The Other GOP Wave: State Legislatures
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on November 12th, 2014 12:08 am by HL
The Other GOP Wave: State Legislatures
David Byler, RealClearPolitics
Last Tuesday, Republicans made historic gains in the nation’s state legislatures. The GOP now controls 68 out of 98 partisan state legislative chambers — the highest number in the history of the party. Republicans currently hold the governorship and both houses of the legislature in 23 states (24 if Sean Parnell wins re-election in Alaska), while Democrats have that level of control in only seven. Democrats dominated these elections for most of the postwar era, often controlling between 60 and 80 chambers. Three specific factors — the increasing strength of Southern Republicans,…
Obama, Udall and What 2014 Was Really About
Carl M. Cannon, RealClearPolitics
WASHINGTON – To understand what went wrong for Democrats in the midterm elections, we can look to the Senate race in Colorado, where Barack Obama was first nominated for president. The state went for Obama in 2008 and again in 2012—and until Tuesday it had a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators. Now it will have one Democratic senator, as well as a chastened and only narrowly re-elected governor in a state where the president’s job approval has slipped below 40 percent. Similar results occurred from Georgia to Alaska. This was inevitable because the…
The New South — Black and Conservative
Pat Buchanan, RealClearPolitics
In 1956, 19 Democratic Senators and 82 Democratic House members signed a Southern Manifesto pledging to resist the integration of Southern public schools as ordered by Earl Warren’s Supreme Court. Only two GOP House members, both from Virginia, signed. The American South was as solidly Democratic as it was solidly segregationist. The break in the dam came in a special election in Texas in 1961 to fill the Senate seat of Lyndon Johnson, newly elected vice president. John Tower became the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a Southern Senate seat by popular election. After a raucous…
