Midterm Return Watch

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Okay, time to get the road on the show.

It’s too early to say anything about McCaskill-Hawley in Missouri; there’s only about 1 percent of the vote counted.

Illinois will now have a Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker. He’s not someone I’m really excited about, but the Republican incumbent, Bruce Rauner, was utterly incompetent.

Joe Donnelly lost Indiana. It looks like Manchin will keep his seat in West Virginia.

Damn, Blackburn won Tennessee. I’m sorry about that.

I don’t think there’s going to be a blue wave. It still looks as if the Dems will take the House, but not by as many seats as I’d hoped.

Looks like the critical races won’t be called until the early morning, and I’m not inclined to stay up all night waiting.

Watching the Missouri Senate race is making me crazy. Online sources like the NY Times are saying McCaskill is ahead, but the people on the teevee keep saying Hawley is ahead.

Kobach lost Kansas. Yay!

Heitkamp lost, which means Republicans now have 50 Senate seats.

NBC is calling Texas for Cruz. Damn.

The Missouri secretary of state is not releasing any voting data until all the people standing in line when the polls closed have voted.  And people are still voting. Probably there won’t be any official data until some time between 9:30 and 10 pm eastern time. That’s why numbers are all over the place for McCaskill-Hawley. There are no official numbers and various news outlets are using unofficial numbers from several sources.

NBC is saying that the Dems have taken back the House.

Well, I’m going to call it a night. I think the big races are going to be too close to call for a few hours.

33 thoughts on “Midterm Return Watch”

  2. Polls have been closed for 2 1/2 hours but Indiana is only 68% reported and my county is zero point zero! Yay Hoosiers!

  5. "Joe Donnelly lost Indiana"

    His last ad was his worst and was also his first (3 months of ads), it's a blurry health-care ad that features Trump and how he worked with Trump twice in a 30 second ad. 45,000 people turned out in Lake county about 10% and only 35,000 voted for Joe. He's a lousy democrat.

  6. Flipping between MSNBC and CNN:

    So far, CNN has been much more optimistic over D's chances than MSNBC.  I gotta admit, that's a bit of a surprise.

  7. "Flipping between MSNBC and CNN"

    Be careful! I can't watch the bobble heads on election nite. Listening to albums and refreshing cnn in the intertube. Beto might win?

  8. HOKEY SMOKES, BULLWINKLE!!!!!

    Kansas has kicked KKKris KKKobach past the "kurb," and down the sewer – where the rats are scurrying away from his stench.

     

  14. It was a bad night for aliens.  Kobach aka KKKobach lost.  Was it the red white and blue tricked out jeep with the machine gun mounted in back he used as his coming out parade that did him in?  I would like to think so, but lately the most outrageous candidate seems to prevail most of the time.  He showed way to well considering his highly checkered past and association with the previous failed state administration to blame the showy ride.  Was it then his association with the ideas of Grover Norquist (make government so small you can drown it in a bathtub) or Arthur Laffer (famous for his not so sexy curve) that drove voters away from the R by his name?  Not a chance.  You would pay hell to find an intelligent conversation about either's ideas in the whole of the state of Kansas.  Was it the backwash from the Trump coat tails that spun him out of contention?  That is hard to say, but it would have helped if Trump would have pronounced his name a little closer to it's normal pronunciation during his whirlwind stumping stop.  I contend it was just a bad night for aliens.  

    What evidence supports that idea.  Well Oumuamua as an alien spacecraft has been contested by noted astronomers.  

     

    Katie Mack, a well-known astrophysicist at North Carolina State, also took issue with the alien hype.

    "The thing you have to understand is: scientists are perfectly happy to publish an outlandish idea if it has even the tiniest sliver of a chance of not being wrong,"

     Outlandish idea is not really a compliment, but it certainly meets the criterion of politically correct if not politically superior.  As for the criticism that the idea might only have a hint of plausibility, well if not just totally wrong is the new politically correct in some circles.  Still the alien spacecraft is being hotly contested.  So I must conclude, with only the tiniest sliver of a chance of not being wrong, that it was just a bad night for aliens.

  17. I feel so bad for Florida – my current state – another rubber stamp for 45, instead of new, progressive energy.

  19. I feel so bad for Florida

    one bright side is that former felons can now vote. Another bright star is Andrew Gillum – that man is a leader, he gave an awesome concession speech. He’s not going anywhere.

  20. The bad:
    No “wave”; I guess turnout fizzled by Election Day???
    Senate: lost Heitkamp. Did’nt pick up Beto or Bredesen. Lost a number I expected to win: McCaskill, Donnelly, maybe Nelson, Simena (TBD!)???
    Ohio did not go Cordray for gov.
    Odious scum took governorship in Florida and maybe Georgia.
    Voter ID amendment actually passed in NC???? Ugh!! Have to take that to the courts again….

    The good:
    Took House by decisive margin.
    Kansas gov.!
    Gay Dem. gov, Colorado.
    Nevada Senate.
    Supermajorities broken in NC state sen/house
    5:2 now on NC Supreme Court since idiot Republicans accidentally ran two Republicans against her and were unable to delete one from the ballot when the discovered their mistake.
    Take control of judicial appointments away from Governor Amendments failed in NC.
    Some VERY high quality people joining the US House.
    A number of other governorships

  21. great comment at TPM:

    …for me (I live in Richmond, VA), Spanberger’s victory was the sweetest of the night. Dave Brat is such an unrepentant dick. And, Spanberger is such a smart, thoughtful person.

