Reuters: “Standing ovations for conservative U.S. justices at Federalist Society event.” I am appalled by their various comments at this event.
U.S. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett received standing ovations from members of the conservative Federalist Society on Thursday at its first annual convention since the court overturned a nationwide right to abortion.
Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch also received applause at the event of the legal group, which is one of the most influential in the country and whose members have long criticized the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that the court overturned in June.
Alito, Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch have helped create a new conservative supermajority on the court.
The loudest applause at the event in Washington, D.C. may have been not for the justices but for Alito’s opinion in the June ruling. Other conservative members of the court backed the ruling.
Alito did not mention the ruling or other aspects of the court’s work during his brief remarks. But Stephen Markman, a former justice on the Michigan Supreme Court, said that if the ruling were forever associated with Alito, “I do not know of any decision on any court by any judge of which that judge could be more proud.”
The comments were met by a standing ovation, with attendees turning to face toward Alito.
Barrett also briefly spoke at the event, largely honoring the late Judge Laurence Silberman, who served on D.C.’s federal appeals court and died last month. As she took the stage, Barrett said: “It’s really nice to have a lot of noise made not by protesters outside of my house.”
Paul Klee, “Death and Fire,” 1940
Gee, the Hand Maiden doesn’t want any of us peons in our democratic society disturbing her attempts to put Christian Nationalism in its place. She needs her beauty rest.
Trump continues to be blamed for all the losses and such bad candidates. Let’s not forget that all Trump has really done is amplify what’s been cooking in the oven since the Reagan years, at the very least. That might be a ham in the oven, but the pig wore lipstick before it got there.
From The Washington Post: “Trump blame continues for midterm losses as ex-president readies to announce bid. ‘I’m tired of losing,’ Trump critic Larry Hogan says, as Republican senators weigh in on leadership contest.” The problem is that even though they attempt to gentrify their radical agenda, the base wants its anger and red meat. I don’t think you will be able to put that back into the closet.
Donald Trump’s Republican critics renewed their push Sunday to steer their party away from the former president, warning that he could hurt Republicans’ chances of winning the Senate runoff in Georgia next month if he announces plans for another White House bid on Tuesday.
“It’s basically the third election in a row that Donald Trump has cost us the race,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And it’s like, three strikes, you’re out.” Hogan said it would be a mistake to nominate Trump again as the party’s 2024 presidential candidate after Republicans failed to take control of the Senate and made far fewer gains in the House than predicted in the midterm elections.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result,” he added. “Donald Trump kept saying we’re gonna be winning so much we’re gonna get tired of winning. I’m tired of losing. That’s all he’s done.”
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) echoed Hogan’s comments on ABC’s “This Week,” calling Don Bolduc, the Republican Senate nominee in his state, a “Republican extremist” and saying the results across the country amounted to “a rejection of that extremism.”
Frantisek Kupka, Localization of Graphic Motifs II, 1912/1913
They can afford to say that now that the Supreme Court is doing its dirty work. I still remember them touting the style of the now Virginia Governor who tried to act moderate enough to get elected but then went full-on Christian White Nationalist. I think they’re just trying to fool centrists and independent voters. Genn Youngkin may have worn the clothing, but he still was a pig wearing lipstick. However, Trump has attacked him recently since he’s not quite pro-Trumpy enough. “Trump hits out at Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin with the bizarre comment that his name ‘sounds Chinese’. This report is from The Insider.
Former President Donald Trump lashed out at Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin amid speculation that the governor might run for president in 2024.
Writing on Truth Social on Friday, Trump bizarrely commented that the governor’s name, which he spelled “Young Kin” “sounds Chinese.”
Trump also took credit for Youngkin’s political rise, claiming that he would not have become governor without his endorsement.
“I Endorsed him, did a very big Trump Rally for him telephonically, got MAGA to Vote for him – or he couldn’t have come close to winning. But he knows that, and admits it,” Trump wrote.
Youngkin dismissed Trump’s comments while speaking to reporters on Friday and said he was focused on bringing people together.
“Listen, you all know me, I do not call people names,” the governor said. “I really work hard to bring people together and that’s what we’re working on.”
“That’s not the way I roll and not the way I behave,” he added.
Youngkin has previously declined to comment on whether he would run in 2024, stating in October that he was “focused right now on being the best governor in Virginia that I can possibly be.”
Gustav Klimt, Baby (Cradle), 1917/1918
No matter how much he talks like a polite gentleman, his policies are the same old Republican Culture wars and wealthy class, corporate appeasement with the same dose of White Christian Nationalism and Jingoism. “Youngkin proposes new history standards, including teaching patriotism in Va. schools.”
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is overhauling former Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration’s proposal that would have set history and social science standards in Virginia schools.
Youngkin’s VDOE’s new draft proposal would determine what students learn about American history and Virginia history inside the classroom.
If adopted by the Virginia Board of Education, the new standards will be in effect for seven years starting in the 2024-2025 school year. Professional development would begin in the summer of 2023, according to a fact sheet that was sent to legislators and obtained by 7News.
