The Midterms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

[Cartmann99]

 

[danvillebelle]

Some good news here in Texas...all 19 black women running for judge in Texas WON. 

 

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/19-black-women-running-judge-181400986.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=fb&fbclid=IwAR0G9-OSvNf153ye5AutyQEQDN04vGMQlMMdI8CkhN8MEH-XAsc1oXkq7fc  

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an interesting analysis of the NC results: "How gerrymandering kept Democrats from winning even more seats Tuesday"

Spoiler

Democrats will pick up at least 26 seats and take a majority in the House of Representatives if the preliminary results from Tuesday’s midterm elections hold. But partisan gerrymandering is still a major issue. Our analysis of one state’s results shows that the party would almost certainly have won more if Republicans hadn’t deliberately drawn districts to limit Democratic chances.

North Carolina’s congressional district lines are already the subject of federal litigation claiming that they give Republicans a systematic, unconstitutional advantage in winning seats. Tuesday’s results bear those claims out. Democrats won roughly 50 percent of the vote in North Carolina, their best performance in almost a decade. But despite an extraordinary year, they netted just three of the state’s 13 congressional seats — the same as in 2014 and 2016. That happened because a promising Democratic wave crashed against one of the country’s most extreme gerrymanders, a congressional map that Republican legislators brazenly stated on the record they carefully crafted “to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats.”

To engineer this advantage, the leaders of the Republican caucus worked in secret with a consultant to pack likely Democrats into three super-blue districts. In each of these districts, Democrats would win by very large margins. The Republican mapmakers then spread the rest of the state’s Democrats more thinly across the remaining 10 districts, ensuring that Republican candidates would win by small, but safe, margins. They made many of these districts safe for the GOP by giving each one just enough Republican voters to win elections in normal years.

With this scientific slicing and dicing of voters, it didn’t matter if Democrats got 30 percent of the statewide vote or 50 percent, as they did this year. The figure below shows the share of the statewide vote at which the Democrats would be expected to win each of the districts. They are guaranteed wins in three districts, but then face a tremendously steep climb to win any additional seats. In fact, they didn’t stand a chance of picking up a fourth seat unless they could net 52.5 percent of the statewide vote, something they achieved only once since 2000, in the 2008 election.

In 2016, the Republicans’ map handed 10 seats to the GOP despite a strong Democratic year that saw Roy Cooper win the governor’s mansion and Democrats sweep to other statewide wins.

At first, the 2018 midterms looked like they could have been a more formidable test to the gerrymander, with as many as four Republican-held districts in play heading into Election Day. In the end, however, the gerrymander held.

Increased Democratic votes were mostly wasted in the state’s three reliably blue districts. Indeed, the Democrats’ average margin of victory in these three districts rose from 18 percentage points in 2016 to an astonishing 23 points in 2018. Still, running up the vote in those districts didn’t send any more Democrats from North Carolina to Congress. The Republicans’ packing strategy worked just as they’d planned.

Meanwhile, in the state’s Republican districts, Democrats were spread too thin for even a robust increase in support to help. All in all, Republicans won their districts with an average margin of 6 points, showing the Republicans’ cracking strategy also playing out as intended. The map below shows the average vote share won by Democrats in North Carolina districts in the last two congressional elections.

All of this has continued to leave North Carolina Democrats with only 23 percent of the congressional delegation even though they won roughly half of the state’s votes in House races. Indeed, despite North Carolina’s well-established purple state status — with hotly contested elections for statewide offices and a vibrant, diverse collection of voices and interests — its congressional delegation remains overridingly Republican. And that goes back to the basic design of the map.

The only way to put a stop to this is to remake North Carolina’s map and the state’s redistricting process. The Supreme Court can help do both this spring by striking down the map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and putting some laws in place to limit the worst redistricting abuses. A strong ruling from the court would not only require the legislature to draw a new, fairer map for 2020, but also set the ground rules for the next round of redistricting in 2021. If the Supreme Court refuses to rule, the North Carolina Supreme Court might.

And while North Carolinians don’t have access to the kind of ballot initiatives that put independent redistricting commissions in place in California and Michigan, there might be some hope for legislative reforms ahead of 2021, if Republicans become sufficiently scared that a blue tsunami in 2020 could sweep away their long-standing majority in the state legislature and, with it, their control over the state’s next redistricting process. The threat of a Democratic gerrymander in 2021 might be enough to put the state’s Republicans in a bargaining mood. Certainly in the long run, the demographics of this fast-changing state don’t favor Republicans.

However, until courts or civic-minded legislators step in to fix a broken redistricting process, the gerrymander is still very much threatening American democracy.

