My District's State Senate Outcome Bodes Ill for Democrats
I live in a State Senate district in California where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 41% to 34%. The area is a large part of the district represented in Washington by Democrat Sam Farr of Carmel, one of the more reliable liberal votes in the House.
This week, former State Assemblyman John Laird, a Democrat, squared off in a special election against a sitting GOP State Assemblyman, Sam Blakeslee. The seat in question had been held by moderate GOP Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, a rising Republican star in the state.
President Obama endorsed Laird while GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman backed Blakeslee.
The Republican won, though he did not receive 50% of the vote.
The warning shot for the Democrats in all this was the incredibly poor voter turnout, a fact that virtually always favors the minority Republican Party, not just here but almost anywhere. If Democrats behave this way in the mid-terms in November, the traditional debacle that ousts the party in power will take place and perhaps be even worse than forecast. This despite the fact that it is really difficult to deny that the current state of the economy -- the central issue in this and any other campaign where it's not going well -- is squarely and almost purely the fault of conservatives of both parties who drove the economy into a deep canyon and then ambushed the first responder liberals whose plans for rescuing it would almost certainly have had far better results if not for the opposition's Strategy of No
We must get out the vote in November. We can't afford to allow the recalcitrant and purely politically motivated conservatives gain even more influence over the government or we will experience economic stagflation that may well cripple this country once and for all. For which the perpetrators will, as usual, blame liberals and all those people who aren't like them.
