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Agree, but the leftists are planting the seed into their agenda for their sheeple to demand. A new 'issue'. It's ridiculous but what do we expect from Boxer.....
Democrat introducing bill to abolish Electoral College
(Here come the Demons - thank god Boxer is retiring. Unfortunately, her replacement is an extreme leftist and could be there for the next quarter century)
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) will introduce legislation on Tuesday to get rid of the Electoral College, after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election despite leading in the popular vote.
"In my lifetime, I have seen two elections where the winner of the general election did not win the popular vote," Boxer said in a statement. "In 2012, Donald Trump tweeted, 'The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy. I couldn't agree more. One person, one vote!"
She added that Clinton, whom she supported, is "on track to have received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history except Barack Obama."
"The Electoral College is an outdated, undemocratic system that does not reflect our modern society, and it needs to change immediately," she said.
Clinton is currently leading Trump by nearly a million votes, according to a Cook Political Report tracker of the national popular vote, but Trump won the Electoral College, leading the former secretary of State 290-232.
According to Pew, Clinton would be the fifth person to win the popular vote, but lose the election.
Boxer's legislation would amend the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College. Even if it is approved by Congress it would need to be approved by three-fourths of the states within seven years before it would take effect.
Trump called the Electoral College "genius" on Tuesday morning, despite past criticism.
The tweet comes after Trump said during a "60 Minutes" interview on Sunday that he still has issues with the Electoral College.
"I'm not going to change my mind just because I won," the president-elect said. "But I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democrat-introducing-bill-to-abolish-electoral-college/ar-AAkkFUW?li=BBnb7Kz
Democrat introducing bill to abolish Electoral College
(Here come the Demons - thank god Boxer is retiring. Unfortunately, her replacement is an extreme leftist and could be there for the next quarter century)
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) will introduce legislation on Tuesday to get rid of the Electoral College, after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election despite leading in the popular vote.
"In my lifetime, I have seen two elections where the winner of the general election did not win the popular vote," Boxer said in a statement. "In 2012, Donald Trump tweeted, 'The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy. I couldn't agree more. One person, one vote!"
She added that Clinton, whom she supported, is "on track to have received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history except Barack Obama."
"The Electoral College is an outdated, undemocratic system that does not reflect our modern society, and it needs to change immediately," she said.
Clinton is currently leading Trump by nearly a million votes, according to a Cook Political Report tracker of the national popular vote, but Trump won the Electoral College, leading the former secretary of State 290-232.
According to Pew, Clinton would be the fifth person to win the popular vote, but lose the election.
Boxer's legislation would amend the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College. Even if it is approved by Congress it would need to be approved by three-fourths of the states within seven years before it would take effect.
Trump called the Electoral College "genius" on Tuesday morning, despite past criticism.
The tweet comes after Trump said during a "60 Minutes" interview on Sunday that he still has issues with the Electoral College.
"I'm not going to change my mind just because I won," the president-elect said. "But I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democrat-introducing-bill-to-abolish-electoral-college/ar-AAkkFUW?li=BBnb7Kz
Not only did we stop Hillary, we're.............
from my camera at an event
A Clinton-Free Democratic Party
With the era of the Clintons now over, Democrats should feel liberated.
Blame Monica Lewinsky.
More precisely, for Democrats wondering how their party ended up in the ditch, Bill Clinton’s sexual dalliance with a then-22-year-old intern is an excellent place to start. Because it’s clear in retrospect that the most significant aftermath of l’affaire Lewinsky was not the subsequent impeachment of President Clinton but the death of the New Democrat movement that was until then driving his administration.
Now, there’s always been more than a little mythmaking about Mr. Clinton’s political moderation. Notwithstanding some campaign rhetoric and a stint as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council when he was governor, there wasn’t much sign of the New Democrat in President Clinton until Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans gave him a drubbing in 1994. Before Republicans took the House and reset the national agenda with their “Contract with America,” the “moderate” President Clinton had reneged on his promise of a middle-class tax cut and tried to push through the unpopular HillaryCare bill.
But give the Big Dawg his due. When the Republicans took Congress, he had the wit to recognize he’d been too far in front of the American people. So instead of fighting the GOP agenda he tried to co-opt it, especially on the economy.
The result? With the exception of the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in 1993, the achievements of the Bill Clinton presidency date mostly from after the Republican revolution and include welfare reform and repeal of the Glass-Steagall restrictions separating commercial from investment banking. As Mr. Clinton himself put it in the 1996 State of the Union, “the era of big government is over.”
So what happened? In a word, Monica.