 

[Alisamer]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is an interesting analysis of the NC results: "How gerrymandering kept Democrats from winning even more seats Tuesday"

  Hide contents

 

 

It's interesting to see just how specifically they have targeted different areas. That blue bit at the bottom just left of center? That's Mecklenburg county, which consists almost entirely of the city of Charlotte. The people living within the city limits include a mix of poor minorities, young professionals, highly educated professionals, and some wealthy people. Charlotte has lots of hospitals, several colleges, and plenty of big businesses. That other blue part at the top right? That's the Raleigh/Durham area - the other major concentration of colleges, research hospitals, and plenty of science/tech businesses. They've managed to squeeze all the younger and better educated people in with the biggest cities and the larger minority populations there, leaving the more rural areas, with their larger numbers of blue collar workers and agriculture to carry all the rest of the vote.

I'm sure a more detailed map of how the actual votes went would probably show more blue in the red areas closer to Charlotte, blue blips in each of the bigger cities like Wilmington and Asheville, and other variations like that. 

[thoughtful]

2 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

[clueliss]

Brace yourself on that Sessions Firing/Resignation.  I'm seeing rumors from the Kansas City area that Kobach is on the short list.  (Since he apparently couldn't manage to vote suppress himself into the Governor's office)

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, clueliss said:

Brace yourself on that Sessions Firing/Resignation.  I'm seeing rumors from the Kansas City area that Kobach is on the short list.  (Since he apparently couldn't manage to vote suppress himself into the Governor's office)

I've also seen rumors that Dumpy wants to replace Kirstjen Nielsen with Kobach. :-(

[Gobsmacked]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I've also seen rumors that Dumpy wants to replace Kirstjen Nielsen with Kobach. :-(

She is a disgusting person. Who is Kobach? Is he even worse?

[zeebaneighba]

1 hour ago, Gobsmacked said:

She is a disgusting person. Who is Kobach? Is he even worse?

Oh, HELL yes. Many prominent Kansas republicans all but begged the people NOT to vote for Kobach.  When your own party in a ruby-red state turns on you like that, you know it's bad. 

[Cartmann99]

Kris Kobach thinks there's massive amounts of voter fraud going on. He was also one of the birthers.

[FloraKitty35]

19 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Kris Kobach thinks there's massive amounts of voter fraud going on. He was also one of the birthers.

And chummy with Ted Nugent.  

[LeftCoastLurker]

Don't think I've seen this, but it looks like it's not over yet in Florida.

30K Senate votes missing Democratic stronghold

Also, it seems that as absentee, mail-in and provisional ballots are being counted, the Governor's race has also moved into the recount arena.

[fraurosena]

Yassssss...

 

[47of74]

29 minutes ago, FloraKitty35 said:

And chummy with Ted Nugent.  

And I hear Pants Shit Fever is rather butt hurt over what happened in Michigan the other night;

Quote

Michigan's own Ted Nugent is not very happy with the state after Michiganders sent several Democrats to the state's highest offices in the midterm elections.

In a post on Wednesday morning, the singer called Michigan a "California s***hole."

"Real God country family Michiganiacs are heartbroke that more of us want the once great state of Michigan to turn into a California s***hole. Downright insane cultural suicide. Thanks for nothing a**holes," the post reads.

 

[FloraKitty35]

2 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

And I hear Pants Shit Fever is rather butt hurt over what happened in Michigan the other night;

 

Then Michigan is moving in the right direction.  ?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Democrats gain hundreds of legislative seats and secure majority of state attorneys general"

Spoiler

After years of trying, Democrats expanded their influence in state capitols on Tuesday, flipping more than 300 state legislative seats while also claiming a majority of the nation’s attorney general offices.

The Democratic gains mark a significant turnaround for a party that had been losing clout in state legislatures for nearly a decade, allowing Republicans in many states to loosen restrictions on firearms, push through new voter-identification laws and weaken environmental regulations. Democrats had also ceded enormous power to Republicans to redraw congressional boundaries.

The victories — buoyed by an apparent net Democratic pickup of seven governorships — will also help fortify the party’s efforts to use states as a firewall against President Trump, including through coordinated lawsuits against the administration.

Although some returns are preliminary, Democrats appear to have won new attorney general offices in Colorado, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. If confirmed, Democrats will occupy 27 of the nation’s 51 attorney general offices next year.

“We now have four more AGs in the room . . . who will be ready to hold this administration in check,” said Oregon Attorney General Ellen F. Rosenblum, the chairwoman of the Democratic Attorneys General Association.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia have an attorney general, although the functions and responsibilities of each office can vary greatly.

Over the past two years, the Democratic attorneys general have stepped up their efforts to coordinate, including weekly conference calls to discuss legal challenges against Trump. Over the past 18 months, Democratic attorneys general have filed dozens of lawsuits against Trump, including several aimed at preventing him from modifying the Affordable Care Act.

Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general of Pennsylvania, said Wednesday that the election results reaffirm Democrats’ strategy of pushing their agenda through the courts.

“There is going to be gridlock in Washington that is going to rule the day,” Shapiro said, referring to expected partisan fights next year between the White House and a divided Congress.

“But what is clear is that the attorneys general will actually be working to get things done. . . protecting people, individual rights and being the only effective check on the federal government.”

