YankeeTarheel wrote: Wed Nov 07, 2018 12:44 pm

AndyH wrote: Wed Nov 07, 2018 12:28 pm Trump just became unhinged ....during the post-election presser. What a sad lying excuse for a human.

How could you tell???

AndyH wrote: Wed Nov 07, 2018 1:03 am Kobach is out in Kansas. That's a plus.

K9s wrote: Wed Nov 07, 2018 3:47 pm Many in GA are pissed off. Stay tuned.... It ain't over.

“He was a cause, not a candidate,” a top Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity because of his involvement in current campaigns, told me. “He was anti-Trump, yes. But he struggled to articulate what that would mean for the people of Texas.”

Second, the vote administered enough Democratic disappointment to check the party’s most self-destructive tendencies. If Beto O’Rourke had eked it out in Texas, Democrats might well have nominated him for president in 2020, almost guaranteeing a debacle. There is no progressive majority in America. There is no progressive plurality in America. And there certainly is no progressive Electoral College coalition in America.

AndyH wrote: Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:50 pm The Atlantic publishes article that says Beto O'Rourke lost because he wasn't a candidate. He wasn't a candidate, apparently, because he wasn't like regular Democrats. Yeah, no shit. That's why I voted for him. Folks in the Dem head office are still smoking something they should be sharing with the rest of us.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... as/575104/

“He was a cause, not a candidate,” a top Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity because of his involvement in current campaigns, told me. “He was anti-Trump, yes. But he struggled to articulate what that would mean for the people of Texas.”

But his loss is a "blessing" for Democrats. Huh.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ms/575179/

Second, the vote administered enough Democratic disappointment to check the party’s most self-destructive tendencies. If Beto O’Rourke had eked it out in Texas, Democrats might well have nominated him for president in 2020, almost guaranteeing a debacle. There is no progressive majority in America. There is no progressive plurality in America. And there certainly is no progressive Electoral College coalition in America.

K9s wrote: Wed Nov 07, 2018 6:07 pm

AndyH wrote: Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:50 pm The Atlantic publishes article that says Beto O'Rourke lost because he wasn't a candidate. He wasn't a candidate, apparently, because he wasn't like regular Democrats. Yeah, no shit. That's why I voted for him. Folks in the Dem head office are still smoking something they should be sharing with the rest of us.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... as/575104/

“He was a cause, not a candidate,” a top Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity because of his involvement in current campaigns, told me. “He was anti-Trump, yes. But he struggled to articulate what that would mean for the people of Texas.”

But his loss is a "blessing" for Democrats. Huh.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ms/575179/

Second, the vote administered enough Democratic disappointment to check the party’s most self-destructive tendencies. If Beto O’Rourke had eked it out in Texas, Democrats might well have nominated him for president in 2020, almost guaranteeing a debacle. There is no progressive majority in America. There is no progressive plurality in America. And there certainly is no progressive Electoral College coalition in America.

I love hearing Republicans and DNC types telling me how I should vote and what "real" candidates should do.

Record midterm turnout for exciting candidates and the rise of the reich in Washington... and they try to tell me Beto (or Gillum or Abrams) was a bad candidate?

Bang wrote: Wed Nov 07, 2018 10:13 pm Living in a deep red state, I made the best choices my ballot would allow, and tossed them into a black hole. One of my voices in Congress is now a fuckwit by the name of Mitt Romney, a carpetbagger so detached from the populous here that it's insane that he was elected. But so many people here are hooked by the nose by a cult that they voted for him even though they have no idea what he stands for.

YankeeTarheel wrote: Wed Nov 07, 2018 10:52 pmAnd didn't you all flip a House seat blue?

CDFingers wrote: Thu Nov 08, 2018 9:12 am We have a republic, if we can keep it.

I really like watching these machinations. Truth be told, though, I'm more glad now that I have guns than I was during Nixon, yet I am also one of the seven (now 8 on another thread) who says there won't be a Civil War. I trust the Constitution will work as designed, but guns are good things to have and not need.

CDFingers

YankeeTarheel wrote: Thu Nov 08, 2018 2:30 pm ...I hope I NEVER shoot anything that isn't paper, wood, or metal!

Martin Luther King’s Cousin
Blocked by Kemp from Casting a Ballot
Despite Voting in every Election for 50 Years
By Greg Palast reporting from Atlanta, GA

Yesterday I visited 92-year-old Christine Jordan who was blocked from voting in Georgia.

I spent time with her and her granddaughter Jessica. Miss Christine, Martin Luther King’s cousin, talked about the family reunions with the Kings at her house. Never talked politics, just Church gossip and family. She misses choir practice at Zion Hill Baptist.

Martin Luther King's Cousin who was blocked from voting in Georgia
92-year-old Christine Jordan, whose 1 minute video of her being stopped from voting we posted on election day turned out to be Martin Luther King's cousin

She sang me, "Jesus loves me." And she sang, "We shall overcome."

Brian Kemp took away her right to vote exactly 50 years to the day since she cast her first ballot in Atlanta.
To get back her vote, she is ready to sue Kemp in federal court, "if someone will help me walk to the courthouse." Any volunteers?