When the Lewinsky scandal broke, it was the New Democrats such as Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman who were Mr. Clinton’s chief critics within the party. By contrast, the Democrats who came to Mr. Clinton’s rescue were liberal stalwarts such as Reps. Barney Frank and John Conyers.
Democrats have been tacking left ever since. Yes, Barack Obama in 2008 campaigned as a moderate, but he never governed that way. What marks this year’s Democratic primary was how antediluvian it all was: a battle between Mrs. Clinton and an aging socialist, each trying to outdo the other in how much he/she would tax, spend and redistribute.
Now Mrs. Clinton has lost to an outsider many on both sides confidently declared could never be elected—and the recriminations are starting. This is standard fare for a party after an unsuccessful presidential campaign, and the GOP would be doing the same had Mr. Trump lost.
But a full accounting of the Democratic Party’s failed bid for the White House must also reckon with the party’s even more profound collapse at the state level. Notwithstanding the idea that the Obama coalition represents America’s future, the political reality is that over the Obama years Republicans more than doubled the number of state legislatures they control and now boast more governors than they’ve had in almost a century.
With Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders holding the heart of the party, the room for the type of New Democrat rethink of the early 1990s seems small. Still, for Democrats the defeat of the Clintons should be liberating. Ever since the Monica scandals, Democrats have found themselves excusing the inexcusable on everything from sex in the Oval Office (his) to private email servers in the Chappaqua basement (hers).
When Mr. Clinton won the presidency in 1992, it helped that he was a governor from Arkansas and not a Washington fixture. Since then, however, the party has become much more Beltway oriented. At a time when the top two concerns of the American people are keeping us safe from attack and fixing a sluggish economy that has left record numbers of Americans out of work, the Democratic Party is preoccupied with overturning the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and upholding the Planned Parenthood view of abortion right up to the minute of birth. Outside a New York or D.C. newsroom, it turns out that these aren’t nearly as popular as Democrats and their allies in the newsrooms think.
The good news for Democrats is that the Clinton hold is now broken. For the next year or two, this will mean a spell in the wilderness where everyone points fingers. Even so, one day there will be a new campaign. And the departure of the Clintons opens the door for other Democrats, including Democratic governors not yet in office, who would never have had a prayer so long as Bill and Hillary dominated the show.
The challenge for the Democratic Party is this: Mrs. Clinton lost an election in good part because she repudiated the compromises with Republicans that accounted for her husband’s greatest achievements as president—but she never would have been nominated if she hadn’t.
Write to McGurn@wsj.com.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-clinton-free-democratic-party-1479168405
A Clinton-Free Democratic Party
With the era of the Clintons now over, Democrats should feel liberated.
Blame Monica Lewinsky.
More precisely, for Democrats wondering how their party ended up in the ditch, Bill Clinton’s sexual dalliance with a then-22-year-old intern is an excellent place to start. Because it’s clear in retrospect that the most significant aftermath of l’affaire Lewinsky was not the subsequent impeachment of President Clinton but the death of the New Democrat movement that was until then driving his administration.
Now, there’s always been more than a little mythmaking about Mr. Clinton’s political moderation. Notwithstanding some campaign rhetoric and a stint as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council when he was governor, there wasn’t much sign of the New Democrat in President Clinton until Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans gave him a drubbing in 1994. Before Republicans took the House and reset the national agenda with their “Contract with America,” the “moderate” President Clinton had reneged on his promise of a middle-class tax cut and tried to push through the unpopular HillaryCare bill.
But give the Big Dawg his due. When the Republicans took Congress, he had the wit to recognize he’d been too far in front of the American people. So instead of fighting the GOP agenda he tried to co-opt it, especially on the economy.
The result? With the exception of the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in 1993, the achievements of the Bill Clinton presidency date mostly from after the Republican revolution and include welfare reform and repeal of the Glass-Steagall restrictions separating commercial from investment banking. As Mr. Clinton himself put it in the 1996 State of the Union, “the era of big government is over.”
So what happened? In a word, Monica.
When the Lewinsky scandal broke, it was the New Democrats such as Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman who were Mr. Clinton’s chief critics within the party. By contrast, the Democrats who came to Mr. Clinton’s rescue were liberal stalwarts such as Reps. Barney Frank and John Conyers.
Democrats have been tacking left ever since. Yes, Barack Obama in 2008 campaigned as a moderate, but he never governed that way. What marks this year’s Democratic primary was how antediluvian it all was: a battle between Mrs. Clinton and an aging socialist, each trying to outdo the other in how much he/she would tax, spend and redistribute.
Now Mrs. Clinton has lost to an outsider many on both sides confidently declared could never be elected—and the recriminations are starting. This is standard fare for a party after an unsuccessful presidential campaign, and the GOP would be doing the same had Mr. Trump lost.
