NPI's Cascadia Advocate

Offering commentary and analysis from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's uplifting perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Tuesday, November 8th, 2016

No Senate upsets behind Trump’s southern firewall

As antic­i­pat­ed going into Elec­tion Day, many of the Sen­ate seats up for reelec­tion were expect­ed to be Safe Repub­li­can. Out of a total of 34 seats, 24 are held by Repub­li­cans. This might seem like a big oppor­tu­ni­ty for Democ­rats inter­est­ed in hav­ing a Con­gress sym­pa­thet­ic to the poten­tial Clin­ton agen­da, but many of these seats were nev­er going to be easy or even plau­si­ble for a Demo­c­rat to win.

For exam­ple, in Alaba­ma, sit­ting Sen­a­tor Richard Shelby (R) won by com­fort­able mar­gins, his 65% of the vote mir­ror­ing the top of the tick­et’s win­ning mar­gin in his state. The same sto­ry is unfold­ing in oth­er fire­wall states for Republicans.

Jer­ry Moran (R — Kansas), John­ny Isak­son (R — Geor­gia), John Booz­man (R — Arkansas), James Lank­ford (R — Okla­homa), and Tim Scott (R — South Car­oli­na) are cruis­ing com­fort­ably to reelec­tion, all in red states.

One inter­est­ing race and one that Democ­rats in par­tic­u­lar were hold­ing out hope for was the one in Indi­ana, where native son and for­mer Gov­er­nor Evan Bayh (D) was defeat­ed con­vinc­ing­ly by Sen­a­tor-elect Todd Young (R).

Bay­h’s for­ay into D.C. lob­by­ing seems to have worked against him in an elec­tion year defined by vot­ers gen­er­al skep­ti­cism of the rela­tion­ship between politi­cians and the cor­po­rate bourgeoisie.

Mean­while, in North Car­oli­na, anoth­er ago­niz­ing Sen­ate race has been called for the Repub­li­cans, with net­works pro­ject­ing a nar­row vic­to­ry for incum­bent Repub­li­can Richard Burr over Demo­c­ra­t­ic chal­lenger Deb­o­rah Ross.

Written by Greg Evans :: 8:02 PM

Categories: Live Coverage

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