Electoral duress

So, election night came and went and was pretty disappointing for me from a liberal standpoint. I had already resigned myself to a GOP takeover as 6th year elections seem to go against the party in power, but it was just a bit ridiculous how much it swung red throughout the rest of the country. Sam Brownback re-elected? Seriously? Just, wow, speechless. For a while it seemed that Mark Warner was going to lose, but I stayed up past midnight when northern Virginia started reporting in and things started swinging back his way. Was still too close for me. Perhaps the only consolation during this year’s election is that we still have Obama in the White House, for all his flaws, and Virginia has a Democratic Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and two Senators.

There has been a trend for the past decade or so, Democrats turn out to vote during presidential elections, then stay home during mid-terms. Reports from this election attributed GOP wins to an older, whiter, conservative base, so it would appear that 18 percent or so of the country’s eligible voters actually turned out for the Republicans against Obama. So, while I hope that the cycle can continue in 2016 with another Democratic winner in the White House, be it Hillary or whoever, really, I’m not going to sit by the next two years and hope that things get better, when in reality the truth is government is broken and needs to change.

Many good points have been made about how Dems ran from Obama and got their asses handed to them, when instead they should have been touting his accomplishments over the past few years. It’s like people don’t remember 6 or 8 years ago; the economy is stronger than ever, jobs, investments, growth, expansion and inflation, are better than they were six, or even twenty years ago. Rather than tout these and other accomplishments in health care, financial reform, and the environment, Dems shied from Obama and allowed pre-election hysteria about Ebola and ISIS take over the discussion. Even if I don’t love Obama as much as I did in 2008, I’m still damn glad that he’s the President and not McCain or Romney. 8 years of Bush II was enough for me.

Another good point that was brought up by the Daily Beast’s Sally Kohn was that the GOP was able to win by running to the left. Even though voters overwhelmingly supported the candidate with the R next to their name, when it came time to voting on the issues themselves, they overwhelmingly approved liberal ideas such as minimum wage increases, striking down personhood amendments. Republican candidates themselves talked up income inequality and wage stagnation. So while certain idiot family members and Facebook friends still freak out over Obamacare or Faux News’s latest outrage of the day is, I still have hope that the country is moving in the right direction.

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