Posts Tagged ‘Pat Toomey’

Election Roundup Part 1: Just the Facts, Ma’am

Friday, November 11th, 2016

Time, finally, for something vaguely resembling a comprehensive post-election roundup.

As this keeps threatening to turn into a very long and unwieldy post, I’m going to break it up into chunks, with this installment centered on vote totals, race outcomes, and statistical facts about the election. We’ll save analysis, implications, and the saltiest examples of liberal tears for another time.

  • Assuming the current results hold, Trump flipped six states Romney lost (Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan), plus Maine’s second congressional district, which gives Trump 306 electoral votes.
  • That’s the highest electoral vote totals for a Republican since Bush41 blew out Dukakis in 1988 (426).
  • Hillary might still edge Trump in the popular vote (right now she’s up by 3/10ths of 1%).
  • Clinton lost over 5 million votes from Obama’s 2012 totals. Trump was down less than a million from Romney’s totals.
  • Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson pulled in over 4 million votes, triple his 2012 showing. Green Party candidate Jill Stein pulled in over 1.2 million votes, which was almost triple her 2012 showing as well.
  • Evan McMullin (or, as Ace of Spades refers to him, “Egg McMuffin”) pulled in less than half a million votes, about a third of which came from his native Utah, where he beat Johnson and Stein. He did not win any counties in Utah, though he did beat Clinton in a few.
  • 1996 was the last time West Virginia (formerly a reliable Democratic state) went for the Democratic presidential candidate. This year they went for Trump by nearly 69%, including every county in the state. Despite that, WV Democratic Senator Joe Manchin says he’s not switching to the Republican Party. Machin, 69, is up for reelection in 2018.
  • Republicans lost two seats (in Illinois and New Hampshire) but maintain control of the Senate. Louisiana will have it’s top two runoff December 9, where Republican John Kennedy will be heavily favored, likely giving Republicans a 53-47 edge.
  • Senators Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania) and Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) both won reelection is historically blue states.
  • Republicans only lost six House seats, easily maintaining control. Three Dem pickups were in Florida (where Republicans flipped two sets themselves), two in Nevada, one in New Hampshire, one in Virginia, and one in New Jersey. Republicans also picked up one House seat in Nebraska. Republicans are guaranteed to retain control of Louisiana’s third congressional district (two Republicans in the runoff) and likely to retain control of the 4th as well.
  • Not a single U.S. House seat in Texas flipped parties, which means that incumbent Republican Will Hurd retained the 23rd Congressional District over Democrat Pete Gallego. CD23 is the only true swing U.S. House district in Texas these days, and Gallego had been the incumbent when Hurd ousted him in 2014.
  • Senator Tim Scott was reelected to a full term. Scott still remains the first black Senator from the South since reconstruction.
  • Republicans control the House, Senate and White House for the first time since 1928.
  • Republicans also picked up three governorships, in Missouri, Vermont and New Hampshire, giving them 33 to the Democrats 15.
  • The North Carolina Governor’s race may not be decided until November 18. If Democrat Roy Cooper’s razor thin lead over Republican incumbent Pat McCrory holds, that will be the Democrats’ only gubernatorial pickup this year.
  • “Eastern Kentucky voters rejected [Democrat] House Speaker Greg Stumbo on Tuesday as Republicans appeared poised to take control of the Kentucky House of Representatives for the first time since 1921.”
  • Democrats pick up four seats in the Texas House.
  • Texas county-by-county Presidential race results. Clinton taking Fort Bend county is a surprise to me; Romney won that by six points in 2012, and Clinton beat Trump by about that much this year.
  • Libertarians maintained automatic ballot access in Texas because their railroad commission candidate pulled in 5.3% of the vote, over the 5% threshold. The Green Party, however, did not, and will have to submit 50,000 petition signatures to make the ballot in 2018.
  • National Review (ad blocker blocker warning) notes that the “Trump won because of racism” talking point is demonstrably wrong:

    Mitt Romney won a greater percentage of the white vote than Donald Trump. Mitt took 59 percent while Trump won 58 percent. Would you believe that Trump improved the GOP’s position with black and Hispanic voters? Obama won 93 percent of the black vote. Hillary won 88 percent. Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote. Hillary won 65 percent. Critically, millions of minority voters apparently stayed home. Trump’s total vote is likely to land somewhere between John McCain’s and Romney’s (and well short of George W. Bush’s 2004 total), while the Democrats have lost almost 10 million voters since 2008.

    And all this happened even as Democrats doubled-down on their own identity politics.

    But all this is based on exit polls. How do we know they’re any more accurate at capturing the electorate than those other faulty polls?

