Thread: The Big Red Flood: Take A Look At These Four Maps To See Just How the Country Changed

The Historic GOP Landslide of 2014 That Nobody’s Talking About

By Michael Hausam (3 hours ago) | Editor's Choice, Elections



We all now know that Tuesday’s results for the GOP were a gain of 7 in the Senate, 14 in the House, and 3 in governor’s mansions across the country. But what about the state legislatures? Did a similar tide of red sweep their statehouses as well?
The short answer: yes, they did.






Here are the summaries of the results, reported by the Washington Post:

1. Net gain of 8 legislative chambers, increasing from 59 to 67 out of a total of 98 (Nebraska is technically unicameral, but it is dominated by Republicans as well).
2. This sets a record for the modern era, breaking the one in 2012.
3. Republicans now have total control of 24 states, controlling legislative chambers as well as the governor’s office.
4. Republicans have supermajority status in 8 states.
5. Control is split in 17 states (3 of whose governors flipped from Democrat to Republican).
6. Republicans now have four lieutenant governorships due to defeating Democrat incumbents.
7. Democrats have total control in 6 states.

Now that the election’s over, Republicans have before them an immense opportunity to influence the direction in which our nation is headed. What they do with this opportunity remains to be seen.

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/11/1984...-legislatures/

He's losing grip...

Rage Spiraling POTUS Snaps At Post-Election Presser (VIDEO)

Defiant Man Child POTUS Snaps At Post-Election Presser

Obama seeing --RED. Is it to much to ask for a little decorum?



Defiant Petulant POTUS Snaps At Post-Election Presser (VIDEO)

By Velvet Hammer
0 7:30 am November 7, 2014

Leftist rage spiraling, it’s all the rage.
Obama is seeing –RED, in more ways than one.
But is it to much to ask for a little decorum?

And so Keystone I just consider as one small aspect of a broader trend that’s really positive for the American people.
And let’s see — okay, medical device tax. I’ve already answered the question. We are going to take a look at whatever ideas — let me take a look comprehensively at the ideas that they present. Let’s give them time to tell me. I’d rather hear it from them than from you.
Q For example
OBAMA: Major (Garrett):
Q: I’m just telling you what they said.
OBAMA: Conceivably, I could just cancel my meeting on Friday because I’ve heard everything from you. (Laughter.) I think I’d rather let Mitch McConnell —
Q: I just asked if it was a line you couldn’t cross.
OBAMA: I’d rather hear from Mitch McConnell and John Boehner what ideas they’d like to pursue, and we’ll have a conversation with them on that.

Apparently so.
Eat your words, Obama.

http://www.libertynews.com/2014/11/d...presser-video/

Democrats Play Ostrich After Electoral Meltdown

By: Leon H. Wolf (Diary) | November 8th, 2014 at 02:24 PM | 16



Via The Hill comes news that Democrats plan to keep the exact same Congressional leadership team in both chambers, with the exception of replacing Steve Israel (who perhaps embarrassed himself the least of all the Democrats on Tuesday). President Obama plans to keep his same leadership as well. More importantly, Democrats plan to keep the same message and focus on the same issues, including outside Democrat groups like American Bridge, who have promised to continue their quixotic quests against the Koch brothers. The message Democrats seem to have taken from the elections is that the deck was unfairly stacked against them, but there was nothing essentially wrong with what they were doing:

Leaders in both the House and the Senate — including Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)Heritage ActionScorecard

Sen. Harry Reid
Senate Democrat Average See Full Scorecard 11% (D-Nev.) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)Heritage ActionScorecard

Rep. Nancy Pelosi
House Democrat Average See Full Scorecard 9% (D-Calif.) — are expected to retain their spots atop the party in the next Congress, while the White House, in similar fashion, says it will keep its top staff largely intact.

“The president is somebody who doesn’t make personnel changes just for cosmetic reasons,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday.
The decision to stick with the status quo sends a clear message that Democrats believe Tuesday’s disastrous outcome was caused by factors beyond their control, and that they see themselves as best suited to steer a comeback.
* * *
Party leaders were quick to note that, historically speaking, they always faced tough odds in the 2014 cycle. They lamented the slew of unsettling international headlines that undermined their economic message — topics as diverse as terrorist beheadings in Syria, Russian incursions into Ukraine and an Ebola epidemic in Africa — and emphasized that Obama’s low approval ratings were beyond their realm of influence.
“Since we have no control over what’s not in our control we don’t wring our hands over that,” Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY)Heritage ActionScorecard

Rep. Steve Israel
House Democrat Average See Full Scorecard 15% (D-N.Y.), head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), said on election night.
The main problem with this fantasy thinking is that it is contradicted by what voters actually said on Tuesday. CNN exit polling indicated extraordinarily broad dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ performance in office and with the Obama administration’s performance in particular. Voters specifically expressed dissatisfaction with the Federal government’s response to the Ebola crisis and to ISIS. According to FoxNews exit polling, voters were extremely dissatisfied with the government’s handling of the economy and foreign policy. Equally troubling to the Democrats is that the issues they spent inordinate money and energy discussing (such as the Koch brothers and climate change) barely registered in the minds of voters, and the other “issue” (if it can fairly be called that), the “war on women,” spectacularly backfired on them.
Definitely, the Republicans should not take away a rosy message from the elections as they are still perceived poorly by the public (thanks in large part to being perceived poorly by their own voters), but the voters sent a clear and unmistakable message to the Democrats that was completely separate from the difficult electoral landscape that they faced. What the Democrats have shown thus far is that, despite the fact that Obama said “I hear you,” they aren’t really listening.

http://www.redstate.com/2014/11/08/d...oral-meltdown/

Republican Victories Mean The U.S. Is Swimming In A Sea Of Red

The Republicans won in a big way on Tuesday, and the U.S. is now...

