Election recap

I didn't make any predictions about the election this year because the last time I did that it went... poorly. I went back and reread some of the stuff I wrote before the 2016 atrocity and it was pretty fucking depressing.

This one went fairly okay! My predictions were that the Dems would pick up the House and if we were lucky maybe a Senate seat. Admittedly things went worse in the Senate than I thought they would, but the House went pretty damn well if I do say so.

As of this writing the Democrats control 225 seats in the House and 46 in the Senate, there are 13 House elections still being counted and they will likely pick up between 4-6 of those, making a pretty solid majority in that chamber. The Senate is less rosy currently sitting at 51-46 in favor of the GOP, with two elections outstanding at the moment and one that will go to a run off in December. If all three go favorably then the status quo will have just been maintained, putting the chamber at 51-49, however I do not see that happening. My guess is that Kyrsten Sinema gets the job done in Arizona, she leads right now and there are a lot of mail in votes left to count, those probably favor the Democrats and odds are good it will give her enough of a lead that a recount is not needed. Florida is another story, it's close enough for a recount and will probably go that way, but I don't trust Florida to do anything smart and the residents there have an unhealthy attachment to their Voldemort-looking candidate.

Missouri is going to a run off in December because that is how they do things, and as much as I would like to say it goes well, it's fuckin' Missouri and I don't think this is the year that seat goes blue.

So my guess is the Senate ends up 53-47 and we have another two years of just the worst people being appointed to high powered posts.

It was a pretty good year to be a Democratic gubernatorial candidate all things considered, they picked up 7 at last count, and only Alaska flipped red. The verdict is still out on Georgia, with Stacey Abrams demanding a recount which I think she will probably get. Will she win? Call it a coin flip, I think she has the votes but the state has been so fucked with it's voter suppression tactics and the fact that her opponent has been in charge of the election that it could go either way and wouldn't surprise me.

Going back to the Senate for a minute, nothing was too surprising there Heidi Heitcamp, Claire McCaskill, and Joe Donnelly all lost their seats, which always was a possibility according to the polling leading up to it. what was a surprise was the margins they lost by, at least six points in every case, this is a lot and was outside most pollsters margins of error, meanwhile, in Texas, Beto O'Rourke damn near pulled it off, losing by less than two points. He is much more liberal than the three incumbents who lost, but had vastly more enthusiastic support than the others. Now he did have the advantage of running against Ted Cruz, who is a man with negative charisma. But I do believe that we saw the model that future candidate need to run on in traditionally red states. To explain that I need to take some things back that I said a while back.

I've long held the opinion that moderate Democrats should run in traditionally conservative areas against Republicans, and that progressive Democrats should make the blue areas even bluer. Primarying out their less liberal party members if they need to. I still think the latter option is right, but as for the first part? Here's the thing: The conservatives are too tribal to break ranks now, and I should have seen that years ago. It doesn't matter if the Democrat running is basically a Reagan Republican and his opponent an avowed racist, rapist, and pedophile, the (D) next to his name is enough to shut off all thought from the GOP supporters especially in the age of Trump. There are no undecided voters to flip, there are only voters, and those who aren't voting.

So if you can't flip the voters, then you have to make those who aren't voting go ahead and do that. Which means you need somebody they are excited about voting for, now I wish people would vote even if they aren't pumped about their candidate, we'd be in a lot less shit right now if they would just fucking do it, but that isn't the world we live in and to be honest, I want to be excited about the candidates running too. Beto made people excited and it showed, another election cycle or two like that and Texas does turn blue. It is becoming more and more clear to me that centrist Democrats aren't gonna win red states very often. Not in the Senate at least.

And if they can't win then, well, we don't really need them do we?