I am writing this on November 15, nine days after the mid-term election. Ballots are still being counted. There are still 7 contests for seats in the House of Representatives that are “too close to be called,” two in California, two in New York, one in Texas, one in Mississippi, and one in Utah. Both are leaning Democrat. In Mississippi and Florida they are still counting ballots for Senate contests. The ballots for Governor in Georgia and Florida are still being counted.
How state-level elections are run is a matter of state law (http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/election-administration-at-state-and-local-levels.aspx). The person who is accountable for how an election is run can be elected or appointed, and if they are appointed, it may be by the Governor, by the legislature, or by some commission whose members are themselves appointed. This person has a lot of leeway in how they run the election. Deadlines, for example — they vary from state to state. Ballots that aren’t counted by whatever deadline the state decides may not get counted at all. Lawyers can go to court and get judges to move the deadlines, however. Some states have requirements that a contest be close within a certain percent in order to trigger a run-off. There are laws about when to use machine counting and when you have to use hand-counting. One state has poll workers eyeballing the signatures on the outside of ballot mailing envelopes and determining if they match a sample signature in some other record. To say nothing of old ballot-counting machines and new ballot-counting machines. Right now, Florida has one manual recount and six machine recounts going. It is Florida again where the Governor has tried to have all the election equipment and processes impounded by the police. Florida, of course, is the state where Bush vs Gore, the 2000- election, was decided.
Here is a parody of what the right has done with our electoral system. It’s five of the weirdest old white guys you ever saw, wearing wigs, and singing Beach Boys songs:
Nonetheless, in many places, state and local level, Democrats have already won or appear to be leading in the un-called races, as mail-in and provisional ballots get counted. Races that appeared to be lost on Nov 7 now are flipping. Josh Harder out in Stockton, for example, whom we supported, has won. Four California districts flipped to blue and one more seems to be coming along. In Florida, Andrew Gillum conceded first, and then as the count continued, withdrew his concession. In Georgia, Stacy Abram’s numbers are climbing.
Overall, in the House of Representatives the Democrats gained 35 seats and hold 230. The Republicans lost 35 to hold 198.
In the Senate, the Democrats lost 1 to hold 47 and the Republicans gained 1 to hold 52, but two races are still uncalled, so it may turn out to be 49-52.
The Democrats won seven Governorships to have 23 and the Republicans lost 6 to have 25. Again, two races (Florida and Georgia) are undecided. As more and more major policies (like Medicare expansion, unemployment compensation, public sector labor laws, school funding) are enacted at the state level as compared to the federal level, people figure out that they have to think about holding state leadership to account and not vote a nationalist “patriotic” ticket on the state and local level.
This is some pretty good news, and the best part of it is that many of the wins for the Democrats are people who are not the old-style corporate liberal Democrats. Many of the candidates who won were endorsed by OR, Our Revolution – the organization that spun off of the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign.
This is in spite of our Electoral College process, the 2-senators-per-state rule for the Senate, and then a 60-plus year (post Brown vs Board of Education) strategy on the part of the right wing to bring back the Confederacy. (See Nancy McLean’s Democracy in Chains.) In spite of failing to re-authorize the Voting Rights Act, permitting massive gerrymandering, and voter suppression down to closing polling places or moving them at the last minute, and on and on, so that the old “3/5ths” rule pretty much is back in place, with only 3/5s of those who could vote being able to vote.
It looks as if we have in fact been able to make a lot of our battered machinery of democracy work anyway. Amazingly. Yes, it has taken a lot of money (individual donations by people who don’t have much extra to begin with) and a whole lot of time. It’s not something you can keep doing forever. But it does look like it happened.
I wrote about his before the election and said, in response to the question, “What would a revolution look like?” — that maybe, if we could make our democracy work, it would look like a shift of the basis of power from the few with bottomless pocketbooks to the many like us. That hasn’t really happened but this is a warning.
____________
Ultimately, Andrew Gillum in Florida, Stacy Abrams in Georgia and Mike Espy in Mississippi (all Black candidates) lost, but lost by a handful of votes. Now (two weeks later) Barbara Lee is contesting Nancy Pelosi’s candidacy for Speaker of the House.
And in between, the hills and mountains northeast of us, up above the Central Valley, went up in flames. A town called Paradise was completely burnt to the ground. Years of alternating drought and heavy rains created thousands of square miles of flourishing forest that would dry out and wither and become kindling. People moved up into these hill towns because land is cheap and living is relatively simple, but if you live way out along a narrow two-lane road and a massive wind-borne wildfire comes pouring down the mountain, and you get stuck behind your neighbors in a traffic jam on that two-lane road, you die. So far there are 80 or more identified deaths and several hundred people simply missing.
The smoke from the wildfires rolled down towards the Bay Area which acted like a basin and collected it. For two weeks the sky was black. According to the air quality index, we had the worst air quality in the world, worse than Beijing on a bad day. Schools were closed and people stayed indoors. If you went outdoors, you work a N95 mask (if you could get one — stores ran out).
At last it rained. The water in the creek running through John Hinkel Park and in the street gutters was thick and black and sudsy. We’ve washed the floors, curtains and other surfaces. But we’ll keep our masks and our new air purifier. There are thousands more square miles of forest to burn, just in Northern California, and it will all pool down into the Bay.
How's that Working Out For You? 