Bill McKibben at The New York Times writes—Up Against Big Oil in the Midterms:
The victories in the midterm elections were real and sweet for environmentalists and progressives: There will be at least 119 women in Congress, and for the first time their ranks will include a Muslim (two, actually) and a Native American (at least two).
Some of those candidates were talking about a Green New Deal, like the one put forward by the soon-to-be-youngest member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that would rapidly reduce the nation’s fossil fuel use while preparing the country for climate change. The fact that the Democrats now control one house of Congress means that President Trump’s pillage of environmental regulations will at least proceed under the spotlight of investigation. Half a dozen new states now have governors and legislatures willing to consider cutting greenhouse gas emissions significantly.
And yet I confess I came away from Tuesday night feeling unsure that there really is the political space to get done what needs doing in the time that we have left. Last month, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that we had perhaps a dozen years to really turn the planet around by substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s not that we won’t see real change eventually. The new governor of Colorado, for instance, announced the most ambitious targets in the nation for converting to 100 percent renewable power by 2040. That’s wonderful — but it’s also in one state, and still slow, at least when compared with the timetable laid out by the United Nations’ climate panel.
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—America Voted. The Climate Lost. Fossil fuel companies spent record amounts to oppose pro-climate ballot initiatives, and it paid off:
But voters didn’t elect many candidates who ran on pro-climate agendas. Environmentalists had hoped that Florida, being on the front lines of climate change, would make history in that regard. But Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, a climate champion, was unseated by Governor Rick Scott, a Republican accused of banning the word climate from state government websites. And Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, who pledged to act swiftly on climate, lost to a Republican who has dismissed the problem.
Voters rejected almost every opportunity to enact strong state-level climate policies. [...]
The oil and gas industry spent quite a lot of money opposing all of these pro-climate ballot initiatives. The campaign against Washington’s carbon fee “raised $20 million, 99 percent of which has come from oil and gas,” according to Vox. The carbon fee was thus one of the most expensive ballot initiative fights in Washington state history. The renewable energy fight in Arizona was also the most expensive in state history because of oil industry spending. The same was true for Colorado’s anti-fracking measure, as the oil and gas industry clearly spent nearly $40 million opposing it.
Phyllis Bennis and Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II at Common Dreams write—We Have Movement Work To Do:
Elections are not how we change history. But they are a big part of how we—social movements, poor and disenfranchised and marginalized people, communities of color—engage with power. So when we win electoral victories, it matters. A lot. It's not because of which party wins, which state turns from red to purple or back again. Elections are not a box of crayons.
It's because of what happens when people are sent to congress or to the state house by and from our movements, and voted in by mobilized, engaged and enraged constituencies who will hold them accountable for what they do. We didn't win everything last night—we never do. But we did see amazing victories in diversifying who serves in Congress (including topping 100 women for the first time) and expanding who gets the right to vote. [...]
The most important defeat of the 2018 midterm elections was the fact that 51% of the voting public still did not vote. With all the anger, all the outrage, all the marches and mobilizations, more than half didn't show up. Certainly many faced structural or institutional problems—for some, the poll lines were too long (by design, as happened in Georgia) and, being low-wage workers with no paid leave, they had to report to work and couldn't wait that long. Naturalized immigrants in border communities may have been terrified to vote. Others, poor and elderly or disabled, couldn't get to the polls because they can't drive/can't afford a car, and there's no public transit where they live. We have movement work to do to change that.
But millions more who could have voted stayed home. What if they had gone to the polls instead? What if Democrats had reclaimed the Senate as well as the House? It wouldn't have meant the end of systemic racism and misogyny, environmental degradation and corporate overlordism, Islamophobia or anti-immigrant laws. Not to speak of endless wars and an out-of-control military budget—plenty of Democrats are longstanding supporters there.
But if more registered voters—more young people, more people of color, more poor people, more women, more immigrants and students and workers and activists—had voted, things might be just a bit better. That's our real challenge. Not to get caught up in the negatives, the limitations of elections which are always—always—about how we engage with power, not victories in and of themselves. And certainly not to just go chill, not to think the fight is over because we won a few things. The challenge is to mobilize now, harder than ever. Not just about voting, though voting remains a key right we need to continue to fight for. But to mobilize, to organize, to build the movements and the organizations we're going to need to fight for power. We have a long way to go – last night was only the latest of our beginnings. We have movement work to do.
Rebecca Traister at New York Magazine’s The Cut writes—The New Face of Power Is Taking Shape
For many progressives, Tuesday’s midterm election results felt muddy, perplexing. Were they to feel relief or stabbing defeat? The Democratic Party took the House, and with it some crucial oversight over the Trump administration; it flipped seven state chambers and won gubernatorial races in Michigan, Kansas, Maine, and Wisconsin. Yet its biggest-ticket, sky-high-hope candidates — Texas’s Beto O’Rourke and Florida’s Andrew Gillum, and perhaps Georgia’s Stacey Abrams — failed to win their hotly watched races, and the defeats of Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly, and Heidi Heitkamp contributed to a grievously bad showing in the Senate.
