Posted on 11/06/2014 8:16:03 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
1:30AM -- I think it was contemplating the fact that both Sam Brownback and Paul LePage both may have survived as governors that was the last straw for me tonight. Brownback has wrecked his state. Even Kansas Republicans believe that. LePage is a local embarrassment who became a national embarrassment in the final days before the election. Even Maine Republicans believe that. But Brownback will go back to wrecking his state, and LePage will go back to embarrassing his because of an attitude that Republicans, and the conservative movement that has powered the party, have cultivated carefully over the last three decades. They have engaged, quite deliberately and quite successfully, in a concerted effort to convince the country that self-government is a game for suckers. Nobody does what they say they're going to do, so ignore the fact that our candidates have drifted so far to the right that they'll be falling into the Thames any minute now because they're not going to act on their fringe beliefs, and just go out there and vote your Id. Once you've divorced the act of voting from the conviction that voting will have any connection to what the government actually does, voters do not vote their desires, they vote their anger and their fear. And Sam Brownback goes back to wrecking his state and Paul LePage goes back to embarrassing his own.
Let us dispense with some conventional wisdom before it petrifies. First of all, the president's basic unpopularity was unquestionably a factor, but not anywhere near as much of a factor as was the reluctance of the Democratic party -- from the president on down -- to embrace the actual successes that the administration has achieved. The economy is, in fact, improving. It is the responsibility of the president and his party that we have the paradoxical polling that indicates that the elements of the Affordable Care Act are popular, while "Obamacare" is not. (Mitch McConnell told a transparent lie that Kentucky could get rid of the ACA and still keep its very popular state exchange. He didn't suffer at all for that.) The senatorial candidates who lost were senators who ran away from the administration. Alison Lundergan Grimes wouldn't say if she'd voted for the president. Kay Hagan endorsed the Keystone XL pipeline. Michelle Nunn practically ran as an independent. How much worse could it possibly have been for all of them had they stood by the president and his record? How much worse could it possibly have been for them had the president come to campaign for them?
Second, it was a great night for voter-suppression, which has been central to the Republican response to the fact that the president has been elected twice. Kris Kobach, the architect of the strategy, was re-elected as Secretary of State in Kansas, and Jon Husted won the same office in Ohio, over Democratic candidate Nina Turner, on an election that was a referendum on Husted's voter-suppression tactics in that state. Thom Tillis, who piloted North Carolina's incredibly stringent voter-suppression law through the state legislature, is going to the Senate, and Scott Walker, who oversaw the same kind of effort in Wisconsin, is going back to his day job, running the state into the ground and dodging subpoenas, until it's time for him to run for president. It's going to take days to sort out the overall effect of these laws on the general electorate, even if anyone cares to do so, which I've come to doubt, because the Supreme Court created a new normal when John Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act and declared the day of jubilee, and the people in the country who are not those inconvenienced by these laws, and who are not those against whose franchise these laws were directly aimed, seem perfectly content with this situation.
Last, and I hate to break this to Tom Brokaw, and to Kasie Hunt, who talked about how the Republicans know they have to "govern," but this election couldn't have been less of a repudiation of the Tea Party. As the cable shows signed off last night, it was dawning even on the most conventional pundits that the Republicans had not elected an escadrille of Republican archangels to descend upon Capitol Hill. It was more like a murder of angry crows. Joni Ernst is not a moderate. David Perdue is not a moderate. Thom Tillis is not a moderate. Cory Gardner -- who spiced up his victory by calling himself "the tip of the spear" -- is not a moderate. Tom Cotton is not a moderate. And these were the people who flipped the Senate to the Republicans. In the reliably Republican states, Ben Sasse in Nebraska is not a moderate. James Lankford in Oklahoma is not a moderate. He's a red-haired fanatic who believes that welfare causes school shootings. Several of these people -- most notably, Sasse and Ernst -- won Republican primaries specifically as Tea Partiers, defeating establishment candidates. The Republicans did not defeat the Tea Party. The Tea Party's ideas animated what happened on Tuesday night. What the Republicans managed to do was to teach the Tea Party to wear shoes, mind its language, and use the proper knife while amputating the social safety net. They did nothing except send the Tea Party to finishing school.
But, honestly, Brownback and LePage?
Sometimes, democracy is a goddamn tough room.
12:15AM -- "We're gonna make 'em squeal!"
That's my new friend Joni Ernst, in her victory speech which she punctuated with a truly terrifying laugh. It was a laugh that had syllables. Hah. Hah-hah. Hah. She went on, one happy banality atop another, with that laugh. Hah. Hah. Hah.
