… Hey, I said the same thing in 2009! ; )
Yes, and midterm elections also tend to have lower turnout. But representatives need to win them to keep their jobs.
And that’s the underlying story here. Forgot about the numbers or trying to predict who will be the next Speaker. It’s too early to tell. But do the special elections make GOP members of the House more apprehensive right now? If so, expect them to react like anyone else who suddenly fears losing their job in a year.
Especially because – and at this point I feel like we need to put this in caps – THIS ISN’T ISOLATED.
No one really paid much attention to the special election in the California 34th last week because a Democrat was going to win. But even there, the Democrat outperformed an already lopsided margin from 2016 by 20 points.
I mean, at some point the sad sack, Droopy Dawg sector of the Left/Trump-appalled is going to have to come to grips with these things:
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holding majorities in both legislative houses AND holding the White House for a full presidential term is tough.
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winning any midterm election when the president sharing your party affiliation has popularity in the low 40s/high 30s is tough. (When the GOP took over the House majority in 2002, it was largely on the back of W’s mid-50s approval ratings.)
Georgia 6th is next week. Make some calls.
Is it more clear to Kansas voters now than it was in November? Hasn’t the Kanasas budget been a shitshow for years thanks to Brownback and his fellow Republicans in the state legislature?
There’s a real Trump effect, and I think it’s some folks waking up to this- that it can happen here. I think many soft liberals got complacent/end of history due to Obama.
The question is will those folks stay woke after the Dems take America back- or do we go through this cycle again?
If only this post existed to frame how blaming this on Brownback was probably not a really good explanation for last night’s vote.
I think the day will come when gerrymandering and demographic change will hit the Republicans like a bricknado and then suddenly everything they’ve ever said will be tossed aside and the new-normal embraced almost without a second thought. I have a hard time parcing how much of Republican BSery is genuine vs how much of it is cynical dog whistling to their increasingly ignorant voters. I liked how Fox News kept Megyn Kelly around until it was clear Trump had won - i have no doubt if he had been swept Fox would have quickly embraced the new normal with Kelly. Trump won, and they dumped her instead. But if the Republicans get swept in the midterms - hardly a sure thing - or worse 4 years from now, i get the sense that it will be a dam breaking moment from which there won’t be a way back from.
The real canary in the coal mine though is the hispanic vote. Democrats really need to make that transition to hispanic values or they’ll leave the door open for Republicans to take the “family values” and “religious” hispanic voters and close the door. Right now the hispanic Democrat party members are almost like long lost cousins with the same last name but hardly any relationship to their erstwhile kin - those spanish speaking majority areas of Texas have almost nothing in common with mainstream Democratic party policies, and frankly, the Democratic party doesn’t really know what to do here, since they’re running on inertia. I can’t find it but i’m pretty sure the Republican party actually increased it’s share of the hispanic male vote last election cycle in Texas (but i might be misremembering). The day the Republican party embraces the hispanic vote (probably the day after said bricknado sweeps the old guard aside) is Zero Day for the Democratic future.
Also, this sort of puts the “This was just a special election” stuff to rest:
I’m still not remotely convinced that Trump voters who are disaffected by Republicans will ever consider voting for a Democrat. Propaganda is a hell of a thing.
Probably not on any sort of large scale, but it might influence voter turnout on both sides.
IF they stay home it’s still a win.
Pretty good analysis of the KS results:
New York Magazine writer Eric Levtitz echoes what I said earlier, but with actual facts’n’charts’n’stuff:
The GOP Almost Lost in Kansas Because Even Republicans Hate Their Party’s Agenda
… Sam Brownback isn’t unpopular for idiosyncratic, personal reasons; the governor didn’t decimate his state’s finances by spending public funds on sex workers. He did it by implementing the conservative movement’s blueprint for utopia.
… Of course, the GOP’s “different way” didn’t work. Instead of providing national Republicans with a winning advertisement for fiscal conservatism, it provided Kansas’s government with giant revenue shortfalls, its economy with weaker job growth than in neighboring states, and Brownback himself with one of the lowest approval ratings of any governor in America.
Election day in the special election in the Georgia 6th. It’s a “jungle primary” according to Georgia election rules, so:
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If any candidate gets 50% of the vote, that person wins the election outright and becomes a member of the House of Representatives.
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If no one gets 50% of the vote, then the top two candidates (can be of either party or both from the same party) are selected to compete in a runoff election in June. Winner of that latter race wins the House seat.
It will be a stunning upset if anyone wins 50% of the vote today. Democrat Jon Ossoff has been polling low-to-mid 40s and is likely to settle there. A slew of Republican challengers have been hovering in the teens/low 20s in polling, and so this is likely to go to a runoff in June.
Polls show that Ossoff runs neck and neck with, but maybe slightly ahead of both Karen Handel and Bob Gray. Dan Moody slightly behind those two in the polls is probably the toughest matchup for Ossoff in June. Handel has run – and lost – bids for office multiple times, and is best described by pundit Dave Weigel as “Martha Coakley with a drawl.” Gray is the evangelical, religious right Trump-supporting candidate. Moody runs as a centrist Republican and Never Trump.
At any rate, tonight’s election returns are likely to be a lot of noise, resulting in a race where nothing much is decided and we head to June with Ossoff facing Handel (most likely) or Gray or Moody.
Seems like, again, the media is just building this up into a story for the sake of getting eyes on their stuff.
I seriously doubt that Ossoff wins, as even if he makes it into the runoff, then the other side will just consolidate against him. Seems like his chance of actually winning are remote at best.
“even if he makes it into the runoff”.
Do you even think as you’re typing?
Out of curiosity, what do you believe my motivations in that post were? Do you believe that there is some political bias that drove it? If so, what do you think that is?
You seem to have some amount of angst that is misdirected.
There is almost no question that Ossoff will make it to the runoff. Ossoff making the runoff is running a close second to “Sun rises in the east tomorrow morning” on the probabilities chart. That you chose to frame it as “even if” shows a lack of understanding or in-depth comprehension of this particular race, even though you’re trying to present it otherwise in your post.