Post election wash-up

As the Prez said, "a thumping". More than anyone had predicted.

But if you check out this post  Tom Faranda’s Folly: the election and financial markets you’ll see that it did keep with history in that the House and Senate both changed party hands. In fact last night, watching the boob tube around 11pm, Harry Reid (head Democrat Senator) clearly did not expect his party to take the Senate. But they won all the tight Senate races (except Tennessee).

If my prior posting is correct, we are in for two years of gridlock. Nothing substantial on the domestic scene will get done. Of course the Republicans were in the driver’s seat for the past two years and nothing got done domestically, which is a big part of the reason they are out.

Politics ebbs and flows – the Republicans won most of the 50-50 races in the last three election cycles, and now it’s the Dems turn.

Simply put, the party controlling the White House nearly always loses House seats in midterm elections — especially in the sixth year.

In Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sixth year in 1938, Democrats lost 71 seats in the House and six in the Senate.

In Dwight Eisenhower’s sixth year in 1958, Republicans lost 47 House seats, 13 in the Senate.

In John F. Kennedy/Lyndon Johnson’s sixth year, Democrats lost 47 seats in the House and three in the Senate.

In Richard Nixon/Gerald Ford’s sixth year in office in 1974, Republicans lost 43 House seats and three Senate seats.

Even  Ronald Reagan, lost five House seats and eight Senate seats in his sixth year in office.

But in the middle of what the media tell us is a massively unpopular war, the Democrats picked up about 30 House seats and five to six Senate seats in a sixth-year election.

The above from a right wing online source who predicted the results. (Ann Coulter).

As mentioned yesterday Tom Faranda’s Folly: How I voted I actually voted for a major party candidate (other then Bush) for the first time in at least eight years. My guy, John Spencer, got 1,328,423 votes. Unfortunately his opponent, Hillary, got 2,816,714. So the percents were 31-67 against John. I was hoping he’d break 40%. Not even close.

My congressional race was between a whacko leftist song writer named John Hall (had some sort of hit in the 60’s or 70’s) and incumbent "moderate" Republican Sue Kelly. The district has more registered Republicans then Dems, but Kelly managed to loss by 3,400 votes. The percents were 51-49 to Hall. Evidently Hall was able to raise some real money from Hollywood connections.

I never voted for Sue Kelly. She got her congressional seat in 1994, in a very interesting manner. Hamilton Fish was an 11 term Republican congressman and he retired. There was a Republican primary involving seven candidates, and Kelly was the only avowedly "pro-choice" candidate. So she was heavily backed by the very powerful Westchester County abortion lobby. She got about 26% of the primary vote, but the rest was split six ways, so she won!

Because the district was skewed Republican, she never had a tough race – until this year. She also incurred the wrath of the abortion lobby by voting to ban partial birth abortion in the late nineties (she is for abortion but evidently drew the line at infanticide). They have been looking to knock her out since then, and this year got a candidate who could do it.

I was in the car at noon today (driving in the rain to New Jersey) and caught the beginning of Rush Limbaugh’s show. He was good – here’s the opening monologue. Hit the link for the whole thing or just read the excerpt: America’s Anchorman: Republicans Lost, But Conservatism Did Not

Oftentimes on this program when discussing the problems that Democrats have had over the last 12 years, electoral problems, one of my observations has always been: until they start examining what’s wrong with themselves, they’re never going to fix their problem — and as such, that’s exactly what we’re going to do today. When things go wrong, you must first look inward. You must ask, "What did we do wrong? What could we have done better? What mistakes did we make?" It would be foolish at this stage to start assigning blame either to the media or to liberals or Democrats or the voters or the American people. I’m not going to fall into the trap that the liberals and Democrats fall into every time they lose an election and start blaming everybody else. Republicans lost last night but conservatism did not, and that is, to me, one of the fundamental elements of last night’s results. Conservatism did not lose; Republicans lost last night. In fact, Republicanism, being a political party first rather than an ideological movement, is what lost. The Democrats beat something last night with nothing. They advanced no agenda other than their usual anti-war position. They have no contract. They really did not get specific. Their message was one of "Vote for us. The other guys have been in power too long," or what have you. There was no dominating conservative theory, nationally — and these were nationalized elections. There was no dominating conservative message that came from the top and filtered down throughout in this campaign. It was nowhere to be found. Oh, I take that back! There was conservatism yesterday in the election, and it was to be found on the Democratic side of the aisle. There were conservative Democrats running for office in the House of Representatives and a couple conservative Senate races won by Democrats yesterday — Jim Webb being one.