    Josh Marshall:

    …Millions more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton to be President two years ago than Donald Trump. The total vote for the House will likely be an aggregate total as large or larger than any wave election in the last 30 years. And yet they’ll end up with a relatively modest majority. These facts are deeply embedded in geography and constitutional structure. They will very hard to change. But a critical task of Democrats going forward will be to delegitimize an electoral system that consistently produces such results. In a 21st century democracy, the majority should not be routinely denied the greater share of political power. This is not merely something to grouse about for the few weeks after election day. It is a sustained argument, one that must leverage the deepest strains of American democratic ideology. That will lay the predicate for new rule making. That is not unprecedented in American history. It is a recurrent, historic pattern of reform.

    We’re still waiting for a lot of results. But Democrats made significant inroads on all the down ticket fronts that are most critical. That’s a big deal. But it’s just the first step….

  22. One theory is that 20th century American culture was unusually ‘collectively-minded’. The causes for this included wins against the Depression, Nazis, fighting totalitarianism, the prevailing Christian philosophy, progressive movements, etc.  Making/having most of the world’s best stuff didn’t hurt either.  But the youth of that collective-mindedness, after having lost major battles against “the man”, transformed themselves into self-contained self-improving individualistic units.  And then these ‘newly freed’ individuals became easy targets for any powers-that-be to exploit for their own ends.  A dysfunctional symbiosis between corporations, governments and free individuals happened.  American culture became unbalanced and unusually anti-‘collectively-minded’.  And then the Iron Law of Oligarchy did its thing and wealthy and powerful insiders profiting from all this became even more wealthy, powerful, and inside.

    And now we’re in the situation where our current youth are really starting to hate our guts for all the fine messes we’ve made.  Hopefully they’ll be able to restore some kind of cultural balance, before we all get to collectively hit bottom.

  23. How the ‘propaganda feedback loop’ of right-wing media keeps more than a quarter of Americans siloed

    …And the critical difference is not that there aren’t crazy clickbait sites on Facebook that try to get people who have left-wing orientations to click on them. They exist.

    But those stories don’t survive as long, because they are part of an ecosystem that says, “Stop. This story is nonsense.”

    Whereas what happens on the right is that no matter how crazy the story, there will be some major media with high impact — whether it’s [Sean] Hannity on Fox News, whether it’s Limbaugh, whether it’s Breitbart — that will pick up the story, reframe it, tell it again, identify it as true, and then everyone will start circulating it.

    So it’s a completely different dynamic on the right than on the left.

  25. Last night – or early this morning, Michael Moore  was asked who the D's should run against tRUMP in 2020?

    His answer ( and he wasn't kidding):  "A celebrity."

    So, after hearing that, I have a great foil to.oppose tRUMP for POTUS :

    SHAQ!

    Shaquille O'Neal isn't just a funny tall man who was a great basketball player.

    Why Shaq v. The Guy the Color and Shape of a Basketball?

    He's smarter than tRUMP – he's got a PHD in education. He's much funnier than him. He's by far a better leader.  He''s calmer than him.  He's very generous.  He's an entrepreneur – so he knows how to delegate.  Etc…

    Can you imagine their debates?  (C'mon!  You know you laughed at that!).

    In a lot of ways, he's kind of a Rennaisance man.

    Or, Oprah!

    I'd be OK with either.

  26. I'm sort of happy Donnelly lost, he was a pro-life milk toast bench filler. I know he was key to the Dems taking back the senate, but I don't think it really was possible. Anyway I can take his contact out of my email, I won't have to send him nasty-grams anymore!

    In other news, Sessions has resigned, Rosenstein is no longer over-seeing the russia probe, I think Tiny is going to try and sh#t can the Mueller probe before the dems take over in Jan?

  27. Culag: Shaq? You've got to be kidding right? I can't stand the sight of that guy, he'll sell any two-bit widget, take any small part just to get in front of a camera, and that godamn phony smile, please tell me your kidding! Oprah, really? Moore is full of sh#t we will never beat tRump at his own game, we need a serious person to run, someone like Amy Klobuchar.

  28. Kidding, yeah.

    But, uncledad, just reread your post, and let me ask you this:

    Forget Shaq.  What other clown fits what you hate?

    SEE?

    Now, me? 

     I'll take Sbaq-fu over tRUMP-of-Shit.

    You? 😇

  29. 4 times I tried to edit, but maha  probably has her twit-spell-correct filter on.

    Shaq-fu.

  30. c u n d gulag, thanks but not entirely mine to take credit for.  The “Century of the Self” series found on Youtube explains that kind of thinking in more detail.  It was referred to me after I kept asking the question: “Where the hell have all the Christians gone?  Er… I mean, why the hell are they going… there?”

    I consider my current mission is to figure out how to contain our current oligarchy / kleptocracy without having to go all Teddy Roosevelt (not enough time to get rich, learn to big game hunt, and effectively say “Bully!”).

    Of course Michael Moore's too frumpy, too easy to attack, to be a decent Teddy.  Maybe a beloved sports star?  Jim Jordan would’ve been good had he not hit his head on the wrestling mat that time and suddenly started talking all wingnut.  Sad when that happens.  Maybe hit him again?

  32. My bad.  I’d forgotten how bizarre the pranks, punishments and dating rituals get on that side of the House.  I may have to skip dinner.

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