Republicans will control the 2011 legislature with a 68-32 majority in the house and a 28-22 majority in the senate, according to preliminary tallies. Those are working majorities, but not veto-proof majorities. Some will say this will force Republicans to compromise with Democratic governor Brian Schweitzer. They may be right. But it also makes possible an extremely dangerous scenario in which state government could be shut down for up to two years. I’ll explain how that could happen in another post.
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Don’t expect a recount to change the outcome in Senate District 25, where Democrat Kendall Van Dyk has a 16-vote lead over incumbent Republican Roy Brown. The probability that the tally will flip on the basis of random errors in the machine count is roughly one-hundredth of one percent. A systemic error, challenged ballots, or blunders of some sort, could change the results, but again, the probability is very low. And remember, randomly distributed errors favor neither candidate, so a recount could increase Van Dyk’s margin of victory.
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Be careful of comparisons to the election of 1938. Republicans gained 81 seats in the U.S. House that year, and six in the U.S. Senate, but Democrats retained control of both chambers. From a Democratic point of view, the election of 2010 was much worse, with Republicans seizing control of the house and Democrats losing seats in the senate but retaining control of the chamber. FDR could still work with Congress. Obama faces investigations and frenzied, relentless opposition from rigid ideologues and reactionaries.
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If you voted by absentee ballot, you exercised your right to do so — but you abdicated your responsibility as a citizen to wait until the campaigns concluded and all the facts were before you to make your choice. Shame on you — and shame on everyone who thinks no-excuse absentee ballots, early voting, and all mail voting are good ideas. They’re not. They’re cancers eating away at our democracy. I’ll have more to say on elections in a future post. Meanwhile, read Burden and Mayer's oped on early voting.
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Montana Cowgirl has another thought provoking analysis of the election that I recommend highly. I don’t necessarily agree with all of the following, but every Democrat should read it:
There were a few bright spots, notably the final exit of Roy Brown, who I predict will not be back. Roy is a tough politician, but his downfall was that he peddled lies from the beginning of his campaign, and never stopped lying. He lied about his opponent, he lied about Democrats generally and about their record in the state. He unfortunately met an opponent who knows how to get voters to see truth versus lies, and who also knows how to bring a gun to a gunfight. Kendall Van Dyk wasn’t afraid to burn Brown down when Brown went negative, and it worked. An impressive victory. Also, a note to organizers: Van Dyk had a highly organized system by which he identified likely Van Dyk voters, delivered them absentee ballots and then collected them. It’s what put him over the top. He should give a lecture on it and focusing on direct voter contact over ads and other tactics such as running his own Get Out the Vote machine given that the democrats didn’t run a GOTV program for the first time since the 1960s.
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George W. Bush reportedly admits that he personally ordered torture. That’s a war crime. Time to arrest and try him for the offense.