National turnout was 36.6%.
http://t.co/... That's lowest since 1942. All that money appears to have just made everybody stay home.
— @leedrutman
USA Today:
President Obama pledged to work with Republican leaders Wednesday, the day after a historic wave election that brought Republican control of the Senate and the largest GOP House majority since 1930.
"Obviously, Republicans had a good night, and deserve credit for running good campaigns," Obama said. The message of the election, he added, was that Americans want their leaders to "work as hard as they do."
Obama then put two new items on the agenda for the lame-duck Congress: A $6.2 billion emergency spending bill that would pay for efforts to fight Ebola and, in a turnabout from his previous stance, explicit congressional authorization for his war against the Islamic State.
For more than an hour, Obama spoke to reporters Wednesday from the East Room, a more formal venue than the briefing room. It's the same place where President George W. Bush talked about his "thumping" in the 2006 midterm elections, and where President Obama discussed his "shellacking" in 2010.
Obama steered clear of using similarly vivid language to describe Tuesday's Democratic defeat, and also declined to analyze its causes.
Seattle Times:
The big story of Election 2014, other than Republicans taking the U.S. Senate, was that gun control finally got its breakthrough. In a big way.
Gun-control measures have never done well at the ballot box, including in our liberal state. But the gun-control groups smashed that barrier for the first time Tuesday.
The NRA had a pretty rotten night, as it turns out. Govs. Hickenlooper (CO) and Malloy (CT) survived despite gun safety measures passing on their watch. In CO, two state senators were recalled,
but
Two of the seats that changed hands Tuesday night once belonged to pro-gun recall winners Bernie Herpin, R-Colorado Springs, and George Rivera, R-Pueblo, both of whom lost their races by relatively large margins in Districts 11 and 3, respectively...
But for as contentious an issue as gun control was at that time, it seemed to fade into the background this election season.
To those watching fight for control of CO: Here is what to watch for House:
https://t.co/.... For Senate, Dems need SD 16, 20
& 22.
— @Taniel
And, btw, it didn't help Sens. Begich or Pryor to oppose background checks. Just a reminder to Dems that it does you no good to try for NRA support. They won't support you and no one else will, either.
More politics and policy below the fold.
David Dayen notes a bright spot in the bleak election picture:
Dan Malloy's progressive victory
As told by @ddayen
Matthew Dickinson:
NO, THAT’S NOT THE MESSAGE VOTERS SENT YESTERDAY
In looking ahead, my guess is that the Senate will become more unruly – not less so – during the next two years. This is partly because the Democratic caucus has shifted left with the loss of its more moderate members. But it is also because several conservative Senate Republicans – with at least one eye on a potential 2016 presidential run – will view this election as an opportunity to push conservative policies designed to appeal to the party base.
Read this post before you overread the election results.
Greg Sargent:
These pollsters argued that this was above all the result of a failure to connect with these voters’ economic concerns. At the root of these concerns, Mellman says, are stagnating wages and the failure of the recovery’s gains to achieve wider, more equitable distribution. Democrats campaigned on a range of economic issues — the minimum wage, pay equity, student loan affordability, expanded pre-kindergarten education — but these didn’t cut through people’s economic anxieties, because they didn’t believe government can successfully address them.
This reflects
what I wrote yesterday.
LA Times:
Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine put a quick end to speculation that he might join the new Republican majority, saying it was in his state's interests for him to continue to caucus with Democrats.
"I think it's in Maine's interests to have a senator in each camp," he said at a news conference in Brunswick. The state's senior senator, Susan Collins, is a Republican. "The reality of the current Senate, whether it's controlled by Democrats or Republicans, is that nothing can or will happen without bipartisan support."
Vox:
"We make democracy way too hard in this country."
That's what Barbara Arnwine, head of a Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights-led coalition of 150 groups that monitored a hotline for voting problems, told The Guardian after Tuesday's midterm elections.
Democracy was even harder than usual on November 4 — strikingly so — if the volume of calls received by the group is any indication.
The hotline answered over 12,000 pleas for help and reports of glitches from distressed voters, many of whom were navigating new, restrictive election laws. The Lawyer's Committee, which does similar work for every election, said that volume was unusually high.
Heidi Przybyla:
Republicans, who spent the past year battling with Democrats for control of the U.S. Congress, are bracing for their own internal feud over the party’s new agenda.
Fissures are erupting between party leaders and the rank and file over whether to first advance the most ambitious goals -- dismantling Obamacare and rolling back environmental rules -- or focus on issues less likely to face a veto from President Barack Obama.
Those close to House leaders are signaling their priority will be more pragmatic initiatives over partisan fights, to show the party is capable of governing. These include repealing a medical-device tax enacted to help pay for Obamacare and granting Obama greater trade-negotiating authority.
NEJM:
For those of us who lived through the early days of the U.S. AIDS epidemic, the current national panic over Ebola brings back some very bad memories. The toxic mix of scientific ignorance and paranoia on display in the reaction to the return of health care workers from the front lines of the fight against Ebola in West Africa, the amplification of these reactions by politicians and the media, and the fear-driven suspicion and shunning of whole classes of people are all reminiscent of the response to the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s.