Several off-year elections were held around the country on Tuesday, and on the whole they went well enough for the Republican party that the respectable press is fretting for the Democrats. The Associated Press gamely tried to claim that the results offer “Warning Signs for Both Parties,” but The Washington Post glumly conceded that “From coast to coast, conservatives gain big victories,” and the once venerable Atlantic Monthly went so far as to worry that “Liberals are Losing the Culture Wars.”
The AP’s assessment is easily refuted by the Post’s more factual post, which notes that Republican Matt Bevin won a poll-defying victory in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race, Democrats failed to pick up a seat in Virginia’s Senate, a legalized marijuana initiative in Ohio and an “equal rights” referendum in Houston associated with the Democratic party both failed, and even in the far-left Democratic stronghold of San Francisco the Sheriff who had steadfastly defended the city’s “sanctuary” status was voted out. The Atlantic Monthly’s dire warning might prove premature, but Republicans have reason to be hopeful.
Bevin’s unforeseen-by-the-pollsters victory in Kentucky came in spite of his figurative and photographed literal embrace of the County Clerk who created a national contretemps by refusing to issue same-sex-marriage licenses, and perhaps even because of it, and we don’t doubt that there’s still some resistance to the Democrats’ enthusiasm for the brave new homosexual world. That Ohio initiative to legalize marijuana involved a convoluted crony capitalism deal that would have granted a monopoly to a group of wealthy investors who were backing the measure, and we’re certain that a large number of potheads who would have supported a more straightforward legalization effort wound up voting against it as a result, but surely some anti-pot sentiment still lingering from the days of Jack Webb’s rants on “Dragnet” was also part of the landslide opposition.
The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, so named for the resulting “HERO” acronym, seems to have gone down to defeat because the finer print allowed any man claiming to be a woman to hang around women’s restrooms, and the overwhelmingly black and Latino and otherwise reliably Democratic voters within the city limits decided they weren’t all that wedded to such an abstract notions of human rights. That Sheriff in San Francisco reportedly had some unsurprising ethical issues that also contributed to his defeat, but we’d like to think that even in his hippy-dippy jurisdiction there’s some resistance to the idea that career criminals should be able to continue their careers just because they’re also in the country illegally, and that in more sensible parts of the country the Democrats are on the unpopular side of that whole issue.
Still, the Associated Press can plausibly go on about demographics and the Democrats’ continuing domination of those densely populated blue spots on the electoral map, and the turnout in those off-year elections is not what you’ll see in a presidential year when even the most uninformed voters have some misinformation that will send them to the voting booth. We can read nothing from such off-year tea leaves, and can only hope that it indicates the coalition of libertine white liberals with the more socially conservative and far more numerous black and Latino Democrats is proving hard to sustain. All the people who vote in off-year elections can be counted on to vote in presidential elections, and perhaps the the next one will add some of those uninformed voters, so one can be hopeful.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 