The Governor’s 53-page proposal would require:
- Kindergarteners to learn patriotism which includes pledging allegiance to the American flag
- Students would learn critical thinking skills starting in the first grade
- Starting in 4th grade, students would describe the Civil Rights movement in Virginia and students would describe why James Madison is called the “Father of the U.S. Constitution” and why George Washington is called the “Father of our Country” and students would learn about Reconstruction and the Civil War
- In 11th grade, students would learn about Christopher Columbus and about the race-based enslavement of Africans and more
After Youngkin appointed new members to the Virginia Board of Education this year, the board delayed adopting the history curriculum proposal that was crafted under the Northam administration.
Northam’s proposed revisions to the history curriculum, which have now been scrapped, included:
- Lessons on the LGTBQ+ community and social justice
- Numerous lessons on racism and discrimination
- Recognized holidays like Juneteenth
- Lessons on gender equity and equality, climate defense, and renewable energy
- It would have halted the requirement of teaching some lessons on Christopher Columbus and Benjamin Franklin
- It would have scrapped the requirement of understanding why George Washington is called the “Father of our Country” and why James Madison is called the “Father of the Constitution.”
See. Pig meet Lipstick.
The one governor’s race that I’m watching is still going in a good direction. “Kari Lake’s path to victory continues to narrow despite gains.” Lake would’ve joined the ranks of elected Republican women that continuously embarrass women and Americans everywhere.
Anyway, that’s my offerings for today.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: November 12, 2022 Filed under: 2022 Elections, Afternoon Reads, cat art, caturday, Congress, Donald Trump | Tags: Arizona, authoritarians, Brian Klaas, Catherine Cortez Masto, independent voters, Katie Hobbs, Mark Finchem, Nevada, young voters 32 Comments
By Sandra Bierman
Happy Caturday!!
I’m completely exhausted! I spent most of my time since Tuesday glued to the TV and Twitter, obsessing on the vote counts. My eyes feel as if they are about to fall out. But democracy seems to be surviving for now, thanks to voters who clearly understood the danger and who didn’t like the Supreme Court trying to turn women into broodmares. And thanks to the young people who turned out to vote in swing states.
The New York Times: Young Voters Helped Democrats. But Experts Differ on Just How Much.
Preliminary figures indicate that Democrats, particularly in swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan, benefited from a strong turnout of young voters, aged 18-29, the age group that regularly shows the strongest support for the party — and regularly votes the least.
But less certain and much debated after Tuesday’s vote was whether the turnout was particularly strong this year, or more a continuation of support seen in the last midterm election in 2018 — which restored the party’s control of the House of Representatives — or the 2020 vote that elected President Biden and gave the party control of both chambers of Congress.
Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life, perhaps the most assiduous tracker of young voters, estimated on Thursday that 27 percent of 18-to-29 voters cast ballots in midterm elections — and that 63 percent of them voted for Democrats in House of Representatives elections.
That estimate was based on a nationwide exit poll of voters jointly conducted by the three major television networks and CNN; those preliminary numbers will be updated with data from actual voting. The turnout rate for all voters was 47 percent, according to a preliminary estimate by the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida….
“What’s clear from the data is that young Democrats turned out,” said Victor Shi, the director of strategy for Voters of Tomorrow, a Generation Z-centered civics advocacy group. An analysis of early voting data, he said, indicated that young people had cast a million more Democratic votes than Republican ones. And he said that early voting by young Democratic supporters exceeded 2018 totals in three battleground states — Georgia, Michigan and Ohio.
Independents also broke for Democrats. Everyone except the crazies is sick and tired of Trump and his whining. The Wall Street Journal: Why Independent Voters Broke for Democrats in the Midterms. GOP candidates closely aligned with Trump turned off some centrists and in-play Republicans.
Lisa Ghelfi, a 58-year-old registered Republican in Arizona, voted for Donald Trump for president two years ago but has grown tired of his election-fraud claims. It is the main reason she voted for Democrats for governor, senator, secretary of state and attorney general this fall and plans to change her registration to independent.
“Not allowing the election to be settled, it’s very divisive,” Ms. Ghelfi, a semiretired attorney from Paradise Valley, said of the 2020 race. “I think the election spoke for itself.” She said she voted for Republicans down-ballot who weren’t as vocal about election fraud or as closely tied to Mr. Trump, yet couldn’t support Arizona’s four major Republican candidates because they echoed Mr. Trump’s false claims.
Republicans succeeded in one of their top goals this year: They brought more of their party’s voters to the polls than did Democrats. But in the course of energizing their core voters, Republicans in many states lost voters in the political center—both independents and many Republicans who are uneasy with elements of the party’s focus under Mr. Trump.
Control of the House and Senate, which had seemed poised to land with the Republican Party, is coming down to a handful of races that so far are too close to call, though the GOP remains on track to winning a narrow majority in the House. Republicans have won nearly 5.5 million more votes in House races than have Democrats, a tally by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report finds, as many voters were motivated by anxiety over high inflation and a low opinion of President Biden’s response.
