It looks like the GOP has a new poster-boy for voter suppression, even though he was demoted to the ‘kiddie table.’ This despite the fact that “New Jersey currently ranks 39th in the country in both percentage of eligible voters who are registered and percentage of voters who actually cast a ballot” and the fact that the “2015 elections likely saw lowest voter turnout in N.J. history.”
Regarding the abysmal voter turnout in Kentucky’s gubernatorial election, Benjamin Knoll writes at Kentucky.com: “One clear option is Election-Day registration (EDR) where voters can show up and register on the spot before going into vote. Studies have shown that it boosts turnout by anywhere from three to four percent. There is very little downside and 11 states plus the District of Columbia have already implemented it…Another option would be to extend poll closing times past 6 p.m. After all, Kentucky has one of the earliest poll closing times in the entire United States. One piece of research by three political scientists at the University of California found that states with poll closing times after 7 p.m. have about a three percent higher turnout rate than those that close before 7 p.m…Perhaps the most effective option would be to consolidate state and federal election cycles in Kentucky, a practice currently done by 45 other states (only Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia hold state-level officer elections in odd-numbered years).”
Duke University Political Scientists John B. Holbein and D. Sunshine Hillygus present evidence in the American Journal of Political Science that preregistration of 17-year old voters increases youth voter turnout.
As reported in The Connection, an Arlington, VA-based newspaper, here’s a voter turnout template which may merit replication: “The turnout drive by VOICE (Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement), a multi-faith citizens power organization, cited a 24 percent increase in voter turnout in Precinct 30 (Nauck neighborhood) from the November 2011 election — the last off-year election with a comparable ballot. It also led to a 12 percent increase in turnout in Precinct 43 (Arlington Mill neighborhood), VOICE leaders said…The voter turnout campaign targeted primarily infrequent voters, enlisting more than 100 volunteers to knock on doors, talk to voters at bus stops, and call voters Nov. 1-3. The aim was to raise turnout by at least 5 percent from November 2011 in these two precincts…Noting that VOICE exceeded its goal almost five-fold in Precinct 30 and more than doubled it in Precinct 43, the Rev. Dr. James E. Victor, Jr., of Mount Olive Baptist Church said, “We learned that, when you make the effort to truly engage people around their hopes and dreams, Arlington’s residents will respond and vote.”
National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar argues that “Donald Trump’s Huge Debate Blunder: By embracing lower wages, Trump risks losing some support from his rock-solid working-class base.”
A few final thoughts regarding the GOP’s last presidential debate: Tony Monkovic reports some bad news for Rubio at The Upshot that “Of the 12 general election winners in the last 100 years who weren’t already president, every Republican was older than the oldest Democrat.” And, I hope Democratic ad makers are doing a good job of compiling Trump’s bully-boy rants, a rich motherlode for Democratic ads, should he get the GOP nomination. Best quote about the GOP debate came from E. J. Dionne, Jr.: “The GOP hopefuls often sounded as if they were addressing a convention of Mercedes owners.”
Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor, Sabato’s Crystal Ball explains their “Ratings Change: Louisiana Gubernatorial Race Now a Toss-Up.”
Sanders scores “landslide margins” iover Trump, Bush in McClatchy-Marist poll, reports Brent Budowski at The Hill. “Sanders has a lead over Trump that could be so huge that he would win a landslide victory in the presidential campaign, with margins that would almost certainly lead Democrats to regain control of the Senate and could help Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives…”
A chuckle from The Onion.

At this juncture I would tend to agree with MSNBC’s Nicole Brown that, rightly or wrongly, “Rubio is the GOPer Democrats fear most…” Tuesday’s debate did nothing to diminish his stature, relative to his admittedly mediocre competition. Ed Kilgore notes at the Washington Monthly, “Marco Rubio was the “winner” according to most Republican assessments (e.g., Politico’s “Caucus” of early-state GOP insiders), partly on style points and partly because he got in the most telling shots at Rand Paul’s heterodoxies on national security.”
James Hohman notes at The Washington Post, “The critical reviews of the Florida senator’s performance are positive across the board, with some dissenters saying he sounded too canned.” Hohman rounds up some other pundits on Rubio’s performance in Milwaukee:

