The aftermath of Nov 2nd is even bigger than thought:
Republicans picked up 680 seats in state legislatures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures — an all time high. To put that number in perspective: In the 1994 GOP wave, Republicans picked up 472 seats. The previous record was in the post-Watergate election of 1974, when Democrats picked up 628 seats.
The GOP gained majorities in at least 14 state house chambers. They now have unified control — meaning both chambers — of 26 state legislatures.
That control is a particularly bad sign for Democrats as they go into the redistricting process. If the GOP is effective in gerrymandering districts in many of these states, it could eventually lead to the GOP actually expanding its majority in 2012.
Republicans now hold the redistricting “trifecta” — both chambers of the state legislature and the governorship — in 15 states. They also control the Nebraska governorship and the unicameral legislature, taking the number up to 16. And in North Carolina — probably the state most gerrymandered to benefit Democrats — Republicans hold both chambers of the state legislature and the Democratic governor does not have veto power over redistricting proposals.
It gets better:
For the first time in two cycles, Democrats will have more seats up for grabs than the Republicans, and the party could see its shrunken majority erased altogether.
Several of the senators up for reelection came in on the 2006 Democratic wave, when the party picked up six GOP seats and won control of the chamber.
Sens. Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Jim Webb (D-Va.) defeated GOP incumbents that year but will have to win reelection in 2012.
And two senators who won special elections Tuesday, Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), will face voters again in two years.
All great news and we have much to celebrate but we have to remind ourselves that this is just the first battle to set our country back to the path of greatness instead of the Obama path of mediocrity.
Sarah Palin writes a great article today about the work ahead:
Does that mean Republican candidates can look forward with greater confidence to the 2012 elections? Yes and no. Yes, objectively speaking the next electoral cycle should be even more favorable than the one that just ended. A large number of red-state Democratic senators will have to defend their seats; and since Obama will be at the top of the ballot that year, they won’t be able to hide from the fact that their party leader is a detached liberal with a destructive tax-and-spend agenda. Whether Republicans will do as well as they did in this cycle depends on whether they learn the lessons from the 2010 election.
What is the lessons? Set the narrative:
Just as in the 1980s, there are today millions of conservative-leaning Democrats and independents who are ready to join our cause. They gave us their votes, now we must earn their trust. And we do that by showing them that a vote for us will not be a vote for the big-spending, over-regulating status quo. The 2012 story should be about conservatives in Congress cutting government down to size and rolling back the spending, and the Left doing everything in its power to prevent these necessary reforms from happening. In the next two years, if all we end up doing is adopting some tax hikes here, some Obama-agenda compromises there, and a thousand little measures that do nothing to get us out of the economic mess we’re in, the same voters that put the GOP in office will vote them out in the next election.
She goes on to write about the daggers already being thrown at her and other true conservatives for backing conservative Republicans over RINO’s in blue states. While backing the RINO’s may have pushed a few over the edge, that is what got us some sorry excuses for Republicans in the first place…and look where that got us:
…we saw in the last decade what happens when conservatives hold their noses and elect liberals who have an “R” after their names. Our party’s message of freedom and fiscal responsibility became diluted. In 2008, it was difficult to claim on the one hand that we were the party of fiscal responsibility and on the other hand that our fiscal policies work. It was clear to the electorate that the GOP had not adhered to fiscally conservative positions, and that the liberal positions they did adhere to didn’t work. If we go on in that direction again, we won’t have a base, let alone a majority. Certainly we can and should back sensible center-right candidates in bluer states, but I see no point in backing someone who supports cap-and-tax, Obamacare, bailouts, taxes, and more useless stimulus packages.
No way in hell Obama changes his stripes…he is no Clinton…and the economy doesn’t look like it will change much over the next few years, most especially if Obama continues on his Socialist path. If we stay on message, continue to campaign for true conservatives, and fight back against the liberal scare mongering there is no reason to think we can’t have a successful 2012 campaign.
