Well, that could have been a lot worse, couldn't it? However things ultimately turn out, there sure wasn't any sign of a red wave this year.
The downside, of course, is the House. As a friend reminded me, even a narrow Republican win means two years of investigations, hearings, "oversight," debt ceiling brinkmanship, and government shutdowns. In other words, all the usual GOP temper tantrums when they get bored and have nothing better to do.
Unfortunately they have nothing better to do. Sigh.
So do they have the Senate? For sure? That'd be a major relief - and a bigger one if we end up with 51 Senators ultimately versus 50, making us less dependent on either Manchin or Sinema's good graces.
The House . . . is what it is. It was always a long shot to keep it. They need to get some stuff done in the lame duck period, get a budget done and neuter a potential debt ceiling crisis, ensure that Ukraine funding is secure for at least another year.
Going into the election, Democrats and independents held a total of 50 Senate seats. Fetterman's victory in Pennsylvania flips one seat from Republican to Democrat. There are three races that are still undecided, all for seats currently held by Democrats. Mark Kelly has a significant lead in Arizona; I expect him to win even though the race hasn't been called. Catherine Cortez Masto is behind in Nevada, so that's likely a Democratic loss. There will be a runoff in the Georgia race, and I think Warnock is likely to be re-elected.
If Kelly wins and Masto loses, we won't know who will control the Senate until we get the results of the runoff in Georgia.
That's what I'm worried about. Good chance Nevada flips, which means we're in nail-biter territory until the runoff in December.
The problem is a Republican House will flood the zone with crap, which will be breathlessly reported over and over. Low information voters are influenced by this 24/7 firehose of crap.
Don't they need a big enough margin to go all crazy with investigations and such? It seems like the few silent ones in the GOP who have just gone along with all the extremists in the party might now feel emboldened to speak up more now and resist the more nutty actions that we'd usually expect.
“It seems like the few silent ones in the GOP who have just gone along with all the extremists in the party might now feel emboldened to speak up more now…”
Just waking up. Needed a good laugh. This made me fall right out of bed. Thanks MindGame!
Forget who said it, but someone was talking about crazy R's vs the normal R's and the point they made was, "Regardless, they all vote the same, so who cares..."
“To me, they're the same! We're fighting the bloody lot! There's only one way to put it, sir: they are the common enemies of everyone who believes in freedom.”
—Bartlett in The Great Escape—
They vote the same when they don't perceive a threat to their reelection chances. I suspect some will now be reconsidering that calculus.
No, because the majority party has majorities on all the committees, and McCarthy will only install the faithful as heads of those committees.
So you think McCarthy will have the votes to become Speaker? I'm not so sure about how safe that assumption is.
I think if the GOP gets a narrow House majority, it will be endless chaos. They'll be able to agree on some noisy bullshit like Hunter Biden investigations or whatever, but basically nothing else.
I don't know who could control a narrow majority of Republicans as currently constituted in the House, but I do know McCarthy ain't that person.
I think we need to wait a few days. Slightly off topic, did you know that TS Nicole is expected to land right around Mar-a-Lago on Thursday? Not that a hurricane hitting Trump is some sort of metaphor or anything.
Any more of "donnie's documents" in the basement?
I thought is was God punishing Florida for that DeSantis 8th day ad.
It will give House Republicans two years to remind voters that they are pretty loathsome.
If voters need to be reminded of this enduring fact, America’s future is hopeless. Even animals have longer memories of mistreatment and bad behavior than America’s voters it seems.
This! Sure, they can spend their time rolling out BS investigations, but when nothing comes of it, what are they going to run on in 2024? Everyone keeps clutching their pearls that they will use the debt limit to cut Social Security and Medicare. I'm no political ad genius, but even I can write the ad that destroys whoever votes for that.
No red wave, but Republicans will narrowly take the House and my money is on another 50-50 Senate.
Democrats are fortunate that Republicans ran so many insane candidates this year or there very well could have been a red wave. Florida stands out as a "what could have been" for the GOP had they run just garden-variety conservative bombthrowers instead of nutty conspiracy theorists.
So you're implying that the Democrat strategy of pushing for the most extreme Republicans to win their respective primaries was successful? Imagine what would have happened if it had backfired. It still might, in some not-yet-decided cases.
OT: Nearly got run over by a right-on-red turning car just now, despite a sign saying “no turn on red 7am-7pm.” But I stopped myself from stepping off the curb even though I had the green when I saw the car not even slowing down or looking in my direction.
Another successful data point for Kevin’s “RTOR isn’t dangerous for pedestrians” theory!
The house will be Jim Jordan sounding like Roland Freisler.
So that's finally the limit on Republicans. The point where they get too extreme that they start cutting into voters numbers they should have had. Meanwhile, if the Democrats are perceived as moving even slightly to the left, voters think they need to be restrained at the first opportunity. Sobering.