Pierre Bonnard – Marthe à la Chatte, 1912
We are still waiting on Nevada’s Senate race, but it looks like Catherine Cortez Masto has a good chance to win, Right now, she is only behind Laxalt by 862 votes, according to Jon Ralston, with Las Vegas still outstanding. If she wins, the Democrats will control the Senate. Nate Cohn at The New York Times: Mail Ballots Around Las Vegas Are Likely to Put Democrats Ahead.
Democrats appeared on the cusp of securing control of the Senate over the weekend, as the counting of mail ballots in Nevada brought Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democratic incumbent, within 1,000 votes of overtaking her Republican opponent, Adam Laxalt, for the final seat the party needs to maintain its 50-50 Senate majority.
All eyes will be on Clark County, home to Las Vegas, which is a Democratic stronghold. Ms. Cortez Masto has led mail ballots tabulated after Election Day there by nearly two to one, a margin that would be more than enough to overtake Mr. Laxalt if the trend continues among the approximately 25,000 mail ballots that remain to be counted.
The bulk of the remaining mail ballots in Clark County are expected to be reported on Saturday (though the deadline to have all ballots counted is not until Tuesday). That could be enough to allow news organizations to project a winner, depending on the number of ballots counted and the size of Ms. Cortez Masto’s lead.
Most news organizations, including The Associated Press, are reluctant to call races when the leading candidate is ahead by less than half a percentage point, or about 5,000 votes in this case.
Even so, Ms. Cortez Masto would build a lead of more than 5,000 votes if she fares as well in the final Clark mail ballots as she has in those counted so far. She is also expected to have an advantage in the remaining mail ballots from Washoe County, as well as the more than 10,000 mail ballots that voters can “cure” after being initially rejected for a bad signature match.
Only a few thousand mail votes remain from the state’s rural, Republican counties.
From The Washington Post last night: Congressional Republicans panic as they watch their lead dwindle.
With control of the House and Senate still undecided, angry Republicans mounted public challenges to their leaders in both chambers Friday as they confronted the possibility of falling short of the majority, eager to drag Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) down from their top posts as consequence.
The narrowing path for Republican victory has stunned lawmakers from both parties, freezing plans for legislation and leadership maneuvers as they wait to see who takes control and learn the margins that will dictate which ideological factions wield power. Regardless of the outcome, the lack of a “red wave” marks a devastating outcome for Republicans, who believed they would cruise to a large governing majority in the House and possibly flip the Senate.
By Isabelle Breyer
The GOP faces a small but real prospect that it may not reclaim the House majority despite high pre-election hopes based on the disapproval of President Biden, record inflation and traditional losses for the party that holds the White House. Late Friday, Democrats moved one Senate seat closer to retaining their majority in the chamber as Sen. Mark Kelly won reelection in Arizona. Winning either in Nevada — which was still counting votes — or in Georgia, where a runoff is set for Dec. 6, would allow them to stay in power.
“It’s an unworkable majority. Nothing meaningful will get passed,” a dejected aide to a senior House Republican said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal tensions….
Outgoing Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) told The Washington Post he knew the evening of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that the GOP would have a difficult time proving to voters they should be in the majority in two years.
“By midnight on January 6, it was obvious that if we continued to sleepwalk down the path of crazy we’d face a rude awakening,” he said. “Instead of facing those facts, the GOP spent the last two years heading in the same direction and actively avoiding any internal reckoning. After Tuesday, we have no choice but to heed voters when they say that ‘the grass is green, the sky is blue, and by the way, you just got your ass handed to you.’ But waking up to that reality is going to be rough.”
Meijer lost in the Michigan primary after he voted to impeach Trump.
More good news for democracy: election-denying candidates lost bigtime. Last night Mark Finchem in Arizona went down to defeat. NBC News: Election denier Mark Finchem loses secretary of state race in Arizona.
Republican Mark Finchem, a prominent election denier, has lost to Democrat Adrian Fontes in the race for Arizona secretary of state race, NBC News projects.
Fontes, a former top elections official for Maricopa County, will succeed Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor.
Finchem was among a host of GOP candidates for statewide office who have repeatedly cast doubt over Joe Biden’s presidential victory or falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump in Arizona.
Last year, Trump backed Finchem’s candidacy and highlighted his record of defending the stolen election claims. “Mark was willing to say what few others had the courage to say” about the 2020 election, Trump said in offering his public support….
With his loss, Finchem joins numerous other election deniers who fell short on Election Day. In Michigan, election deniers lost bids for governor, secretary of state and attorney general. Republican Doug Mastriano, a prominent election denier in Pennsylvania who was on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, lost his bid for governor, along with similar GOP gubernatorial candidates in Minnesota and New Mexico.
Other prominent election deniers in Arizona, including attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh and Kari Lake, the party’s pick for governor, are still locked in tight races with their opponents several days after the election.
