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.