GOP wipeout in Virginia
Republicans, there is no sugarcoating the VA election result tonight. We got CRUSHED. And there is zero, I mean zero, way to put a positive spin on the results.
Let's review what happened and what this portends for the party going forward.
Yes, VA is a fairly reliable Democratic state: Obama won it twice and Hillary won it. But Northam won the governor's race by close to 9 points. He massively outperformed the polls, which showed him with a 2-3 point lead on average. He also outperformed Hillary's 5.3% win in the state in 2016 as well as Mark Warner's 2001, Tim Kaine's 2005, and Terry McAuliffe's 2013 governor victories. Northam crushed pretty much everywhere, winning exurban Loudoun County by a whopping 20 points, a margin that pretty much no Democrat has achieved in that county.
Then we have the VA House of Delegates races. Going into election day, the Republicans held a commanding 66-34 margin. As of now, Democrats are set to take over the House, giving the party complete control of the state. The Republican House Whip lost to an actual Socialist. And minority and transgender Democrats also won races.
What does this mean? At a high level, it means that the Trump led GOP is anathema to both minorities and college whites. I had said from the beginning that Trump was the wrong man to lead the GOP, and his unexpected victory in the 2016 election did not change that. Trump is fundamentally unable to expand the appeal of the party beyond his most hardcore base; his victory was due to Hillary's weaknesses and the Democrats' overreach on cultural liberalism. But what happens in 2018 when the GOP has to defend the Trump record, especially in moderate districts? Today's results are a huge warning sign to the party and the President to get their acts together.
Holy shit, we are winning so fucking much. I'm not sure how much more winning I can handle at the hands of the 3-D chess grandmaster DJT. #MAGA.
If we exclude starting wars, this is probably the worst Republican president + congress combination in history. At this point, the only way things can get worse is if we get involved in another war, and that's certainly plausible. We've had control of the White House and congress, and yet everything has been a total fucking disappointment.
By electing Trump and these pathetic pseudo-conservatives in congress (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski) we've all but ensured a Sanders presidency in 2020.
This is ENTIRELY the fault of Trump Republicans. When we get president Sanders in 2020, I will be blaming this 100% on the idiots who advocated for a Trump presidency and then afterwards ran around with red MAGA hats shouting "MAGA". As if it wasn't obvious that electing Donald fucking Trump as president would be anything other than disastrous.
Get ready for Sanders/Warren 2020.
And guess what happens when Sanders and Warren get elected? Assuming Trump and this congress manage to achieve a single thing before their time is over, it will be completely destroyed and then some by Sanders/Warren and a Democrat congress. It will be one toe forward, 87 fucking years backwards: Get ready for a "new New Deal".
EDIT: @TNA" Thanks nationalist/socialist scum. Perhaps when Sanders gets elected, you can sit in some dusty old room with Steve Bannon and his white-board and try to imagine the country out of bankruptcy and economic depression.
The mistake Republicans made was entertaining the nationalist/socialist Trumpers. These people should have been vociferously lambasted, crushed, and purged before it got to this point. Strategically speaking, I would rather have 4 shitty years of Clinton and then 8 years of a good Republican (Romney), rather than 4 shitty years of Trump and then 4-8 years of irreversibly disastrous Sanders. And let's not kid ourselves: A president Sanders would signal the end of the USA's competitive economic advantage over other countries; after all, why would I move to "democratic socialist" USA when I could stay in tried-and-true "democratic socialist" Denmark, or any other Western country, since they're all "democratic socialists" these days?
It sounds comical, but It might be that we will look back in a decade and realise that DJT was the catalyst/trigger for the end of Americanism (American exceptionalism). Realistically, how would a "democratic socialist" USA differentiate itself economically from the rest of the western world, which is also "democratic socialist"?
This is why I have nightmares about Trump and his presidency: Not because I think he will be the second-coming of Hitler, but because he's so incompetent and devoid of values/principles that he will either start WW3 or fuck-up so badly that Sanders gets elected; and at that point, it's all over.