But a full accounting of the Democratic Party’s failed bid for the White House must also reckon with the party’s even more profound collapse at the state level. Notwithstanding the idea that the Obama coalition represents America’s future, the political reality is that over the Obama years Republicans more than doubled the number of state legislatures they control and now boast more governors than they’ve had in almost a century.
With Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders holding the heart of the party, the room for the type of New Democrat rethink of the early 1990s seems small. Still, for Democrats the defeat of the Clintons should be liberating. Ever since the Monica scandals, Democrats have found themselves excusing the inexcusable on everything from sex in the Oval Office (his) to private email servers in the Chappaqua basement (hers).
When Mr. Clinton won the presidency in 1992, it helped that he was a governor from Arkansas and not a Washington fixture. Since then, however, the party has become much more Beltway oriented. At a time when the top two concerns of the American people are keeping us safe from attack and fixing a sluggish economy that has left record numbers of Americans out of work, the Democratic Party is preoccupied with overturning the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and upholding the Planned Parenthood view of abortion right up to the minute of birth. Outside a New York or D.C. newsroom, it turns out that these aren’t nearly as popular as Democrats and their allies in the newsrooms think.
The good news for Democrats is that the Clinton hold is now broken. For the next year or two, this will mean a spell in the wilderness where everyone points fingers. Even so, one day there will be a new campaign. And the departure of the Clintons opens the door for other Democrats, including Democratic governors not yet in office, who would never have had a prayer so long as Bill and Hillary dominated the show.
The challenge for the Democratic Party is this: Mrs. Clinton lost an election in good part because she repudiated the compromises with Republicans that accounted for her husband’s greatest achievements as president—but she never would have been nominated if she hadn’t.
Write to McGurn@wsj.com.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-clinton-free-democratic-party-1479168405
No problem, glad we're on this. We don't want to be 'ruled' by millennials and states are going out of their way to let them destroy the country. Zero people protested against BO being elected. These crybabies need to grow up. Shows us why they are still living in their parent's basements.
New voter rule: If you are unemployed, not in school and live in your parents basement and are 25 yrs or older, you can't vote. How about a proof of employment card or 'in school card' for millennials?......
More than half of arrested anti-Trump protesters didn't vote in Oregon
PORTLAND, Ore. — More than half of the anti-Trump protesters arrested in Portland didn’t vote in Oregon, according to state election records.
At least sixty-nine demonstrators either didn’t turn in a ballot or weren’t registered to vote in the state.
KGW compiled a list of the 112 people arrested by the Portland Police Bureau during recent protests. Those names and ages, provided by police, were then compared to state voter logs by Multnomah County Elections officials.
Records show 34 of the protesters arrested didn’t return a ballot for the November 8 election. Thirty-five of the demonstrators taken into custody weren’t registered to vote in Oregon.
Twenty-five protesters who were arrested did vote.
KGW is still working to verify voting records for the remaining 17 protesters who were arrested.
This article originally stated that 35 people were registered to vote and did not. One woman who was arrested told KGW she recently moved to Washington and did vote in Washington. She was also registered to vote in Oregon.
http://www.kgw.com/news/local/more-than-half-of-arrested-anti-trump-protesters-didnt-vote/351964445
More than half of arrested anti-Trump protesters didn't vote in Oregon
PORTLAND, Ore. — More than half of the anti-Trump protesters arrested in Portland didn’t vote in Oregon, according to state election records.
At least sixty-nine demonstrators either didn’t turn in a ballot or weren’t registered to vote in the state.
KGW compiled a list of the 112 people arrested by the Portland Police Bureau during recent protests. Those names and ages, provided by police, were then compared to state voter logs by Multnomah County Elections officials.
Records show 34 of the protesters arrested didn’t return a ballot for the November 8 election. Thirty-five of the demonstrators taken into custody weren’t registered to vote in Oregon.
Twenty-five protesters who were arrested did vote.
KGW is still working to verify voting records for the remaining 17 protesters who were arrested.
This article originally stated that 35 people were registered to vote and did not. One woman who was arrested told KGW she recently moved to Washington and did vote in Washington. She was also registered to vote in Oregon.
http://www.kgw.com/news/local/more-than-half-of-arrested-anti-trump-protesters-didnt-vote/351964445
Yes, Canada is considering building a wall.....
Do You Understand the Electoral College?
https://www.prageru.com/courses/political-science/do-you-understand-electoral-college
Here in CA, we are destroying ourselves through legislation, laws being deciding through the ballot vs through our state government.
Do You Understand the Electoral College?
https://www.prageru.com/courses/political-science/do-you-understand-electoral-college
Here in CA, we are destroying ourselves through legislation, laws being deciding through the ballot vs through our state government.