But as confusing as it may have felt for those watching Steve Kornacki frantically banging on his big screen on MSNBC, Tuesday’s results were in fact perfectly coherent, very much in line with the fight we have long been immersed in. That fight is — as it has been since this nation’s founding — a fight over two concepts central to our nation’s origins, its progress, and its future: the promises of and restrictions on political representation and political enfranchisement.
Progressives yearned for a clean wave last night, the swift correction of what many liked to imagine as a fluky clerical error two years ago. After all, there were so many factors — Comey, Russia, the Clintonness of it all, Jill Stein — that could have explained away our descent into openly bigoted authoritarianism. The harder thing to absorb has been the fact that Donald Trump, and the party that created and sticks with him, is not a fluke. He and they are the living, powerful embodiment of an old American theory about who should get to participate, who should get to have power, whose voices should be heard, whose votes count. This is not a fluke. This is thecivic, legal, political, and social American argument — the one that at its core circles around the question of who among us is counted as fully human.
Cas Mudde at The Guardian writes—Don't be fooled. The midterms were not a bad night for Trump:
The midterms turned out to indeed be a referendum on Trump and “Trumpism”, ie a populist radical right combination of authoritarianism, nativism and populism. It was fully embraced by the Republican party and fully rejected by the Democratic party. The key result of the midterms is that America is now both more nativist and more multicultural.
True, some of the most strident white nationalist and white supremacist Republicans were defeated – although an open neo-Nazi like Arthur Jones still got over 25% of the vote in the third congressional district of Illinois, while openly white nationalist and pro-Confederate Corey Stewart lost the Virginia Senate race with virtually the same score as his conservative predecessor six years ago. Perhaps most painful for Trump was that Kris Kobach, a key player in his ill-fated and ill-named Presidential Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity who has a decade-long history of racial voter suppression, was handsomely defeated in the Kansas gubernatorial race.
But many other far-right Republicans were re-elected, including Louie Gohmert, Steve King and Ted Cruz in Texas, while old-school Republicanswere replaced by more brazenly Trumpian ones – as, for example, Katie Arrington in South Carolina (House of Representatives), Brian Kemp in Georgia (governor), and Ron DeSantis in Florida (governor).
On the other side of the political spectrum, the Democratic party made modest overall advances, in terms of seats rather than votes – barely taking the House, while staying well behind a US Senate majority. That said, the party has changed fundamentally in composition. Two years after Bernie Sanders’ failed challenge for the presidential nomination, there will be almost as many democratic socialists as conservative-leaning Democrats (known as Blue Dog Democrats) in Congress. While still a minority, they will be a loud minority, convinced they represent the future of the party.
Joan Walsh at The Nation writes—Last Night, the Feminist Insurgency Hit the Polls—and Now It’s Headed to Congress:
The feminist resistance to Donald Trump marched from America’s cities, suburbs, and small towns into Congress and the statehouses on November 6. As of this writing, nearly 100 women will take their seatsin the US House of Representatives in January; almost ninety percent of these women are Democrats. “I feel so good,” says Emily’s List president Stephanie Schriock. The group had a plan to elect at least 23 Democratic women to the House, so that the 23 victories needed by the Democrats to control the chamber were provided by women. Of the party’s 27 pickups in the midterms thus far, 19 are women, all endorsed by Emily’s List. Another six Emily’s List-backed candidates are in races too close to call.
According to CNN exit polls, almost 80 percent of voters said that electing women was important to them, and apparently they meant it. [...]
Analysts are resisting calling this one a wave election, since the party “only” won 27 House seats (at current count)—Republicans won 63 in 2010, with a much smaller share of the popular vote—because gerrymandering has given the GOP a structural advantage both in the US House and in state chambers around the country. Given those disadvantages, this was indeed a wave election, no matter what underinformed pundits tell you.
And the wave was largely due to female voters and candidates. Women broke for Democrats by a 19-point margin, the largest midterm gender gap we’ve seen. But there is still some room for shame: at least 59 percent of white women supported Ted Cruz, and an unacceptable 67 percent of Georgia’s white women backed Kemp over Abrams. That’s why the diversity of the women that Democrats send to Congress matters so much, Schriock says. “You have to make sure you have someone who understands her community, and these women do. They just rolled up their sleeves and got it done.”
Bob Borosage at The Nation writes—The 2018 Election: A Blue Wave With a Harsh Red Undertow:
The Democrats’ blue wave reclaimed the House of Representatives yesterday, moving toward flipping over 30 seats, they took seven gubernatorial races and counting, and made significant gains in down ballot races—winning over 260 state legislative seats with more to come. But the red undertow gave Republicans a larger majority in the Senate—with Republicans consolidating their hold on conservative, largely white and rural states. Transformative Democratic candidates—Gillum in Florida, O’Rourke in Texas—made stunning runs, only to fall short by the smallest of margins. (Stacey Abrams’s run for governor in Georgia remains a race too close to call as this is written.)
