The most common belief about the midterm elections is that they were sort of a wash nationally, or at worst a slender victory for the Democrats, who won a majority for the first time in a decade in the U.S. House, but lost seats to the Republicans in the Senate.
That indeed was the impression Donald Trump, aka “the mayor of Crazytown,” as Frank Rich so aptly calls him, sought to give in a semi-coherent news conference the day after the election.
However, it was really nothing of the kind.
Counting won’t be complete for weeks in California, where there are millions of mail-in ballots, but it looks like Democrats will have gained at least 36 seats in the House, for a 230-205 majority.
That’s not too shabby, especially given Republican gerrymandering in so many states. Millions more votes were cast for Democrats than for Republicans in both national House and Senate races; Democrats also picked up something like 300 seats in various state legislatures and seven governorships.
Republicans did gain in the U.S. Senate – but it was almost inevitable that they would. Counting two special elections, there were 26 Democratic-held seats up for election; only 9 GOP ones.
Republicans knocked off Democratic incumbents in the deeply red states of Indiana, North Dakota and Missouri. In the one unpleasant surprise for Democrats, Bill Nelson seems to have also lost in Florida.That could be reversed, however; a statewide recount is underway, as I write this, Nelson trails Gov. Rick Scott by about 12,500 votes out of more than eight million counted so far.
However, Democrats defeated a GOP incumbent in Nevada, and seem to have picked up another U.S. Senate seat in Arizona (watch for that state to turn blue in the next Presidential election.
That should leave Democrats with 47 seats for sure and 48 if Nelson manages to win the recount. They could even get back to 49, which is where they were before the election, if, by some miracle, Democrat Mike Espy won the runoff in Mississippi Nov, 29.
Don’t hold your breath on that one. But do turn the prayer wheel every morning so that Ruth Bader Ginsburg can stay alive and on the bench for at least two and a half more years.
Two years from now, two-thirds of the Senate seats up will be held by Republicans, and if Democrats are ever going to be able to take back the Senate, that’s when they should be able to do it.
Nationally, then, this was a very good year for Democrats. But if there’s any doubt that the nation as a whole saw a true “blue wave,” there’s none whatsoever about Michigan. Democrats won all the statewide offices – governor/lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general, for the first time since 1986.
They gained two seats in Congress, seats gerrymandered to be Republican, with Elissa Slotkin knocking off Mike Bishop and Haley Stevens taking the seat Republican U.S. Rep. David Trott is leaving.
Thanks to extreme gerrymandering, Democrats did fail to win either house of the legislature, though they got far more total votes than the Republicans did. They did gain five seats in the House, to cut the GOP margin to 58-52. Democrats also picked up five in the state senate – more than they expected – to get to 22-16.
U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow won a fourth term as expected, though Republican John James did better than anyone thought.
Whether that’s because he was an exciting and appealing new face, or because some voters were wearing of the predictable, even-keel Stabenow after 18 years is hard to say. Still, the race was never really in doubt; she won by a solid 273,000 votes.
She may, however, want to think twice or remake her image if she wants to run for a fifth term in 2024, when she will be 74. (Of course, given Donald Trump’s behavior and the course he’s on, this could be part of the Lower Quebec Protectorate by then.)
But in the perhaps most notable result, the grass-roots Voters Not Politicians amendment to end gerrymandering won by nearly a million votes, despite heavy GOP lobbying against it.
When the new congressional and legislative boundaries are redrawn in 2021, it won’t be right-wing Republican lawmakers drawing them, but a coalition of four members of both parties and five independents, which each group having to agree on boundaries.
That should mean fairer elections, and districts composed of people who live near each other and have common concerns.
By the way, if you think this election didn’t have clear implications for 2020, think again. Trump won his freak victory by scoring narrow wins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
David Dulio, head of the political science department at Oakland University, agreed that there’s “no way” Trump would have carried Michigan had he been on the ballot this year.
In Wisconsin, voters threw out Trump wannabee governor Scott Walker. In Pennsylvania, Democrats gained three seats in Congress and their candidate for governor won by 835,000 votes.
The next day, giving what seemed to be an impression of Benito Mussolini on crack, Trump bragged that the GOP performance had been a big success, and those who lost did so because they had not sufficiently associated themselves with him.
It’s worth worrying about what he will be like between Nov. 3, 2020, and Jan. 20, 2021, if voters do the sane thing in the next presidential election. Still, that would be a great problem to have.
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Think about this: Every year we lose more people in this country to handgun violence than we have in any war, except for World War II and the Civil War, and both of those lasted only four years. As I noted in an essay on my program on Superstation 910 AM radio last week, last year 15,549 people died violently from gunplay, and a lot more shot themselves to death.
According to the U.S. government’s own Centers for Disease Control, 38,658 Americans were shot to death in 2016, including suicides. This is truly one of the most deadly epidemics in history.
We’d be screaming and spending billions to stop it if it were a disease. But, thanks to the efforts of truly evil groups like the National Rifle Association, we have come to accept that this is inevitable.
It’s not, if we had the will to take some sensible steps that wouldn’t conflict with even the U.S. Supreme Court’s misreading of the Second Amendment. But we’ve been brainwashed into believing common sense is politically impossible.
Japan, which lost a world war to us a lifetime ago, now has a free and happy and prosperous people – and strict gun control laws. They do have gun murders in Japan. Last year, for example, they had three in the whole country, which has 127 million people.
Three. They finished fighting their world war in 1945. Meanwhile, we are still inflicting the equivalent on our own people.
“This is America’s first mass murder in 12 days,” a TV talking head said when the ex-Marine attacked that bar in California last week. Is this really the kind of world we want to accept?
We wouldn’t have to, if we could muster the will to stop it.
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Listen to Jack Lessenberry every morning from 9 to 11 on Superstation 910 AM, or stream his show from 910’s web site or Facebook live page.
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