Nevada’s incumbent Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto on Saturday defeated Republican Adam Laxalt, giving the Democrats 50 Senate seats to the GOP’s 49, with Georgia’s runoff election between incumbent Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker to take place Tuesday, December 6, after neither candidate received the needed 50% (Warnock took 49.2%, Walker 48.7%, Libertarian Chase Oliver took 2.1%).
The enormity of Walker’s election results, after a campaign mired in scandal that was ridiculed by every late-night talk show host and then some, was best expressed by the satirical paper, The Onion, which ran the headline: “Raphael Warnock Loses All Faith In God After Being Forced Into Runoff Against Herschel Walker.” On paper, the race belonged to Warnock, and yet, Walker kept up with him to the bitter end. Exit polls showed Warnock received the vast majority of non-white votes,
Every racial demographic except for white people and men voted overwhelmingly for Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, a Baptist minister, while only whites chose the former University of Georgia running back and Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker––who, like Warnock, is black.
Walker was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder in 2001 when he sought professional help for his ideation of murdering a man who didn’t deliver a car to him on time. In his 2008 book, “Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder,” he dealt with myths about mental illness. In his book, Walker said he had a dozen distinct identities or alters, some of them doing many good things, but others exhibiting extreme and violent behavior.
While the Republicans’ dream of recapturing the Senate has just gone up in smoke, they are still the favorites to win the House of Representatives, but by a much smaller margin than was expected. There was no “red wave” here, and the results constitute a kind of victory for the Democrats, considering every mid-term race save for one in the 21st century ended with a bloodbath for the party in the White House.
As of Sunday morning, the Republicans have 211 seats in the House, compared to the Democrats’ 203, with the magic number for control of the chamber being 218.
The NY Times pointed out on Saturday that every election denier (claiming Trump won in 2020) running for a top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the polls. The voters in those states rejected GOP candidates who promised to, essentially, tilt the results of the 2024 election in favor of the Republican presidential nominee. The only “America First” candidate for Secretary of State who won was Diego Morales in Indiana – a state so red he’ll have nothing controversial to do in two years.
In the end, the explanation for the Democrats’ surprisingly strong showing had to do with a serious miscalculation on the part of their Republican opponents: the GOP believed that, as in most elections, Americans would vote with their wallets, and in a time of runaway inflation and high energy prices would dump the candidates associated with the man in the White House. But exit poll interviews showed Americans felt more threatened by the Supreme Court’s decision to kill Roe v. Wade, and the future of democracy–after watching half a year of well-produced television courtesy of the January 6 committee.
Now, with an anticipated slim majority in the House, it remains to be seen whether the GOP is ready to return to the center, with legislation that benefits the American people. It’s not clear yet how many election deniers have won a seat in the new Congress, but if the next House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, devotes the next two years to impeaching President Joe Biden rather than dealing effectively with the more grownup issues facing America, he might contribute to yet another Democrat taking the White House in 2024.
It was good to see that Republican Jews have decided to help carve a winning 2024 campaign. As I reported on Friday (Republican Jewish Coalition Invites DeSantis, Pence, But Not Trump to Vegas Annual Leadership Meeting), the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), with at least 47 chapters throughout the United States, is holding its annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas, November 18 to 20, to which it invited at least two major Republicans former President Donald Trump is not enamored with: former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The guest list includes at least three additional potential candidates for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024: Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, and Ted Cruz.
I would vote for any one of them for President.