When People Laughed At The Idea Of Trump Actually Being Elected President! [Compilation]
When People Laughed At The Idea Of Trump Actually Being Elected President! [Compilation]
The Sunday leftist shows are going crazy. Guess reality is too much for them, PEOPLE DON'T LIKE HILLARY!!!!
Good clip here:
Trump gets to port (WH), Clinton never makes it, lost at sea in her Foundation ship of fools. Toss in Chelsea along with the rest of the crew.
Forgot to change my siggy. Here's the ship. Put Clinton and Soros on the ship with them.
Arrest them, put them on a prison ship in the Atlantic that never reaches port.
We know him, sat with him at an event last week, is a Hoover Fellow and in the Central Valley farmer. He hosts tours in Europe and we have gone on a few. Were at Normandy on Memorial Day for example. Went to an EU meeting. Takes people to significant historical sites and has scholars that come to fill in the detail of the significance of each location. Great writer. You can find his articles on the Hoover site and sign up to receive the Hoover Daily Report. Good info.
Donald Trump: 290 electoral votes and 59.23 million votes Hillary Clinton: 232 electoral votes and 59.41 million votes (if not CA, Trump runs away with it)
Senate: 52 Republicans, 47 Democrats (loss of one for Republicans)
House: 237 Republicans, 193 Democrats (loss of seven for Republicans)
Governor: 33 Republicans, 14 Democrats (gain of three for Republicans)
State legislatures: Republicans now control more than two-thirds of all chambers.
The final numbers aren't required until 11/18 so the 'counting' mischief will continue until then.
Why Trump Won
by Victor Davis Hanson
Friday, November 11, 2016
Throughout the course of the 2016 election, the conventional groupthink was that the renegade Donald Trump had irrevocably torn apart the Republican Party. His base populism supposedly sandbagged more experienced and electable Republican candidates, who were bewildered that a “conservative” would dare to pander to hoi polloi by promising deportations of illegal aliens, renegotiation of trade agreements that “ripped off” working people, and a messy attack on the reigning political correctness.
It was also a common complaint that Trump had neither political nor military experience. He trash-talked his way into the nomination, critics said, which led to defections among the outraged Republican elite. By August, a #NeverTrump movement had taken root among many conservatives, including some at National Review, The Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal. Many neoconservatives who formerly supported President George W. Bush flipped parties, openly supporting the Clinton candidacy.
Trump’s Republican critics variously disparaged him as, at best, a Huey Long or Ross Perot, whose populist message was antithetical to conservative principles of unrestricted trade, open-border immigration, and proper personal comportment. At worse, a few Republican elites wrote Trump off as a dangerous fascist akin to Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler.
For his part, Trump often sounded bombastic and vulgar. By October, after the Access Hollywood video went viral, many in the party were openly calling for him to step down. Former primary rivals like Jeb Bush and John Kasich reneged on their past oaths to support the eventual Republican nominee and turned on Trump with a vengeance.
By the end of the third debate, it seemed as if Trump had carjacked the Republican limousine and driven it off a cliff. His campaign seemed indifferent to the usual stuff of an election run—high-paid handlers, a ground game, polling, oppositional research, fundraising, social media, establishment endorsements, and celebrity guest appearances at campaign rallies. Pundits ridiculed his supposedly “shallow bench” of advisors, a liability that would necessitate him crawling back to the Republican elite for guidance at some point.
What was forgotten in all this hysteria was that Trump had brought to the race unique advantages, some of his own making, some from finessing naturally occurring phenomena. His advocacy for fair rather than free trade, his insistence on enforcement of federal immigration law, and promises to bring back jobs to the United States brought back formerly disaffected Reagan Democrats, white working-class union members, and blue-dog Democrats—the “missing Romney voters”—into the party. Because of that, the formidable wall of rich electoral blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina crumbled.
Beyond that, even Trump’s admitted crudity was seen by many as evidence of a street-fighting spirit sorely lacking in Republican candidates that had lost too magnanimously in 1992, 2008, and 2016 to vicious Democratic hit machines. Whatever Trump was, he would not lose nobly, but perhaps pull down the rotten walls of the Philistines with him. That Hillary Clinton never got beyond her email scandals, the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation wrongdoing, and the Wikileaks and Guccifer hackings reminded the electorate that whatever Trump was or had done, he at least had not brazenly broken federal law as a public servant, or colluded with the media and the Republican National Committee to undermine the integrity of the primaries and sabotage his Republican rivals.