"ISIS isn't just going to go away. Our economic struggles aren't just going to go away. But we can overcome them because this is the greatest nation in the history of mankind. But to get there, it starts with new leadership and that's what Iowa voted for today. These are the values that my mother, that my mother taught me on rainy mornings, not with a lecture or a book, but with plastic bread bags. My mom would slip bread bags over my shoes to keep them dry. You know what I'm talking about. It wasn't high fashion. But every day, when I got on the schoolbus, there were rows, and rows, and rows of kids with bread bags on their feet. These were the sons and daughters of hard-working Iowa. They taught us to thank God every day that we live in this special place that we call Iowa.
"Before tonight, my favorite part of the campaign was going through the Iowa State Fair. Believe me, I hugged my way through the state fair. I love the state fair because it really is all the best things about Iowa. It's about who we are, and that's the Iowa Way. Our Iowa Way is working. It's because we have the greatest governor and the greatest lieutenant governor of any state in the nation. Here in Iowa we understand that America's greatness doesn't come from its government, it comes from its people.
"As they say, only in America. Our grandparents dreamed of a better life for their children...They gave an ordinary Iowan extraordinary opportunities. In the Senate, that's the kind of America that I want to fight for every single day...An America, where it doesn't matter who you know, all that matters is what you can do. And that's the America that we are going to build. With your help, we can change direction and take the Iowa Way all the way to Washington, D.C."
The local anchors here are unanimous in their relief that Iowa no longer shares with Mississippi the distinction of being the only states in the Union that never sent a woman to Congress. Mississippi, again, stands alone. I am somehow not comforted by that.
11:30PM -- My new friend Joni Ernst has won in Iowa. Channel 13 is off the hook. And our golfs are safe from the threat posed to them by the United Nations. "I will say this, she goes to Washington and she becomes a hot commodity," Luke Russert just said. "She's gone away from the hot button issues, being more vague and general."
God, get these people off my television. Robert Gibbs is burying the whole Battleground Texas effort because Wendy Davis is getting crushed, and Steve Schmidt is declaring a "big night" for the Clintons because Hillary campaigned for Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, but somehow forgetting that they both campaigned for Mark Pryor in Arkansas and that they went really long for Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky. And, it seems to these untrained eyes that the strategy of running away from the president's record did not do very much good at all for anyone who made a big deal about it. That includes Grimes, Michelle Nunn in Georgia, and Kay Hagan, who's hanging on by her fingernails in North Carolina. Also, David Perdue, the newly elected senator from Georgia, said in his victory speech that he was going to the Senate to "fight for the Fair Tax," a fleabitten scam and longtime conservative fetish object by which you and Steve Forbes will pay the same percentage of your income in taxes, and we'll make up the revenue with a sales tax that will introduce America to the $20 banana. Yeah, they're coming to Washington to work with the president.
The races for governor are heading into a Democratic death spiral. Martha Coakley's done much better than she did in 2010, but what's left to be counted in the Commonwealth (God save it!) doesn't give me much hope for her to close what is still a narrow gap. It also looks like Maryland may elect a Republican governor, and Connecticut's hanging by a thread.
11:00PM -- The Hour Of Suck finally has arrived. Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, has been re-elected governor of Wisconsin, Rick Scott apparently will win in Florida, and Channel 13 in Des Moines has called the Senate seat here for my new friend, Joni Ernst, but nobody else has. (Florida, it should be said, could still go to a recount.) If Channel 13 is wrong, this would be an epic blunder. Elsewhere, Fox and MSNBC have given the Kansas Senate seat to Pat Roberts, and CNN and MSNBC have called the Georgia Senate for David Perdue, without a runoff.
Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, former Senator McDreamy is declining to say die. Fox has even called this one for Jeanne Shaheen, and the Manchester Union-Leader is of the same mind, but is hedging its call just a bit, attributing it to TV projections. Apparently, Jennifer Horn, the delightfully metaphor-happy chair of the Republican state committee, came out at McDreamy World HQ and ginned up the crowd about how it wasn't over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.
10:30PM -- Colorado's gone. Cory Gardner's long con has triumphed. Now we will pretend that Gardner is a reasonable guy. I think that may be the ballgame. Chris Matthews just used the word "pissant," and Cory Booker, for whom I have little use, replied that Matthews would be surprised that "there are a lot of new senators" that just want to get something done. The concrete on the narrative is beginning to solidify. Matthews wants to trade a minimum wage hike for "corporate tax reform." I suspect that the fix on the Keystone XL pipeline is already in, too. And Udall was one of the few people in Congress who made reigning in the surveillance state a priority. I guess it's all up to Aqua Buddha.
