It was an exceptionally ugly night for Democrats. The Republicans winning the Senate is discouraging, though not unexpected. (I had held out hope of a 50-50 tie.) But the Democrats also lost multiple governorships, including several that should have been easy holds or promising pickups. A few scattered thoughts:
• If you thought the last few years of obstruction were bad, things are about to get worse. It was already a given that President Obama wouldn’t be able to pass any major legislation for the rest of his term; now he won’t be able to appoint any judges or federal officials either. I really, really hope no Supreme Court justice decides to retire in the next two years.
• The U.S. electorate has an absurdly short memory. Last year the Republicans were roundly condemned for shutting down the government; this year we rewarded them for it.
• Are we now stuck in a pattern where we elect a president every four years, then get disgruntled with him and two years later elect the opposition party to obstruct him for the rest of his term?
• More realistically, this can probably be chalked up to a chronic problem of turnout. The young, diverse electorate who showed up to elect Obama in 2008 and resoundingly reelect him in 2012 keeps sitting the midterms out. Republican gerrymandering and laws designed to make voting difficult can’t have helped, but this collapse was too widespread to be blamed solely on that. How did we fail to get the Obama coalition to the polls?
• Liberal ideas continue to be far more popular than Democratic politicians, as minimum wage and marijuana-legalization ballot initiatives notched wins even in red states.
• I trust Martha Coakley’s political career is now over, since she’s now blown two important, eminently winnable races in the bluest state in the nation. On the other hand, Sam Brownback, who’s run Kansas into the ground with unpaid-for tax cuts that devastated public services, was reelected promising… more tax cuts.
If you want to strategize or just vent, here’s the place. How do you explain last night? How can we keep this from happening in every midterm from now on?