Election '09

A huge victory for Republicans last night. Independents voted in massive numbers for the Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey. Will Barack Obama and the national Democratic party leaders listen or will they continue to take this country in a very unpopular direction? Perhaps, seeing the writing on the wall, Democrats will redouble their efforts to quickly pass whatever they can now because they know their powers will be greatly diminished after the 2010 midterm elections. The dramatic swing from Democratic support to Republican support in both of these states is quite reminiscent of the 1993 elections. Of course, it was in 1994 that the House of Representatives was won by a majority of Republicans for the first time since the Eisenhower Administration.

I was mostly surprised by the New Jersey gubernatorial race yesterday. I've watched over the years as Democrats have snagged victories from the jaws of defeats so many times in recent years. For example, Sen. Bob Torricelli was so tainted as a candidate that in October 2002, Democrats dropped him from the ballot in favor of former U.S. Sen Frank Lautenberg. This was all done after it was legally permitted to change the ballot in New Jersey. The courts in New Jersey allowed the changes nonetheless. It had become clear that Torricelli was about to lose to the Republican candidate. Other seemingly close New Jersey races eventually swung heavily to the Democrat in recent elections.

The Virginia race was an overwhelming landslide for Republicans. Just one year after then-Senator Obama was able to win a resounding victory in this state, a conservative Republican beat his Democratic opponent by a 59% - 41% margin. Two months ago, the Washington Post revelation that Republican Bob McDonnell had written a socially conservative graduate thesis at Regent University was supposed to be his downfall. Well, it turned out that the voters rightly paid no heed to such an irrelevant piece of information. In a time of economic crisis, are we really supposed to care what you wrote in your graduate thesis?

The race for Congress in what used to be Bill Baker's and then Ellen Tauscher's district in California was won by a Democrat, John Garamendi. This Congressional District has been so gerrymandered that Garamendi, who lives in Walnut Grove (near Sacramento) will be representing Alamo. That's a ridiculously drawn district which seeks only to maximize the number of congressional Democrats in California. In the 1980s, Alamo was represented by Ron Dellums of Berkeley. Only when the Democrats were unable to draw the districts in 1990 was the district an accurate representation of the area, linking the Alamo, Danville, San Ramon and Walnut Creek areas together, if I recall correctly. Although California still had a Democratic Legislature doing the redistricting after the 1990 census, the fact that the governor was a Republican kept Democrats from being the final say. Also, California had gained a number of new seats, and the 10th District was one of those new seats. I helped on the 1992 Bill Baker for Congress campaign.