Being Minnesotan, we were able to keep a blue senate and Governor. But some special highlights:
Ilhan Omar: 5th district representative replaces Keith Ellison. Somalian refugee, woman of color and Muslim. A perfect response to Trump.
Dave Hutch: Hennepin County sheriff, Defeated Trump/ICE supporting incumbent, supports deescalation training for officers, married to husband Justin, has a dog, rides a Harley.
Also being a Minnesotan, Iâm very pleased.
Being a Minnesotan in exile, less so. My other home states didnât go for Beto, didnât oust Steve King, and didnât oust Scalise. But my new home did vote to require unanimous juries, so thatâs good!
MIssouri, and St Louis County, both did reasonably well-ish except for losing a DINO Senate seat to a Trumpkin.
Our state legislature didnât exactly have a blue wave, but the Democrat we liked from our district got in.
We voted for a minimum wage increase (*), medical marijuana (the best of three options on the ballot), and an election reform bill that reduces lobbyist power and fixes redistricting. We voted down a gas tax increase that would have gone 75% to the Highway Patrol.
The county got zoo funding, requires voter approval to sell county park land to private companies, and reigned in County Executive powers a bit.
(*) in a previous recent election, voters in the City of St. Louis (which is independent of the county) chose an $11/hr minimum wage and the state legislature blocked it. Now itâs going to be $12/hr statewide.
NO MORE RICK "THE âPâ IS SILENT AS GOVERNOR OF MICHIGAN!
Debbie Stabenow, who when she first elected to the US Senate from MI back in the 1990s, and other frosh Senators were asked by Spy what they thought of ethnic cleansing in Freedonia. I remember reading about that in the Detroit News when it happened, too. And thank goodness for the Internet:
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/13/us/isn-t-freedonia-next-to-oz.html
And cannabis is legal for recreational usage in Michigan now, too! I WANT MY MMMP LICENSE FEE BACK, DAMMIT!!!
Tennessee showed instead of being âThe Volunteer Stateâ, they are âThe Ignorant Stateâ. The only up side is that the people who support the TGOP wonât have any insurance now and will die off that much faster (natural selection you know).
Didnât the same thing happen in KY (the Jelly State)? More like the âspineless jellyfishâ state.
Illinois did great in general, but my personal favorite is someone who really seems to be exactly the right person for the job sheâs now won: intelligent, competent, ethical, caring, public-service oriented, etc. etc. But to flip a normally solid-R congressional district to the first BLACK WOMAN, whoâs a Democrat no less? Oh, yeah!!!
Hurrah!
My state isnât racist!
kind of sucks that the rest of the country didnât follow through en masse.
Dead Republican pimp wins anyway in Nevada?
I work in Bloomfield Hills, an âeliteâ and red area north of Detroit. I couldnât believe I saw signs for a BLACK REPUBLICAN MILITARY VETERAN up on some of the lawns! And he lost to Debbie Stabenow, anyhow.
CA did okay, with the exceptions of Feinstein still hanging in there and the defeat of the rent control initiative.
Hopefully Steve Knightâs, Darrell Issaâs, and Dana Rohrabacherâs districts all flip.
That would be nice!
MD remained blue except for governor (again). The Dem candidate ran a non-existent campaign, as far as I could tell.
Also, we Michiganians got non-partisan redistricting, automatic voter registration, and easier absentee ballots passed. And my Congresswoman is now Rashida Tlaib, one of the two first Muslim women elected to Congress. (I met her on more than one occasion when she went door-to-door in state representative campaigns.) Sheâs a progressive and a real fighter; Iâm expecting good things from her.
And my former home district re-elected Republican shitbird Duncan Hunter the Lesser despite his thievery, indictment, and being stripped of all his committee memberships. Which is a pity, because Campa-Najjar might have been an interesting choice.
This, so much this:
Go ahead and villify individuals like cheating coward Brian Fucking Kemp. Go ahead and criticise the systems that allow for the oppression and disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of people. But when you write off the state, you are writing off those same people, and the people who worked their asses off to get a lot of these races ss close as they were.
Instead of writing them off, try to figure out how to help those who might be able to change things, if they could just climb all the hurdles that were deliberately placed in their way.
Good people deserve better than being abandoned.
Not my state, and not exactly a surprise, but Iâm excited:
The cheating coward Brian Fucking Kemp has just doxxed thousands of Georgians.
https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1060298988891582464
Edited to change link to one without a link to the offending doc.