The Fix’s Chris Cillizza: “Rubio knocked it out of the park when debating military spending and the right role for America in the world with Rand Paul. He got a meatball of a question when asked by the moderators about Hillary Clinton’s résumé as compared with his own; he, unsurprisingly, answered it well and easily. Time and time again, he oozed knowledge while appearing entirely relaxed.”
Conservative Post columnist Jennifer Rubin: “Rubio once again had the strongest performance. He shot down Paul’s suggestion that spending on the military makes one ‘liberal’ and repeatedly spoke up in favor of strong U.S. leadership. … Asked about running against an experienced Clinton, he went into his effective riff about representing the future while she represents the past.”
The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin and Patrick Healy: “Rubio was not only able to avoid being drawn into the contentious immigration debate, but also repeatedly received questions that allowed him to answer with versions of his stump speech. Even he seemed unable to believe his good fortune when he was asked to make his case against Clinton. He chuckled for a moment before unspooling a well-rehearsed argument: why he can prosecute a ‘generational’ case against her.”

Rubio does show sporadic flashes of passion and eloquence in presenting his conservative arguments, even though most Democrats probably still visualize him clumsily grasping for a glass of water with shifty eyes. And, as Brown quotes former Obama administration White House communications director, Dan Preiffer, “Rubio is also the most broadly appealing GOP candidate and would have the best shot to close the non-white vote gap with the Democrats.”
Rubio has been hovering around third place, behind Carson and Trump in the most recent polls. Trump drew some boos, or at least groans, from the debate audience last night. It may be that his bully-boy act is beginning to wear thin. Looks to me like Carson is not going to wear well either, when we get to the primaries. He needs a more substantial menu of policies, despite having the least annoying persona of the GOP field.
Democrats will have plenty of material to face down Rubio, if he gets the nomination. As the U.S. Senator with the worst attendance record, Rubio has been able to dodge a lot of criticism by laying relatively low on the most contentious issues for Republicans. Those days are now over. His GOP adversaries will be coming for him in a big way from now on.

From Greg Sargent’s Plum Line post, “Here’s Hillary Clinton’s big 2016 challenge, in one chart”:

The new poll, which was commissioned by Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund and conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, shows that members of the Rising American Electorate — minorities, millennials, and single women — are significantly less tuned in to next year’s election than GOP-aligned voter groups are.
The poll has some good news for Democrats. The survey, which was taken in four key battleground states — Colorado, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin — suggests that in those states, the demographics do favor Dems. That’s because the poll finds that RAE voter groups — who helped drive Obama’s wins — now make up a “majority or near majority of the vote” in all those states. The poll also finds Dems leading in Senate races in two of those states and tied in two others.
But members of the RAE are insufficiently engaged in next year’s election when compared to Republican-aligned voter groups:

Sargent adds, “Unmarried women, minorities, and particularly millennials are less interested in next year’s voting than seniors, conservatives, and white non-college men are. Non-college women — a group the Clinton camp is reportedly eyeing as a way to expand on the Obama coalition — are also less interested.” However, “If Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, and the prospect of electing the first female president seems increasingly within reach, you could see engagement kicking in much more substantially. (It will be interesting to see how non-college, unmarried, minority and millennial women respond.)” Further,

But Greenberg’s pollsters are sounding the alarm now, warning that Democrats need to take more steps to tailor their message towards boosting the interest level among these voters. As Stan Greenberg outlines in his new book, America Ascendant, the key to engaging these voters is two-fold. It isn’t enough to simply outline bold economic policies to deal with college affordability, child care (universal pre-K), workplace flexibility (paid family and sick leave), and so forth, though those things are crucial. What’s also required to engage these groups, Greenberg argues, is a reform agenda geared to reducing the influence of the wealthy, the lobbyists, and the special interests over our politics. Today’s new poll suggests the same.

The reason is that “many Americans don’t believe government can or will actually deliver on those policies.” However, writes Greenberg, “when voters hear the reform narrative first, they are dramatically more open to the middle-class economic narrative that calls for government activism in response to America’s problems.”
Sargent notes that Clinton’s campaign has embraced the need for reforms to reduce the political influence of the wealthy in politics. It’s important that other Democratic candidates do so as well — down ballot as well as presidential candidates.