Trump’s manic, unhinged, dishonest, and scurrilous campaigning insured that he would be, as he put it, “on the ballot.” No doubt his blend of hate and fear helped build Republican turnout. His results were decidedly mixed. He surely aided Democratic takeover of the House, while helping Republican victories in the Senate. Hand-selected candidates, like the scabrous Kris Kobach in Kansas, lost, as did Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Teflon no longer.
The new Democratic House is expected to feature over 100 women. A new wave of progressive legislators—younger, more female, more diverse, more progressive—will energize the Democratic caucus. [...]
Among Democrats, the votes hadn’t even been cast before the Wall Street wing of the party was declaring victory, arguing that Democrats had won with moderates and veterans able to appeal in the suburbs, suggesting a rerun of the Clinton strategy in 2016. But the reality is that progressives made remarkable advances over the past two years. In the Senate and in the new Democratic majority in the House, progressives will drive the agenda, a defensive agenda—defending Obamacare, fending off attacks on abortion, defending Medicare and Social Security, defending failed US trade policies—offers no answers for the future. Progressive political groups—People’s Action, Indivisible, Our Revolution, Democrats for America, the Progressive Congressional Campaign Committee, the Congressional Progressive Caucus—dramatically increased their capacity, their sophistication, and their resources.
Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post writes—Pundits talk about other events the way they have talked about the ‘blue wave’:
In Disappointment to Female Voters, 19th Amendment Passes Only Once
Truman Only Defeats Dewey For President
Disappointing Night for Rebels Who Only Manage to Destroy Death Star, Dashing Hopes They Might Also Have Engaged and Defeated Entire Imperial Navy
Waterloo Outcome Not All Wellington Could Have Hoped For, Fails to Deliver Napoleon Complete Rebuke
Edward Jenner, In Disappointing Find, Develops Smallpox Vaccine (Mumps, Rubella Remain Rampant)
Victory at Yorktown Could Have Been More Resounding
Moses Parts Red Sea in Half, Not Thirds
Faulkner Wins Nobel Prize for Literature, Comes Up Empty in Chemistry and Biology
Jesus Feeds 5,000, No More
NASA Manages to Land First Man on Moon, Falls Short of Mars [...]
Keli Goff at The Guardian writes—Thank you Donald Trump for giving us the year of the woman. Had Trump not won, had it been Clinton or even a decent man like John Kasich, it’s possible fewer women would have run for office:
It was widely reported that a record number of women were inspired to run in 1992 due in large part to the confirmation hearings of future supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas and what they saw as an unfair system controlled by men (the Senate judiciary committee) having free rein to humiliate a woman, Thomas’s accuser Anita Hill, because there were no women there to provide checks and balances.
The years leading up to this election almost make the Thomas/Hill hearings look quaint by comparison. From a sitting president who has previously bragged about committing sexual assault, to a supreme court nominee not just accused of sexual harassment like Thomas was, but actual assault, 2018 became the year of the woman, in large part because women felt under siege. Had Donald Trump not won the presidency, had it been Hillary Clinton or even a decent man like John Kasich, it is quite possible fewer women would have run for office this year.
A marketing professor once told me that the primary ways to motivate people are through the promise of pleasure or the fear of pain, and fear is often more convincing. While I wish a lot of women ran for office because they grew up being made to believe that they have a right to power, just as much as plenty of men grow up believing they do, the truth is a lot of women ran this year because they feared for their daughters. They didn’t want them growing up in a country in which sexual assault is normalized by male leaders, or one in which their daughters face a committee full of men if she ever finds herself testifying in the same seat as Anita Hill or Dr Christine Blasey Ford.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon writes—Here’s your midterm analysis: America is being held hostage by angry old white guys:
America is being held hostage by older white people — especially older white men. That, above all other things, is the moral of the 2018 elections. The CNN exit polls coming out of the midterm elections are stark in many ways, particularly tracking the growing gender and education gaps among voters, but what is most startling is how white people over 45 are heavily Republican and no one else is. [...]
A huge, diverse nation is being controlled by a bunch of people who think the last good music was Led Zeppelin. The answer to why this is happening is complicated. Part of it is that older voters simply turn out in disproportionate numbers. Part of it, however, is the lingering effects of the baby boom, and the fact that there were just a whole lot of people born between 1946 and 1964. Part of it is the result of our increasingly outdated electoral system, which give a disproportionate share of power to votes in suburban and rural areas. That's how Democrats wound up losing several seats in the Senate this year, despite winning the popular vote by 15 percentage points.
And this is no doubt why Republicans continue to believe that as long as they hang onto the votes of middle-aged and elderly white people, the rest of the country's wishes don't matter. As has been evident for the last three years, Donald Trump believes the trick to keeping that voting bloc engaged and active is to be really, really racist
At In These Times, 8 Thinkers on the Left Explain What the Midterm Results Mean for Progressives.