A blue wave or a blue ripple

Many people are saying the Democrats didn’t get the blue wave on Tuesday they were hoping for but I disagree. Before the election, most Democrats and a lot of Republicans agreed that the Democrats had a good chance of taking back the House of Representatives and the Republicans would most likely hold on to the Senate. That’s exactly what happened. In fact, the numbers were like a Blue wave. 32 seats were flipped by Democrats and only 3 by Republicans. That’s fairly significant. The results showed House Democrats with 223 seats, several more than they needed to retake control.

On the other hand, the Democrats lost a couple of seats in the U.S. Senate with a very strange vote total. Democratic Senate candidates received almost 12 million more votes than Republican Senate candidates nationwide but lost seats because they either got those votes in the wrong places or didn’t get them in the right places.

At the state level, Democrats flipped at least seven governorships from red to blue including Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico and Wisconsin. Wisconsin was notable because the Republicans thought they had run an unbeatable candidate in Scott Walker who was running for re-election but they were wrong. No governorships flipped from Democrat to Republican.

That trend even trickled down to Nebraska and the city of McCook where Gene Weedin, a Democrat, was the leading vote-getter for City Council. I was aware of that because of a mailing I received a couple of weeks before the election from the Nebraska State Democratic Headquarters.

From a diversity perspective, women won a record number of seats in the House-at least 90 as I write this column. That includes the first two Muslim women to ever serve in the chamber. Tennessee elected its first female senator and Massachusetts elected its first black congresswoman. Colorado elected the country’s first openly gay male governor. Kansas and New Mexico elected the U.S.’s first Native American congresswomen. Maine got its first woman governor. Iowa elected its first congresswoman.

As Bob Dylan wrote and sang, “The times they are a changin’.”

White males without college degrees are a different story and they have a very strange back-story also. 72% of them believe that the U.S. economic system favors the wealthy, yet this same group voted for House Republicans 64% to 34% which has always been the party of the rich, typified by the current President. In addition, overwhelming white electorates of Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota voted decisively to raise the minimum wage while, at the same time, voting for Republican candidates who oppose it. White males with college educations generally support candidates from the Democrat Party.

In terms of state initiatives, Florida voters passed Amendment 4 which restores voting rights to more than one million previously convicted felons. The measure needed 60 percent of the vote to pass and by surpassing that percentage it could shift Florida’s future political climate. Colorado passed two amendments concerning the operation of elections with about 71 percent of the vote each. The two amendments enact an independent commission to draw up electoral districts for legislators there rather than the current method of the Colorado legislature doing it.

So this past Wednesday’s mid-term elections were much closer to a Blue wave than a Blue ripple. In fact, because of all the different factors and a voter turnout that rivals many Presidential elections, experts are now calling it a sea change in American politics.

This was not lost on President Trump. After a long and confrontive Press conference on Wednesday in which the lead CNN reporter was banned from the White House, it became obvious to the President that his message of good hope and cheer was falling on deaf ears and he realized he had to take another tactic.

The President is not known for school smarts but there are few that can rival his street smarts because he’s been using them all of his life. He realized he had to change the narrative of the week so he asked Jeff Sessions to resign as Attorney General, Sessions complied, and instead of appointing the next person in line as is customary, he appointed an underling in the AG’s office because he knew he would have his loyalty. Interesting enough, two attorneys, including Kelly Anne Conway’s husband, wrote today that not only was that unconstitutional but also likely illegal.

This immediately changed the news media talking points from the successes of the Democrats on Tuesday to the resignation of Sessions on Wednesday and the political appointee the President made to take Sessions’ place. His mission had been accomplished without the national media even noticing it because I didn’t hear one commentator mention the change-up that the President had thrown them.

Like him or not, he’s the shrewdest politician we’ve ever had and that’s why he is where he is.