Dude chill out, it's not that serious.
I don't agree with everything you're saying here, but I do agree that it's becoming more and more plausible now that Trump could do to the GOP what Obama did to the Democrats--and that's to completely gut the party at the state and local level. Like, I understand losing the VA governor's race, but to get wiped out in the House of Delegates in Virginia portends political doom for the party.
I even think it's possible Trump wins re-election, like Obama did, but still manages to destroy the GOP in the process.
Virginia is not a "reliable Democratic state." It has swung from being firmly red, to being a swing state, to leaning blue. Democratic Presidential nominees winning the last 3 elections don't change how close the race is. Virginia is and was winnable for Republicans.
It is an indictment on Trumpism. Virginia is not the right place to play white nationalist anti-establishment trumpets. Much of the state's population is quite literally "the establishment" and the state as a whole is very well-educated.
Virginia was a reliable right-wing state until the growth of the DC metro area spurred on the migration of people from liberal parts of the country and from overseas (i.e. people who vote Democrat). Politics is a matter of demographics (Democrats in Texas are keenly aware of this), and the demographics of Virginia have shifted.
Quite so, but there aren't enough well-educated yuppies in the metro DC area to turn Virginia blue, so there's more to it. I posit that it is growth of an immigrant population as well (the amount of foreign-born and their descendants in Virginia has increased markedly).
Virginia's cultural, economic, and political power base used to be the arch-conservative aristocrats of the Tidewater area (Hampton Roads, Newport News, Williamsburg, Richmond, etc.) Virginia was fully seen as part of the South, and DC and even Baltimore were considered Southern cities.
Now with the monstrous growth of the US government since the 1960s, a massive apparatus has sprouted around Washington DC to serve it, and it has become primarily staffed with transplants from elsewhere.
And this point cannot be over-emphasized. I have two friends who are to the right of me politically (imagine that!) who voted for Hillary Clinton because they saw Trump as a threat to their federal jobs. This area is flooded by people who are entirely reliant upon big government.
Even California used to be solid Republican, but basically you have the conflation of Bill Clinton's centrist re-alignment of the Democratic Party, the end of crime and communism as salient political issues, and massive demographic changes due to immigration and suburban sprawl, that is turning once GOP states into either rock solid blue (CA, IL, CT, ME, VT), center-left and reliably democratic (NV, CO, NM, VA, NH), or swing states (AZ, GA, NC). In contrast, the GOP has not been able to convert a similar number of states to their side because our base is older whites and working class whites, who are declining shares of the overall electorate.
Let's look at VA in more depth. You say that VA is winnable for Republicans. In theory, yes. But it's damm hard. Since George W Bush won VA by 8.3% in the 2004 presidential election, the only other Republican to win the state in either a presidential, senate, or gubernatorial election, was Bob McDonnell in the 2009 gubernatorial race. To win statewide in Virginia, a Republican must win exurban Loudoun and Prince William counties convincingly, limit his loss in suburban behemoth Fairfax County to 10-15%, and pretty much crush it everywhere else. The exurbs used to be rock solid republican while Fairfax used to be swing-slightly left (W Bush won Loudoun and Prince William twice and Fairfax in 2000; he lost Fairfax in 2004 by 7.3%). However, due to the DC liberals-many of them government employees-moving to NOVA as well as mass immigration, the political landscape is now immensely stacked against the GOP. These are macro trends that no politician has control over.
Having said that, I do think Trump is toxic, and if he acted more like an actual mature adult President, the losses in VA last night would have been more limited.
Lifelong Virginian here from the D.C. suburbs.
The Virginia Republican Party is a victim of its own success. For 2 decades, Democrats have flooded into Northern Virginia as they have sought the economic opportunity of the D.C. suburbs without the crushing regulatory and tax burden of Maryland or the District of Columbia. Virginia is turning reliably blue almost solely for this reason. This same thing happened in Colorado and New Hampshire, which were reliably red until about 15 years ago when the flood of California and Massachusetts "refugees," respectively, turned the states blue. And this is unfortunately going to happen in Texas, too, and is starting to happen to Kansas, my family's true home state, as well as Georgia.
