Now let’s look at the state legislatures
And you may like what you see:
Republican gains extended to state legislative chambers as well. Before Election Day, the GOP controlled 59 of 98 partisan legislative chambers across the country. On Tuesday, preliminary results showed Republicans had won control of both the Nevada Assembly and Senate, the Colorado Senate and state House chambers in Minnesota, New Mexico, Maine, West Virginia and New Hampshire.
That would give the party control of 67 chambers, five more than their previous record in the modern era, set after special elections in 2011 and 2012.
It also would give Republicans total control of 24 states, in which they hold the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature (Nebraska’s unicameral legislature is technically nonpartisan, but in practice Republicans control the chamber by a wide margin). Democrats, by contrast, are likely to control all three legs of the governing stool in only six states.
Of course, one of those Democratic states is a mighty big one: California.
[ADDENDUM: John Hinderaker reflects.]
The divided legislature in Massachusetts looks mighty fine to me. Which means that the leg won’t be able to steamroll a Pub governor, like it did Mitt Romney. And the divided leg in Mass will drive my yellow dog Democrat sister-in-law, a Mass native and MSNBC addict, up the wall.
Interesting that four states in the Midwest have Pub-controlled legislatures. So when some progs say that the old Confederacy is the heart of the Pub party these days, you can drive them crazy by pointing out that four Midwestern states which were among the hard core Lincoln supporters are also Pub states today.
But as our POTUS said once, Texas has always been Pub country. After all, President Lyndon Johnson, that stalwart Pub, hailed from Texas. 🙂
Hmm.
Umm.
What could this really mean …?
Oh.
Wait!
I know:
…it means
…probably the founders got it right in the first place, and we should repeal the 17th Amendment.
To be an employee in California is like being a knight in feudal times: expensive and dangerous. No wonder slobs like Zuckerburg need illegal immigrants to circumvent California employment law. But even illegals sue!
Obama has been a wrecking ball for the Democrat party. The number of Republican members in the house is the greatest since Hoover. Republican have taken over or maintained the governorships of states like Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Maryland.
If the Republicans can carve up Obamacare, Obama will have no legacy beyond being feckless.
The fighters won. The Rs who openly repudiated Obama and Obamacare and everything won.
The Rinos lost. AMnesty lost. Obamacare lost. Obama foreign policy lost. Obamanomics lost
Everything that true blue Rs said for years was right – that if you compromise with these people, if you try to become like them, you will lose. If you confront them, shout at them, call them the liars and cheats and fascists that they are – then you win.
That means we win if we proceed that way over the next two years – Obama should get zero, nothing, nada. All he should get is condemnation and ridicule and criticism for two years on everything all the time with zero exceptions, period, end of story, done.
And for 2016 there cannot even be a hint of or the smell of timid cowardly Rs like McCain and Romney.
Good people for the Tennis Club. Non-Presidential since they do not have the guts to fight and win.
Cruz, Rubio, Palin, Walker, Christie, a few others – all acceptable.
Rinotypes?
See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya!
Immigration done wrong and a lot more of the country will be looking and voting like California.
Walker/Ernst 2016. The supreme, stick to principles manager, and the make them squeal happy warrior. Flyover country is the heart of America.
I did not vote for republicans. I voted against democrats. I just want that made perfectly clear. What I want is defined as closely as I can associate with, by tea party sensibilities. RINOS can, and probably will, screw it all up.
I think I would trade all the numbers advantages for republicans in office if just half of Americans would give up the indoctrination box we call television.
With a rogue president, I’m not sure how much it matters.
He said in his press conference he’s going to see what he can do legally through executive decree. I’m not convinced he’s going to be all that careful about sticking to the “legally” part. Past presidents, no matter how partisan, didn’t seem to have the inherent lack of respect for the system this man displays. Even Nixon got in trouble for political tricks, not for inherent disrespect of the Constitution. In fact, he resigned because it did still mean something then. I just can’t believe how short-sighted people are who want to trash the rules for their pet projects. Don’t they see that the same thing can be done going the other way and in the long run it’s just not good for anyone. We’re heading for a civil war if that becomes the norm.
I was pleased to see the Republicans outperform the pools in my home state of North Carolina. We just elected a Republican legislature two years ago for the first time since Reconstruction. In those two years, the Republicans, despite predictions to the contrary, have not legalized slavery or lynching, have not driven thousands of women to die from coat hanger abortions, have not abolished public education to make an ignorant and illiterate populace easier to control, and have not raped the land, cut down every tree, strip mined every square acre of countryside and exterminated all wildlife with oil spills from fracking. Two party government, it turns out, is not the end of the world.
Obama and dems have acted similarly to lenin and the revolution, as well as mao and so on.
ie. they believed that the people were behind them, and would rise up and so on…
so far, never has happened.
Democrats were projecting about slavery and abusing women.
“In those two years, the Republicans, despite predictions to the contrary, have not legalized slavery or lynching…”
Which is all the more ridiculous because the reason it’s the first Republican legislature since Reconstruction is that the racist Democrats back in that era monopolized the legislature and carried that monopoly forward for 150 years. They were the ones resisting the end of slavery, they were committing the lynchings, they promoted Jim Crow, etc., etc. The Republicans have no history of doing any of those things, it’s the Democrats who have that stain on their record. The accusers have got it exactly backwards.
Not sure I understand this map. Pennsylvania does not have a divided legislature, Republicans have both the House and the Senate.
