StrangeSox

GOP still controls one branch of Congress and the other two branches of the federal government so it seems to have worked out well for them? You said earlier that you think they should focus on the Russia stuff. Tax returns could be directly related to that sort of corrupting influence.

I can only say it so many ways, but I don't care about "states." I care about people. I'm sensitive to not having purely majoritarian politics, but I don't see why Citizen A should have literally 100x more representation in the Senate than Citizen B simply because of what arbitrary state border they choose to reside in. Big population states have plenty of rural areas. California is the largest agricultural producer in the country. Republicans still win statewide races in big population states with major metro areas. Small states wouldn't be underrepresented--they would be represented in rough proportion to the number of people who live there rather than being massively overadvantaged and overrepresented.

Corruption and conflicts of interest are a real issue in my opinion. How many Benghazi investigations did the GOP launch? It paid off for them politically.

Democrats are announcing that they will request Trump's tax returns, will bring Mueller in for televised hearings if Trump fires him. Trump threatening retaliatory Senate investigations of House Democrats. Next two years gonna be lit.

Speaking of statehouses, here's a pretty wild result:

You give control to a majority of people instead. We've long since moved away from the model of "the Senate represents the statehouses" when we went to direct election of Senators. Now it's just two chambers of a legislative body. We don't replicate that model at any other governmental level. California doesn't have a House with single representative districts and then a state Senate where every county gets two equal representatives. It was a 1780's political compromise, maybe necessary at the time, but that's not a justification for not reforming it. We've come a very long way democratically in many other ways since then.

On the Senate, Democrats will have won more cumulative votes in 2004, 2016 and 2018 yet will not have taken the majority in any of those years (Republicans won big in 2010 and didn't take the chamber). Yes, this was a brutal map for them this year, but there's something structurally wrong with the system. Madison and Hamilton knew this back in 1788. The Senate is a "lesser evil" compromise of 1780's politics, not some high-minded ideal of democracy or republicanism.

The NH thing was blocked by the courts, thankfully. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-hampshire-voting-restriction-sb3-blocked_us_5bce24eae4b0d38b587b2638

At the end of the day, Rauner was just an awful politician who had no clue how to be governor and hurt the state deeply trying to force his will. I don't have high hopes JB and the Dems will fix the state. Hopefully the calls for a constitutional convention increase so we can address some of those problems (if you're liberal, a progressive tax, if you're conservative, weaken pension obligation protections). We still get to blame Republicans forever thanks to the Edgar Ramp, though!

Pending a recount or two, Dems look poised to have *supermajorities* in both chambers in Illinois, plus obviously the Governorship.

yeah, we also saw Medicaid expansion in three red states last night. that's hundreds of thousands of people with health care coverage now.

Recount in Florida for Senate.

I saw one pro-Jones sign on Archer in Lemont just north of Cog Hill. Glad to be reminded of my Nazi neighbor daily.

Yes. The Senate is a bad model by design that no one else in the world uses. You can still have a bicameral legislature without the current structure of the Senate. Almost every state in the US does this. Illinois does that. I don't think we should advantage land over people, especially not at the massive scale we do. There's no reason for Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Montana to all be separate states with 8 total Senators and a fraction of the population of many other states. The federal government should represent the people, not the states, and we've otherwise largely moved away from late 18th century political thoughts. I don't think it's good for our democracy to give someone 100x more Senatorial representation simply because they happen to live in Wyoming instead of California, or 50x more because they don't live in NY. It gives a political minority a strongly disproportionate amount of power over the minority. We'll see the effects of that in the judiciary for decades to come. Like I said though, it's a pipe dream. We're stuck with the Senate until the US Federal Government collapses at some point. More realistically to restore some balance would be DC and PR statehood. DC has a larger population than two states, and PR would rank 29th overall.

It is a criticism of the structure of the Senate itself. The outcome shown above was entirely predictable, and some people (myself included) think it's a bad thing. It's the same old "Wyoming Senator represents 200,000 people, California Senator represents 20,000,000 people" criticism of the Senate. "Two senators for every state" is a bad model and the huge disparities in what Americans actually vote for and what they actually get from the federal government drives that home. No other national government in the world follows that model. No US state government follows that model and in fact they're prohibited from doing so. It's a bad, broken system based on a centuries' old compromise with slave power. It's beating a dead horse though because the only realistic way to "fix" it is PR/DC statehood. In pro-democratic news, some good referendums/amendments/ballot measures passed last night. NC unfortunately amended their state constitution to enact a Voter ID law that was previously struck down for being deliberately hyper-targeted at black voters, but they also rejected a court-packing plan from the state GOP and the Dems have a 5-2 majority in the state court. Florida voted to enfranchise former felons who have served their sentences, restoring voting rights to over a million people. Previously, it was solely at the Governor's discretion. Michigan passed a raft of measures including independent redistricting and same day registration/auto-registration/no-excuse absentee and early voting. Colorado did some independent redistricting measure. MD passed same-day registration. NV passed automatic voter registration. Iowa came *really* close to going 4/4 blue in the House and bouncing white supremacist Steve King, but he hung on. Sad to see 50k+ of my neighbors vote for the literal nazi in IL-03. Dems picked up something like 333 total seats across state legislatures, breaking at least one GOP supermajority and strengthening a bunch of their own majorities.

Why? It's a criticism of the deeply anti-democratic (small d) nature of the Senate. You can disagree and think it's good to have minority rule baked in, but that doesn't make people who disagree dumb.

Democrats will end up with several million more votes for Senate seats tonight but still lose 3 seats.

I refuse to have any hope that she will not run and that Trump will not win in 2020

It's her turn

Also congrats @The Beast for helping with Casten, @Reddy your race looks solid too

Dems already saying they're requesting the tax returns Things are gonna be wild for the next couple of years. My gut tells me that unless we get a recession within two years, Trump will win another four.

Overall results tracking predictions, some surprises here and there though. Shocked with Florida gov, even more shocked with Kansas wtf Casten, Underwood winning in Illinois, surprise in IL-13 too. I was in a bad place when 538's house chances dropped to 35% around 8pm for a little bit. We're seeing the big difference in how our government is structured. Haven't had a house-Senate divergence since 1984.

NFL scheduling is so baffling sometimes

another bomb discovered