Polls closed out here in Iowa not long ago, and CNN has run exit poll data that show my new friend Joni Ernst ahead by four points.
I think Steve Kornacki may have a stroke over what's going on in the Virginia Senate race. Mark Warner needs a great kick out of Fairfax County to avert an upset that would be nothing short of a kill shot for the Democrats in the Senate. If Warner does collapse over the finish line, whoever in the Republican National Committee made the call to defund Gillespie's campaign is going to be thrown out a window and fired before he hits the sidewalk. Meanwhile, whoever it was that advised Warner to rip the president on his handling of the Ebola issue should be joining that guy in midair.
Continuing our theme of The Tea Party Is Not Dead, It's Just Wearing Shoes This Time, we have the new senator from Nebraska, Ben Sasse. He won a crowded Republican primary as a pure Tea Party candidate. He brought out Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz, and Sarah Palin to campaign for him in that primary and he crushed Establishment favorite Shane Osborn, and a late run by a self-financed moneybot named Sid Dinsdale. Almost at the moment he won, however, Sasse began to explain how he was really a "problem solver," and not a conservative True Believer, which is the same thing that Cory Gardner did in Colorado, and what Ernst did in Iowa. However, Sasse remains the guy who suggested moving the nation's capital to Omaha to keep it safe from socialism, and the man who ran the single strangest campaign ad I've ever seen.
10:00PM -- It does not look good for Mark Udall in Colorado at all right now. As kindly Doc Maddow just pointed out, career wingnut Cory Gardner may win here not only by running to the left of Udall on immigration reform and reproductive rights, but also by running to the left of Cory Gardner on those two issues as well. (Colorado's Personhood Initiative, which Cory Gardner 1.0 loved, but which Cory Gardner 2.0 wouldn't acknowledge if you stapled it to his forehead, was beaten like a red-headed mule.) This is why Tom Brokaw's theory that the Republican establishment "sent the Tea Party back to the locker room" is fundamentally absurd. (We also learned that Brokaw's cellphone apparently has a ring tone borrowed from a World War II U-boat. Jeebus, Tom. Turn off the phone when you're on the air. How long have you worked in television, anyway?) What the Republicans did was send their Tea Partiers to finishing school. Tom Cotton's already in the Senate, and Gardner may be on his way. These are not people who are going to Washington to play nice.
They've already determined that Louisiana's going to a run-off in December. My preferred chaos theory of this election is still alive -- control of the Senate coming down to a runoff...in Louisiana! Between the torrents of dark money and the outright ratfking, this thing may turn into an exercise in Ukrainian parliamentary procedure. I have absolutely no faith that Mary Landrieu can hang onto this seat but, in that place, anything's possible.
Seth Moulton wins in the Massachusetts Sixth. This already is my favorite result of the night.
9:30PM -- Polls are now closed in Wisconsin, and it apparently has been a busy damn day. It's looking like something around a 57 percent turnout, which is absurd for a midterm election. Daniel Bice of the Journal-Sentinel says their exit polls unsurprisingly show massive income, gender, and rural-urban gaps in the voting. A CNN exit poll had Scott Walker beating Mary Burke narrowly among the state's independents -- who may or may not be defined as Republicans with some sense of shame. Here's an interactive map to track the results as the night goes along. Again, according to Bice, the Walker people are brimming with confidence, while the polls suggest a razor's-edge election. I think there's some whistling past the graveyard here.
9:00PM -- Maggie Hassan's re-election as governor of New Hampshire has to augur well for Jeanne Shaheen in her race to beat former Senator McDreamy, which will keep Democratic hearts beating for another round of poll closings at least. Especially since Mark Pryor got his seat flipped on him by Tea Party pheee-nom Tom Cotton down in Arkansas. Cotton has been groomed for stardom by the Republican right for three or four years now. His election means he'll have a long and dangerous career, and that the underground alliance between ISIS, and the Mexican drug cartels, and the Klingon Empire, the Cylons, and the Ozark Crips is now doomed. But Arkansas also became the 11th state to pass a referendum to raise the minimum wage.
And, if I may interject right here...
Jeanne Shaheen has retained her seat in the Senate, and Scott Brown is now the first person in American history to lose Senate elections in two states. And, for the last time, such were the dreams of the everyday has-been. I can't make any sense of the fact that Enron Ed Gillespie is making Mark Warner sweat in Virginia.
Nina Turner has lost for Secretary of State in Ohio, which is a goddamn shame.