Finally, the more Clinton Inc. talked about the Latino vote, the black vote, the gay vote, the woman vote, the more Americans tired of the same old identity politics pandering. What if minority bloc voters who had turned out for Obama might not be as sympathetic to a middle-aged, multimillionaire white woman? And what if the working white classes might flock to the politically incorrect populist Trump in a way that they would not to a leftist elitist like Hillary Clinton? In other words, the more Clinton played the identity politics card, the more she earned fewer returns for herself and more voters for Trump.
In the end, the #NeverTrump movement fizzled, and most of the party rightly saw, after putting aside the matter of his character, that Trump’s agenda was conservative in almost every area—immigration, energy, gun rights, taxes and regulation, abortion, health care, and military spending. In areas of doubt—foreign policy and entitlements—voters reasoned that sober and judicious Republican advisors would surround and enlighten Trump.
As a result, Republican voters, along with working class Democrats and Independents voted into power a Republican President, Republican Congress, and, in essence, a Republican judiciary. Trump’s cunning and energy, and his unique appeal to the disaffected white working class, did not destroy the Republican down ballot, but more likely saved it. Senators and Representatives followed in Trump’s wake, as did state legislatures and executive officers. Any Republican senatorial candidate who voted for him won election; any who did not, lost. Trump got a greater percentage of Latinos, blacks, and non-minority women than did Romney, and proved to be medicine rather than poison for Republican candidates. With hindsight, it is hard to fathom how any other Republican candidate might have defeated Clinton Inc.—or how, again with hindsight, the Party could be in a stronger, more unified position.
In contrast, the Democratic Party is torn and rent. Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with both houses of Congress, two likely Supreme Court picks, and the good will of the nation. By 2010 he had lost the House; by 2012, the Senate. And by 2016, Obama had ensured that his would-be successor could not win by running on his platform.
A failed health care law, non-existent economic growth, serial zero interest rates, near record labor non-participation rates, $20 trillion in national debt, a Middle East in ruins, failed reset and redlines, and the Iran deal were albatrosses around Democratic Party’s neck. Obama divided the country with the apology tour, the Cairo Speech, the beer summit, the rhetoric of disparagement (“you didn’t build that,” “punish our enemies,” etc.), the encouragement of the Black Lives Matter movement, and a series of anti-Constitutional executive orders.
In other words, even as Obama left the Democrats with ideological and political detritus, he also had established an electoral calculus built on his own transformative identity that neither had coattails nor was transferrable to other candidates. Indeed, his hard-left positions on redistribution, social issues, sanctuary cities, amnesty, foreign policy, and spending would likely doom candidates other than himself who embraced them.
The Bernie Sanders candidacy was the natural response, on the left, to Obama’s ideological presidency. But the cranky socialist septuagenarian mesmerized primary voters on platitudes that would have proven disastrous in a general election—before meekly whining about Clinton sabotage and then endorsing the ticket. What then has the Democratic Party become other than a hard left and elite progressive force, which without Obama’s personal appeal to bloc-voting minorities, resonates with only about 40 percent of the country?
The Democratic Party is now neither a centrist nor a coalition party. Instead, it finds itself at a dead-end: had Hillary Clinton emulated her husband’s pragmatic politics of the 1990s, she would have never won the nomination—even though she would have had a far better chance of winning the general election.
Wikileaks reminded us that the party is run by rich, snobbish, and often ethically bankrupt grandees. In John Podesta’s world, it’s normal and acceptable for Democratic apparatchiks to talk about their stock portfolios and name-drop the Hamptons, while making cruel asides about “needy” Latinos, medieval Catholics, and African-Americans with silly names—who are nonetheless expected to keep them in power. Such paradoxes are not sustainable. Nor is the liberal nexus of colluding journalists, compromised lobbyists, narcissistic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, family dynasties, and Clintonian get-rich ethics.
The old blue-collar middle class was bewildered by the leftwing social agenda in which gay marriage, women in combat units, and transgendered restrooms went from possible to mandatory party positions in an eye blink. In a party in which “white privilege” was pro forma disparagement, those who were both white and without it grew furious that the elites with such privilege massaged the allegation to provide cover for their own entitlement.
In the aftermath of defeat, where goes the Democratic Party?
It is now a municipal party. It has no real power over the federal government or state houses. Its once feared cudgel of race/class/gender invective has become a false wolf call heard one too many times. The Sanders-Warren branch of the party, along with the now discredited Clinton strays, will hover over the party’s carcass. Meanwhile, President Obama will likely ride off into the sunset to a lucrative globe-trotting ex-presidency. His executive orders will systematically be dismantled by Donald Trump, leaving as his legacy a polarizing electoral formula that had a shelf life of just two terms.
http://www.hoover.org/research/why-trump-won
I think of them as dandruff......
Trump needs to brush them off and move forward.
