You get the good news first.
- Warnock has definitely defeated Loeffler in Georgia.
- Ossoff has a strong lead over Perdue that will probably strengthen as mail-in votes are counted.
- Democrats will gain control of the Senate, narrowly.
- Moscow Mitch’s stranglehold will be broken.
Now the bad news.
- These were close races. Almost half the voting citizens of Georgia voted for two rabidly conservative, corrupt Republicans.
- The Democrats are a conservative party, just less mad than the Republicans. Don’t expect rapid advancement of progressive legislation.
- The Blue Dog will have his day. The Democrats will be trying to appease Joe Manchin, the West Virginia DINO, so that he doesn’t defect to the other party.
It’s going to be interesting. Watch the Democrats drag their heels over doing the right thing over and over again, and then watch them lose in the next round of elections. At least they won’t be able to hide their sympathies anymore!
It is remarkable the lengths Dems will go to, to secure the affiliation of senators who will vote against the party at almost every turn. No Republican senator has as much power over US politics as the one with a D next to his name.
It’s almost as if people like Manchin are a convenient excuse for doing what they wanted to do all along, but were afraid to own up to for fear of voters realising that the entire system is locked up by a tiny cabal of geriatric lizards.
Damn shame about Quint though:
“Y’know the thing about a Loeffler, she’s got… lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. When she comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’… until she bites ya. And those black eyes roll over white, and then… oh, then you hear that terrible high-pitch screamin’, the MAGA hats turn red, and spite of all the poundin’ and the hollerin’, Trumpkins all come in and they… rip you to pieces.”
The good news about the Georgia results is that the Democratic wins there aren’t only a repudiation of Trump, but of the Republican Party in general.
Joe Manchin sucks and all, but it’s hard to understate just how good it is to get McConnell out of the senate majority leader position. There was a lot of legislation that more moderate Republican senators would have voted for that never went to a vote because of the power he has.
Say what you will about Manchin as a Democrat, but winning re-election in a state Trump carried by 42 points is impressive.
I belong to three separate risk groups. If I get Sars-cov-2 I promise to go hug Joe Manchin before I die. But you have to cough up the airfare.
.
A colored senator from Georgia? (grasps pearls) Are they going to appoint homersexuals next? (grabs MAGA hat) -They have moved a million brown people from their hiding places to vote illegally, using Romulan invisibility tech. This confirms the Reptilian connection.
I don’t think it was so much they voted for the GOP candidates as against the radical liberal socialists who were going to let illegal immigrants vote, replace private healthcare with expensive government-run healthcare, and gut our proud military (actual claims from a David Perdue campaign spot that I got VERY tired of hearing). They really laid the fear-mongering on thick this time around.
Evil has been downgraded from Mcconnell to Manchin.
We’ll know more about where Manchin stands when the Senate votes on the filibuster rule. Hopefully Manchin will at least support doing away with it for judicial appointments, because you know McConnell will block every Biden nominee he can.
If he and Trump were in a tag-team mud-wrestling match in West Virginia, would you be impressed by how dirty he got? I mean, I’m trying to get how that’s supposed to be a badge of honor, but I just don’t get it.
I’m impressed because Democratic Senate candidates who faced far less daunting odds didn’t pull off wins in Iowa, Maine, and North Carolina in 2020.
I hope that, deprived of his lifeblood of underserved power, Moscow Mitch now finishes the process of withering and finally dies. Preferably in lots of pain and misery.
naturalistguy, #11:
Still not impressed, partly for the same reason that I’m not impressed when conservatives in our other conservative party (the GOP) also win some races, particularly in conservative states, which feels more like watching paint dry and definitely not something impressive. Also….
— There were a bunch of Senate races, and my prior is not that it’s likely that they would either all be won by the Dem or they would all be lost by the Dem. So when we get a mixture of the two, as we often do, I don’t feel a need to attribute that to anything in particular.
— The degree and kind of support given to candidates by the party, in primaries as well as the general election, is not at all equivalent. On the flip side, consider how much went to McGrath in the Kentucky race against McConnell, only to lose anyway as everyone should’ve expected from the beginning. In any event, you can sometimes attribute these things (wins and losses) not so much to the candidate as to incompetence/stupidity/dogmatism/corruption/etc. in the party leadership.
— Those states aren’t very similar to West Virginia. Not really sure what to do about comparing them, other than to note the fact that they are all states in this country.
— Those other candidates aren’t very similar to Manchin. Because “Democratic Senate candidate” doesn’t actually say much of anything about what that candidate is like. One of them winning (or losing) and gaining power/authority (or not) just doesn’t mean the same thing in every case, so it’s at best unclear if there’s anything to celebrate about a Joe Manchin win, which is not the sort of thing I’d say about all Democratic politicians. Although of course all of them have some flaws, obviously, they really aren’t interchangeable, so “the Dem won that race” tells me almost nothing. Maybe it just takes me a bit more to be impressed or happy or whatever, but anyway that’s how it is for me.
I’m celebrating a Manchin win along with other Democratic Senate wins because it gives the Democrats the trifecta they very much need right now. Having a majority matters.
With the margin that narrow, it’s pretty clear that a lot of credit goes to the difference made by the efforts of Stacy Abrams. Seeing as without the Republicans voter suppression efforts she might actually have become the governor of Georgia, I’m guessing she knows if it’s true that revenge is sweet. Of course, if she were governor of Georgia, Trump wouldn’t have called her over the weekend to give the Fulton County District Attorney all that grounds for indictment … Abrams not being governor isn’t working out so well for the Republicans after all, is it?