8:30PM -- There's some interesting stuff going on in Florida, where Charlie Crist may have coat-tails that help everybody but him. Patrick Murphy, the man who did the Republic a good service by eliminating from the House the concept of Congressman Allen West, has held his seat in a largely Republican district. And, in the Second Congressional District, Democratic candidate Gwen Graham is leading against incumbent Steve Southerland, who probably was distracted by his concern about how he would never make ends meet on his congressional salary. He might not have to worry about that so much.
* If there's one lesson to be learned about Tom Corbett's Skylab-ish descent from power in Pennsylvania, it is always to use the inside voices while discussing how you're rigging the electoral process. Just as the state was getting disgusted with Corbett generally, the secretary of state gave the game away.
* Alison Lundergan Grimes is conceding right now in Kentucky. Apparently, she was on a journey for 16 months. She also pointedly declined to make nice to Mitch McConnell. (Even Al Sharpton thought that was a bit graceless.) It's entirely possible that she was just stunned -- a duck who's been hit on the head, as Lincoln said of Joe Hooker at Chancellorsville. A little while back, Senator Joe Manchin (D-Anthracite) was on television bemoaning the terrible disservice that the president did to people like him and Grimes by treating coal so disrespectfully throughout his administration. He's proud to take a Coal Baron's Dollar, that's for sure.
8:00PM -- Turn your back for a minute and Mitch McConnell gets himself re-elected. As much as I hate to admit it, it never made a lot of sense, given the fundamentals and the general zeitgeist of a sixth-year midterm, that the Senate's Republican leader would get beaten. Alison Lundergan Grimes was the best shot the Democratic party's ever had against him. (Turns out declining to say whether she voted for the president wasn't exactly an ace move for Grimes.) Now he can start lining up votes to keep his job in the Senate itself.
* It seems that John Kasich's easy re-election has a lot of the punditariat all a'quiver. But the race to watch in Ohio is the race for Secretary of State, where Nina Turner is running against Jon Husted, who has been front and center of voter-suppression in that state. The utter collapse of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ed Fitzgerald can't be good for Taylor. And Kasich saved his own hide by accepting the FREE MONEY (!) available to Ohio under the Affordable Care Act, a fact that likely will not be over-analyzed by the folks who already have half their brains in 2016.
* Here's the most obviously strategic leak of the day.
James Peyser, former chair of the state Board of Education and, like Baker, a veteran of the Weld administration, left a voicemail for a Patrick aide, asking for a sitdown among Patrick and his aides, and Baker, himself, and another onetime Weld aide, attorney Mark Robinson.
Peyser, by the way, is one of those school "reformers" who believe that education is best left in the hands of the people who run hedge funds.
At the same time these districts are working more closely with charter operators, they are also creating new opportunities for more traditional district schools to enjoy similar levels of autonomy and accountability, especially as part of a turnaround strategy for the lowest performing schools.
That Peyser is front and center on this scoop is a pretty good indication of what Governor Charlie Baker might be about, if he gets elected.
* NBC calls the House of Representatives for the Republicans. The Democratic losses may be in single digits, which counts as something of a victory. Meanwhile, it appears that Chris Matthews is allergic to someone on his set.
Does the need for ID mean we have aircraft flight suppression ?
It’s kind of fun listening to traitors choke on their own vomit.
Or alcohol, firearm, ammunition & cigarette purchase suppression? Or welfare eligibility suppression?
He just adds layers of meaning to the term "sophomoric".
Chuck doesn't understand that you can't hug smoke.
This thing is just rich with comment food.
Huh? The law only comprised a reduction in early voting days (but the early voting went UP this year anyway), a requirement to vote in your own precinct, an end to same-day registration, and a voter ID starting in 2016.
Hardly "incredibly stringent."
He may get another chance to gut Obamacare on the issue of subsidies in states that don't set up their own exchanges.
“We have our narrative and we’re sticking to it and I don’t understand why we lost oh yeah it’s because everybody else is stupid.” It will be interesting to read how this author does when he graduates grade school.
Let's hope they won't play nice. Playing nice got us 18 trillion dollars in debt. Send them lots of bottled water so they don't get infected with Potomac fever.
Until I read the comments, I hadn’t realized how much I missed the hysteria of the girls from Junior High School. It’s as entertaining today as it was then.
They will Not choke.
Proverbs 26:11
I don’t think I’ve ever been understood by a RAT before, until I read this. BTTT
Watching a RAT read the writing on the wall while ferociously, intentionally refusing to understand that writing, priceless.
It really is...what a bee eye itch!
To this dumbass, suppression is stopping a bus full of illegals being taken around to multiple voting places.
Is this the same Charles Pierce who used to impersonate Streisand, Garland, Channing, and all the other icons of the gays?
This guy used to write for the Boston Globe. I think they parted on unfriendly terms.
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