Immediate post-election observations
Infidel753: “Immediate post-election observations,” Infidel753 Blog
There was no red wave. There was no blue wave. Most incumbents got re-elected. Whichever side ends up controlling the House and Senate will have a razor-thin margin.
Turnout was very high on both sides and the process ran smoothly pretty much everywhere, so it was a big win for democracy.
If the Republicans get the House majority, the margin will be small and the faction-riddled caucus will be difficult to keep unified. It may be that Democrats will still be able to pass occasional decent legislation by peeling off a few Republican votes. The really loopy stuff, like holding the debt ceiling hostage, may not work since just a few Republican defectors could undermine it.
There were some important state-level victories. Vermont, Michigan, Kentucky, and California voted by referendum to protect abortion rights — abortion is clearly a losing issue for the right wing. Illinois passed a ballot measure to strengthen unions, while Missouri passed one to legalize marijuana. Democrats won the Michigan state senate after forty years of Republican control.
Here in Oregon, the ballot measure I mentioned on Monday to take pro-slavery language out of the state constitution did pass, but more than half a million people voted against it.
The exasperating Lauren Boebert appears to have lost re-election.
Democrats need to stop trying to make Beto O’Rourke happen. An open and confirmed gun-grabber is never going to win any statewide office in Texas. It’s just not possible.
If there was one big loser yesterday, it was Trump. Most of the major candidates he foisted on his party via his endorsements were defeated, some of them losing close races that a better candidate might have won. His intra-party arch-rival DeSantis won re-election as governor by a huge margin, boosting his stature and cementing his position as the dominant Republican alternative to Trump. The rivalry between the two will likely dominate the party from now until the 2024 race, perhaps dividing it severely.
But this election is over, and that’s a hell of a relief.
Some thoughts:
– Infidel, the race is not over. We should work our Dem butts off to win Georgia too. We need an alternative to Sinema, Manchin, and Independents. Warnock is one of three.
– Dems always seem to walk away from the fight when they believe it is over. It is not over yet. I did not hear anyone singing in the background.
– The pollsters were inaccurate, many deliberately so, and they appear to be misleading people with their opinions. I told my wife to ignore them as many were outrageous.
– I love watching Kari Lake and the other AZ Repubs getting feisty with Maricopa County in AZ. The Board of Commissioners there are mostly Republican. The person in charge of the counting of the votes is also Republican. Nothing like beating up your own people and telling them to row faster.
– Should we be thanking SCOTUS for overturning Roe v. Wade? It did put a crimp in Robert’s plan to wait till after the election. That decision and Thomas’s historical analysis requirement for bullet-spewing-weapons laws has anger people and federal judges having to history books rather than using precedent.
– Democrats should not be satisfied. They still have a lot of work to do with the economy.
– Biden should be telling Fed Chairman to back off. We are heading to a recession, one in which will have a large impact on the very people he saved with his policies early on in his administration.
– Fix the issue of business rent taking over the last two years. Much of the shortages could have been avoided with proper planning. 2008 was a similar scenario.
OK, so it’s mostly over. When I said it was a relief I was referring to the stress of worrying about it, not the work of trying to win it. Yes, the extra Georgia seat will be valuable, but it’s now clear that the worst things I was concerned about will not happen.
Lake and Trump are bashing Arizona election officials because there is no one else they can plausibly bash about their defeats. The fact that those officials are Republican makes it even more silly, but the intended audience of Trumpazoid troglodytes is used to dismissing such people as RINOs, traitors within the party.
No, we should not be grateful for the fall of Roe. The human suffering caused by the decision is far more important than any political advantage derived from it. We don’t express gratitude to the guy who kicked a dog and broke its leg because that act forced the dog’s owner to take it to the vet and get its leg fixed. It was the Democratic party’s responsibility to explain to the voters what the danger was and how the Republicans would threaten their freedom.
Somebody need to rein in the Fed, though that’s really Congress’s responsibility. Constitutionally, most things are. Our current situation in which the president is a commanding king-like figure, and Congress is a mere handmaiden or obstacle to his agenda, is a gross perversion of the Constitution’s intent.
Big business’s price-gouging and underpayment of workers has been a problem for decades. The government should have done something about it a long time ago, but has never been willing, probably because of the influence of lobbyists and donations, and the general American allergy to government intervention in the “free market” (freedom for the most powerful to exploit the rest). I doubt the odds of government action will improve any time soon. That problem is better addressed by grassroots action such as boycotts, unionization, etc. We need to get over the idea that only government action on a problem is “real” action.