Well, that was quite a night. Being a vaguely competent human adult, and a statistical nerd, I had very little doubt about the general outcome. And still, there’s always some nervousness. Add in a great deal of doubt about some really important state-level initiatives, and I had a lot to stress about.
And, at the end of the day, basically everything broke right. The polls were spot-on for the presidential and Senate races. Marijuana was legalized in two states. California managed to pass a tax to prevent itself from collapsing AND finally gave the Democrats a super-majority. Which means they could actually have just passed the tax anyways. But still, having clear popular commitment to it is a big deal.
And gay marriage. On November 5th, it had never been approved in a statewide vote of any kind. That’s an 0-32 record. But last night three states affirmed marriage equality, and Minnesota rejected a ban on it. More thoughts coming about this later tonight, but suffice to say, this is a Big F-ing Deal.
The Democrats grabbed a couple extra Senate seats, and held onto some that looked DOA six months ago. Thanks to a Republican Party that decided to pose the question: ‘rape…is it really that bad?’ But also thanks to Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Jon Tester in Montana. Heitkamp in particular kind of blew me away. I gave up on that one as soon as Conrad announced he was leaving and never really thought about it again.
Perhaps even more importantly, the Senate became a LOT more progressive. Again, I’ll have a full post about that up soon. But, the short version is that Elizabeth Warren is in the chamber, and Joe Lieberman is not.
Of course, the House remains in Republican hands (despite the Dems actually getting more net-votes – yay gerrymandering! yay federalism!), which is a bummer. And the initiative to eliminate the death penalty failed in California, but I wasn’t really expecting that to pass anyways.
Anyways, this wasn’t a ‘transformational’ election and the blue team didn’t win a ‘mandate.’ But even just preserving all the gains from Obama’s first term is a HUGE win for progressive values and human dignity. Most prominently, universal health care is now safe, probably forever.
There’s a lot of reasons to be cynical about the current state of American liberalism. But yesterday was a really good day.