See author page
John Boehner and friends have been “summoned” to the White House, . . . for some slirping.
Boehner should make sure he controls the message, and not allow Obama to pretend co-operation and bipartisanship in an after-meeting teleprompted announcement. Boehner should slide out the back door after the meeting and hold his own press conference at the Capitol
He has to develop a comprehensive plan which might take time, but he simply cannot give the very far left tendencies in the W.H. any room to breathe.
Stand firm and make no concessions, or Obama will take credit and take the opportunity to buoy his run in 2012
An elder statesman of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition is calling on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to step down from party leadership….
“I’m just suggesting that when you have the largest turnover since 1948, then it’s time to shake things up,” said Matheson, a co-chairman of the Blue Dogs, who watched as more than half of the Blue Dog districts flipped into Republican hands on Tuesday night.
His comments come on the same day that fellow Blue Dog leader Heath Shuler of North Carolina told CQ-Roll Call that he would run against Pelosi if she runs for minority leader — echoing an earlier suggestion that he would have challenged her for speaker had Democrats held the House.
Shuler told the paper that he didn’t think she would run for the job of leader.
………..
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44710.html#ixzz14LsLIgup
The Tea Party rebellion was, perhaps, a necessary corrective to the sloppy, inconsistent Republicanism of George W. Bush’s presidency. But it raised up some of the least qualified — indeed, loony — candidates for high office in recent history, and it saved the Senate for the Democrats.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2029353,00.html?xid=huffpo-direct#ixzz14MCdPFOH
More on the Aftermath
Reason to prevent Democrats who were elected to Congress, from ever getting re-elected, ever:
They rammed through major ideologically rooted legislation they didn’t read, then immediately thereafter ran the other way disavowing it, and disowning it through the mid-term campaigns, AND they distanced themselves from their illustrious leader.
What kind of spineless, unprincipled individual does that?
Pathetic hardly describes such characteristics of mindset.
Imagine the outcome if the mid-terms hadn’t swept these weeds out the door?
@Snerd Gronk:
Oh Snerd, let’s take a look at W Virginia’s race, Sen-elect, Joe Manchin, compared to what’s left in the Senate democrats, he’s a DINO with only two years to serve before he has to run again. He’s pledged no Crap and Tax, he’s pro-life and ran on other conservative values. How do you think he’s going to vote? With Reid, Schumer and Durbin? How about some of those other senators that have to run in red states in 2012? Best be focusing on your own loons.
BTW, nothing could be loonier than blue states electing more of the same like my state, Illinois re-electing Blagos tax raising pal to replace him, or California, New York, drowning in debt, broke, most likely hoping for a bail out that’s ain’t going to happen now. Stupid, stupid, stupid and what in the world are you going to do with Pelosi. 🙄 replace her with Hoyer? 🙄 Either, partnered with Reid would be more of why you guys lost.
John Boehner = old world, old school Republican…the same old-schoolers that refused to support true conservative Tea Party candidates in this election. Another one – Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority leader, who supported Trey Grayson in Kentucky’s GOP Senate primary instead of Rand Paul.
I’m Republican, and I’m tired of these RINO’s and old school scumbags that refuse to acknowledge that people didn’t elect Republicans because they were homesick for them from the Bush era…voters put them back in office Tuesday because the Democrats gave them no better choice and people want change…real change. We want policy as usual to change in Washington. We want you to stop pandering to special interests, stop pandering to wealthy corporate interests, stop foreign aid, domestic welfare, welfare for the wealthy such as incentives for oil companies, and trade policies that chase jobs over seas.
We want the borders sealed. We want deportation, not amnesty. We want spending cuts. We want earmarks to stop. We want wasteful spending in the military cleaned up. We want real energy policy. We want the EPA under control. We want a postal system that works. We want out of the car and banking business. We don’t want any more bailouts, and we want you to tell the unions to shove it up thier lazy asses.