Their leader was defeated and they're living up to their script.
The left has a message that America doesn't agree with:
Green is good.
We were fighting a significant election battle. And we won.
That alone is honoring all our veterans.
Republicans Expand Control in a Deeply Divided Nation
SOMERS, Wis. — It is the stunning paradox of American politics. In a bitterly divided nation, where Tuesday’s vote once again showed a country almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, one party now dominates almost everything in American governance.
With Donald J. Trump’s win, Republicans will soon control the White House, both chambers of Congress, the tilt of the Supreme Court, more state legislative chambers than any time in history, and more governor’s offices than they have held in nearly a century.
Republican leaders say that shift — to a level of one-party control that some historians said the Republicans have not seen since the 1920s — will finally end gridlock in now-divided Washington. They say it will allow the party to charge forward on pledges to change policies on health care, immigration and taxes, and expedite changes that have long been sought in the states. Democrats say the change has the potential to undo years of legislation meant to ensure a more equitable America, upend progress fighting climate change, leave millions stranded without health insurance and usher in harsh laws against immigrants.
Experts said that no one thing likely handed the Republicans so much power, even in places like this that were once reliably blue. The current power balance reflects, among other things, the extraordinary dynamics of a race featuring a television-savvy outsider against the first female major party nominee, the vagaries of turnout in a nation where roughly half of registered voters cast ballots, the systematic redrawing of political maps in ways that favored Republicans, and frustration among voters over lost jobs, low wages and the nation’s changing racial and ethnic mix.
“That’s just the way it broke,” said Tim Storey, an elections expert at the National Conference of State Legislatures. “Republicans thought they were playing defense, and Democrats thought that it was going to be a good year for them, but Republicans outpaced them and came out as strong as they went in, all across the board.”
At the state level, the outcome means 24 states will be under full Republican control in legislatures and governor’s offices, clearing the way for new policy. Only six states will now have legislatures and governor’s offices exclusively dominated by Democrats, Mr. Storey said.
Matt Walter, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, said the Republican sweep has been mounting for years, particularly in state legislatures, where Republicans have grown increasingly dominant since 2010. During President Obama’s time in office, Democratic state lawmakers lost more than 800 legislative seats.
“The personalities this time were so big and the drama was so big and so rapidly changing and consumed so many people’s attention that it in some respects blinded them to this trend line that this has been bubbling up for many years,” Mr. Walter said. “It really is the manifestation of this change that we’ve been seeing bubbling up from the bottom for many cycles now.”
In theory, one-party control in a divided nation might spur lawmakers to find bipartisan answers to bipartisan problems. But few people expect that. In Wisconsin, where Republicans took hold of state government years ago though the populace remained somewhat split politically, the political leaders have done the opposite — pressing forward with a conservative agenda that has included hard-fought measures to reduce labor power, limit abortions and add restrictions on voting that disproportionately affect Democratic constituencies.
On Tuesday, Wisconsinites chose a Republican for president, something they had not done since 1984, propelled by worries over the economy and a desire to shake up Washington. Mr. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by about 1 percentage point, or about 27,000 votes. Some voters here said that they were encouraged by a flip to Republican control of Wisconsin’s state Legislature and governor’s office six years ago, and favored Mr. Trump in the hopes that he would deliver more of the same to the nation.
“Since 2011, we have made decisions one after another — some controversial, many, many bipartisan — to move Wisconsin forward,” Robin Vos, the speaker of the state Assembly, said on Wednesday. “And I think that’s the model that we want to use as we go to look at what Washington, D.C., should do. Stick to your principles. Remember the people who actually sent you to get things done.”
Wisconsin’s state-level switch to Republican control was not without a battle. In 2011, thousands of demonstrators furiously protested efforts to limit labor union power, including sharply cutting collective bargaining rights for most public-sector workers. Gov. Scott Walker soon faced a recall election, which he won. Labor unions shrank significantly in the state, and the Republicans pressed on with other parts of their agenda, including voter ID requirements and redrawing political maps. On Tuesday night, the Wisconsin Legislature remained firmly in the hands of Republicans, including what leaders described as their largest majority in the Assembly since 1956.
“The Republicans didn’t work with the Democrats at all,” said Chris Larson, a state senator, who was among a group of Democratic lawmakers who fled to Illinois for weeks in 2011 in an unsuccessful attempt to block passage of the collective-bargaining cuts. “They came in and just did everything as fast as they could. They jammed through everything. And pretty quickly, they had everything they wanted.”
In more than a dozen interviews in Somers, a bedroom community on Lake Michigan dominated by farms, small businesses and a public university, many residents said they were pleasantly surprised to wake up to the news Wednesday morning that their state had flipped from blue to red.