The next Democratic President should do this:

From M.J. Lee’s “Strong economy could help Hillary Clinton, Democrats” at CNN Politics: “The Labor Department announced Friday that the U.S. economy added 271,000 jobs in October, pushing the unemployment rate down to 5%. To put that figure in perspective, the last time the jobless rate was 5% was in April 2008…The most striking bright spot in Friday’s report was wage growth. After remaining stubbornly stagnant, average hourly earnings rose 2.5% — the best gain since 2009″…”This is a very good report. And it’s not just the headline number but the fact that average hourly earnings are up,” said Gus Faucher, a PNC senior economist. “If I were a Democrat I would be making a lot of hay out of it.”
Austerity’s fruits even worse than progressive economists predicted, writes NYT columnist Paul Krugman.
At The New Yorker Margaret Talbot’s “The Populist Prophet: Bernie Sanders has spent decades attacking inequality. Now the country is listening” provides one of the best 2016 presidential candidate profiles to date.
“The presidential race is the main event. It has everything: It has glamour, it has money, it has power — it’s showbiz. It’s an attraction,” Pelosi said Thursday. “And off years are like the lounge act. Who goes there — right?” — from House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, as reported in Eric Bradner’s CNN Politics post, “The Democrats’ off-year election crisis.” Some other observations from Bradner’s post include the suggestion that “the DNC launch and fund a national training program for state parties — which would then train local parties. A particular focus: Teaching the new voters the party has attracted in recent years the importance of voting in every race — not leaving the polling place with the first few boxes filled in an a massive “undervote” by failing to vote down-ballot. That problem reached record levels in 2008.” Other Democrats pointed to messaging…”I think it’s communicating a clear message on policy and policy differences,” said Holly Shulman, a Democratic strategist and former DNC official…The now nearly nine-month-old DNC task force document suggested a “national narrative project” to advance the premise that electing Democrats everywhere — not just to top national offices — is what’s necessary to promote some policy priorities.”
Bradner’s article also contains a clue that the Kentucky governor’s race may not have been just a spanking for Democrats: “Some Democrats said Kentucky’s results aren’t a useful check on where the two parties stand a year away from the presidential election…Their argument: The Democratic candidate, Attorney General Jack Conway, shied away from taking any Democratic-sounding positions. And two other statewide candidates, including failed 2014 Senate nominee Alison Lundergan Grimes as secretary of state and another Democrat as attorney general, actually won.” — despite a 31 percent turnout.
The Guardian’s Washington political correspondent Ben Jacobs praises Rachel Maddow’s forum with Democratic presidential candidates: “The forum may not sway many voters. It lacked fireworks and the type of “gotcha” moments that have defined the most widely seen presidential debates. However, the format did lend itself to substance and serious discussion. It may not have altered the arc of the Democratic campaign, but it left voters knowing a lot more about all three candidates who appeared.
Patrik Jonsson’s Monitor post “Do Democrats have a viable strategy to win back the South?” explores the possibility that Democrats are doing poorly in the South in large part because they have neglected the white working class in the region, as well as nation-wide. Johnson quotes Andrew Levison, who notes “The “harsh reality for Democrats is that they cannot achieve … [their] objectives without increasing their support among white working class Americans,”… it’s impossible to write off working Americans in all of the Red states or in all non-urban areas and still have a stable and enduring Democratic majority…”
in Politico’s ‘Democrats look to ride Clinton wave to Senate control:The party is angling to expand the electoral map by fielding strong recruits in red states like Missouri and Arkansas,” Burgess Everett and Kevin Robillard survey the Democratic senatorial field for 2016 and find some unexpected opportunities and a couple of problem races. The most glaring weakness for Dems seems to be the lack of a formidable candidate in NC to beat Sen. Richard Burr, who currently has dismal approval ratings.

Democrats disappointed about the Kentucky elections have another off-cycle contest just ahead that is creating some unlikely optimism: the “jungle primary” runoff for governor in Louisiana. I wrote about the contest at Washington Monthly this week:

Looking at the polls (there are now three of them) showing Democrat John Bel Edwards with a double-digit lead over U.S. Sen. David Vitter in the November 21 Louisiana gubernatorial runoff, you’d figure Republicans would be focused on a unity effort to bring Vitter’s defeated GOP rivals into the tent. If so, the effort suffered a blow this morning, when Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne endorsed Edwards in the runoff. Kevin Litten of the Times-Pic has some background:

Although Dardenne originally indicated he wouldn’t offer an endorsement in the general election, the source said his thinking on the subject evolved over time. Dardenne and Edwards had been talking since election day (Oct. 24), when Dardenne and Republican candidate Scott Angelle were defeated by Edwards and U.S. Sen. David Vitter.
“He went from ‘No I won’t’ to ‘I would if…’ to ‘I might have to,’ to ‘Let’s do this now,'” the source said.
Both Dardenne and Angelle, were the subject of withering political attacks during the primary launched by U.S. Sen. David Vitter’s campaign and the super PACS supporting him. Angelle struck back hard, and Dardenne complained bitterly about the ads during the last two weeks of the campaign during debates before running an ad criticizing Vitter in the last days of the campaign.