We want prosecution of black panthers that disrupt voting. We want a Border Patrol that’s allowed to shoot back. We want liberals out of the US Attorney’s office. We want homo’s out of the military and out of our faces.
And finally, we want you to stop the buthering of millions of babies that can’t speak for themselves.
If you can’t do that, get out. We’ll find someone who can.
Post-election press conference with Jim Mora, head coach of the Democrats . 😉
Post-election press conference with Jim Mora, head coach of the Democrats
3 Reasons Obama Should Kick His Own Ass
How The Hell Did GM Pay Back Its Loans “in Full And Ahead of Schedule”? Well, It Didn’t.
Obama CEO of GM : The Road to Fascism in America – A Study in Tyranny
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sIk71CQuc4&feature=related
The Messiah’s World Apology Tour 09
👿
I assume the Secretaries of State change too…
Re: “Those Loony Tea Party candidates” meme.
In fact, there is no shortage of loons in any election year. Look at some of the freaks of nature that have actually been elected to office.
Rep. Hank Johnson (D), worried that a troop redployment to Guam might capsize the island.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D), and the UFOs.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D), “We have to pass the bill so that we can find out what’s in it,” “Food stamps and unemployment compensation are the most effective economic stimulus.”
Sen. Ted Kennedy (D), Chappaquiddick, secret treasonous communications with the KGB, ‘Borking,’ ‘waitress sandwich.’
Sen. Robert Byrd (D), rose to high rank (Kleagle) in the Ku Klux Klan back in the day, wrote at length raving about his nasty racial views, yet became a grand old man of the Democratic Party.
Then there is Alvin Greene, the 2010 Democratic candidate for senator in South Carolina. I will not elaborate on his deficiencies. He got 390,000 votes on Nov. 2.
————————————————————————–
The above is just off the top of my head. I’m not even trying. A much better list could certainly be assembled.
One thing is for sure, whatever hopes the left had about the country going from slightly right of center to hard left in 2008 has been squashed. The only thing that saved them from total defeat was the fact the Senate had only 37 seats at stake. Although the Republicans fell a couple of seats short from what most were predicting, given the percentages had the whole Senate been up for grabs, they could have picked up between 15-20 seats.
What’ll be interesting on the dems side is if anyone will challenge Obama in the primary. The pundits are saying he’ll probably face a challenge from someone on the left but there aren’t too many to the left of him. I think his worst nightmare would be if someone closer to the center like Hillary or better yet, Jim Webb, were to challenge him. Unless he gets lucky in the next couple of years, either of those two would destroy him in the primary. His side always point to Bill Clinton but he’s no Clinton. Clinton was able to pull himself closer to the center by ’96 because he had been there before or at least close to it. Signing the Contract with America into law and signing the balanced budgets put forth by the Republican congress helped him a lot to pull himself toward the center. Obama wouldn’t know the center if it bit him on the ass. He’s also the most divisive President we’ve had in a LONG time. He’s divided this country along class, racial, ethnic, and party lines. And getting back to Clinton, he won re-election with less than 50% of the vote despite being opposed by relatively weak opponents.
The interesting thing for the Republicans will be to see if they can stay united and expand their majority to the Senate or end up a fractured party with the Tea Party backed Republicans, who are going to D.C. to restore fiscal sanity through spending cuts and smaller government, butting heads with the status quo Republicans who helped get us into this financial mess.
Missy #5- I live in Illinois too. As for the governor, there must have been a good turn out at the polling places in the Chicago and Cook County cemetaries with the dead folks. Either that or the majority of the voters in our state didn’t learn anything with the last embarrassment we had for governor and therefore deserve everything we get as far as corruption, job losses, and bankruptcy by electing Blago’s number two man. This state has a knack for electing crooks from both parties. At the rate we’re going, the feds will have to open a new prison just for our governors.
One way the republicans can show fiscal responsibility and fund the different Federal departments and agencies the way they should be funded is to fund them by the numbers. Each one would be given a number rating. The military, including the VA, would be the only #1 and would get their money first.
