radio·free·donia

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

We won! Cool. Now the real work begins.

If anyone's actually stopping by, my apologies for the lack of posts recently. Life's been busy, and the big things lately have been Iraq and the election, which you didn't need my help to follow.

The Dems won, which is of course a Good Thing. Just for the heck of it, here's the updated, consolidated scorecard:

House of Representatives: we picked up 29 formerly GOP-held seats, at last count, and lost none, with 5 GOP-held seats still being contested in one way or another. (I'll get back to that in a minute.) So the Dems will have, at a minimum, a 232-203 edge in the House in 2007.

Senate: As everyone knows, we picked up 6 GOP-held seats, and lost none. Webb, Tester, McCaskill, Sherrod Brown, Casey, and Whitehouse in VA, MT, MO, OH, PA, and RI, respectively.

Lieberman (CFL) beat Lamont (D) in CT, but he'll caucus with the Dems, despite veiled threats to do otherwise: the day after he goes over, he becomes irrelevant, and he knows it. All he's got is bullshit. Main thing is, he's in the Senate as a sorta Democrat, but as a marriage of convenience all around. He's not there by dint of the support of actual Democrat voters.

Governorships: picked up 6 and lost 0 here, too. Beebe, Ritter, O'Malley, Spitzer, Strickland, and Deval Patrick in AR, CO, MD, NY, OH, and MA, respectively.

State Legislatures: we picked up control of nine state legislative chambers, with control of two (MT House and PA House) still pending final results in local races. This gives us at least 56 of the 98 state legislative chambers. (Nebraska has a technically nonpartisan unicameral legislature, which is why only 98 rather than 100.)

This is almost as big a deal as everything else here, for several reasons: (1) it shows that people liked us better than the GOP at the state level, as well as this just being an anti-Bush, anti-Iraq protest vote; (2) it adds a whole bunch of potential Dem candidates for House seats and governorships; and (3) these are the folks who control redistricting, which the GOP has famously gone out of its way to game in their favor in the past few years. The more state legislatures where we control at least one house, the fewer states where the GOP can pull that sort of stuff.

Getting back to those still-pending House races:

There are two runoffs pending. One of them is between two Dems (LA-02, where William ($80K in the icebox) Jefferson is in a runoff with Karen Carter) so we hold that seat either way, but hopefully Carter will emerge victorious over one of the few genuinely sleazy Dems of note. The other is in TX-23, between GOP incumbent Bonilla and Dem challenger Ciro Rodriguez. Don't know what our prospects are, but apparently it ain't over, because the DCCC is putting money and staff into that one. So that's a chance for a pickup.

There are four GOP-held seats where the Election Day results are either still being tabulated or being contested. Larry Kissel in NC-08, Dr. Vicki Wulsin in OH-2, and Mary Jo Kilroy in OH-15 all trail, but by substantially less than the number of absentee and provisional ballots still to be counted. The odds are against any of these three becoming a pickup, but you never know.

And Christine Jennings in FL-13 is legally challenging a loss by only a few hundred votes on account of an astonishingly high number of voters in Sarasota County, where she won a majority of the voters, who failed to vote in the House race. Many people reported problems with the House race not appearing on the electronic ballot, and there were about 12% fewer votes in the House race in Sarasota County than in the Senate and Governor races, while the difference was more like 2% in the rest of the district. This one may be decided by the House of Representatives, which could either seat Jennings or keep the seat open pending a revote. So this one's very much in play.

Now that the scorecard's over, the reason why I'm not jumping up and down with joy is that this is only a first step. The point of winning these races is to actually do stuff. Iraq's gone from quagmire to disaster, we're still doing nothing about global warming, and average Americans still aren't sharing in the nation's economic gains.

But now we can at least try to start addressing these issues. When the GOP controlled Congress, we couldn't even get our legislation considered, let alone passed. So it's a big first step.

1 Comments:

At 5:20 PM, Blogger StopBonilla said...

Ciro Rodriguez is rated 100% by the NEA, indicating a pro-public education voting record, and he voted against the school voucher program which will bleed money from the public schools and for reducing class size in grades 1 to 3.

Ciro is rated 100% by APHA, indicating a pro-public health record, and he has voted for more federal funding for health coverage, against the Prescription Drug Coverage boondoggle for international pharmaceutical corporations, for allowing reimportation of safe prescription drugs from Canada, and against arbitrarily capping damages in lawsuits involving hospital and nursing home negligence.

Ciro is rated 100% by the ARA, indicating a pro-senior voting record, and he voted against privatizing Social Security and in favor of strengthening the Social Security Lockbox.

Ciro is rated 100% by NARAL, indicating a pro-choice voting record.

Ciro is rated 89% by SANE, indicating a pro-peace voting record.

Ciro is rated 0% by the xenophobes at FAIR, indicating he favors a non-punitive immigration policy, and he voted for extending Immigrant Residency rules, and against reporting illegal aliens who receive hospital treatment.

Ciro has fought against discrimination and voted for a Constitutional Amendment for equal rights by gender and voted against ending affirmative action in college admissions.

Ciro believes a person's sexual orientation should not be the basis for limiting his or her civil rights, and he voted for more funding and stricter sentencing for hate crimes and against the Constitutional Amendment banning civil unions.

Ciro stands for the freedom of religion balanced against the freedom from unwanted religious interference with the state, and he voted against requiring school prayer.

Ciro voted for a moratorium on the death penalty, for requiring DNA testing for all federal executions, against the Mandatory Three Strikes sentencing laws, against harsher prosecution and sentencing for juvenile crime, and for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.

Ciro voted against eliminating the Estate Tax for the ultra-wealthy, against making the Bush tax cuts for the rich permanent, and for ending offshore tax havens for corporate tax cheats.

Ciro voted against "Fast Track" authority for trade agreements, against withdrawing from the WTO, against implementing the US-Singapore trade agreement, against implementing the trade agreement with Chile, and for linking human rights to trade with China.

 

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