Dardenne finished fourth in the primary with 15% of the vote.
Vitter countered with an endorsement from former Gov. Mike Foster, who left office in 2004. You’d normally figure a big target of any Republican unity campaign would be the sitting two-term Republican governor of the state. But according to the Baton Rouge Advocate, Bobby Jindal is in “not in a hurry” to endorse a successor:

Both candidates remaining in the governor’s race — Democrat John Bel Edwards and Republican David Vitter — have repeatedly criticized Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal on the campaign trail.
And it appears Jindal isn’t eager to pick which of the two he would prefer succeeds him in the Governor’s Office.
The National Review caught up with Jindal in Boulder, Colorado, on Wednesday and asked whom he prefers.
Jindal has frequently butted heads with both men.
“We haven’t made that decision yet,” Jindal, who is running for president, demurred when asked if he planned to endorse in the race, NRO reports. “That doesn’t mean we won’t. But we haven’t made that decision yet.”
It’s no secret that Jindal and Vitter have an icy relationship. And as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Edwards has been one of Jindal’s most vocal opponents at the State Capitol.

Well, I guess bipartisanship’s not dead in Louisiana. Not only do you have a former Republican candidate for governor endorsing a Democrat, but nobody much likes Bobby Jindal.

HuffPo’s senior polling editor Natalie Jackson explains “Here’s Why The Kentucky Polls Were Wrong” in reporting that Democratic candidate for Governor Jack Conway was leading (with one exception) in the late polling. In one key graph, Jackson notes, “It’s not a disaster for pollsters, but the industry did miss the mark.”turnout in the race was only around 31 percent. That means the polls probably overshot turnout projections in trying to identify likely voters. This is the same problem that we see in primary polling — when turnout is low, it’s very difficult to predict who will vote. And lower turnout often favors Republicans.”
At FiveThirtyEight.com Harry Enten opines, “It’s not yet clear whether pollsters simply projected that more Democratic voters would show up than actually did or whether undecided voters broke overwhelmingly for the Republican candidates. The former suggests an electorate modeling problem that could be a big problem during the presidential primaries, when turnout is low. On the other hand, trouble modeling the electorate would be less of an issue in the 2016 general election, when turnout is at its highest…Yet, I would be careful of making too much of the Kentucky results. Only three polls not sponsored by a candidate came out during the final three weeks of the campaign. That’s far less polling than was conducted in other recent polling mishaps…”
In Chicken Little reportage, Josh Kraushaar makes a case at National Journal that “Matt Bevin’s Kentucky Win Is the End of an Era–and That Should Scare Democrats Everywhere.” Overstated though it may be, Kraushaar’s post does offer an interesting observation: “The GOP’s out­reach to Afric­an-Amer­ic­an voters is con­sequen­tial–even if it isn’t provid­ing im­me­di­ate di­vidends. Bev­in wasn’t just a Re­pub­lic­an out­sider be­cause of his apolit­ic­al bio­graphy. His cam­paign also looked a lot dif­fer­ent than pre­vi­ous can­did­ates, and he traveled to parts of the state that Re­pub­lic­ans rarely ven­tured. At his vic­tory speech Tues­day night, he was ac­com­pan­ied by his nine chil­dren–four ad­op­ted from Ethiopia–and his Afric­an-Amer­ic­an run­ning mate Jenean Hamp­ton, who be­comes the first black statewide of­fice­hold­er in the state’s 223-year his­tory.”
Robert McCartney addresses an important question about Tuesday’s election at The Washington Post, “Did gun control cost McAuliffe and Democrats the Virginia election?” McCartney reports, “In a race that proved decisive in enabling Republicans to retain control of the Senate, Republican Glen H. Sturtevant won the 10th District seat after benefiting from a huge turnout in conservative Powhatan County, which analysts attributed in part to the gun issue.” McCartney’s article also notes another interesting possibility: “”Donald Trump probably gets some of the credit” for the Republicans’ success, said Christopher Newport University political scientist Quentin Kidd. “The primary has raised awareness. Republicans are just more tuned in right now.”
Estelle Erasmus argues at Newsweek that Hillary Clinton should emphasize more forcefully “her dedication to advocating for women and children at home and abroad, a topic that has yet to be as boldly embraced by any prior presidential candidate.” Erasmus says that child development and education are priorities that enjoy enormous public support, and should become a central focus of her campaign.
Bush 41 distances himself from the neocon lunacy of Dick Cheney and “arrogance of Donald Rumsfeld,” both architects of the Iraq mess. Along with the global financial meltdown, the Iraq quagmire helped Bush 43 earn the designation of “worst president ever” in the opinions of millions, as well as 61 percent of a poll of 109 historians. Wonder what 41 thinks of the current crop of GOP presidential aspirants.
“Then there are the lesser crimes,” adds M.W. Jacobs at Huffpo, “theft of the 2000 election, multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts for cronies, pandering to anti-gay bigotry during his reelection campaign, withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol lowering greenhouse gas emissions, withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, invalidation of the Geneva Convention protocols against torture, and here are 300 anti-environmental actions listed by the Sierra Club.” All of which should make voters more than a little concerned about the presidential ambitions of Bush 43’s stoutest defender, brother Jeb.
A reported half million petitioners want Saturday Night Live to disinvite Donald Trump as guest host in their upcoming show. Latino voters are not amused by the prospect of Trump’s immigration bigotry becoming fodder for public merriment. There is also grumbling among other presidential campaigns about giving choice media exposure to humanize an already over-exposed presidential contender to the detriment of his competition.
It appears that Ohio’s reefer referendum may have increased voter turnout a smidgen or two, according to the Associated Press. “Unofficial results show more Ohioans voted in Tuesday’s off-year election that included a marijuana legalization issue than in last year’s midterm election highlighted by the race for governor…Nearly 3.2 million people, or about 42.4 percent of Ohio’s registered voters, cast ballots for this general election…The turnout topped the roughly 40.7 percent reported last November, when Gov. John Kasich was re-elected. The number of ballots cast also is higher this year.”