Katie Hobbes still has a chance to win the governor’s race.
By Sandra Bierman
Republicans are angry with Trump for backing crazy, incompetent, far-right candidates. Liz Goodwin writes at The Washington Post: A red wave of criticism crashes into Donald Trump after midterm losses.
As Republicans grapple with their lackluster performance in Tuesday’s midterm elections, one man has begun to take on an unusual amount of criticism from his fellow partisans: Donald Trump.
Frayed Nerves Friday Reads: Vote Updates still Coming in
Posted: November 11, 2022 Filed under: just because | Tags: 2022 Midterms, Twitter Free zone 26 Comments
1917, Sitting Woman with Legs Drawn Up, Egon Schiele
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Biting nails is probably a national pastime for those still following the election. This is a nail-biter of an election! It looks like the Democratic Party will hold on to the Senate. The House is still in play. This is from Politico. “The path to 218: Why Democrats aren’t out of the race for the House yet. A district-by-district look at which party is favored in the uncalled races.” Some of the California House races are still out and quite close.
Republicans still have a wider path to the House majority than Democrats — but it’s narrowed a lot over the past 24 hours.
As the vote count continues, particularly in mail-heavy Western states, Democrats continue to win most of the contested races, keeping them in the hunt and meaning news organizations won’t declare a winner in the overall fight for the chamber.
Not all of the 32House districts that remain uncalled are truly in doubt: In some of them, one party is clearly favored, and Democrats are likely to win more of them than Republicans, according to a POLITICO analysis.
But that alone wouldn’t be enough for Democrats to snatch the House majority, with the GOP only seven seats away. Democrats would still need to win the vast majority of the nearly-a-dozen races that are truly in doubt.
It’s not impossible, but it’s not likely, either.
The Mad Woman, Chaim Soutine, c.1919
If the Republicans do get control of the House, there is no guarantee that Kevin McCarthy will be the next Speaker of the House. This is from CNN. “Kevin McCarthy faces rocky road to speakership as hardliners emboldened by GOP’s election showing.”
Members of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus are withholding their support for House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid and have begun to lay out their list of demands, putting the California Republican’s path to securing 218 votes in peril if the party ultimately takes the House with a slim majority.
McCarthy and his team are confident he will ultimately get the votes to be speaker. But the conservative hardliners are emboldened by the likelihood of a narrow House GOP majority and are threatening to withhold their support – something that could imperil his bid or force him to make deals to weaken the speakership, something he has long resisted.
Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told reporters that “no one currently has 218” votes for speaker, which is the magic number McCarthy would need to secure the speaker’s gavel on the House floor in January, and said he wants McCarthy to list in greater detail his plans for a wide array of investigations into the Biden administration. And Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona complained that McCarthy seemed to backpedal on whether he’d be willing to launch impeachment proceedings into President Joe Biden or members of his Cabinet.
“I’ve heard from multiple of my constituents who question the wisdom of proceeding forward with that leadership,” Biggs said, adding that there needs to be a “frank conversation” about who they elect for the top job.
Members of the group are also pushing to make it easier for lawmakers to call for floor votes on ousting a sitting speaker. That is something that McCarthy is adamantly against and was wielded over former Speaker John Boehner before he eventually resigned.
Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado said it was a “red line” for her, but not everyone in the Freedom Caucus is united on whether to make that a hard line.
Boebert has pulled ahead in her race by less than 900 votes.
The race may head to a recount according to the Denver Post. “A thin-enough margin will trigger an automatic recount, but candidates can also request their own.”
Few votes separate Colorado’s congressional race between U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert and Adam Frisch, meaning whoever wins the heated election could still suffer through a recount.
Eyes across the country are watching the race, which could swing either way as counties continue to count straggling ballots.
If neither candidate gains a wide enough margin, election officials might not declare an official winner in the race for weeks, depending on how the process plays out. Not only would a slim margin of victory trigger an automatic recount but either candidate can also request a recount so long as they’re willing to pay for it.
The process could then extend into December.
Self-Portrait with Hand on the Forehead (Selbstbildnis mit der Hand an der Stirn), Käthe Kollwitz, 1910
Axios has good news at the state level, where many of the worst election deniers will not be in control of future elections. Also, a woman’s right to choose is a winning issue. “Democrats make quiet history with state-level gains.”
Overlooked amid frantic punditry about the “red ripple” in Congress: Democrats quietly won and defended majorities in state legislatures across the country, weakening GOP power on issues at the heart of the national political debate.
Why it matters: State legislative races are on pace to be the highlight of the Democratic ballot. If Democrats hold on to Nevada, this will be the first time the party in power hasn’t lost a single chamber in a midterms year since 1934, according to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
The big picture: The partisan battles over democracy and abortion rights — the two issues that dominated Democratic messaging this cycle — are shaped at the state level.