In all, 30 states and the District held races for attorney general on Tuesday. Zack Roday, communicators director for the Republican Attorneys General Association, said in an interview that Tuesday’s election amounted to “a natural” leveling of what had been years of GOP dominance in attorney general races.

“This is a reflection of the environment and to the fact these states had been under Republican control for a long time, and these races . . . ebb and flow,” Roday said, noting that Republicans still won fiercely contested attorney general races in Florida, Ohio, Georgia, South Dakota and South Carolina.

For Democrats, however, the wins represented the party’s broader effort to rebound after it was pummeled in local and state races when President Barack Obama was in office.

In 2010, during Obama’s first midterm elections, Republicans won control of 21 additional state legislative chambers after more than 700 new GOP legislators were elected.

Before Tuesday’s election, Republicans held the majority in two-thirds of state legislative chambers. Republicans also held 33 of the nation’s 50 governorships, just one below their all-time high of 34.

Now, after new state leaders are sworn in next month or in January, Republicans will have a 27-23 advantage over Democrats in governorships, if results hold.

Democrats also will have made up ground in state legislatures.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) said the party won at least 323 GOP-held legislative seats on Tuesday. Republicans counter that they won nearly 100 seats held by Democrats.

Still, the DLCC is confident that Democrats have won new majorities in the Colorado Senate, the New York Senate, the Maine Senate, the Minnesota House, and both the Senate and the House in New Hampshire.

Democrats also significantly eroded Republican legislative majorities in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona while also making more-modest inroads in Florida and Michigan.

In New York, Democrats won eight state Senate seats, ending about a decade of GOP control while giving their party complete control over both the legislative and executive branches of government.

State Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who will probably become the new Senate leader, said even she was surprised by the extent of her party’s wins on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley, which she credited to unusually high turnout.

“I think people realized after the 2016 elections that four years between presidential elections is a long time, but state legislatures matter,” Stewart-Cousins said.

She expects many Democratic priorities will now swiftly move through the legislative process.

“Whether it’s gun laws, or criminal justice reform, or reproductive rights issues, to acknowledging climate change, there are many things that have not been able to move because of my Republican colleagues,” Stewart-Cousins said. “We are expecting we will be able to restore trust in government for New Yorkers as well as being a progressive beacon.”

Former Florida attorney general Bill McCollum, the chairman of the Republican State Leadership Committee, said GOP losses in state races are still relatively limited considering the number of seats the party was defending.

McCollum noted that high-profile Democrats, including Obama and former U.S. attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., have made it a priority to focus on legislative and statewide offices. Holder’s group, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, raised more than $18 million to try to influence state elections.

“We kept both the Wisconsin House and Senate, the Michigan House and Senate, and the Senate in Pennsylvania, and those were three very big priorities for them,” McCollum said.

Even so, McCollum acknowledges that Democrats will probably be even more aggressive in targeting local and statewide GOP-held offices in 2020.

“They have finally figured out they have to pay attention,” said McCollum. “Are we concerned? Of course we are concerned — the sheer amount of money concerns us — but last night’s showing shows money is not everything.”

 

[fraurosena]

Hard evidence America is not a democracy.

 

[fraurosena]

Stacey Abrams is taking blatant voter suppression to the courts.

 

[Howl]

18 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I've also seen rumors that Dumpy wants to replace Kirstjen Nielsen with Kobach. ?

I've been reading that if Nielsen goes, John Kelly will go (or vice versa).  Uber turd John Bolton thinks Nielsen hasn't been sufficiently enthusiastic about implementing Trump's his and Stephen Miller's draconian immigration and border policies.  As I've noted elsewhere, a screaming match between Kelly and Bolton occurred in the hallway after a meeting in which Bolton obnoxiously took Nielson to task over this issue. I think Nielson is a horrible human being for implementing border separation and other policies (troops to the border!), rather than expressing some shred of human decency and resigning, so I DGAF how she is treated by Bolton. 

I can't even imagine the volume of uppers, downers, antacids and sleeping pills that are being consumed on an hourly basis in the DC area. 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

 

[formergothardite]

It sounds like a bunch of ballots weren't counted and now he is mad that they will be counted because he might lose. Where did these votes come from and why weren't they included at first? 

 

[fraurosena]

4 hours ago, formergothardite said:

It sounds like a bunch of ballots weren't counted and now he is mad that they will be counted because he might lose. Where did these votes come from and why weren't they included at first? 

 

Apparently they were found in a school that had acted as a polling station. The ballot box (?) was standing in an obscure corner somewhere... allegedly forgotten... 

[fraurosena]

Wow.

 

[AuntK]

The problem is Palm Beach & Broward are two of Florida's biggest counties and are heavily Democratic. We NEED those votes! And these are also the counties that screwed up and gave us George Bush.  I'm hopeful, because I believe if they actually count ALL the votes, Nelson and Gillum will win. The question remains, will they be allowed to count them all?

And both of these counties need new Supervisors of Elections!