My biggest fear is that if the republicans get control of both houses and the presidency that they will go back to their old ways and loose them again, giving the far left libs another chance to try to turn the USA into a socialist country.
Ya gotta love Utah’s Matheson current political machinations & manuevers. Matheson knows he will soon be another blue dog victim put down by Nasty Pelousy & Dingy Harry at their altar of socialized medicine and big governemnt statism. When Utah gets the reapportionement seat the democraps & leftist census bureauweenies screwed the state out of in 2002 by illegaly deleting tens of thousands of Mormon youth on their missionary trip from the census data in determining the poulation statistics for setting the number of the state’s House seats Matheson had his political death warrant signed by the Census Bureau’s left-wing union activists and his own democorrupt party leaders.
The Republican dominated Utah legislature to the cheers of the state’s near Mormon majority will be gunning for the butt nugget faux moderate Matheson. In the redistricting process Matheson’s clueless leftist leaning Salt Lake’s ghetto, barrio, and University of Utah Ivory tower socialist base voters can be will be parceled out and politically neutered during the legislature’s line redrawing process. The SLC
clueless democreep voters that have kept Matheson in the House of Representatives will be dispersed to Utah’s new and presently overpopulated underepresented overwhelmingly Republican voting districts. Nasty Pelousy & Dingy Harryl have sentenced another blue dog to his ten year late being put down visit to the vet.
@another vet:
I wonder how many of our troops were denied their vote this election, guess it’s easier to get the dead to vote rather than get a ballot to our heroes within nine months time.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-scandal-of-military-voter-disenfranchisement/
Smorgasbord #11,
That is a definite concern. Perhaps they need to go back to that document called the Constitution and start there. Look at what they are responsible for and fund that first. Everything else is extra and not the responsibilty of the Federal Government. Prioritize from there. Some of it has to go plain and simple. It’ll be tough medicine but it’s time people start realizing what the stakes are here before it’s too late which it may already be.
Another Vet …
Personally I think it is already too late. The existing power structure can not be reformed from within … Or rather, it could be reformed, but probably won’t be. I think it’ll have to collapse, first.
Why do I think it’ll have to collapse first? ‘Cause Ame(R)icanz, until they understand who the puppet masters are, can not understand how to fix it, and instead end up supporting the corrupting, by accident.
Government is ‘bad’ in the U$A, not because government is inherently bad, but because of who it services.
The U$ ‘democracy’ has morphed from Citizen-democracy, one citizen/one vote to a Capital-democracy, one dollar, one vote/many dollars, many votes. Elections are so expensive and you need so much money to run, you have to start fund raising from day one, and fund raise all the time. Consequently, your ‘real’ constituency, are those that pay your ticket … Big Money!
Government needs to be reformed, but it is the symptom, not the cause.
Snerd
Nancy Pelosi has just announced she will run for minority leader after GOP takes control of the House.
All of the things the American voters grated against that led to this midterm election trounce, the ObamaCare, et al., might be just the cake.
The icing might be what the Dems do while they are in lame duck session.
If they try to ram even more legislative garbage into law they might find 2012 will make 2010 look like just the appetizer.
And if Obama tries to skin the carbon-cat through the EPA because he can’t get a cap-&-trade law on his desk, he’s going to find out what defunding an agency looks like for real.
Another bit of fallout:
Keith Olbermann Suspended From MSNBC!
http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog/2010/11/msnbc_has_suspe.html
Snerd Gronk #15,
“Follow the money” definitely fits. Ironically, at the time the Constitution was written, political parties were actually frowned upon by the Founding Fathers. Eventually they realized they were useful in getting the message out in order to get elected. Unfortunately they morphed into what we know them as today which is a hangout for politicians who place party and office over serving “We the people”.
