Well the results were more-or-less as expected, Republicans keeping the House and gaining a clear majority in the Senate. But there were still a lot of surprises.
Races that were supposed to be close, weren’t. They were massacres.
Of the seats the Democrats were able to keep, a number of them were very near run things after all.
Polls in Virginia, Georgia and Illinois were seriously wrong, putting their methodology or objectivity, or both into question.
Republicans gained on the state level as well. Obama’s home state elected a Republican governor.
Senatorial candidate Wendy Davis started out as the bright hope of turning Texas blue. Then as we watched in either horrified or gleeful fascination, she made gaffe after gaffe, revealing herself to be a liar, an opportunist and a thoroughly unpleasant person.
(Note to Wendy: insulting a man in a wheelchair with an interracial marriage as a racist out of touch with people’s problems probably won’t fly.)
Democrat Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu made it into a runoff, but didn’t seem to realize that calling your constituents racists and sexists probably isn’t a vote getter either. The Democratic Party cut off her funds, not wanting to throw good money after bad.
Democratic candidates treated the president like an Ebola patient. Kentucky senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes actually refused to answer whether she had voted for him! Let that sink in for a moment.
Bill and Hillary Clinton actually did get in the trenches and stump for candidates, many of whom are now wishing they hadn’t.
What the heck just happened? And why?
For one, Obamacare is hugely unpopular and growing more so. There are winners who came out ahead, but even the winners know a lot of people who didn’t.
Of those that didn’t come out ahead, the reasons were capricious enough to be frightening. Such as a friend of mine with no children and past childbearing age whose “substandard” policy was cancelled because it didn’t cover pediatric dentistry.
To say the least, this does not reassure those hoping for a government more responsive to people’s needs.
Foreign policy may have been an even greater factor than the economy, and Obama has repeatedly shown he is out of his depth. Foreign heads of state from Chavez to Putin to the mad mullahs of
Iran have shown open contempt for him. Lines drawn in the sand have blown away with the first strong wind.
This was the year of the rise of black conservatives. Daughter of Haitian immigrants Mia Love was elected to the senate from a state that is 97 percent white. Tim Scot was elected from South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War!
There are more of them than anyone suspected and they are nobody’s tokens, but a significant influence in the conservative brain trust. It’s getting much, much harder to play the race card these days.
The libertarian presence in the Republican Party is stronger. However grudgingly they admit it, many libertarians have come to the conclusion third-party attempts are expensive exercises in futility.
The libertarian live-and-let-live image sells well with a lot of moderate independent voters.
The left on the other hand, looks increasingly intolerant. In particular to expressions of Christian faith in the public sphere.
(Note to the mayor of Houston: when you subpoena texts of pastors’ sermons, you don’t look like a fearless champion of liberty and tolerance, you look like the Gestapo.)
It’s become increasingly evident that for all their talk of “right-wing extremists” the Democratic Party is controlled at the national level by the extreme left – and we are starting to see signs it’s making Democrats at the state level nervous. Because the truth is, most Democrats are not hard leftists.
Obama recently made a casual remark that choosing to be a stay-at-home mom, “is not a choice we want them to make.”
Pick up your jaw from the floor and consider that for a moment. The President of the United States thinks he has a right to step into the most intimately personal choices a woman can make. And
he doesn’t even realize how totalitarian that sounds.
I see lessons for both Democrats and Republicans here.
For Republicans, the last time they capture both houses they elbowed their way to the trough and stuck their snouts in as enthusiastically as any Democrat. They might do it again, and if they do they’ll lose again – and people are watching this time.
For Democrats, the ideological leadership of their party is seriously out of touch with that part of America outside the D.C. cocktail circuit. Their ability to be competitive on a state level will be seriously compromised as long as the national leadership is Hard Left.