2023-2024 Presidential, senate, house, state and city election thread

[weatheriscool]

[caltrek]

Could it be...that the Wicked Witch of California (Kamala) has been forced to lift her evil spell on Brandon? Now that the great wizard Donald the Orange has vanquished the Witch-Queen, her corrupt magic is fading and Brandon's soul has been saved. Perhaps we will even see MAGA Brandon soon!

Another shallow attempt to portray conflict where there is none. When Harris assumed the role of candidate the polls showed her doing better than Biden. It just wasn’t good enough to beat Trump. She ran a flawless campaign. It was just that the information silo that includes Fox and Sky News was too big and too powerful to overcome. I suspect both Biden and Obama realize this.

[raklian]

So this means if Trump wants to implement an extreme agenda, he won't get it. If the above predictions for the House are accurate, the Republicans have a narrower majority than they had in the previous Congress. The more extreme the proposals, the less likely they'll pass.

[caltrek]

Congress’ Longest Serving Woman May Eke Out a Win
by Rachel Barber
November 8, 2024

Introduction:

(USA Today) Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, has been in Congress for 41 years. As the legislature’s longest-serving woman, the 78-year-old Democrat is looking to win another term by defeating her Republican opponent, Derek Merrin.

Theirs is one of the closest matchups left to be called. As of Friday morning, Kaptur was ahead by 0.3 percentage points with 99% of votes in.

Read more here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/po ... 25967007/

[caltrek]

Representative Don Bacon Keeps His Seat in 'Blue Dot' Nebraska
by Savannah Kuchar and Maya Marchel Hoff
November 8, 2024

Introduction:

(USA Today) Republican Rep. Don Bacon will serve a fifth term in Congress representing Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, according to the Associated Press, which called his race at 6:11 p.m. EST Friday. He beat Democratic challenger and state Sen. Tony Vargas by 2.4 points.

Bacon’s margin of victory in 2024 is just below his win two years ago, when he also faced Vargas and won by 2.6 percentage points. In this year’s May primary, he fended off hardline conservative and Omaha businessman Dan Frei, who had the backing of Nebraska’s state party.

The district, encompassing Omaha and area west of the city, earned the nickname “blue dot” after going for Biden by over six points in 2020.

Read more here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/po ... 5967007/

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

Harris was always a joke. Biden would have been stronger...Period

[caltrek]

More on that: https://www.klcc.org/politics-governmen ... -district

[caltrek]

Democrat Jacky Rosen Wins Re-Election in Close Nevada Senate Race
by Theo Berman
November 9, 2024

Introduction:

(Newsweek) Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen won re-election in Nevada, even as President-elect Donald Trump expanded his Electoral College victory by flipping the state red.

Rosen, who was first elected to the Senate in 2018, narrowly defeated Republican challenger Sam Brown by 1.4 percentage points. The Associated Press called the race for Rosen at 12:15 a.m. ET on Saturday.

Rosen campaigned heavily on abortion rights and positioned herself as a non-ideological politician, a formula that also worked for the state's senior senator, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, in her own re-election bid two years ago.

Read more here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politic ... bArticle

Edit: More on that from Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... lection/

[firestar464]

WSJ- Harris Fundraising Fine Print Signals Recount Effort

https://archive.ph/kB28J

TBH, I dunno what this is for. She got crushed badly in more ways than one. Could it be for downballot races? I really don't know how this is gonna work

[weatheriscool]

CA27 George Whitesides pulls ahead of Mike Garcia!

This is a huge pickup!

About 20% left to count but will be heavily Democratic.

Whitesides (D) 50.40%
Garcia (R)49.60%

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... se-27.html

[Bird]

An absolute thumping.
With how off my predictions for this election were, I reckon I'm done trying to predict them for the foreseeable future. Plenty of polls did show Trump in the lead, yes, but I don't think I would ever have expected such a decisive victory.

[Cyber_Rebel]

Harris was always a joke. Biden would have been stronger...Period

Or it would've simply been worse without a change in outcome. Really, at this point I have doubts even Bernie Sanders would've been that much different aside from the debates.

Biden was elected in an anti-incumbency era same as now, and it's very possible without the Covid-19 pandemic Trump would've been re-elected in 2020 anyways. America is just not Canada or the EU, and the electorate has very different priorities, or at least ways in seeing the world.

This might've been posted before, but more on the anti-incumbency sentiment globally: Donald Trump's Big Election Win Is Part of a Major Global Trend

(At least now the "keys" person can finally just retire)

[caltrek]

Pennsylvania Senate Race Called for Republican David McCormick
by Peter Aiken
Updated November 8, 2024

Introduction:

(Newsweek) Republicans continued to grow their majority in the Senate after news outlets projected challenger Dave McCormick to unseat Democratic Senator Bob Casey, flipping another seat even as the race remains close enough to possibly trigger a recount.