Heather Laskin — November 6, 2014


The Republicans won in a big way on Tuesday, and the U.S. is now covered in a sea of red. Take a look at these maps put out by the New York Times:

The House Election Results



The Senate Election Results



The Governor Race Election Results



After the elections, President Obama showed some humility, congratulating Republicans on “a good night” and telling voters, “I want you to know, I hear you.”
Republicans and Democrats will now need to work together to get things done.
Senator Mitch McConnell, who will become Senate majority leader, said he would look for ways to work with the president. “When the American people choose divided government, I don’t think that means they don’t want us to do anything,” he said. “I want to first look for areas that we can agree on. There probably are some.”
He conceded that it’s not realistic to expect to change everything. In regard to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, McConnell said it would be impossible to repeal it fully; but there are pieces of the law he hopes to dismantle.
In a post-election press conference Wednesday, President Obama said, “The key is to make sure that those ideas that I have somewhere overlap with ideas that Republicans have.” He did warn, though, “there’s not going to be perfect overlap.”
All in all, a great victory for Republicans.

h/t Qpolitical

http://www.westernjournalism.com/rep...mming-sea-red/

RedState

Stop treating demographics as single-issue demographics.




Some Democrats Will Just Never Understand Why They Lost in 2014
Joan Walsh, one of the biggest beacons of White Guilt on the Internet, has released her "reflection" of 2014, and looks back at what she calls her "mistakes" (which,...
redstate.com



Joan Walsh’s refusal to understand why Democrats lost

By: Joe Cunningham (Diary) | November 28th, 2014 at 01:00 PM | 8

Joan Walsh, one of the biggest beacons of White Guilt on the Internet, has released her “reflection” of 2014, and looks back at what she calls her “mistakes” (which, oddly, don’t include almost everything she’s ever written). In this piece at Salon, she says her mistake was overconfidence in red state women and what she got right was the use of Ebola as a fear-mongering story. Because those are definitely why the Democrats did so poorly.

My faith that white Democratic women could win over red state white women voters was particularly misplaced. CNN exit polls showed that Michelle Nunn lost white women to David Perdue 69-27; Wendy Davis lost them 66-31; Alison Grimes lost them 55-41. For now, the Democrats’ oft-touted advantages with “women” – which should always be described as “all women except for white women” — are outweighed by their difficulties with whites.
[...]
What did I get right? Well, lots of things, if I do say so myself, but the most obvious late-cycle story was that Republicans and Fox News were ginning up a minimal Ebola threat as a powerful political weapon – and too many mainstream media outlets, and even Democratic politicians, participated. In the post-election mayhem, this seemed like too small a point to raise, but as we start bidding goodbye to 2014, I couldn’t resist it. I’d like to say Democrats learned from this one, too, but again, I’m not sure.

Of course, Walsh refers to exit polling from CNN to justify the idea that Ebola fear played a major role, which of course, is the most selective reading of the exit polls imaginable. That is one issue while this breakdown at CNN has multiple issues broken down that show a split and diverse electorate on many issues. The issues that showed bigger margins than the Ebola worries in several areas.

• Two-thirds of the nation believed, as of election day, that the nation was currently on the wrong track.
• 72% of voters believed that there could be a terrorist attack on the U.S. sometime in the near future.
• Only 20% of voters believe the government will do the right thing.

Also included in this was the idea that 40% of the electorate is moderate, and of the remaining 60% of them, the larger voting block was conservative (36%). Therefore, a multitude of issues, not just Ebola worries, played a major role in a midterm election that was already destined to lean Republican based on historic trends (party in power loses support in the sixth year, Democrat voters are not as motivated in midterms, etc.).
Even better than all this, though, is the tone that Joan just narrowly manages to avoid in the piece she wrote: She is incredibly disappointed with women for not being more Democratic:

Right now, for complicated historical, cultural and racial reasons, white women vote more like “whites” – mostly Republican, though less than white men – and less like other women. Single white women and college-educated white women defy that trend more than others, but any 2016 prognosticating that relies on white women as Hillary Clinton’s secret weapon shouldn’t be trusted unless there’s data behind it. And I haven’t seen any.

And this is a major problem Democrats still don’t seem to get – Stop treating demographics as single-issue demographics. Right, Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO)Heritage ActionScorecard

Sen. Mark Udall

Senate Democrat Average See Full Scorecard 0%?

http://www.redstate.com/2014/11/28/j...paign=rsupdate