For those of you who are baseball ignorant, AAA is the professional baseball league one step down from the Major Leagues. It's where all major league baseball players finish their development before they hit the Big Show.
We lost narrowly in the majors last Tuesday, but at the AAA, we actually gained seats. from John Fund in the subscription-only Wall Street Journal:
The general GOP euphoria over Tuesday's election results should not obscure the fact that the election was close and that Republican victories become scarcer as you go further down the ballot. Republicans did win governorships in Indiana and Missouri and are tied in Washington State. But they lost the New Hampshire and Montana governorships and wound up losing seats in state legislatures overall.
Of the country's 99 state legislative chambers, the GOP lost control of six and won only four from the Democrats. Republicans have apparently gone from having complete control of both chambers in 21 states to only dominating 17 states. Most of the GOP pickups involve the slow dissolution of Democratic dominance in the South. In Georgia, Tennessee and Oklahoma the Republicans will now control the state House for the first time in decades, or in the case of Georgia since Sherman's march to the sea in 1864.
But Republicans also lost ground in some traditional strongholds. Democrats now control both houses of the Colorado legislature for the first time since the 1950s. They also failed to win any seats at all in California, despite the campaigning and fundraising prowess of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In Hawaii, that state's popular GOP governor, Linda Lingle, saw the voters ignore her appeals for a more cooperative legislature as unions picked off several Republican incumbents. Even in the South, Democrats made some gains, winning back complete control of North Carolina's state House.
The lesson here is that while Republican grassroots efforts may have improved, the quality of many of their state legislative candidates and campaigns remains poor. Democrats may be the opposition party in Congress, but they are alive and kicking at the state level.
The
current score:
Republicans now control 20 state Legislatures. Democrats have 19, and 10 are split, with Democrats holding one chamber and Republicans the other.
Before Tuesday's vote, the GOP held 21 and the Democrats 17, with 11 split. The Nebraska Legislature, which has only one chamber, is nonpartisan.
It's not the White House or Congress, but we are making gains on the ground. We likely have a great deal to learn from gains in Colorado and even Minnesota, were we can probably
learn some lessons:
But Democrats, performing better at the local level than statewide or nationally, took both chambers in Colorado, as well as the Vermont House and the Senates in Oregon and Washington. In hard-fought Iowa they earned a Senate tie with Republicans, and in Minnesota they used an aggressive voter-turnout operation to make dramatic gains.
Minnesota's 77 percent turnout, the highest since 1960, helped the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party narrow a 28-seat Republican majority in the House to just two seats. A recount is scheduled in a race where Republican Judy Soderstrom finished 94 votes ahead of DFL opponent Tim Faust among 20,000 votes cast.
The national party may be on life support, as well as Democratic parties across the South. But we are making gains at the local level where the future stars of our party are learning their trade.