- Republicans have controlled more state legislative seats than Democrats for more than a decade straight, thanks in large part to a deliberate strategy the GOP hatched in 2010 to dominate the redistricting process.
- Even after Democrats’ stunning gains, Republicans still control more states and will have more total legislative seats. But this election shows Democrats are committed to playing the long game, says Daniel Squadron, founder of The States Project.
State of play: Democrats defended their state-level majorities in Massachusetts and Maryland and won governor seats left open after Republican retirements, securing a “trifecta” in both states. Helmed by a historic $50M investment from the DLCC, they also kept the Maine legislature, the New Mexico and Colorado state Houses, and secured a supermajority in both chambers in Vermont (which has a GOP governor).
- In Michigan, Democrats flipped the House and Senate to take complete control of the state government for the first time in 40 years. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won re-election by double-digits, vaulting the rising Democratic star into the national spotlight.
- In Minnesota, Democrats also secured a trifecta after taking the state Senate.
- In Wisconsin, Democrats denied Republicans a supermajority that would have allowed them to override Gov. Tony Evers’ veto — the only thing standing in the way of a statewide abortion ban.
What we’re watching: Arizona, where Republicans have a narrow two-seat majority in both chambers, was another top target for Democrats. It’s still early in the state’s vote-counting process, but Democrats told Axios they’re hopeful their winning streak will continue there.
- In Pennsylvania, Democrats are just one seat away from flipping the state House.
The backdrop: Outside Dem groups — fueled by Republican threats to abortion rights and fair election processes — made unprecedented investments in state legislative races this cycle.
- Two groups, The States Project and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), poured millions into state races in the final four weeks of the election. They targeted races with thin margins in Arizona, Colorado, New Hampshire, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
- Forward Majority, a Democratic super PAC focused on the states, invested over $20 million this cycle targeting 25 seats in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona.
- “We’re clawing our way back to power after 50 years of investment for Republicans and so much neglect for so long by the Democratic Party,” said Forward Majority’s president Vicky Hausman.
Pink Blouse, Amedeo Modigliani,1919
This analysis of our election comes from The Economist. “A Republican victory will be much smaller than Democrats feared. Several sorts of extremism may have prevented the party from securing a more convincing victory.”
Imagine if Noah’s prognostications about a world-ending flood had ended in a light shower. That is roughly the situation faced by Republicans who had been expecting a biblical sort of rebuke of President Joe Biden in the midterm elections. Despite clear voter discontent with Mr Biden and the pace of inflation, Republicans managed only a limp showing. As final results were being tallied, they looked on track to barely pick up the five seats needed for a majority in the House of Representatives (a typical loss for a president’s party in the modern era is 30 seats). That will be sufficient for Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, to wrest the speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, and ensure divided government in Washington for the next two years. But it is hardly a spectacular showing.
The same is true of the contest to control the Senate, which may take weeks to decide, due to the need for a run-off election in Georgia in December. Taking the Senate would have required netting only a single additional seat—but it now looks likelier than not that even this low bar will not be met (see chart 1). Democrats never met the attacks that Republicans launched at them on crime, inflation, indoctrination of schoolchildren and immigration with a convincing or cohesive rejoinder. And yet the morning after the election there was, surprisingly, more need for Republican soul-searching than for Democratic recriminations.
Several sorts of extremism may have robbed Republicans of the marginal seats they needed to secure a more convincing victory. The first was over abortion, which became an immediate rallying cry for Democrats when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the case that had established a right to terminate a pregnancy up until the point of fetal viability, in June. Although most Americans supported some limitations on the procedure, they also found bans pitched by many Republicans too extreme. In the suburban battlegrounds for the House, abortion proved a potent battering-ram for Democrats, who improved their margins in districts with lots of white, college-educated voters—previously a reliable constituency for the Republicans (see chart 2).
Self-Portrait (1886), Edvard Munch © Munch Museum
You may see the charts and read more analysis at the link.
Jonathan Chait-writing for New York Magazine–thinks “The GOP Revolt Against Trump Is More Serious Than You Think. It’s not going to be like 2016 or 2021.”
I’ve been telling people for most of the year that I consider Ron DeSantis to be the odds-on favorite — not a guarantee, not a prohibitive favorite, but the favorite — to win the Republican presidential nomination. Usually, they nod and then add something like, “But not if Trump runs, right?” “Yes,” I reply, “even if Trump runs.” Then they look at me like I’m crazy.
Tuesday night, my view began to look a little less crazy. The Murdoch-owned media, very much including Fox News, unleashed an undisguised propaganda blitz to convince its audience that Trump is the source of the party’s struggles and DeSantis represents its future. Trump’s angry response is a measure of how seriously he takes the threat to steer the base away from him. Many journalists registered surprise at the bluntness of the chorus blaming Trump. Yet the prospects for a DeSantis nomination, and the changes beneath the surface that have made it relatively likely, have not been fully appreciated outside the Republican world.