So whatever you think is happening to support levels for Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, there’s not much doubt Dr. Ben Carson is enjoying a significant boom in support. At TPMCafe today, I examined the varying sources of his support, and warned Democrats not to dismiss his campaign too readily:

The conventional wisdom is that Carson is beloved for being a genial, soft-spoken figure and a non-politician with a distinguished biography. That may be true, though this does not necessarily distinguish him from many thousands of his fellow Americans. An equally obvious factor is that he is African American, and Republicans frustrated with being accused of white identity politics if not outright racism love being able to support a black candidate who is as conservative as they are.
Less obvious — and finally being recognized by political reporters spending time in Iowa — is that Carson is a familiar, beloved figure to conservative evangelicals, who have been reading his books for years.
Another factor, and one that I emphasized in my own take here two months ago, is that Carson is a devoted believer in a number of surprisingly resonant right-wing conspiracy theories, which he articulates via dog whistles that excite fellow devotees (particularly fans of Glenn Beck, who shares much of Carson’s world-view) without alarming regular GOP voters or alerting the MSM.
As David Corn of Mother Jones has patiently explained, the real key for understanding Carson (like Beck) is via the works of Cold War-era John Birch Society member and prolific pseudo-historian W. Cleon Skousen, who stipulated that America was under siege from the secret domestic agents of global Marxism who masqueraded as liberals. Carson has also clearly bought into the idea that these crypto-commies are systematically applying the deceptive tactics of Saul Alinsky in order to destroy the country from within–a theme to which he alluded in the famous National Prayer Breakfast speech that launched his political career and in the first Republican presidential candidates’ debate.
It’s not clear how many Carson supporters hear the dog whistles and understand what his constant references to “political correctness” connote (it’s his all-purpose term for the efforts of America’s secret enemies to mock or silence cognoscenti like himself, Beck and Skousen), but added with his other advantages, it fills out his coalition with depth as well as breadth.
And that is why the broadly held assumption that Carson will, like 2012 candidate Herman Cain, quickly fade from contention as voting nears is worth rethinking. For one thing, Carson’s race is just one source of his appeal, so identifying him with the last black conservative to run for president is highly questionable.
Cain was not a revered figure before running in 2012, beyond those who listened when he sat in for an Atlanta-based radio host. He also was not exactly a non-politician, having run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate. But the most important reason to stop identifying Carson with Cain is simple: Cain’s loss of his once-high poll ratings were not caused by a voters getting tired with a “flavor of the month” or realizing his slim qualifications; he was brought down by a series of sexual allegations that escalated from multiple claims of sexual harassment to a long-term extramarital affair. Cain never admitted any wrong-doing, but he also never convincingly rebutted the allegations, and all the smoke convinced many observers there might be fire. He left the race on his own terms, but after losing most of his altitude.
There’s zero reason to think Carson has any such skeletons in his closet. The one thing we know about his background that is politically dangerous is his testimonial work for a subsequently fined nutritional supplement company. But unless it turns out he was paid a lot more than seems to be the case, he’s only in hot water if he cannot soon keep his story straight. Being a straight shooter is extremely important to his image.
He seems to have successfully back-pedaled on his one easy-to-understand policy heresy, a proposal to replace Medicare and Medicaid with heavily subsidized health savings accounts, which he now describes as an “option” for beneficiaries (that, too, is problematic, but not as much as his original “idea”).
So there remains what should actually disqualify Carson: his extremist, paranoid “world-view” which treats regular boring old center-left liberals as conscious and systematically deceitful would-be destroyers of this country bent on imposing a Marxist tyranny via “politically correct” suppression of free speech and confiscation of guns.
There’s unquestionably a constituency for this point of view, but we may never know whether it would outnumber the Republicans baffled or horrified by it until such time as one of his rivals or the heretofore clueless media start talking about it. If they don’t pretty soon, then one theory of the 2016 GOP nominating process could come true: conservatives want to rerun the 1964 elections, and they’ve finally found their Barry Goldwater.

