The Election Season: Was It Good For You?

I am willing to concede that the Republicans will most likely win enough seats in Tuesday's Senate elections to take control of the chamber and... and... deny the heck out of President Obama's judicial appointments for the next two years. Other than that, a GOP-run, Mitch McConnell-led august debating chamber will do little more. They can try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, slash taxes to deserving millionaires, vote to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, fund more coal-fired power plants, rail against unions and decry the evil intentions of those who would dare to support the Common Core Curriculum standards, and all it will get them is... nothing.

And two years from now, when the Obama coalition comes back to the polls, the GOP will most likely lose their majority and, by the by, the presidential election for the third straight time.

This means that next Tuesday will need to be a mass right-wing orgasm, followed by a mass right-wing cigarette, whose afterglow shudders will need to reverberate until 2020.

Consider the landscape. Most Republicans are locked into very close races in states that Obama lost in 2012. Couple that with the fact that Obama's approval numbers are in Bush-Nixon territory and you have a scenario where the opposition party should be cleaning up. Now here comes the threesome: Despite being ahead in the polls, most of these Republicans aren't attracting newer Obama voters to their campaigns. They're actually struggling with the voters who should be most enthusiastic about a GOP takeover of the Senate. But it's not happening. The fact that the Tea Party is staying fairly quiet through this cycle also tells you a great deal about enthusiasm on and for the right.

If more Obama voters, the young, the female, the Hispanic, the African-American, come out to vote on Tuesday than are currently projected, then these elections will get very interesting. I don't see that happening but it does bode well for the Democrats' future because those voters will come out in 2016.

And as bad as losing the Senate might be for the left, the fact that the GOP is not running on repealing the ACA and is even giving a bit of credence to the idea that we might need to address this climate issue, tells us that the American people want action. This should put pressure on the GOP Congress because now they will be responsible for actually doing something other than saying no.

It is true that the country is in an especially sour mood over a lot of issues that we'll need to address over the next two years, but Ebola will go away and the economy will continue to improve. More people will have health insurance. And perhaps the parties will begin to work together again.

Ever the optimist.

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