The Associated Press called the race for McCormick at around 4:09 p.m. ET on November 7 after earlier saying that Casey still had a "narrow path to victory" with 97 percent of the vote counted.

McCormick's communications director, Elizabeth Gregory, said in a press release that he has a lead of just over 30,000 votes and that the remaining votes to count will not break strongly enough for Casey to make up the difference.

"While votes continue to be counted, any way you slice it, Dave McCormick will be the next United States Senator from Pennsylvania," Gregory said, pointing to Cambria County as one area that could provide a firewall against a last-minute surge from Casey.

Cambria County suffered an Election Day setback because of a voting system malfunction, resulting in a necessary hand count, according to The Tribune-Democrat in Johnstown.

Read more here: https://www.newsweek.com/pennsylvania- ... e-1982289

[caltrek]

Why Did Trump Really Win? It’s Simple, Actually.
by Michale Mechanic
November 7, 2024

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) In the coming days, you will hear every imaginable take on why Americans voted to put Donald Trump back in office.

Pundits will say toxic masculinity was to blame—and men feeling usurped by women. They’ll say it was the Christian nationalism movement. A surprising shift in Latino voting patterns. Sexism. Racism. Transphobia. Elon Musk. Crypto bros. “Theo bros.” Housing prices. Gaza! Propaganda from Fox News and Newsmax. Misinformation on X.

Perhaps it was the cowardice of powerful men like Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon. The anti-immigrant frenzy—Trump’s incessant false claims about vicious murderers and rapists and mental patients swarming across the border like locusts. Property crime. Inflation. Interest rates. Lingering malaise from the pandemic. The Democrats’ failure to sell their economic wins. Kamala Harris’ inability to distance herself from an unpopular president.

Or maybe a combination of all these things. Gender and Gaza clearly made a difference. Inflation is a notorious regime killer—it was high inflation that underpinned the rise of fascism in Europe in the last century—and rising wages haven’t kept pace. When the Dems say, “Look, inflation is back to normal,” well, the price of groceries sure ain’t.

But I’m talking here about something even more basic, something that undergirds so much of America’s discontent. The best explanation, after all, is often the simplest:

Wealth inequality.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... ite-house

[caltrek]

The Debate Over Why Harris Lost is in Full Swing. Here’s a guide.
by Andrew Prokop
November 9, 2024

Introduction:

(Vox) Democrats have faced a bitterly disappointing defeat, and the debate is on about why that happened.

Amid the opportunistic finger-pointing and evidence-free assertions that Vice President Kamala Harris could have won if only she had done this or that, there is a genuine search for explanations about what happened. The answer Democrats find most persuasive could greatly influence the party’s direction as it tries to win again.

This debate will clearly go on for some time, and disentangling causality is difficult. But one way to think about it is to break up the question.

How much of the defeat was about Harris’s weakness as a candidate or her campaign strategy? How much was about Donald Trump’s strengths? How much was about Joe Biden’s record? How much was the Democratic Party brand generally? And how much was due to larger structural factors like a global anti-incumbent trend?

It’s possible that all of these played some role in the outcome, especially because issues like inflation can resonate across them all. But let’s go through them.

Read more here: https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/383 ... rump-won

[weatheriscool]

[Tadasuke]

An article on how to deal with disappointment, for example over election results, can be useful:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ent/680520

[caltrek]

Democrat April McClain Delaney wins a U.S. House Seat in a Competitive Maryland Race
by Lea Skene
November 9, 2024

Introduction:

(ABC) BALTIMORE -- Democrat April McClain Delaney narrowly won a U.S. House seat in Maryland’s most competitive congressional races that came to focus on reproductive rights and the economy.

The state’s sprawling 6th Congressional District covers a wide swath of rural Maryland as well as more affluent liberal suburbs of Washington, D.C. The close race wasn’t called until Saturday, four days after Election Day.

McClain Delaney, who declared victory Friday, said in a statement that she is “deeply honored and humbled” by the trust the voters have placed in her.

“Since the beginning of this campaign, our message has been clear: it’s time for common sense, common ground leadership that puts people over politics, defends our freedoms and values, and builds a future centered on unity,” she said.

A mother of four daughters whose husband previously represented the district, McClain Delaney campaigned heavily on issues impacting women. She pledged to protect reproductive freedoms in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to end the constitutional right to an abortion and leave those decisions to individual states.

Read more here: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/de ... 15703904

[firestar464]

This explains it