The Blue Wave

[PaulG]

Trump's lemmings whined about President Obama actively campaigning for blue candidates. As if. I would have loved to have seen two rallies in an evenly split city, a Thump vs Obama thing, and compared the crowd size. Of course we know who has a tendency to embellish their crowd size just a little.

I bet Obama gets more people than a Trump rally when he stops for lunch.

[MN-Skeptic]

I was amused by the changes in Minnesota's U.S. Reps.

Going into the election, we had 3 Republican Representatives and 5 Democratic Representatives. After the election we also had 3 Republican Representatives and 5 Democratic Representatives. But we had 4 seats flip parties. How weird is that?

I also find it interesting that we went from 1 female Representative to 3 female Representatives. All Democrats, of course.

[Whatever4]

Does this year have more extremely close races?

[NotaPerson]

Does this year have more extremely close races?

Yes. A NJ district was just decided today in favor of the Dems, and there are 4 or 5(?) more races that still haven't been decided.

[bob]

Democratic wins in the lingering races: CA-10; CA-25; CA-48; NJ-3; NY-22; WA-8.

Republican wins: NY-27; TX-23.

Still uncalled: CA-39; CA-45; GA-7; ME-2; UT-4.

[bob]

CNN says the Democrats won 228 House seats, and presently are leading in five of the seven remaining uncalled races.

[SuzieC]

Jared Golden wins in ME-2; Mia Love losing in UT-4 and predictably sues to interrupt the vote count. 538 has Dems +39 at the latest.

[Kendra]

Wow, look at this graphic.

[jonbeck]

The Blue Wave hit Escondido, CA. I rarely go that far east but the bigotted BS that came out of that city always bothered me. The city was a Republican stronghold for decades. When I moved to the county in the early 80s it was lilly white. The latino population has grown significantly, but historically they did not show up on election day. That all changed this year, THANK YOU DONALD TRUMP, Sam Abed helped too. Sam gained national attention when he proposed a ban on renting to unlawful immigrants

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2006/oct/05/es ... ordinance/

Mayor Sam Abed claimed victory last week, however it proved to be premature. As votes continued to come in his Democratic challenger moved ahead and continues to pull further ahead. It might be another week before the votes are all counted, but it looks like Abed is out, a victim of Trump-Stench disease, it is contagious.

In May, Abed was one of the San Diego officials who went to Washington DC and sat next to President Trump, throwing his weight against California‘s sanctuary city laws. In the past he supported measures that penalized landlords who housed undocumented immigrants.

Currently there is one progressive on the council, an Hispanic lady. She could never get anyone to join her in proposing policy. With the mayor out and another Hispanic lady just elected on the council progressives will have a council majority. I am so happy for them that I am seeing blue.

https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/nov/15/b ... os-shores/

[Kendra]

Everything Trump touches dies...

[Orlylicious]

Dave Wasserman Verified account
@Redistrict

Democrats' national lead in U.S. House races just surpassed 8 million votes (now 7.3%).

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

Blue is the color of the Healing Buddha.
https://zenawakened.com/medicine-buddha-meaning/

[bob]

[Whatever4]

I read the comments. More correctly described as “not part of the next Congress” as some retired.

Here’s the fate of all who voted. http://acasignups.net/18/11/15/whatever ... class-2017. PLEASE CLICK TO ENSURE THE ORIGINAL POSTER GETS CREDIT.

Whatever Happened To The AHCA Class of 2017?

As of Thu, 11/15/2018
Out of curiosity, I went through the entire roll call vote and figured out exactly what the fate was of all 217 House Republicans who voted for the AHCA (It didn't need 218 votes to pass due to a handful of vacancies at the time).

23 of them ran for re-election and lost:
4 of them ran for higher office and lost:
6 of them ran for re-election or higher office and lost in the primary:
24 of them either retired or resigned (plus one guy who resigned because he was appointed to run NASA). Note that no fewer than 4 of them resigned or retired due to a sexual abuse/harassment scandal of some sort:
4 of them ran for re-election or for higher office and the results are still uncertain:

In all, at least 57 of those who voted "yes" on the AHCA have since lost their jobs in public office one way or another in the past year and a half, or at least 26% of the total. This number could climb as high as 63, though it'll likely top off at around 60.