Limit??? No, no, no.....
Conservatism can not fail, it can only be failed. We need nuttier nutjobs to prevail!!!
/S
Not sure that the results are a sign of the limit of Republican radicalism, I think it’s more that everyone underestimated the response to Dobbs.
In Michigan, Democrats will simultaneously control the Governor's office 𝐚𝐧𝐝 the State Legislature for the first time in nearly 40 years
Thank you Justice Alito!
(you incredible shithead)
I'm not sure what Kevin is talking about. We gain PA and lose NV. There will be a runoff in Georgia, and they could get their sh!t together, and thus win the Senate. Am I missing something? Thanks.
NV has not been called. Majority of outstanding votes are from Clark County which leans pretty heavily D. It’s going to be very close.
Good to do better than many projections. Still, in my heart, hard for me to understand why 50% of Americans prefer the GOP.
Not quite. It's more like 50-45 and some voting for different parties--though still to close for my liking. Gerrymandering keeps the Republicans competitive in the House; the Senate was skewed from the start.
The Dems did very well in New Mexico, even better than expected. It looks likely that Gabe Vasquez will defeat trumpiest trumper Yvette Herrell in the southern district (CD2), which was unexpected. That visit from President Joe must have helped! And the redistricting.
Republicans hold no statewide offices. Zip. Ronchetti went down to ignominius defeat in the Governor's race against tiny MLG (Michelle Lujan Grisham), with an even worse margin than in his last statewide contest for Senator vs incumbent Ben Ray Lujan. My (new!) state house district in the NE Heights has retained its appointed, black, female rep ... firsts on all counts.
The rest of the country is doing better than expected, but still some big losses for Ds, like Texas, Florida and Georgia.
Here in the lower Hudson Valley NY, my congress person will likely not survive the onslaught of GOP attack ads, but my state Senator did survive. NY State is the only place where the Democrats control both state houses and the governor's mansion but can't properly gerrymander a congressional redistricting. My guess is that crime in NYC was the main culprit, even though most suburbanites have not been effected.
Perhaps the MAGA controlled House will investigate the tragic sudden death of Biden's dog Champ and the anti social behavior of Major. Probably both the fault of illicit drugs sourced from Hunter Biden. America needs to know!
The Republicans got the House thanks to extreme gerrymandering.
And Johnson kept his Senate seat.
Looks like it might come down to the run off in Georgia for the Senate.
How'd the sheriff do???
Presuming the Dems hold onto the Senate you couldn't have asked for a better outcome from a mid-term election where all the trends were running against them even if the GOP controls the House. A 219-216 or 218-217 House does them no good and if they do decide to act like imbiciles, so much the better to contrast to the Dems. And even if Dems are in the minority, it means basically the new faces in leadership they've been clamoring for.
A GOP majority in the House means endless hearings on Hunter Biden and whatever other fake scandal they come up with, not to mention impeachment articles against Biden, Harris, and whoever else they imagine has slighted them.
Given the extremely lackluster results they got relative to the expectations, it would be interesting to see how many Republicans in the House will still be on board with trying to rehash Trump's grudges as their main strategy during the next 2 years. I think there will be a lot of interest in following DeSantis strategy of focusing entirely on demonizing the social issues and groups they hate without having to rely on getting back at Biden for beating Trump.
A GOP majority in the House means endless hearings on Hunter Biden and whatever other fake scandal they come up with..
Let them. About the only thing that's as predictable as regular bouts of Democratic fecklessness is GOP hubris and overreach. Revisit 1998. An improving economy and voters pissed off at Republican antics will be just what the doctor ordered for 2024 (assuming we'll have an actual free and fair election).
A serious issue for Democrats is running black candidates in places where racism can be a real factor.
Hello Wisconsin!
As a Badger Stater let me speak on this, because a lot of people were like "WTF? How can you elect Evers and Johnson?" Easy, because we have Tammy Baldwin and Johnson as our Senators. Because we have Evers and a hard-ass GOP dominated legislature that's why.
This a very evenly divided state, especially between rural and urban. The swing voters, suffice that there are in in the Milwaukee suburbs and the Fox Valley region. That's where the split -ticket voting took place. These voters said "Evers is a good guy. A Wisconsin guy. If he loses the GOP will run everything and I don't want that bunch of crazy sore losers and their voting investigators running state b y their lonesome." At the same time they also said: "This Johnson fellow may be a jack-ass but damn that Barnes, all that anti-police, woke stuff he said in the past, abolish ICE, not paying his taxes with crime rates high that's just too much for me."