The reality is, there is no true red and blue state divide--there is a red and blue divide between the urban and large suburban areas and the smaller suburban and rural areas. A lot of cities in red states are getting flooded by emigrants seeking economic opportunity. Unfortunately, they are taking their values with them.
And Trump is an awful, horrible, terrible, no good, very bad de facto head of the Republican Party.
The reality is until republicans get minorities and young people on board with their party they are endangered. They've won the popular vote once in the past 5 presidential elections. Yea, the gerrymandering is hiding their endangered status in the house but how long will that last? Sure, young people and minorities are not the best at voting in mid-term elections but can you really rely on that? In any case, the favorability rating for both parties is at a multi-decade low, hopefully we are seeing the beginning of a 3rd or maybe even 4th major party to challenge this ridiculous either-or we've had to deal with.
I agree that Republicans need minorities on board, but the "right" in modern American politics has rarely, if ever, won young people. I just don't think conservatism will ever appeal to young people until they are older. I do think Republicans need the young people of today to be the Republican voters of tomorrow, that's for sure.
Yes and no. Trump won more of those people than Romney did, but populism, nationalism, and immigration aside, the traditional Republican ideology is a really a turnoff to many of these people. George Bush and Reagan were not popular with minorities, and they were arguably liberal on things like immigration and race relations.
Call me a pessimist, but I think Republicans are going about appealing to minorities all wrong. They seem to think if they just advocate for their usual economic policies but just be nice to minorities on cultural and social issues, then minorities will suddenly become apple pie Americans with a Protestant work ethic who whistle the Star-Spangled Banner daily. They seem to also think that by being more religious, they'll appeal to the intense Catholicism of Hispanics.
Neither of these are really close to the truth. Minorities vote for Democrats for just as much economic reasons as they do social reasons. Proportionally (mainly Latinos and African-Americans), they are very consistent supporters of big government. They want more welfare, they support hate speech laws, they want free college, they want free healthcare, they want gun control.
If Republicans compromise on these issues, then they might as well just be socially conservative Democrats, who are another group of political losers. And if that's the case, what's the point of voting Republican? Might as well vote Gary Johnson.
I think the whole "minorities are the future and if you still try to go about things traditionally (or according to Democrats, 'white'), you're racist and outdated" is overblown and also a bit of hubris by Democrats. Whites are still the majority of the country (and will be for about another 50 years), and conservative whites outnumber liberal whites. Conservative whites also have more kids than any other group besides Hispanics. However, the Hispanic birthrate has been dropping while the conservative white birthrate has remained consistently above replacement, which means that in a few years, conservative whites could have the highest birthrates in the country. The majority of Americans (of all races) support immigration restriction, and if Trump is able to leave a lasting legacy on this by getting the RAISE Act through and formally repealing Hart-Celler, it would be in the Republican's best interest to double down on their position, and the Democrats will do the same.
American politics will be more polarized than ever as the nation is essentially split between two countries (an urban, multicultural liberal one and a rural, white, conservative one). However, there is enough internal inertia to keep this polarization holding for a long time. I expect elections in lieu of the nasty Trump/Hillary showdown to be more common.
I doubt AA minorities will ever really vote Republican. The idea behind the GOP is more individualistic. It appreciates God and the embodiment of being a unique vessel designed to fulfill its own destiny. There's a tradition that I don't think blacks care about because of the ugly history that led to AA's current socioeconomic conditions.
And, people from Africa or blacks tend to be more communal as a whole, for various reasons that would go too deep into anthropology for me to describe. I just think that black people are not interested in running their life as hardcore as it takes to 'kick ass and take names' or something.