  • More exit poll analysis from Oren Cass. The thrust is that Trump did better among nonwhites than Romney. But when he gets down to differences of less than 2%, he’s counting angels on the heads of pins.

    • Remember all that MSM talk about Trump turning Texas into a swing state? Instead he turned Michigan and Wisconsin into swing states.

    Here’s a Tweet that encapsulates a New York Times interactive map indicating which areas of the country voted notably more Republican or more Democratic in the Presidential race than in 2012. Note the strong surge of Trump voters in the rust belt.

    As far as the senate, things don’t get any easier for Democrats in 2018:

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    Legislative Mountain Labors To Give Birth to Dead Gun Control Mouse

    Wednesday, April 17th, 2013

    Manchin-Toomey went down in flames today, a cloture vote falling six votes short (including four Democrats (Baucus (MT), Begich (AK), Heitkamp (ND) and Pryor (AK) voting no) of the 60 it needed.

    Let’s catalog what Democrats won’t be getting during the current congress, shall we?

  • No national gun confiscation regime, like the one imposed in Australia.
  • No ban on civilian gun ownership, like Sen. Diane Feinstein has admitted she wants to impose.
  • No universal gun registration act.
  • No national “high” capacity magazine ban.
  • No modern sporting rifle (AKA “assault weapon”) ban.
  • No reinstitution of the Clinton-era cosmetic modern sporting rifle ban.
  • And, with the defeat of Manchin-Toomey, no “universal background check” as a prelude to a national gun registry.

    • This is one case in which the Senate’s deliberative style has worked in conservative’s favor. If Harry Reid had been able to ram through a vote days after the Sandy Hook massacre (as happened in New York), it’s very possible some sort of gun control might have passed. But with time for the knee-jerk emotional response to die down, and for the NRA and gun owners across America to mobilize, all Democrats managed to do was endanger a few senate careers, both among themselves and the RINO herd. Remember Michael Moore declaring how the NRA was doomed?

    Didn’t work out that way, did it?

    Instead, they got…well, let’s Mr. Wonka break it down for them:

    And how about a little sad trombone?

    And thanks to Senator Ted Cruz for fighting the good fight.

    Shall Not Be Questioned has the blow-by-blow description of the Senate debate.

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    Texas Senate Race Update for August 3, 2011

    Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

    The Cruz campaign emailed to say they’ll be sending me the video file of the interview sometime in the next 24 hours, so here are a few race updates to tide you over until then.

  • Matt S. Dowling has his interview with Cruz up. I haven’t had a chance to watch all of it yet. Expect the setting to seem eerily familiar when you watch my interview…
  • And speaking on interviews with Cruz, here’s a snippet he did on a radio interview about the debt limit vote, which he was against.
  • David Dewhurst wasn’t wild about the debt deal either.
  • Nor was Tom Leppert.
  • Nor Glenn Addison.
  • Even Ricardo Sanchez and longshot Sean Hubbard are against it.
  • However, Elizabeth Ames Jones offered qualified support.
  • And naturally, after compiling all that, I found a roundup article on the same topic.
  • Yet another high-profile national conservative endorses Cruz, in this case Pennyslvania Senator Pat Toomey. Toomey will always have a place in the hearts of conservative everywhere for pushing the odious Arlen Specter out of the party and taking his Senate seat.
  • Cruz is also expected to get support from Sen. Mike Lee’s new Constitutional Conservatives Fund PAC.
  • Here’s a liberal handicapping the race. He had this to say about Cruz:

    I first encountered Ted Cruz in Laredo in 2003. As the state Senate Democrats’ 46-day Albuquerque quorum break ended, they boarded a plane and went to Laredo to attend a hearing on the matter in Federal court. I accompanied them on the plane, and attended the hearing in the Laredo courtroom. Ted Cruz, then the Solicitor General, was the state’s lawyer in court that day. In other words – ironically – he was Dewhurst’s lawyer in the suit. I have never seen a better courtroom performance, before or since. He was articulate, passionate, and flat-out out-lawyered the Democrats’ legal team. By the end of that hearing, not only was I convinced that Cruz had won the day (which he did), but he was so utterly great that I myself had serious doubts as to the merits of the Democrats’ suit. I’ve been a begrudging admirer of Cruz’ skills ever since.

  • Polifact says that Tom Leppert calling David Dewhurst a “career politician” is false. Because he’s only been in politics since 1998, not “most of [his] working life.” While I’m not sure I agree with that line of thinking, at least it’s less risible than some of the arguments Polifact has made in the last year…

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