Missy #13- Hopefully Brady won’t throw the towel in until those votes are counted. Last I checked there were still 50,000 that hadn’t been counted. If those break heavily toward him he may still have a chance. When I went to vote they claimed I had received an absentee ballot which I hadn’t. The last time I voted absentee was 2008 when I was in Iraq. It was an issue when I first voted after returning but wasn’t one earlier this year during the primary because the issue was supposedly cleared up. I wonder if that is part of the scandal you are referring to.
@another vet:
I was called by a democratic outfit asking if I wanted a ballot mailed to my home for early voting, there were thousands of ballots sent out by these people.
Instead of the ballots being mailed back to the Board of Elections, they went back to the dem outfit.
Problems arose last week when this bunch started dumping large amounts of ballots on the election officials that had no time to process them.
Don’t know how or if it was resolved, that was a ton of votes and I wondered at the time why were they contacting me, a registered Republican? I would never call democrats when I worked for Congressman Don.
They had to be calling off voter lists and that information, ph#, addresses,etc is all on the lists.
Now I think it was just another scheme they figured out to deny votes by, oops, holding them too long. Why in the world should they be able to get their hands on ballots anyway!?
I posted the newspaper article here somewhere last week.
Missy,
Sounds fishy. I received a phone call from BHO telling me not to vote for Kirk and another one saying Kirk wasn’t a conservative or something like that. Like you, I’m not a registered Democrat and wonder where they got my phone number. Someone did take my sign down in the front yard that was for Roskam. I put it back up but moved it closer to the house and didn’t have anymore issues. My neighbor had hers taken down three times. The first time they laid it down, the second time they crumpled it up, and the last time they stole it. Could have been kids too. Who knows. Lots of coincidences though and it was a first for all of them.
That didn’t take long
Hitler Finds Out The GOP has retaken the House.
@Missy: #13 Missy
I can understand our King-in-Chief’s reasoning for not wanting to prosecute counties that don’t get the ballots to the military personnel in time. Would you want your “enemy” to have a vote whether you get elected or not?
@another vet: #14 another vet
Please pass the idea along to your politicians. All three of my Federal reps are libs, so it won’t do any good to contact them.
Smorgasbord #23,
Damn. You must live in a really bad district. You have my sympathy. At least my county in the People’s Republic of Illinois is Republican although it went for Obama in ’08 which was the first time it went for a dem since Franklin Pierce in 1852. Not surprisingly, he ranks as one of the biggest failures as a President too. Perhaps a pattern is forming. My congressman is pretty conservative so he’ll listen and probably share the same viewpoint. As for DICK Durbin, I won’t waste my time, especially since I’m one of those people he compared to Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.
@another vet: #24 another vet
The democrat senator who was up for reelection, lost. Even the democratic party didn’t want Specter back, and his replacement was defeated. Hopefully, Casey will be taken out when he comes up for reelection. My lib House rep was reelected.
Heh, Politico’s postmortem has some very interesting details regarding what has gone on in Obama’s political life through the past few years and question whether he is up to change.
excerpts:
The ego factor: Can Barack Obama change?
He surrounded himself with yes men from the beginning, almost one year in they set a pattern, nothing will be the fault of the “One.”
But, per Douglas Brinkley, they do recognize there are some issues:
Not to worry, an egomaniac with a thin skin will do just fine, he’s different, far better, more skilled, better poised than anyone that went before him. I have no doubt Obama also believes that.
James Carville was on to it early, remember his frustration with this administration, particularly, the pathetic way the oil spill was handled.
Whew, this is the gem of the whole piece from Valerie Jarrett, the other half of Obama’s brain.
Wouldn’t you love to start a job after your boss informs you that he would be better than you? Especially if you may have personally noted arrogance and an exaggerated ego in the course of the interview.
Healthcare warnings from democrats, but alas, they were conservative dems, probably considered a tier or two above those nasty Republican conservatives.
This from a former Des Moines Register….Iowa’s very liberal rag, reporter:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44732.html
My, my, my, won’t they have their hands full…..probably full of their own hair. 😉
Nice one Missy!