Before the great era of bipartisan cooperation breaks out, there’s this epic confrontation over Obama breaking the logjam on immigration by executive order.
“To prevent Obama from becoming the hero who fixed Washington, McConnell decided to break it. And it worked.” That’s from Matt Yglesias in a post he published yesterday evening before the scope of the GOP victory became fully clear. This is succinct and it is correct.
Indeed, in key respects it worked in 2010. By many measures Republicans should have won the Senate in 2010 and 2012. But each year they were hobbled by a raft of crazy and indisciplined senate candidates who squandered what should have been easy or at least odds-on wins. This year, the terrain was heavily weighted in their favor. And they kept their candidates on the straight and narrow.
But if this was the plan (and it was) and if it worked (which it did) we should ask, why?
Luke Russert says Joni Ernst is the “kingmaker”, maybe even the future of the GOP. Watch.
National Review warns GOP: Don’t be fooled, actually ‘governing’ is a Democratic trap.
Mitch McConnell says there won’t be any government shutdowns on his watch. But how is he going to get leader Majority Leader Cruz to go along with that?
Even after last night’s results, Nate Silver still seems to have the last months’ criticism and second-guessing a bit under his skin.
No two ways about it – a big, big night for the GOP. We won’t know the outcome in Louisiana until December. But it’s now looking likely that the GOP will end up with a 54 – 46 seat majority in the next Congress. We still haven’t heard from Alaska. And we can’t totally count Landrieu out. But this is close to a maximal win for the Republicans.
It now seems clear that Warner will hold on in Virginia – which of course wasn’t even supposed to be remotely close. The big surprise for me tonight is Hagan – the polls, the quality of the race she ran, it really seemed to me that she was going to win. Hagan going down is about what should have been a winning campaign simply not being strong enough to overcome the national tide. Sen. Roberts’ win is basically the reverse of that.
This one surprises me. The polls were super close. So it’s not surprising in that sense. But I thought Charlie Crist would beat Rick Scott. Didn’t happen.
Earlier this evening things were looking pretty solid for Kay Hagan. And she’s had a small but consistent lead through the whole cycle. Now it’s looking really really tight. Still possible for Hagan to pull it out. But a very different picture from a couple hours ago.
Late Update: Now looking like Warner probably pulls it out; looking tough for Hagan.