Greetings followers of this blog:
Please click on the advertising so I can stop looking for a
new job, (actually I don't get paid for the advertising, click at your own risk, I have no idea, if the advertising is legit). And more importantly please read to the end. There is a surprise
contest, which you have a 0% chance of winning money (only slightly less of a chance
than that of winning the Powerball lottery), but only it's only for if you read until the end of this
article.
I last posted, I was hoping and praying that Donald Trump,
would not be our next president. I thought he wouldn’t, but I was worried. And
now he is the president. People really don’t like Hillary. A lot of the
dialogue is such. She screwed up in her campaign and didn’t visit enough of
rural America.
But you’d think with
a presidential candidate like Trump, that he wouldn’t get as much Republican
support. He did. This turned out to be a
fairly typical election. Republicans voted for Trump 88-90% to 8% or so for
Hillary. Democrats voted for Hillary 88-90% vs. 8% or so for Trump.
In 2012, Democrats were 38% of the vote. Republicans: 32%.
In 2016, it was Democrats 36% and Republicans 33%. Independents in both
election years tended to favor the Republican candidate. So, the main take-away from this election is
not as many Democrats showed up to the polls as in 2012.
In Wisconsin and
Pennsylvania there were key House of Representatives that where held by
Democrats and went unchallenged. Wisconsin’s 3rd district and Pennsylvania’s
13th. There is talk that the Presidential races determines the
“lesser” races, but maybe in this year, it worked the other way.
People voted for the lesser of the two evils in this
campaign for President, and maybe some democrats didn’t get out to vote in
those house districts, in which there was no republican candidate, because the
house representative in those districts just needed one vote to win.
Also, big senate or governor races might increase the voting
turnout. In New Hampshire and Nevada, the Senate race was won by the Democratic
candidate. Nevada also legalized recreational marijuana. Both states voted for
Clinton. In Arizona, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin
all held senate races, that went to the Republican candidate. These senate
candidates beat their Democratic challenger, by a larger margin that Trump won
the presidential vote in each state. So Trump won on the coattails of these
senators, not the other way around!
Arizona failed to
legalize weed, but agreed to raise the minimum wage, but still voted Republican. North Carolina apparently didn’t get the memo
and also had a governor’s race this year, the only one in all of the swing states. This surprisingly went to the Democratic
challenger.
While it seemed that Trump and Clinton were not the typical
candidates, perhaps, they forced voters to do what they often do when faced
with a difficult choice- vote down party lines. This year- as in most election
years (and maybe more than other years) the senate races and ballot measures
had more of say in who turned out to vote. And who turned out to vote, not how
they voted, seemed to make all the difference. The big anomaly was how the
Republican North Carolina governor lost to a democratic challenger, when the
rest of the state went red. It was because he passed that controversial bill that allowed
discrimination of gays, and forced transgender people to use the bathroom of
the gender they were born in. And the NBA pulled its All Star game out of the state. At least the Democrats got this
one. Although they still didn’t win the senate race or that state’s presidential
electoral votes.
Maybe the Democrats need to not just focus on the
presidential election, but on the senate candidates that they put
out-especially in the swing states. Most
people didn’t want either Trump or Clinton in the White House this year. But in
pretty much all the swing states, they preferred the Republican senator to the
Democratic senator. This has to change. The presidency isn’t everything (famous
last words), but it is especially true, if there isn’t also a favorable
Congress with which to work.
Hopefully we will survive the next few years,
without them being as bad as people worry, and going forward we won’t just focus
on the big prize, but all the little prizes too.
Speaking of prizes: Congratulations on reading to the end of the article!!! While I have no monetary prize for you, or even a contest, you must really like
to read, and therefore must be a very hard worker and likely to be very successful.
Keep up the good work!! Yes, you get a compliment! (I'm unemployed, unfortunately something free is the most I can spend on prizes for the loyal blog readers of this blog.)
note: If you just skipped to the end, I could be mean and say, you don't deserve the compliment. You are probably not a hard worker, therefore you probably aren't or won't be successful! (How are those government handouts treating you? Republicans at least say they want to take them away- you should be proactive and....) You can still go back to the beginning of the article and read it- and maybe even write a comment, and then you'll have earned that compliment in the last paragraph.
Until next time!
Best,
GCNOF