Unfortunately, that still leaves 5 of them who managed to win higher office (either U.S. Senate, Governor or State Supreme Court)...

...and 150 who won re-election regardless (one of whom, Duncan Hunter of California, has also been recently indicted in federal court on campaign finance abuse):

While I'm at it, I should also note that there were 20 House Republicans who voted "no" on the AHCA. Here's their fate:

4 of them lost re-election (possibly 5 depending on the outcome of one race in Texas
9 (or 10) of them won re-election
6 of them resigned or retired...including yet another sexual harassment/abuse scandal.

Lots clipped, I didn’t mark them.

[Addie]

New York Times OpEd - Stan Greenberg

Trump Is Beginning to Lose His Grip

It isn’t just white suburban women who switched to Democrats. Parts of rural and white working class America peeled off too. ...

In the days that followed, though, it became clear that Democrats had made substantial gains. Analysts I trusted concluded that this was because suburban and college-educated women issued “a sharp rebuke to President Trump” that set off a “blue wave through the urban and suburban House districts.” At first, I also believed that was the main story line.

But the 2018 election was much bigger than that. It was transformative, knocking down what we assumed were Electoral College certainties. We didn’t immediately see this transformation because we assumed that Mr. Trump and the polarization in his wake still governed as before.

First of all, Democrats did not win simply because white women with college degrees rebelled against Mr. Trump’s misogyny, sexism and disrespect for women. Nearly every category of women rebelled. ...

In 2016, the white working class men that Mr. Trump spoke most forcefully to as the “forgotten Americans” gave him 71 percent of their votes and gave only 23 percent to Hillary Clinton. This year, the Republicans won their votes with a still-impressive margin of 66 to 32 percent. But what was essentially a three-to-one margin was deflated to two-to-one, which affected a lot of races.

[Orlylicious]

Loved the pic of the congressfolk who were defeated but apparently there were some errors so he took it down. It's still mostly accurate, somebody I reckon is working on the correction, it's a fun visual.

[Turtle]

[Kendra]

Orange County is now a misnomer

[TollandRCR]

I love that graphic showing the diversity of the Democratic members of the House. That is America. The lily white Republicans are on tge road to death.

[bob]

Still uncalled: CA-39; CA-45; GA-7; ME-2; UT-4.

CA-39, CA-45, and ME-2 called for Democrats. GA-7 and UT-4 still uncalled (but Republicans presently leading).

And it looks like CA-21 has slipped into "close contest" territory:

TJ Cox (D) 51,151 49.5%
(Incb.) David Valadao (R) 52,081 50.5%

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

I won! I selected 236+ in the poll. I never win!!!!

[bob]

LGoUT presently reporting that, in UT-4, McAdams has a 739-vote lead over Love.

[Addie]

NBC News

Democrats won House popular vote by largest midterm margin since Watergate

Nationally, Democrats have 53.1 percent of all votes counted while Republicans took 45.2 percent.


Not since the Watergate scandal have Democrats run up such a large margin of victory in midterm House races, NBC News data showed.

With votes continuing to be tallied more than two weeks after Election Day, Democrats hold a lead over Republicans in the House popular vote by more than 8.6 million votes.

That's the largest total victory in a midterm House election since Democrats defeated Republicans by more than 8.7 million votes in 1974, just months after President Richard Nixon resigned from office in disgrace.

[ZekeB]

Trump seems to think that Nixon's approach worked.

[Dan1100]

Trump seems to think that Nixon's approach worked.

To the extent that Nixon's approach was the Southern Strategy (i.e. turn racist and closet racist White Southern Democrats into Republicans over giving black people civil rights), it did work and Trump and the alt-right are the predictable and logical result.