For one thing, the Murdoch-owned media, and many other legacy conservative-media outlets, like National Review, have never fully supported Trump. They defended him against Democrats while wishing the party would nominate somebody else. This has meant, in other words, that they would criticize some of his excesses, even while insisting the Democrats were worse. During moments when Republicans had the opportunity to wrest leadership of the party from his hands, like during the 2016 primary campaign and in the days after January 6, they would even savage him. But when his leadership of the party went unchallenged, they would mute their criticism and fall dutifully in line.
This pattern has led to an easy assumption that whatever misgivings Republicans express now will come to nothing. “We have heard this tune many times before,” Dan Drezner says, sighing. “It’s nice to hope that this time it’ll take,” writes the Bulwark, “But we’ve all seen this movie before. Many, many, many times before.”
This ignores a crucial difference. In both 2016, and the aftermath of the insurrection, there was no unified Republican alternative. The non-Trump candidates in 2016 infamously failed to coordinate, and even devoted most of their energy to attacking each other in the belief that the last non-Trump standing would automatically prevail. “Jeb, Rubio, Christie, Kasich, Walker… every one of these guys was as hyped as DeSantis is now. Trump beat them all,” argues Adam Jentleson. But that is the point – beating them all was easier than beating a single opponent with unified conservative movement support.
After the insurrection, a brief window opened to move on, but the party lacked any obvious figure to rally around. (DeSantis had yet to make the key moves consolidating his support on the right.) And in between these events, Trump was president.
I wish I could get over my premonition that the next two years will be stressful and will still be dominated by MAGA Republicans in Congress. I just do not want to go back to where turning on the TV means enduring crazy Gym Jordan, Sleazy Steve Scalise who could potentially be Speaker of the House to my dismay, Marjorie Three Names in a Committee Hearing, and Trump flying around the country with his HateFest events as he runs for president. Trump may find more time to roast DeSantis than “Sleepy Joe”, but it will still be that anxiety-inducing, stomach-clenching shit show. We’ll just have to see what nickname he gives DeSantis.
Happy Veterans Day to everyone that served!!!
So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?
“Baby, I see this world has made you sadSome people can be badThe things they do, the things they say.”
Mark Knopfler
Thursday Reads: Election Aftermath
Posted: November 10, 2022 Filed under: 2022 Elections, Afternoon Reads, Donald Trump | Tags: "red wave", abortion rights, Joe Biden 22 Comments
The Yellow Cow, Franz Marc
Good Afternoon!!
I’ve been sitting here for awhile with my laptop open, staring into space; and I just realized that I’m kind of in a daze after the past few days.
Election day was much better for Democrats than I expected, even though I had read convincing arguments from Democratic polling experts Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier that they could do well. I actually included their predictions in my election day Tuesday post via a piece by Rosenberg.
My worst fears didn’t materialize, and that’s great; but we’re still in a kind of limbo waiting for results in Arizona and Nevada. It will also be a long time before California counts all the votes, so we may not know who controls the House for some time. In the Senate, we may not know until the December 6 Georgia runoff.
One thing we do know for sure is that abortion rights was an extremely important issue for voters in many states.
The New York Times: ‘My Main, Core Issue’: Abortion Was the Driving Force for Many Voters.
It was a driving force for a retired banker in San Antonio, an artist in Racine, Wis., an event planner in Miami Beach. It motivated college students and retirees, men and especially women. Even those who might usually skip a midterm election had been compelled to make time to cast a ballot.
Across the nation, voters felt an obligation to weigh in on what, for many, was a vital matter: abortion rights.
“Abortion was my main, core issue,” said Urica Carver, 41, a registered Republican from Scranton, Pa.
A single mother of six children, Ms. Carver, a caseworker for the state, said she would have most likely supported Republicans in the midterms. But the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade this summer magnified an issue that outweighed all others, she said. Abortion, she said, was a personal decision, and she would want her own daughters to have the option if needed.
Ms. Carver voted a straight Democratic ticket. “If they didn’t support that right, regardless of who they were,” she said, “they were not getting my vote.”
Two Poodles, Pierre Bonnard
Abortion played a larger role in midterm election results than even many Democrats, who had made it central to their campaigns, expected. Pre-election polls had shown Americans fixated on inflation and crime, with abortion still a concern but not as much of a priority.
Those opposed to abortion rights also said the issue moved them to vote. But in states with ballot initiatives that could affect abortion access, the issue drew more people who supported abortion rights, or did not want more restrictions.
In all five states where abortion-related questions were on the ballot on Tuesday, voters chose to protect access to the procedure or reject further limits. And in some places where the future of abortion rights were uncertain, Democratic candidates who campaigned on the issue fared well — particularly in Michigan, where voters re-elected the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and in Pennsylvania, where the Democrat Josh Shapiro won the governorship and the Democrat John Fetterman won the Senate race.
Read the rest at the NYT.
John Hendrikson at The Atlantic: How Abortion Defined the 2022 Midterms. Where Dr. Oz stumbled, John Fetterman only had to say Roe v. Wade. And so it went across the nation.
