The 2018 Election Cycle

The recent elections were a great success for the Democrats, and a needed palliative for the stressed Republic.  The results irreversibly set the Republican party on a downward spiral where it will have to re-invent itself in a number of years, a sad state for the great party of Lincoln, our greatest president.  It's going to have to grow a backbone, develop or remember a sense of principles first and maybe read or re-read the blueprint for our country, the constitution.

The great achievement of all the Democratic volunteers and voters who came out was to win a double digit majority in the House in order to achieve a much needed and hitherto not present check on our out-of-control, incompetent faux president.  It is unfortunate that there really was no realistic path to retaking the senate for the Democrats, leaving in place the outsized influence of the extreme-right Federalist Society, which controls the list of judges promoting some sort of Christian understanding of and application of the law that is primarily underlaid by some personal belief in a biblical sense of justice in our secular nation, that the lazy president uses exclusively to nominate judges to the federal bench.  The Democratic success in the election lies in how close the party kept the Senate ratio in preparation for the 2020 election, which presents a far more favorable path to the Senate majority for the Democrats.

On a national scale, Democrats flipped seven governorships while losing none of their own, six state legislative bodies were flipped from red to blue and about 300 individual state legislative races replaced a Republican incumbency to a Democrat, boding well for the party's future.  In Virginia's eleven Congressional Districts, three districts were flipped from red to blue despite the extreme Republican gerrymandering of districts after the last census, including the one I worked on where Democratic challenger Jennifer Wexton ousted Republican incumbent Barbara Comstock in a formerly rock-solid safe Republican seat.  The ratio of Virginia representation in the House switched from 7-4 Republican to 7-4 Democratic.

Individually, I delighted in the turning out of his governorship Scott Walker in Wisconsin, a union-busting, lying ("As long as I am governor, I will always cover pre-existing conditions.") GOP SOB in Wisconsin, and the flipping of my boyhood home of Staten Island from red to blue, thereby eradicating the last Republican Congressional District in all of New York City.  I have been disappointed in the apparent results coming out of Florida and Georgia, where racism, and corruption and racism, have driven the incomplete results so far.  Unquestionably, Tuesday was a great day in the struggle to make America great again after a couple of extraordinally dark years.