Votes from Election Day are still being tabulated in Arizona. As of Saturday morning, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema was leading the race against Republican Martha McSally by around 20,000 votes. McSally had led by a narrow margin in the days after Election Day, but Sinema took the lead when ballots from heavily Democratic areas such as Maricopa County were counted. One reason it is taking days to count the votes is that around three-quarters of Arizona's voters send mail-in ballots, meaning that they fill out their votes at home and mail them to their county board of elections. Since some mail-in ballots arrive close to Election Day, it takes longer to count them.

Additionally, Maricopa County and Pima County -- two primarily Democratic counties -- allow voters to address problems with their mail-in ballots up to five days after the election if there is a disparity between the signature on their voter registration and the signature on the ballot envelope. Last week, four county Republican parties sued to prevent counties from trying to verify signatures after polls closed.

Arizona Democrats and Republicans reached a settlement on the issue on Friday, allowing voters in rural counties as well as in Maricopa and Pima to have extra time to fix problems with their ballots. The counties have until November 14 to address the issue. As of Saturday, it was unclear when the vote count would be completed.

AndyH wrote: Thu Nov 08, 2018 2:33 pm

YankeeTarheel wrote: Thu Nov 08, 2018 2:30 pm ...I hope I NEVER shoot anything that isn't paper, wood, or metal!

Or pumpkin! Don't forget pumpkin!

Two former aides to the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) are publicly criticizing the Republican Party for seeking to cast doubt on the results of the Senate race in Arizona, where Democrat Kyrsten Sinema is narrowly edging out Republican Martha McSally. The tweets by Mark Salter on Saturday and John Weaver on Sunday come amid ramped-up scrutiny of the race, in which Sinema leads by a little more than one percentage point.

Seventy-five percent of Arizona’s electorate votes by mail, meaning that counting ballots can typically take weeks as officials match voters’ signatures on their ballots with those on their registration forms. Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan (R) explained the process in a statement Thursday and said that “everybody is working diligently to tabulate all of the election results in a manner that Arizonans can be proud of and, most importantly, trust the results.” Yet Republicans at the national level have struck a different note. First, President Trump suggested without evidence in a Friday tweet that there may be “electoral corruption” in the state, raising the prospect of a new election and claiming, “In Arizona, SIGNATURES DON’T MATCH.”

Then, on Saturday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent an email to reporters that claimed that the Senate race results were rigged. “If you thought the Arizona Democrats’ voter suppression tactics weren’t shady enough, now look at the questionable Maricopa County election official who has been using his position to cook the books for Kyrsten Sinema,” the email read. Salter, McCain’s longtime aide and writing partner, voiced his disapproval of the party’s tactics in a tweet Saturday.

“Stop doing this, NRSC,” he said. “McSally is losing fair and square, and she’s underperforming in more than Maricopa. The race is almost certainly lost and nothing will change that. All this does is poison our politics more. Despicable.” On Sunday, Weaver, a longtime Republican operative and adviser to the campaigns of McCain and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, followed suit with a tweet Sunday accusing the Senate GOP campaign arm and its chairman, Sen. Cory Gardner (Colo.), of inflicting damage on the electoral process. “I ran @SenJohnMcCain political world for 10 years & can tell you what is going on in AZ is above board & by the rules,” Weaver said. “The @NRSC & @SenCoryGardner are not only spreading lies & nutty theories, but undermining democracy. @RepMcSally lost this race when she became Trump clone.”

Asked about the dust-up during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Gardner defended the NRSC’s message, although he said that he was not familiar with the “cook the books” email. “What I do think is important, and it’s not the first time that somebody’s been accused of cooking the books or rigging the outcome of an election,” he said. “I think that’s the last two years have been about Democrats trying to go after President Trump on that as well.” He added that the committee’s focus is on “making sure that the votes are counted, and the votes are counted fairly.”

The total turnout estimates for this midterm have been going up since Tuesday, for the same reason that so many races haven't been called: Votes keep getting counted in rural counties and Western states. But as of Sunday, it looks like national turnout is tracking toward 49.7 percent of all registered voters.

That would be the highest turnout for a midterm election since 1914, one of the last elections held before universal suffrage. It's obviously higher than any midterm since the passage of the Voting Rights Act and since the voting age was lowered to 18. It's even higher than turnout in the 1996 presidential election.

Democrats told themselves all year that a turnout spike like that would deliver them a blowout win. It didn't, and the reason was that Republican turnout in rural areas, especially Appalachia, also blew past the norm for a midterm. In Ohio, for example, turnout rose from 40.7 percent in 2014 to at least 49.8 percent this year. In 2014, voters in the nine counties along Ohio's border with West Virginia cast 76,882 votes for Gov. John Kasich (R). In 2018, those counties cast 103,255 votes for Attorney General Mike DeWine for governor. Here's the twist: In 2006, when he lost his Senate seat to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), DeWine lost eight of those nine counties.

To win the House, Democrats succeeded in turning cities and suburbs into turnout machines, often coming close to their numbers from the 2016 presidential election. But the Trump-era GOP has been turning its rural strongholds into turnout machines, too.

Twitter user Ally Maynard painstakingly compiled a list of 55 House, Senate, and gubernatorial candidates President Trump either held rallies for or endorsed on Twitter, and found that 39 of them lost, meaning 70.9 percent of candidates President Trump endorsed were defeated.