They said the deepening conservatism has been years in the making. They had grown discontented with Mr. Obama’s policies, particularly the Affordable Care Act and were turned off by Mrs. Clinton, whom they saw as untrustworthy. At Tina’s Somers Inn on the village’s main commercial strip, one group of retirees sat at a table playing their regular game of euchre while Fox News was on a nearby television.
“We’re still a mix of Democrats and Republicans here — I don’t think you could call us a red state,” said Dianne Hegewald, 71. “I have very close friends who are Democrats. But the Republican regime is just doing a better job right now.”
Karen Ashton, the owner of a gift shop in Somers, said she is a registered independent but was eager for Republicans to have full control of all branches of government. “Now they’ll really be able to get things done,” she said.
Some of her friends and neighbors in town are farmers who have been hurt by Environmental Protection Agency regulations and high taxes, she said, sipping a kombucha tea. “They’re sick of the government,” she said. “They think that with Trump in there, he can fix all of that.”
One-party rule can produce results, experts say, and it can also produce changes that will benefit the party in power. Control tends to breed more: legislators have the ability to redraw political maps in the coming years and establish voting rules that benefit their party. Cooperation between state and federal leaders of a single party can speed along results, from infrastructure projects to federal grants.
But there are risks, too. Charging too far too fast can cause blowback as quickly as in elections just two years from now.
“There’s always a danger of overreach,” said KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College. He noted the Republican dominance in the 1920s, when, he said, a debate over cultural issues tended to overshadow mounting economic questions that eventually culminated in the Great Depression.
“The contrast between attention paid to issues that ultimately proved unimportant and attention not paid to issues that became important later on is interesting. We know how the 1920s end,” he said. It is hard to measure control of so many offices with numeric precision, but he said that Democrats had probably last held a level of power similar to what the Republicans have now between 1937 and 1945.
“The evidence is mixed on unified government,” said William Howell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. “There is a fair bit of historical evidence that Congress enacts more laws during periods of unified government. But in this period of slim majorities and rampant obstructionism, past trends may not hold.”
Fred Risser, a Democratic Wisconsin state senator who is the longest-serving state lawmaker in the nation, said the stakes of the Republicans’ dominance for the nation’s policy — for taxes, education policy, environmental regulation — were enormous. Yet Mr. Risser, 89, who first held political office in 1956, said the risks for the Republicans were also large. “They’ve got everything now, and so everything that happens they are responsible for and no one can blame the Democrats anymore. It’s always difficult to control everything. They have a lot to lose.”
Linda Truesdell, whose family has lived in the Somers area since the 1820s, said on Wednesday that she was disheartened by the Republican takeover. She had twice voted for Mr. Obama, who in 2012 beat Mitt Romney by 12 points in this county; on Tuesday, Mr. Trump beat Mrs. Clinton here by less than one percentage point — 225 votes.
“Trump was a television personality and that had a big influence on people,” she said, as she left the town post office and walked toward her pickup truck. “People here are thinking that he’s going to solve their problems.”
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-expand-control-in-a-deeply-divided-nation/ar-AAkc9fE?li=BBnb7Kz
All the BS about the country being 50/50. Check out who the people have elected to run their states. Another article to follow:
https://www.multistate.com/state-resources/governors-legislatures
I'm sure most of you have seen Chelsea is going to run for Congress. The Foundation buys the property next door I'm sure and she is running for that district, not in NYC where she has her 10m apartment undoubtedly paid for by the Foundation since she works for their family business. Guess that will turn into the 'family' residence so she can pretend to be living in Chappaqua. The cycle refuses to end until the people end it. One step completed. Why would Chappaqua want someone who knows nothing about their town, talks like she has walnuts in the mouth and can't string two coherent sentences together as their Representative?
No idea. We still have red ones here in CA.
Honoring our veterans and the peace many gave their lives for to provide it.
Veterans still hand them out here. We give donations to them though not necessary. I like to hang on to some in case we don't see someone handing them out. It's a great photo for sure. It's hard to believe how young she was when suddenly became Queen and then the traumas she and her country had to endure.
11th hour, 11th day, 11th month
11th hour, 11th day, 11th month
Seems pretty obvious, 3 applications of B, 2 in p2, 1 in p3, prime time partnership. Wouldn't surprise me if this is what was requested by potential partner(s) to maximize value to CTIX and the partner.
One has to ask, why aren't the protestors at the Trump Tower in DC aren't being arrested. Same here in SF. The high schoolers that skipped school should be rounded up and sent back home.
Dims get their ass handed to them..........
Hollywood hysteria! These post-election freak-outs are amazing! -
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/11/hollywood-hysteria-these-post-election-freak-outs-are-amazing
BO and Mooch slept while the counting continued........