The GOP is not going to win minorities outright; it's just not possible due to historical, political, and policy reasons, just like Democrats are not going to win white working class voters outright. Even Reagan, who won YUGE landslides, got less than 15% of the black vote and around 30% of the latino vote, so I'm not holding my breath here. Could the GOP do better in terms of honest outreach and rhetoric regarding minorities? Absolutely. I'm a minority and cringed at many of the stuff that Trump said during the campaign. At the same time, the GOP should not compromise its principles by becoming Democrat-lite and granting amnesty to illegals, advocating for open borders, giving illegals citizenship, and expanding the federal government. Unfortunately, the unprincipled dumb President may bow to Democratic pressure and do all those things. Damm, I wish Cruz were President right now.
This statement made me LOL and is so ironic (I'm not disputing what you're saying). Texas went through the same thing when oil was around $100/bbl and our healthcare sector was booming.
Combine the availability of jobs and the fact that we have no state income tax and homes that are far more affordable and guess what...we saw a flood of New Yorkers, Californians, and others from deep Blue states come over here, bitch about how much Texas sucks, and take advantage of all the opportunities only to shit all over this and push Texas more towards California.
It wouldn't surprise me if within the next decade Texans end up paying a state income tax and see our cost of living skyrocket as a result of the shift towards the deep Blue.
Yep. They come to our homes, take advantage of the opportunities our policies have provided, and then bitch about how backwards we are.
This seems to be a reflection of Trump's approvals shrinking. Most people that disliked Trump have probably strengthen their views, but this is confirmation that the people who once supported Trump are weakening. It's a good sign for the country overall. Even if Trump doesn't get removed from office, to have his power and influence diminished will hopefully result in a peaceful 4 years and an equally peaceful transition afterwards.
As a Virginian, I don't think this is good. The GOP House of Delegates was the moderating influence that kept that "blue wave" in check, and the Virginia Democratic party is a fairly left party at the state level (although, fairly moderate at the local level, at least in Northern Virginia). Virginia has long been a bastion of economic liberty and fiscal restraint, so I'm fairly concerned about the long-term trend here.
Get ready for VA to embrace sanctuary cities, higher taxes, illegal aliens, mandatory transgender pronouns, and other liberal nonsense. You guys are on the path to becoming California-lite.
I'd be totally fine if both parties got completely assfucked in these forthcoming elections and the people who came out on the other side were more moderate types like mitch daniels, mark warner, paul ryan, and joe biden
Paul Ryan is economically ultraconservative
Unfortunately, all signs indicate the opposite. As @lwmg" said, I would not be surprised if a "progressive" won the Democratic primary and beat Trump in 2020. The Sanders/Warren wing of the left is the Democrat's own "Tea Party" - full of the purity tests and infighting and whatnot that has plagued the Republicans for a decade.
Our saving grace is that both are past 70, so maybe both will decide not to run.
If Trump keeps this up, we are going to have a Democratic president who makes Obama look like a conservative. It will truly be frightening, and America's path to socialism will be all but complete.
This is in fact exactly what will happen. The guy who will knock off Trump in 2020 (assuming he runs again) will be a relative mainstream "moderate" in the mold of Biden or Warner.
These fears of Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren getting into the White House are comically overblown.
Uh, not really. Bernie Sanders, an actual Socialist, got 44% of the vote in the 2016 Democratic primary against a candidate who had the support of the entire Democratic Party infrastructure and every advantage one can think of.
The Democratic Party has moved VERY far left under Obama, an ideological transformation not seen in modern times. There is empirical data to support this; if you chart both parties' positions, the GOP now is roughly where they were in 1994 while the Democrats are more liberal now than ever. Democrats now simply do not want more government programs. They insist on open borders, oppose any limit on immigration as racist and xenophobic, beholden to divisive identity politics, anti-cops, and quite frankly anti-American on many of their core values and policies.
This is where the Democratic Party's energy and soul lies, and there's no turning back. We are at an inflection point in American history. Our nation's fundamental character is at stake.
The demographic divide has been thoroughly covered in the comments thus far, but isn’t the economic divide just as, if not more, consequential here?
