Mustang
Gold Member
- Jan 15, 2010
- 9,257
- 3,230
Republicans who swept the Democrats from office last night, didn't run as a party with a stated agenda.
Many of the individual candidates ran on disagreeing with Obamacare and wanting it repealed. Others ran on the poor condition of the economy and the leftist actions that prolonged the recession for so long.
Overall, the election showed, not so much the people's approval of Republicans (which has been lukewarm for more than a decade), but on virulent rejection of President Obama and his agenda, his results, and his and ideology.
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2014 Midterms A complete rejection of President Obama his agenda and his leadership Fox News
Democrats and Republicans alike predicted that November 4 would be a big night for the GOP. The polling had indicated that the election – in the Senate and on the state level – was going to go their direction.
What began as cautious optimism has ended up just about as well as could have ever been expected. Even in races where Republicans didn’t end up with a victory, we saw closer races than predicted.
Tuesday night wasn’t about campaigns – it was about a deeply unpopular president. And it was about negativity and dirty tactics.
All in all, the net negative view of President Obama was over 30 points in battleground states.
This election represents a complete rejection of the president, his agenda and his leadership.
This is true in traditionally Republican states, but crucially in the states that defined his victory in both 2008 and 2012.
Newt Gingrich argued on CNN this evening that these tight races across the nation indicates that campaigns actually matter and that tonight is a good for American democracy.
I respectfully disagree. Tuesday night wasn’t about campaigns – it was about a deeply unpopular president, and American abhorrence of what he and his allies tried to do.
To this end, Tuesday night’s final result isn’t anything but deeply disheartening.
I see that the post-election analyses have begun.
Unfortunately, we can count on a couple of things to happen.
For one, we can count on Democrats to claim that this is NOT a rejection of their policies, per se.
Secondly, we can count on Republicans to claim that it IS a rejection of those polices and/or that it's an electoral embrace of conservative ideas and their governing philosophy.
However, there IS another even more likely possibility which bodes poorly for the country as a whole and is an indictment on the current state of politics and governance in America. It's a combination of apathy and disillusionment with the political process as a whole, gridlock in general, and politics as usual.
Since the US has a notoriously generally apathetic electorate which culminates in an embarrassingly low turnout of only about 53% of eligible voters in years when it's a presidential election year and even far less in off year elections, AND the fact that so many people are not engaged or invested in the process because they think their vote has little meaning, AND the fact that large amounts of money from undisclosed sources have been allowed to flood the process, AND the fact that people in generally are mostly completely turned off by all the negative campaign ads, AND the fact that a small highly energized segment of the electorate dictates not only who the nominees of their party will be but can determine the outcome of a general election, this election may have considerably more to do with a general disengagement of a majority of eligible voters than any kind of ideological rejection or support for any particular party or their policies.
But I fully expect everybody to put their own self-serving spin on the outcome in an effort to burnish the credibility of whatever their governing philosophy may be. With that said, it's almost a certainty that the Republicans will overreach in the reading of the results which frankly is not supported by the simple fact that the midterm turnout is so low.
And when push comes to shove, the Republicans will probably pass bills that they KNOW the president will not sign, and the gridlock will continue for another two years, just like it has for the last two years.