The sad thing is is that Barnes has carried himself very well at Lt. Governor and has hardly been a radical while in office. But his activist past caught up with him and turnout in Milwaukee was down this year by 40,000 votes compared to 2018 (which was a huge difference as it turned out. He also got a free ride into the general election from the primary because for the other candidates to win they would have had to use the same attacks on Barnes as Johnson did and among Democrats that would ahve backfired bigly. Just as a rule, always comb through your Twitter feed to delete stuff before you even think about running for office.
Thing of it is though, it wasn't like Twitter was invented yesterday. It's amazing Scott Walker never used any of this stuff back in '18 because it really would have been awkward for Evers to run with Barnes tagged with a radical label, someone he didn't pick (Lt. Gov's in Wisconsin are chosen by party primary). Shows what a bunch idiots the Walker crowd was after 2014.
Curious who's going to come out and say Trump needs to go for the GOP to win. McConnell? DeSantis? And Trump will be even more wounded after he's indicted, which presumably will be soon.
dear heaven, can we stop congratulating ourselves that the worst didn't happen?
If we lose the House and the Senate, or even one of them, the worst can still happen.
My concern is this not only enables Democrats to keep attacking moderate Republicans in their primary (thus gaining an easier, extremist candidate to defeat in the general election), but that Republicans will now learn from this and do it as well. This would result in more extremism, more division, more partisan politics, with nobody representing the middle.
So far, Republicans seem to be scratching their heads over what went wrong, but the more they analyze their performance, the more likely they will be to come to this decision. Welcome to the New Normal!
This will be hard for Republicans to pull off. The “: too conservative for ” formulation is like catnip for Republican primary voters. I don't think that Democratic primary voters are looking for extremists, so “: too leftist for ” isn't going to work.
The comment system deleted some of the text in my previous comment, and doesn't provide an edit function, so I'm reposting.
This will be hard for Republicans to pull off. The “candidate name: too conservative for place name” formulation is like catnip for Republican primary voters. I don't think that Democratic primary voters are looking for extremists, so “candiate name: too leftist for place name” isn't going to work.
It drives me to distraction that the LA Times story from a few years ago in which Kevin McCarthy says his wife is Cherokee (her brother has millions in military contracts which require that he be American Indian) got so little notice. So here's a link you can use to spread the word. 🙂
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-na-pol-mccarthy-contracts-20181014-story.html
The discussion here and elsehwere ignores what looks to me a veri significant question: in how many places are election deniers now in a position where they can mess up the election of 2024 by "mistakes" or by "using their judgment" (e.g. refusing to certify election from some county)?
Anybody has good information on that?
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/america-starts-to-reject-election-deniers
Thanks.
Put me down as hoping the Republicans try screwing with the debt ceiling or a government shutdown. They love that stuff, and it never works in their favor politically.
When your opponent is trying to hang themselves, give them more rope.
I'm with you on issues other than the debt ceiling, but I'd prefer to take that one off the table, if possible (I doubt Democrats will do so, but you never know). Today's GOP is already living in Crazytown: you just never know at this point, and I think it's dangerous to assume they'll blink at the last moment, as they've always done in the past. The last thing the US needs is a true financial crisis, irrespective of the politics involved. And it's moreover unknowable as to how the politics would shake out in any event. It's also possible Democrats would agree to entitlement cuts as the price of not having the economy blown up. Or, I could totally see the MAGA Supreme Court telling the administration it can't mint a trillion dollar coin. Lots of scary possibilities. Let's not tempt fate.
The Republican Party, --motivating hayseed psychotics since yore grandpappy had to work for a livin' .
" all the usual GOP temper tantrums when they get bored and have nothing better to do."
Like they always do. After all, it isn't like they have a platform or principles, no,no, they just throw bombs over the fence and drop bloody chum in the water. That's How The GOP Governs (SM).
Maybe we should have a law that anyone running for state or federal office has to pass the citizenship test required for naturalization. Golly, the loons might even learn what's actually in the Constitution
As a friend reminded me, even a narrow Republican win means two years of investigations, hearings, "oversight," debt ceiling brinkmanship, and government shutdowns.
Democrats could remove the possibility of debt ceiling blackmail by dealing with the issue in the lame duck session. Will they? Of course not, they're Democrats, which means the obey the law of physics that mandates they follow up something good (yesterday's election) with a failure.
(They should also move to expeditiously pass the Electoral Count Reform Act, again, during the lame duck session. Get those two things done, secure victory for Warnock, and I think Democrats are actually in pretty good shape for the long, hard slog toward November 5, 2024, at least if we're not in a major recession that summer).
It'll be pulling out a squeaker after/if Dems win the GA runoff. If that happens, I don't really care much about the endless nonsensical house investigations the GOP run. Because I don't think the public, outside republican base voters, will care. As for debt ceiling brinkmanship and government shutdowns, we've seen how well that's played out for republicans in the past. I don't expect it to be any more successful over the next 2 years.