Hillary meets with the Saudis after the election.......
A Blow to the Non-Elite Elite
Victor Davis Hanson · Nov. 10, 2016
There were a lot of losers in this election, well beyond Hillary Clinton and the smug, incompetent pollsters and know-it-all, groupthink pundits who embarrassed themselves.
From hacked email troves we received a glimpse of the bankrupt values of Washington journalists, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists and wealthy donors. Despite their brand-name Ivy League degrees and 1 percenter resumes, dozens of the highly paid grandees who run our country and shape our news appear petty and spiteful — and clueless about the America that exists beyond their Beltway habitat.
Leveraging rich people for favors and money seems an obsession. They brag about wealth and status in the fashion of preteens.
Journalists often violated their own ethics codes during the campaign. Political analyst Donna Brazile even leaked debate topics to the Clinton team. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank reportedly asked the Democratic National Committee to provide him with anti-Trump research.
Reading about the characters who inhabit the Clinton campaign email trove, one wonders about the purpose of their Yale degrees, their tenures at Goldman Sachs, even their very stints in the Clinton campaign. Was the end game to lose their souls?
One big loser is the Obama Justice Department — or rather the very concept of justice as administered by the present administration. It has gone the tainted way of the IRS, VA and NSA. The Justice Department clearly pressured the FBI to limit its investigation of pay-for-play corruption at the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.
Seemingly every few weeks of the campaign, FBI Director James Comey flip-flopped — depending on whether the most recent pressure on him came from rank-and-file FBI agents, the Clinton campaign or his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Lynch met with Bill Clinton in a secret “accidental” encounter on an airport tarmac while Hillary Clinton was under investigation. Immunity was granted to several Clinton aides without the FBI obtaining much cooperation in return. Clinton techies invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to testify before Congress.
Clinton campaign organizer John Podesta was in direct contact with his old friend, Peter Kadzik, a high-ranking Justice Department official who was tipping off the Clinton campaign about an impending hearing and a legal filing regarding Clinton’s emails. Until he was reassigned, Kadzik was in charge of the Justice Department’s probe of the Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner email trove.
A special prosecutor should have been appointed. But Democrats and Republicans alike had long ago soured on the use of special prosecutors. Democrats felt Ken Starr went way beyond his mandates in pursuing Bill Clinton’s excesses. Republicans charged that Lawrence Walsh’s investigation of the Iran-Contra affair had turned into a witch hunt.
But now, it is clear why there was — and still is — a need for special prosecutors in some instances. In an election year, the Obama Justice Department certainly cannot investigate Obama’s former secretary of state and heir to the Obama presidency — much less itself.
Another election casualty is the practice of extended voting. The recent trend to open state polls early and over several days is proving a terrible idea. Campaigns (think 1980, 1992 and 2000) are often not over until the last week. When millions of people vote days or even weeks before Election Day, what the candidates say or do in the critical final days becomes irrelevant. When a candidate urges citizens, “Vote early,” it is synonymous with, “Vote quickly, before more dirt surfaces about my ongoing scandals.”
Voting should return to a single event, rather than becoming a daily tracking poll.
President Obama lost big time as well. He emerged from his virtual seclusion to campaign on behalf of Clinton in a way never before seen with a sitting president. By Election Day, Obama had resorted to making fun of Donald Trump’s baseball hats, and took the low road of claiming that Trump would tolerate the Ku Klux Klan.
While encouraging Latinos to vote during an interview with actress Gina Rodriguez, Obama seemingly condoned voting by illegal immigrants when he said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not be investigating voter rolls. A Trump victory, along with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, is a repudiation of the Obama administration’s legacy and its effort to navigate around the law.
The high-tech industry and Silicon Valley lost as well. The new high-tech class prides itself on its laid-back attitude rather than its super-wealth — casual clothes, hip tastes and cool informality. But in fact, we have learned from WikiLeaks that the 21st-century high-tech aristocracy is more conniving and more status-conscious — and far more powerful — than were Gilded Age capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.
Billionaire CEO Eric Schmidt of Google advised the Clinton campaign to hire “low paid” urban campaign operatives, apparently in hopes that his efforts would earn him some sort of informal Svengali advisory role in a hoped-for Clinton administration. A leaked email from tech executive Sheryl Sandberg revealed that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wanted to meet with people on the Clinton team who could help him understand “political operations to advance public policy goals.”
It became easy to say that a “crude” Trump and a “crooked” Clinton polluted the 2016 campaign. The real culprits were a corrupt Washington elite, who were as biased as they were incompetent — and clueless about how disliked they were by the very America they held in such contempt.
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/45868