A fun topic for everyone!
Election results: Democrats take the House, Republicans gained significant ground in the Senate. So everyone is claiming victory this morning. No matter what your views are, you can find something in the election to celebrate, something to mock, and something to worry to about. To me, this reaffirms how divided the country is, and that there’s no sign it’s going to get better anytime soon. 2020 is likely to be a blood bath.
I wrote this tweet:
Then the thought police came along and smacked my hand for finding humor in a serious situation and daring to speak my opinions. :)
Of course you can’t fit thousands of words of complex thoughts about an election and American politics into a single tweet, so I had to distill it all down to a single joke, which I still think is a pretty good one. It’s non-partisan–a Democrat or a Republican, conservative or liberal can look at that and nod in agreement. It’s agnostic about how I personally voted or view things. And it’s also 100% truthful and reflects the objective reality of the situation… it’s funny because it’s true.
Something that people (including we in America) often forget is that America is not so much “one country” as it is “50 states.” Consider this: Within the same country, in the same election, we had record numbers of elected women, two elected Muslim-American Congresswomen [update: not sure this is 100% accurate, but I’m so tired of reading about this election now to correct it], while simultaneously, Ted Cruz won in Texas with hardcore Trump rhetoric, and a Senator lost in North Dakota because Native Americans were blatantly and unashamedly barred from casting ballots [update: double-check me on this too], all while in Florida, voting rights were restored to millions of convicted felons. It’s 50 different cultures with 50 different agendas squashed together, often painted as “one” people that should have “one” agenda. Friction is inevitable, and constant. It’s rare when America hasn’t been at war with itself. I saw an interview with Jon Stewart after the 2016 election that I think really expressed that thought well, but of course I can’t remember where I saw it and can’t find it.
The thing that disturbs me, and what seems to be changing (for the worse) lately is the idea that one side is “good” and the other side is “evil.” That we can no longer “work with” or “compromise” with the people who hold different views–the other side is so evil that it must now be eliminated. They aren’t even human beings anymore. It’s okay to hate them because they aren’t real. It’s so bad that I would probably get yelled at for saying Republicans have “different views,” because in the minds of a whole lot of people since 2016, Republicans are literal Nazis and no amount of logic or reason will change their minds. More and more people are becoming crusaders and zealots. That attitude used to be held only by radical conservatives, but now it’s held by the radicals among conservatives and progressives, and it gets worse every year because conflict sells, and fear sells.
Can you even imagine how much money you could make by running for office these days? Millions and millions of dollars are poured into the coffers of any candidates who have the courage to say the things that people want to cheer for. Where does that money go? It ain’t all spent on campaign ads.
Anyway. I digress. I watched segments of morning shows on three different networks: Morning Joe on MSNBC, Fox and Friends, and BBC World News. Each of those networks described an entirely different reality this morning. MSNBC celebrated the House wins and the repudiation of Trump, while downplaying the Senate. Fox celebrated the Senate wins and the clear Trump victory, while downplaying the House. BBC World News was the only one that gave a fairly accurate but slightly bemused representation of what had actually happened, which was the same reality that I saw… across the entire country, both sides won, and both sides lost.
Except here in my state of Virginia, of course, where the election solidified just how much this state has flipped from Red to Blue (Republican to Democratic) in the last 10-15 years. Tim Kaine (D) won the Senate seat handily, as expected. The polls were precisely correct in this race–Cory Stewart never had a chance, a massive rejection of Trump-style candidates here in Virginia. (Clinton won here in Virginia, by the way.) The Virginia Republican Party is in shambles right now.
This follows last year’s governor’s election, which was also a solid win for the Democrats. One might even say Virginia was among the first of the American electorate to say after 2016, “Hey, guys, that Trump guy is kind of an idiot.” Not that anyone ever brought that up in news coverage last night. :)
All 11 Congressional seats were up for election in Virginia, but there were only four “battleground” seats that anyone cared about: VA-02, VA-05, VA-07, and VA-10. (The Democrat won easily in my district, VA-04, in another blowout no-contest race that everyone knew how it would turn out–they say every vote counts, but that only applies in close races; I need not have bothered.) Three of them were taken by Democrats in close races (all women, I believe?), another resounding rejection of Trump politics. That means of 11 House Representatives, we’ll have 7 Democrats, and only 4 Republicans. And our two Senators remain Democratic. That is a pretty radical flip from the Bush days of the 2000s. Virginia is not so much a “purple” state anymore as it is solidly blue.
I have to mention the 7th District. That’s been my district for most of my adult life, but due to a court-ordered redistricting I got moved to the 4th District in 2016. The 7th District was held in an iron grip by a staunch, annoying Republican guy named Eric Cantor for most of my voting memory, but in 2014 he lost to a Tea Party-ish Republican named Dave Brat. This year, Dave Brat lost to Democrat Abigail Williams Spanberger [update: lol why was I thinking of the Salem Witch Trials?? I promise that wasn’t a Freudian slip, I have nothing against her, although I didn’t follow that election at all] in a very, very close race.
The idea that a Democrat could win in the 7th District is mind-boggling. They’ve been blown out by ridiculous 70-30 margins for years and years and years. (The redistricting pulled in a lot more Democratic areas, though, so it wasn’t so much a case of the people changing their minds.) I’m kind of annoyed that I didn’t get to vote in that district, because it would have been the first time my vote actually mattered.
The two tax-related state constitutional amendments on the ballot in Virginia both passed handily. They seemed sensible to me, but I’m not a money guy and I have no idea what the consequences of them might be. Neither really applied to me anyway. I don’t remember seeing a single mention of those amendments in any news report.
I specifically didn’t participate in the rampant “vote shaming” that the kids on Twitter enjoy and steadfastly refused to say whether I voted or not, or how. I’ll just say that I behaved in a manner that is consistent with the behavior of an adult who is knowledgable about the history and operation of his government and has followed the politics of his area somewhat closely for well over a decade.