Funniest point in an article:
that the Republicans will kill fillibuster the way the dems killed it… preventing dems from what, before their action, was an important thing.
hoisted by ones own petard
A petard was a small bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications, of French origin and dating back to the sixteenth century. A typical petard was a conical or rectangular metal object containing 2—3 kg (5 or 6 pounds) of gunpowder, with a slow match as a fuse.
hoisted and connical tells one where it was placed 🙂
Pétard comes from the Middle French péter, to break wind
The word remains in modern usage in the phrase hoist with one’s own petard, which means “to be harmed by one’s own plan to harm someone else” or “to fall into one’s own trap,” implying that one could be lifted up (hoist, or blown upward) by one’s own bomb.
Midterm Neurosis is setting in…
[given her feminist credentials, she believes that her details explain why its ok to do what she did]
The chairwoman of the Stokes County Democratic Party told King police that the man she is accused of assaulting Tuesday had argued with her and called her a profane name and a liar before she kicked him in the groin and threw herbal tea on him…
Fulk, 55, of Goff Road in King, is charged with misdemeanor simple assault, according to an arrest warrant
Dan D:
I just looked up the PA legislature, and you do seem to be correct.
I’m not sure why the map says otherwise.
Link for Artfldgr’s story. The herbal tea is a nice touch.
Dan D and Neo,
Maybe the governorship too? I haven’t checked any others to be sure.
London Trader:
I thought the chart is supposed to only be about legislatures. The PA governor is indeed a Democrat, but I didn’t think the chart was supposed to reflect that.
Neo: It is all three, both houses plus the governorship. The article says that the GOP controls all 3 in 24 states and there are 24 red states on the map.
London Trader:
That explains it then.
The balance of power shifted in NH by 60 some votes. Dems lost 60 and Republicans gained 60. It is a puzzlement because Sen Shaheen, Gov Hassan, and Rep Kuster, all Dems won. So the votes for the legislature didn’t translate to the top of the ticket.
I realize that it’s probably futile at this point, but I wish conservatives would quit using the red state/blue state meme, or at least reverse the colors to what they should be. It is really starting to bug me.
Apparently, there was variation in the way the MSM portrayed the colors before 2000. I seem to recall that blue was used for the incumbent and red for the challenger, but Wikipedia says there was no set system for the various TV networks. (I read this a long time ago and I don’t remember the link.)
But since the 2000 recount, the D=Blue and R=Red color scheme has become set in stone. I dislike it more and more, because we all know that it benefits the Democrats, who are the real Reds.
I wish our side would quit letting the Left define the terms of debate. It’s a form of surrender.
Oh well, I can keep telling myself that red and blue are both colors in the American flag, which predates the red flag of Communism.
California needs to be broken up. There is a proposal to break it up into six states, some of which would tend conservative. I’m all for it.
Rand Simberg recently wrote a series of posts at his blog Transterrestrial Musings, that were travelogues of the six new states. Here is the last one, and you can get to the others by following the links. They’re very informative posts.
Exasperated:
New Hampshire’s a very quirky place. Don’t expect consistency.
However, since all governors in NH have been committed to not changing the tax base in NH, the Republican/Democratic distinctions at the governor level are not as big as those in other states.
As far as Shaheen’s win goes, she had been governor in NH for years and people may have gotten to thinking of her as Not A Liberal, no matter how she voted in Washington. However, she did try to implement a sales tax in NH (which was defeated), so I really don’t get why she’s so popular there.
I know Neo. I have met Jeanne Shaheen; when she was on a tour of small businesses. She is very poised and personable and asks the right questions.
Oddly, she didn’t perform as well as Hassan who won with a 26,000 vote edge. Yet, the voters stuck Hassan with a solid Republican majority.
Exasperated:
Actually, it makes sense, in a weird way.
Hassan was running for governor. She’s a Democrat, but she hasn’t really done anything all that different than a Republican would have. She hasn’t raised taxes—she took the famous Pledge—and her Republican opponent was a less-than-compelling candidate in terms of personality. What would he have done differently, anyway? It’s not apparent it would have been much. And saddling her with a Republican legislature hobbles Hassan even more from being anything but a Republican-lite.
Shaheen, despite being well-liked in NH, is in the US Senate, where she can do (and has done) more damage. That’s why (IMHO) she did worse than Hassan, and why she almost got turned out of office. As for NH’s respresentatives, the western (liberal) part of the state elected a liberal, the eastern (more conservative) part of the state elected a conservative.
As I said, it kind of all makes sense.
Even in California, there was some movement to the right. The super majority in the state legislator is no longer as we actually got some Republicans in there! This is good news, though far from being as amazingly wonderful as much of the news around the country. Even so, I’ll take what I can get now.
I am not certainly how or if California can change, but the issues here caused by progressivism are so acute, I mean – economically, that if people were aware of a way out, they might take it. Here in SF, there are libertarians and moderates and even conservatives hanging out in the tech industry, and the progressives and uber-lefties sense this, they can smell it, and they hate tech because of that. However, this side of tech is still subsumed culturally though the far left is being driven out of SF due to rising costs. Of course, they blame tech, instead of their own rotten thirty plus years of bad housing/growth and other economic policies. They are going into Oakland (G_d save Oakland) which is now becoming more an epicenter of the far and odious left. But even there was some tiny bit of good news as the favorite of the far lefties, Rebecca Kaplan did not win the office of Mayor and instead, the more moderate (if not at all conservative) Libby Schaef won.
Any way, this is all to say there is hope in California!
Of course, it is still out of touch with the rest of the country in a big way — to say the least.
Of course, Oakland, home of the Black Panthers many years ago — has always been very far left but many disenfranchised SF lefties who can’t afford the high rents here in San Francisco are leaving to live there. It is interesting to watch… San Francisco lefties hate “tech” almost as much as they hate Republicans BTW. Even if some lefties are in tech themselves! It is an interesting situation.
This election just makes me want to leave this area again, to leave California again, it is so crazy here. (left wing wise)
I wouldn’t trust this graphic: not only do Republicans control both houses of the Missouri legislature, they have veto-proof majorities.