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- Yesterday's election apparently installed Mitch McConnell as lord and master of these United States, because I can't look anywhere without seeing him making some prophetic or commanding statement. My favorite: "Every one of the 23 Democrats up [for re-election] in the next cycle has a clear understanding of what happened Tuesday. I think we have major opportunities for bipartisan coalitions to support what we want to do" (emphasis mine). In other words, vote for the GOP agenda (whatever the hell that is) -- or else. Kind of an empty threat from a guy who's still in the minority in his legislative body.
- I agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates' assessment of populism's shortcomings, but I'm still curious what perceived risk there was for Democrats to take on the nongovernmental institutions Americans hate -- the banks, the telecoms, the insurance industry, energy companies -- instead of letting Republicans and Tea Partiers commandeer the populist label. Is it as simple as being beholden to powerful interests for campaign donations? And to be clear, I'm not saying the right "messaging" would have saved their congressional majority; I just wonder why some Democrats call themselves Democrats. What do they believe in?
- There's no simple ideological explanation (i.e. "rejecting the liberal agenda") for the Republican landslide, but at a basic level, Democrats were defending a lot of seats in marginal districts where casting difficult votes for health care or ACES or FinReg might have made some difference. This is the real value of using political science to examine election results. Regardless of how I feel about the results, we can dispassionately understand the forces that made it happen rather than shallowly believing the results confirm you were right.
- Remainders: I doubt they lost because of it, but every candidate who supported net neutrality went down on Tuesday; I don't want to alarm anybody, but both Muslim members of Congress were easily re-elected; this is the stupidest Politico article I've seen in at least the last hour; and Scott Rasmussen is a hack.
--Mori Dinauer
