United States Mid-Term Results

So I have left it a week before posting about the US election results! I wanted to get a feel of what has happened.

The biggest deal was the Senate elections in which the Democrats were simply devastated by Republicans. At the moment the Republicans have gained eight seats, which will likely rise to nine when Mary Landrieu loses her run-off election in December. This means that the Republicans have taken control of the Senate. They won open seats in Montana, South Dakota, Iowa and West Virginia and ousted Democratic incumbents in Alaska, Colorado, Arkansas and North Carolina. Republicans also fended off challenges from Democrats in Kentucky and Georgia, whilst Pat Roberts successfully beat independent Greg Orman in Kansas. The surprise was not that the Democrats lost these seats, only Kay Hagan in North Carolina was leading the polls going into election day, it was how badly they lost. Going into Election Day the polls had Mark Pryor losing to Tom Cotton in Arkansas by 5%, he ended up losing by 17%! That is an incredible Democratic bias of 12%, this meant that Pryor only received 39% of the vote. Which is a rather large decline from 2008 when the Republicans didn’t run anyone against him and he got 80% of the vote! Overall the poll averages were biased towards the Democrats by 4%, the only close race which had a Republican bias was New Hampshire where there was a 1.2% bias.

The Senate was always going to be difficult for Democrats, however the gubernatorial elections looked favourable. There were Republican governors in Wisconsin, Maine, Michigan, Florida and Pennsylvania that looked particularly weak. Unfortunately for Democrats they only managed to take Pennsylvania, with the Republican governors holding on in the other four states. To make matters worse they lost open seats in the heavily Democratic states of Massachusetts and Maryland, and incumbent governor Pat Quinn lost in Illinois. In Alaska the Republican incumbent was beating by independent, Bill Walker; this is the first time that Alaska has elected an independent as governor.

One of the biggest deals of the midterms has barely got any coverage on the national and international news circuit, and that’s the elections to the State Houses. They get less coverage for obvious reasons, but that does not make them less important, especially when you take into account the aggregate effect of them all. As with elections to all other positions, there was a Republican tide that left Republicans with the most state legislators since 1928 and the Democrats with control of the fewest state legislatures in their party’s history! Democrats took control of zero state legislatures whilst losing both state Houses in Nevada, leaving Republicans with complete control of Nevada governance. They lost control of lower Houses in West Virginia, New Hampshire, Minnesota and New Mexico whilst they lost control of state Senates in New York, Maine, Colorado and Washington.

Obviously this has massive ramifications for the next few years, if you want to find out more then read my post; “What the Election Results Mean”.