In red and blue states alike, reproductive autonomy proved a defining issue of the 2022 midterms. Although much preelection punditry predicted that the Pennsylvania Democratic nominee John Fetterman’s post-stroke verbal disfluency was poised to “blow up” the pivotal Senate race on Election Day, the exit polls suggest that abortion seismically affected contests up and down the ballot.
Concerns over the future of reproductive rights unequivocally drove Democratic turnout and will now lead to the rewriting of state laws around the country. In deep-red Kentucky, voters rejected an amendment that read, “Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.” In blue havens such as California and Vermont, voters approved ballot initiatives enshrining abortion rights into their state constitutions.
In Michigan, a traditionally blue state that in recent years has turned more purple, voters likewise enshrined reproductive protections into law, with 45 percent of exit-poll respondents calling abortion the most important issue on the ballot. In the race for the Michigan statehouse, the incumbent Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, trounced her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon, who had said that she supports abortion only in instances that would save the life of the woman, and never in the case of rape or incest. Dixon lost by more than 10 percentage points and almost half a million votes.
After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision ended the federal right to abortion in June, many observers wondered whether pro-abortion-rights Democrats would remain paralyzed with despair or whether their anger would become a galvanizing force going into the election season. The answer is now clear—though, in fact, it has been for some time.
In August, just six weeks after Dobbs, Kansas voters rejected an amendment to the state constitution that could have ushered in a ban on abortion. That grassroots-movement defeat of the ballot initiative was a genuine shocker—and it showed voters in other states what was possible at the local level.
William James Webbe, The White Owl, ‘Alone and warming his five wits, The white owl in the belfry sits,’ signed with monogram and dated ‘1856’
Right leaning Axios reports that anti-abortion groups think the problem is that Republicans distanced themselves from the abortion issues: Republicans’ abortion silence backfires in midterms, by Oriana Gonzalez.
The blame game has begun around what led to Republicans’ disappointing results in the midterms, with some outside groups zeroing in on the party’s lack of an abortion message.
Driving the news: Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a large anti-abortion organization with close ties to GOP leaders, slammed Republican candidates who distanced themselves from abortion bans and failed to clearly communicate their stance on the issue, calling it “political malpractice.”
The group said in a memo that to “win in competitive races,” candidates needed to focus on defining their opponents as “abortion extremists” and “contrast that with a clearly defined pro-life position centered around consensus such as pain-capable or heartbeat limits.” [….]
They specifically praised Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Sen.-elect J.D. Vance of Ohio, and Georgia Senate hopeful Herschel Walker, whose closely watched race is headed for a runoff.
Yeah, no. I don’t think that would have worked. The candidates who did talk about it mostly didn’t do well.
More points of view on what kept the anticipated “red wave” from happening
Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: The red wave that wasn’t.
In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the results of the 2022 midterms were still uncertain. Control of both the House and the Senate remained up for grabs; the latter may ultimately be determined by a run-off in Georgia in December.
We do know one thing though. Joe Biden has had the most successful midterm of any president in 20 years. The Democrats in disarray narrative looks a lot more like Republicans in disarray. The American people, it turns out, did care about inflation. But they cared about democracy too….
The Democrats currently have 50 seats in the Senate and a narrow majority of 224-213 in the House. Holding that, or losing a handful of seats in the House, may not seem like an impressive outcome. Usually, though, the president’s party gets clobbered in the midterms. Donald Trump in the 2018 midterms lost 40 seats in the House. Barack Obama lost a whopping 63 seats in 2010. In comparison, his 13 seat loss in 2014 seems relatively mild, even though it shifted control to the Republicans again. George W. Bush lost 31 seats in his 2006 midterm.
You have to go back to the 2002 midterm, in the rally around the flag aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, to find a midterm in which the president’s party made any gains. The Republicans that year picked up eight seats, solidifying their hold on the House. Before that, the president’s party lost control of the House in every other midterm election since 1978.
Biden’s achievement — even if he ends up losing a handful of House seats — is all the more remarkable because his popularity remains in the doldrums. Poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight has his approval at around 41.4 percent. That’s lower than Trump’s (42.2 percent) and or Obama’s (44.8 percent) at the same point in their presidencies, when they experienced catastrophic losses.
Biden’s low approval ratings and high inflation nationally led many pundits to believe that there would be a red wave in line with most midterms. Pundits said that New York governor Kathy Hochul could be in danger of losing her blue state to challenger Lee Zeldin. Analysts also suggested Democrats could lose a Rhode Island House seat they’d held since 1991, as Republican Allen Fung looked prepared to unseat Democrat Seth Magaziner. Colorado Democratic Senator Michale Bennett was supposed to be in trouble. So was Washington state’s senator Patty Murray.
Oops! The media’s favorite meme, “Dems in disarray,” might need revisions. Read more at Public Notice.
