Most of the midterm elections in the United States have been called. (more…)
Tag: US Elections 2018
Congressional elections were held in the United States on November 6. Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, but Republicans defended their majority in the Senate.
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The Election Is Almost Over: Most Races in America Have Been Called
United States Capitol in Washington DC (Shutterstock/Orhan Cam) -
The Election Isn’t Over: Counts and Recounts in America
Three days after midterm elections in the United States, the outcome in several states still hangs in the balance. (more…)
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Takeaways from the Midterm Elections in the United States
United States Capitol in Washington DC (Shutterstock/Orhan Cam) Democratic victories in America’s midterm elections on Tuesday lacked star power. Andrew Gillum and Beto O’Rourke failed to win their races in Florida and Texas, respectively. Stacey Abrams is behind in Georgia.
But none were favored to win. Nationally, Democrats did not have a bad night at all. (more…)
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What America’s Midterm Elections Mean for Europe
Skyline of Washington DC at night (Shutterstock) Congress doesn’t make foreign policy; the president does. So whether or not Donald Trump’s Republicans win or lose on Tuesday, America’s relations with its allies across the Atlantic are unlikely to change — for the better or worse. (more…)
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Election in Georgia Clouded by Racial and Voting Controversy
One of the most closely watched elections on Tuesday is in Georgia, where Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp are competing for the governorship.
Abrams led Democrats in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017 and is the first-ever female African American gubernatorial nominee of a major political party in the United States.
Kemp has been the secretary of state of Georgia since 2010. That puts him in charge of overseeing the very election he is hoping to win. (more…)
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Divided Congress After Midterm Elections in America
United States Capitol in Washington DC (Shutterstock/Brandon Bourdages) - Democrats are poised to take control of the House of Representatives after midterm elections in the United States.
- Republicans maintain a majority in the Senate.
- In addition to all 435 House and 35 Senate seats, 38 state and territorial governorships were contested. (more…)
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Beto O’Rourke Has Challenged the Stereotype of Texas
View of San Antonio, Texas from the Tower of the Americas (Unsplash/Chandra Maharzan) One of the most watched elections in the United States on Tuesday will be in Texas, where Democrat Beto O’Rourke is challenging the incumbent Republican senator, Ted Cruz.
The unexpectedly close contest — polls put Cruz 3 to 10 points ahead; he won by 16 points in 2012 — has revealed something many had forgotten: Texas is not, and never was, monolithic.
When people, especially non-Americans, think of Texas, they think of cowboys, oil and Republicans. For a quarter century, this narrative has held. Now it seems to be fracturing. A new, or perhaps the true, Texas is emerging. (more…)
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Steve King Is Awful, But Austria’s Freedom Party Is Not Neo-Nazi
For the first time in sixteen years, Republican congressman Steve King of Iowa seems vulnerable. The polling gurus at FiveThirtyEight still give him a five-in-six chance of winning reelection, but one recent survey had King tied with his Democratic challenger.
I don’t think it’s unfair to call King a white supremacist. He speaks about the superiority of Western civilization, argues that certain races work harder than others and worries that white women are not having enough babies to preserve the dominant culture of the United States.
Many journalists have become comfortable calling out such bigotry in the age of Trump, but sometimes they go too far. There are stories referring to King meeting with members of a “neo-Nazi party” in Austria. That party is the ruling Freedom Party, and calling it neo-Nazi is inaccurate. (more…)
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American Elections: Analysis and Opinion Blog
View of Washington DC with the United States Capitol in the distance, February 17, 2015 (Matt Popovich) - Americans vote in midterm elections on Tuesday, November 6.
- All 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate and 39 state and territorial governorships are contested. Many states also hold legislative elections. (more…)
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Donald Trump’s Strategy of Tension
Voters wait outside a convention center in Rochester, Minnesota, where American president Donald Trump is giving a speech, October 5 (Lorie Shaul) Matthew Yglesias argues in Vox that there is method to the right-wing madness in the United States.
The violence, and threats of violence, are the result of a Republican strategy, he argues, to foster a political debate that is centered on divisive questions of personal identity rather than on potentially unifying themes of material advancement.
The downside of this strategy is that it pushes American society to the breaking point. The upside for Republicans is that it facilitates policies that serve the interests of their wealthiest supporters. (more…)
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Republicans Are Making It Harder to Vote Across America
Night falls on the Texas State Capitol in Austin (Shutterstock/Ryan Conine) Republicans are making it harder to vote across America.
The Economist summarizes:
In some states voters have been “purged” from the rolls in overzealous clean-up efforts. Other states demand ever more documentary proof that people are eligible to vote. Well-off homeowners who drive cars and have passports barely notice such hurdles. But young, poor and ethnic-minority voters are more likely to crash into them. Often, this is not just an unfortunate side-effect of tighter voting rules; it is their intent.
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American Left Must Not Create Its Own Stab-in-the-Back Legend
The American left risks making the same mistake as the far right in blaming its political failures on the alleged impurity of its leaders.
The defeat of establishment-backed Democrats in New York and Massachusetts at the hands of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, respectively, is giving the left hope that America is finally ready for social democracy.
They wants Democrats to campaign on debt-free college education, Medicare-for-all, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and impeaching President Donald Trump.
They are appalled that Nancy Pelosi has promised to restore pay-as-you-go budgeting in a Democratic Congress — requiring spending cuts or tax increases to pay for new policies — fearing this will make overhauls of education, environmental law and health care impossible.
There are several problems with this attitude. (more…)
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New Figures Argue Democrats Should Target College Graduates in Suburbs
Suburb of Austin, Texas (Shutterstock/Roschetzky Photography) Amy Walter reports for The Cook Political Report that a Pew Research assessment of the 2016 electorate belies some of the insights we thought we had gleaned from that year’s exit polls:
- Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump didn’t actually split the white college-educated vote. Clinton bested Trump by 17 points.
- They did split the white women’s vote, 45-47 percent. Exit polls suggested Trump was more popular with white women.
- The exit polls probably overestimated the electorate’s share of white college graduates.
The revised figures argue that Trump hasn’t lost support from college-educated whites and white women. Fewer supported him to begin with.
The exit polls and Pew’s data do agree that Trump has lost support from white voters without a college degree: from 66-64 to 57 percent. (more…)
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Midterm Elections Likely to Deepen Blue-Red Divide in America
United States Capitol in Washington DC, January 15, 2017 (DoD/William Lockwood) Ronald Brownstein reports for CNN that the congressional elections in November are likely to deepen the divide between “blue” and “red” America:
Democrats seem likely to emerge … with a clear upper hand in highly urbanized House seats that are racially and religiously diverse, disproportionately white-collar and secular and connected to the globalized information economy. Republicans, in turn, could remain dominant in districts outside of urban centers that are preponderantly white, heavily blue-collar, more religiously traditional and reliant on manufacturing, agriculture and resource extraction.
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Rumors of a Democratic Civil War Are (Probably) Exaggerated
Axios warns that Democrats in the United States risk throwing away their advantage in November’s congressional elections if they nominate more left-wing candidates.
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leftist endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated incumbent congressman Joe Crowley in New York last week.
- Membership of the Democratic Socialists of America has ballooned from 7,000 to 37,000 since the 2016 election.
- 37 Democratic state legislators have been defeated by primary challengers so far.
It’s a little early to panic, but there is clearly a trend — and the fear is it will doom Democrats in the midterms, when, due to built-in disadvantages for their demographics and geographies, they need to defeat Republicans nationwide by around 7 percent to take back Congress. (more…)