I’ve made this point before, but Trump in 2016 was a true faustian bargain for conservatives. He won the election, but only because he diluted and contradicted true conservative values. During his campaign he promised broader healthcare insurance, no cuts to medicaid, medicare, or social security. He wanted to dismantle global trade agreements and advocated for increasing taxes on the economic elite, like himself. He said these things not because they are consistent with his ideology, but because he needed to in order to win the election.
According to the tax foundation, 77% of Americans who file taxes fall into the 15% tax bracket or lower. Like it or not, a large portion of these people rely on the government in some form or another. They detest the “welfare queens” portrayed and perpetuated by the right’s media apparatus, but then blindly ignore the reality of their own subtle government reliance.
Take Kentucky, the second reddest state. Almost 40% of its state budget is federally bankrolled and it has expanded Medicaid coverage for its populace. Government spending and subsidies are so entrenched in the U.S. economy at this point that a major contraction or restructuring is just politically untenable. Note, I’m not saying the theoretical framework for conservativism is unfounded, just that you cannot impose it on our current economic system without grave backlash. The only possible thing stopping conservatives from an inexorable gutting in the ’18 mid-terms is their inability to fully enact their agenda.
This is correct. I'm convinced that Bush 2004 is the last traditionally conservative campaign that will win the Presidency. Romney was a fantastic candidate with great policy platform, but he got crushed by Obama's vision of big government and cultural liberalism. America is decisively center-left on economics; the nation is filled with fat lazy people who want free stuff from the government. Add to that mass immigration of unskilled workers from Third World countries, and you have the recipe for Democratic dominance. The only way Republicans win is to combine big government economics with nationalist rhetoric on immigration, trade, and national security. It's not the path to victory that I like, but these are macro trends that we can't escape.
I will be happy to watch Republicans get their asses kicked in as many elections as it takes for them to rid themselves of the Trumpian cancer festering in all wings of their party. The Trump agenda was rejected loudly and emphatically last night, which was the first time in 365 days I'd felt good about the political current in this country.
Read this article if you haven't already - I hope these ppl dissapear back into the non-voting wasteland from whence they came. They deserve no say in the future of our political system - https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/08/donald-trump-johnsto…
Look, you can disagree strongly with them, but as U.S. citizens, they are eligible to vote and thus have a say in the direction of our country. I have similar contempt for ultra liberals, SJWs, and BLM activists, but they are just as American as anyone else.
Americans' support for Trump's policies actually increase as soon as you divorce those policies from Trump. America is center-left on economic policy and center-right on cultural/social policies such as immigration and radical Islam. That's where Trump is at (albeit he's not too consistent), and this helped him win the election. I do agree that Trump's behavior is hurting the GOP brand immensely, something I have been worried about for a while.
It's interesting to see things from a Republican point of view given I do not live in the States.
I'm not sure where you're from but I am curious to get your thoughts on Republicans in the US. If you're from Europe I know quite a few who feel that the Republican Party is far right or right-wing which I find to be laughable.
We may have elements of this (and the flip side is true for the Democrats as well) but at the core the Republican philosophy is around adherence to the Constitution, limited government, strong focus on defense and the laws on the books, and maximizing the individuals ability to make decisions and chart their own course through life with limited governmental interference.
To allude to Mr. Burns, I think non-American media view the Republican party as "booger men." I think our philosophy is so foreign to them that they fail to understand it at even the most basic level: Gov't is necessary, and limited government is best. Market capitalism liberates people from poverty. Whatever you want less of tax it, so if you want more economic growth then tax the economy less. Welfare is for the orphaned, widowed and disabled, and should not be a way of life. And so on. Evil, right?
It's all a matter of perspective, no? The European "center" and the American "center" are at different points along the political spectrum, and the American center is decisively right of the European center.
Also, one can debate what the "far right" is vs. "right wing," but the Republican party is most definitely "right-wing" both by an American's perspective and a European's.
and a vehement denial of anthropological global warming... No need for a serious rebuttal as I'm just giving you a hard time-- although it is very much an aspect unique to the American right.
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