Cows, by Vincent Van Gogh
This is a “guest essay” at The New York Times by Sohrab Ahmari: Why the Red Wave Didn’t Materialize. Ahmari thinks the Republicans’ failure to help or even empathize with working class Americans explains their electoral losses.
A week before the midterms, a video circulated online of a Starbucks barista crying while explaining the need for a union: “I’m a full-time student. I get scheduled for 25 hours a week, and on weekends they schedule me the entire day — open to close.” The manager is bad, the staffing is inadequate and the stress is overwhelming.
The video should have elicited sympathy from anyone familiar with the lousy wages and grinding conditions that characterize today’s service economy. That was not, though, the response of the full spectrum of conservative media and personalities, from Fox News to The Daily Wire to Sebastian Gorka.
“Boo Hoo!” replied Media Research Center TV, a conservative media site. “This ‘person’” — the barista happens to be transgender, hence, I suppose, the scare quotes around “person” — “was in tears because they had to work eight hours a day on the weekend.”
Episodes like this may be one reason the red wave didn’t materialize, why Republicans failed to usher in a new dawn of prosperity for the multiracial working class that Republican leaders from Senator Ted Cruz to the House policy honcho Jim Banks say they want to champion. When it came down to it, the Republican Party offered ordinary American workers little that might have bolstered their power or leveled the economic playing field. That failure helped dash conservative hopes for a clean Republican sweep.
Read more at the NYT.
Some Republicans and pundits are blaming Trump.
The New York Times: Trump Under Fire From Within G.O.P. After Midterms.
Donald J. Trump faced unusual public attacks from across the Republican Party on Wednesday after a string of midterm losses by candidates he had handpicked and supported, a display of weakness as he prepared to announce a third presidential campaign as soon as next week.
As the sheer number of missed Republican opportunities sank in, the rush to openly blame Mr. Trump was as immediate as it was surprising.
Hunting Dogs in a Boat (1889) by Winslow Homer
Conservative allies criticized Mr. Trump on social media and cable news, questioning whether he should continue as the party’s leader and pointing to his toxic political brand as the common thread woven through three consecutive lackluster election cycles.
Mr. Trump was seen as largely to blame for the Republicans’ underwhelming finish in Tuesday’s elections, as a number of the candidates he had endorsed in competitive races were defeated — including nominees for governor and Senate in Pennsylvania and for governor of Michigan, New York and Wisconsin.
“Republicans have followed Donald Trump off the side of a cliff,” David Urban, a longtime Trump adviser with ties to Pennsylvania, said in an interview.
Former Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island who has long supported Mr. Trump, said, “I strongly believe he should no longer be the face of the Republican Party,” adding that the party “can’t become a personality cult.”
The chorus of criticism, which unfolded on Fox News and social media throughout the day, revealed Mr. Trump to be at his most vulnerable point politically since the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The Washington Post: How Trump, infighting and flawed candidates limited Republican gains. This is one of the Post’s trademark gossipy reports with 5 authors and many sources, so you’ll need to go read the whole thing if you’re interested. Here’s the intro:
Florida Sen. Rick Scott made a plea to about 35 of his colleagues during lunch at the National Republican Senatorial Committee offices in early August: Send money to the NRSC from your personal campaign accounts. The candidates were in need.
The Republican outlook had gone from glossy to grim since the July campaign finance reports. Despite $5-a-gallon gasoline and a historically unpopular president, Democratic Senate candidates in pivotal states had big financial and polling leads. First-time Republican candidates propelled by former president Donald Trump, on the other hand, were viewed unfavorably in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona and Georgia.
But Scott’s hopes of a united GOP response were dashed as soon as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) stood to address the same room: Send 20 percent of the money from their leadership PACs, he told the senators, to the Senate Leadership Fund, an outside group controlled by his own loyalists, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The implication, said multiple people familiar with the exchange, was that senators needed to choose sides in a months-long battle between the two Senate leaders about the best strategy for winning, a conflict that would have serious consequences in the fall.
Bull, 1911, by Franz Marc
At least one senator left the meeting frustrated that Scott had to come hat-in-hand so late in the campaign, according to people briefed afterward. Other senators raised private concerns broadly about how Scott had managed the committee. Others blamed McConnell….
From the outside, this year’s elections looked like a virtual Republican lock. Since Lyndon B. Johnson, new Democratic presidents have lost an average of 45 House and five Senate seats in the midterms. Republicans went to the polls Tuesday needing to gain just five House seats and a single Senate seat to take control, amid soaring inflation and broad dissatisfaction with the nation’s direction.
But behind the scenes, nothing came easy to Republicans this cycle, as their historic tail winds collided with the fractious reality of a political party in the midst of a generational molting. GOP leaders spent much of the last year fighting against each other or plotting against their own primary voters. They were hobbled by unprepared first-time candidates, fundraising shortfalls and Trump, whose self-concern required constant attention — right up to the eve of the election, when he forced party bosses to beg him once again to delay a presidential campaign announcement.
That’s all I have for you today. Please share your thoughts and links in the comment thread, and have a great Thursday!
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