Perdido 03

Perdido 03

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Democrats Slaughtered From Coast To Coast

There's no better emblem of how badly voters took the sledgehammer to Democrats last night then what happened to Congresswoman Louise Slaughter in Western New York:

If Democrats went into Election Day anxious about any local race, it certainly wasn't Louise Slaughter's bid for a 15th term in Congress.

In the end, it was likely that contest that caused them the greatest grief. Republican challenger Mark Assini gave Slaughter the race of her career.

The race was too close to call on Tuesday night. Unofficial results from the polls and a partial count of absentee ballots put Slaughter ahead of Assini, but only by 605 votes — 94,251 to 93,646. Another 2,800 absentee ballots still have to be tallied.

Slaughter claims she's won, but the race is too close to call.

Frankly, the race should have never been close at all.

It was that kind of night for the Democratic Party.

Republicans added seats in the Congress, they took at least seven seats in the Senate, they held on to governor's seats they were supposed to lose (like Scott Walker's in Wisconsin), they made races close that weren't expected to be close (like Slaughter's in Western New York and Mark Warner's in Virginia), and they easily took back the State Senate here in New York.

Message sent: America thinks Democrats suck.

And they do suck - most of them stand for little other than their own careers, many of them govern or vote whatever their corporate masters want and, if you put the politics of a lot of these people up against, say Ronald Reagan's record, they look an awful lot like Republicans.

Slaughter, alas, isn't one of those kind of Dems, but she got caught up in it too - a night when a lot of Democrats went down to defeat or had races of their lives that weren't supposed to be races at all.

In the end, I suspect yesterday's election is as much or more of an expression of overall dissatisfaction with the direction of the country as it is a thumbs-up for Republicans.

In two years, many Republican Senators in blue or purple states face re-election and I wouldn't be surprised to see exactly what happened to a lot of Dems last night happen to Republicans in 2016 - especially if Hillary Clinton is at the top of the Democratic ticket.

But before we get to 2016, there's a whole lot of damage that can be done.

Nationwide, will Obama, dying to do a deal to destroy Social Security, get to do it now that Republicans control both the House and the Senate?

Will we finally get passage of No Child Left Behind II now that the GOP has both houses of the legislature?

In New York State, Andrew Cuomo won re-election with 54% of the vote and now has an out-and-out Republican State Senate to work with - no Jeff Klein or Tony Avella needed to ram through anti-teacher or anti-public school legislation or lift the charter cap completely, though I suspect the members of the Independent Democratic Caucus will be seduced to govern as Republicans anyway and really put an exclamation point on the whole thing.

Early on last night, I tweeted this:

But of course, that won't be the lesson Dems nationwide will take.

The lesson they'll take is to move ever more rightward, ever more corprorate-friendly, ever more corporate-whorey.

The NY Times says the political map has been re-ordered for the next two years, with Republicans in the ascendant across the nation.

That is certainly the case even here in blue New York where a Republican Lite governor has  a Republican State Senate and his eyes aimed on "breaking" the public school "monopoly" and bringing a punitive revision to his APPR teacher evaluation system in order to fire more teachers.

Going to be a bumpy two years.


  1. It has been predicted for weeks, months , rather, that the Democrats would lose the Senate.

    Kathleen Rice won the Congressional seat for District 4 in NYS. She and Bruce Blakeman were campaigning for the seat, now that Carolyn McCarthy stepped down. I have to tell you, IT WAS REALLY REALLY CLOSE. Like a 2-3% margin.
    I was at the K.R. reception, now victory party. The votes were not fully counted until 12:30am.

    At least we have 1 democrat in the House, and she is one of the people who blew the whistle on Cuomo with Moreland.


  2. This all goes back to Obama's first few months in office. That's when he pushed through Obamacare before even worrying about the economy. Pelosi told Dems it was worth losing their seats over....idiot she is because even Dems that voted against Obamacare lost their seats. But more important, it was the first midterm election to give rise and power to the Tea Party. Obama's advisors told him the Tea Party was not a threat, so Obama continued on his path thinking he was king. He wasn't. Btw, these people are not Republicans nor should we call them that. They are Right Wing Conservatives.

    I was going to wait a year before applying for Social Security, but now I will do it.