Election of 2012 - The Wrap-Up

Hurricane Sandy and what The Weather Channel is calling Winter Storm Athena (yeah, right) are behind me, as are my electrical and cable blackouts, but, even more thankfully, so is the travesty called the 2012 election campaign.  This election campaign, despite the pleasure I found in the outcome, was not pleasurable to go through, and I'm glad it's over. So, now that Barack Obama has been re-elected President, the House has stayed Republican, and the Senate has stayed Democratic, what's the take-away from all this, boys and girls?

Well . . .

First of all, let's get to the big race. Yes - Obama won! And he did it the old-fashioned way; he organized.  With stiff competition from Mitt Romney and big money from various Republican super-PACs, Obama targeted Democratic-leaning demographic groups with sharp focus, energizing people who had never voted before and giving them strong impetus to vote Democratic.  Meanwhile, Karl Rove spent millions of dollars of other people's money and Sheldon Adelson spent untold millions of dollars of his own money to produce a Romney presidency and an all-Republican Congress to institute one-party rule to be enforced by even more big money in the future.  All Rove and Adelson proved was that it's not how much money you spend that counts, it's how you spend it.  And they obviously threw money all over the place without any of it  doing anyone any good.

Spending your own money won't help you.  It may just hurt you.  Noted violence peddler Linda McMahon spent $42 billion of her own money in her bid for the U.S. Senate, blanketing the airwaves in Connecticut with ads tearing down Chris Murphy, her Democratic opponent.   Having seen and heard her TV and radio ads in New York City media - but seeing and hearing none of Murphy's - I thought it was an unfair fight.  But Connecticut voters got so tired of hearing her merciless attacks on Murphy they were led to vote for him instead.  As for why I never saw or heard a Murphy ad on New York TV and radio, I'm assuming that he didn't need Fairfield County (which the New York broadcast media reaches) so much as long he was competitive in the rest of the state.  Whatever his idea was, it clearly worked.  So does this mean we've heard the last of Linda McMahon? Don't bet on it; she's probably gearing up to buy the Connecticut governorship in 2014.

Democrats proved that, when an effective message, you can not only defend a Senate majority when you have twice as many of your seats as the Republicans up for election, you can win a Senate seat as well. A strong, sharp message, as well as a good ground game, allowed Elizabeth Warren to topple incumbent Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

An incompetent opponent can also help in expanding your majority.  The Democrats picked up a Republican Senate seat in Indiana, thanks to Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock's insensitive comments on pregnancies resulting from rape and Democratic candidate (now Senator-elect) Joe Donnelly's prudent decision to let Mourdock hang himself with his own rope.  This was pretty much how Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri saved her seat from Tea Party favorite Todd Akin, who also demonstrated a similar misunderstanding about rape-related pregnancies.  So, it seems, women do vote on women's health issues after all.

The country is changing demographically   One in three Americans are Hispanic or nonwhite, and non-Hispanic whites are a shrinking part of the electorate.  Republicans will continue to stoke fears of the de-Europeanization of America in the short term (even as they insist Obama is trying to make America more like Europe) and it may be too late by the time they go back to the commendable Bush-Rove strategy of reaching out to racial and non-European ethnic groups.

The country is getting more liberal as well.  The openly lesbian Tammy Baldwin was elected to the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin.  One in five U.S. Senate seats, along with the entire New Hampshire congressional delegation (plus that state's governorship), will be held be women.  Also, voters in Maryland and Maine approved gay marriage, and voters in Colorado and Washington State approved marijuana.  Now you can get high with a little help from friends - Amy and her wife Emily. ;-) 

Some politicians will put the interests of the people over the interests of their party.  Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey was a solid Romney backer, but when a hurricane devastated his beloved state and President Obama came to help, Christie worked with the President and helped put the Romney campaign out of sight and out of mind  to get recovery for the Garden State up and running.

Chris Matthews is a jerk.  He had the audacity to say that he was "glad" a hurricane that disrupted lives and took others and turned the Jersey Shore into a post-apocalyptic wasteland may have helped Obama win a second term.  How Matthews stays on the air after spewing out gaffes Keith Olbermann would never have made astonishes me.

Oh yeah, the results.  The House of Representatives will be comprised of 234 Republicans and 195 Democrats, with six races to be decided.  Speaker of the House John Boehner has used this outcome as an argument against raising taxes on all those "job creators" without noting that a continued Republican majority in the House was made possible by reapportionment benefiting Republican states and Republicans in states losing House delegates redistricting in the GOP's favor.  The Senate will be comprised of 53 Democrats, 45 Republicans, and 2 independents.  Bernard Sanders of Vermont, one of the independents, will caucus with the Democrats; the other independent, the newly elected Angus King of Maine, is expected to do the same.

And the presidential election? Here's the map: 

 

If you compare this to the electoral map I posted earlier on this blog, with my projections, you'll notice that I called every state right except Colorado and, now that the ballots have finally been counted there,  Florida.  Not a bad call. :-)

Whew. That's it for this election.  Next - the fiscal cliff story! (Later.)