"A Big Night For Democrats"
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Opinion Columnist
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“He’s tried to rip health care away from our families, and he’s cutting public education,” Andy Beshear, Kentucky’s Democratic candidate for governor, said about his Republican opponent Gov. Matt Bevin in a TV ad. |
It’s a strategy we’ve seen before from Democrats — namely, in the 2018 midterms: Portray Republican incumbents as extremists who are hurting ordinary families and instead promise common-sense solutions. The strategy has proved highly effective, too. Last night, Beshear evidently pulled off a big upset, beating Bevin in a state that voted for Donald Trump by 30 percentage points. Beshear leads by more than 5,000 votes, or 0.4 percentage points, in the latest count, and he has claimed victory. |
“As it turns out, when the governor slashes social programs in one of the poorest states in America, voters don’t want to re-elect him. Even if the president tells them to,” The Atlantic’s Alex Wagner wrote. It’s a also reminder, Slate’s Jordan Weissmann wrote, that “Obamacare and Medicaid are fairly popular for all their flaws and fixing/expanding them rather than starting from scratch is probably a good national policy pitch.” |
Take note, Democratic presidential candidates.
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A few other themes from last night’s elections:
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- Virginia. Democrats flipped both houses of Virginia’s state legislature. They already hold the governor’s office, so they now control the state government for the first time since 1993. “Democrats plan to move swiftly to pass tougher gun safety regulations, protections against discrimination for LGBTQ residents, and an increase in the minimum wage,” wrote HuffPost’s Daniel Marans. Amanda Litman of the progressive group Run for Something wrote: “Flipping VA blue didn’t happen in one election cycle. It took *years* of investing, organizing, hard work, recruiting great candidates, and losing a little (or a lot) until we finally won big.”
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- Voting rights. The Virginia and Kentucky results will likely lead to big progress on voting rights. During the campaign, Beshear pledged to issue an executive order restoring voting rights to an estimated 140,000 Kentucky residents with prior criminal convictions, Daniel Nichanian of The Appeal has noted. “That number alone represents about 4 percent of the state’s voting-age population,” Nichanian wrote. In Virginia, lawmakers are likely to go even further and enact automatic and same-day registration, expand early voting and extend polling hours, as Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos argues.
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- Ranked-choice voting. I’m a big fan of ranked-choice voting, in which voters list their preferred candidates in order. It allows people to signal their support for a third party without potentially costing a top candidate victory. And voters in New York City yesterday overwhelmingly voted to implement ranked-choice voting for primary and special elections. The result “will serve as a good test case for ranked-choice voting, and it signals growing momentum for this voting reform,” Vox’s Li Zhou wrote. By one count, New York’s decision will triple the number of voters who use ranked-choice voting.
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