This is simply not a good year to assume anything conventional from Republican voters.

Republicans won a couple of significant electoral victories yesterday, including the governorship of Kentucky and holding on to their edge in the Virginia state senate. The Republican businessman, Matt Bevin beat Democratic Attorney-General Jack Conway in Kentucky by an impressive 53 to 44 percent (county results map here.).
Bevin almost certainly benefitted from KY’s red state demographics, along with coal industry support, ‘outsider’ (not a career politician) status and a late onslaught of attack ads linking Conway to President Obama’s energy policies. There is also speculation that Bevin may have been boosted by having an African-American running-mate Jenean Hampton. The vote tally compared with October polls suggests either a weak turnout effort on Conway’s behalf, a strong ground game in support of Bevin, or some combination of both.
Yesterday’s elections weren’t all bad news for Democrats. In Mississippi, Attorney General Jim Hood, the last Democrat to hold a statewide office, was re-elected to a fourth term by an impressive 56 percent-44 percent vote. But also in Mississippi, Republican Governor Phil Bryant was re-elected in a 2-1 landslide.
National Democratic leaders were probably more disappointed, however, by the results in the Virginia legislative elections than by Conway’s loss in KY. As Patrick Wilson reports at the Virginia Pilot,

Virginia Republicans handed Gov. Terry McAuliffe a defeat in Tuesday’s General Assembly election, holding their Senate majority in a year when the Democratic governor had predicted his party would take control of the chamber. The House of Delegates retained its strong Republican majority, and the Senate remains in GOP control, 21-19…The GOP kept its Senate majority by holding onto a Richmond-area seat. Republican Glen Sturtevant will replace retiring GOP Sen. John Watkins in the 10th District…Democrats all year expressed confidence they’d win the Senate, and they had star power behind them. They hold all five statewide elected offices in Virginia, and their party leader has touted himself as a job-creating governor.

Democrats did well in Pennsylvania, reports Roll Call’s Eli Yokley:

Democrats swept the three seats up for election on the state’s Supreme Court, and control of the seven-member panel, which could have a broad implication on redistricting in 2020…With the court often tasked with picking the fifth member of the Legislative Reapportionment Commission, Democrats will have a leg-up on redrawing the 18 congressional seats in the Keystone State, of which Democrats currently control just five, despite carrying presidential, governor and Senate races.

So yesterday’s elections were not a total disaster for Democrats, as GOP spin will undoubtedly play it. All in all, however, it was surely a better day for Republicans. There is just no point in putting lipstick on the pig of losing yet another governorship and the dashed hopes in swing state Virginia. Dems simply have to do better in statewide races to create enough room to be competitive in congressional races. Perhaps more effort in recruitment, training and funding of potential candidates.
Democratic hopes are now focused on November 21st, when the party’s candidate for Governor, John Bel Edwards hopes to beat the prostitution scandal-tainted Sen. David Vitter in a race for the Governorship. This one is winnable, despite, Louisiana’s GOP tilt in recent years. But it will require an exceptionally well-organized turnout effort focused on both the pro-Democratic base and creative outreach to persuadable voters who are creeped-out by Vitter.