This warrants the attention that was mistakenly given to the KY governorship.

..... the Fascists are shown the exit door.

because Trump publicly made it a referendum on him. Until Bevin lost.

By HOLLY OTTERBEIN
11/06/2019 08:09 PM EST
Updated: 11/06/2019 09:36 PM EST

Thanks for posting!

If so, c'mon now, BRAG!

I always say that I'm 100% biased but Holly is the best journalist ever!

Congrats, so cool.

LOL!

I would be more ready to believe Holly is your daughter Congratulations again. Holly is a really fine journalist.

50-state strategy.

The splash at the top in Kentucky is important for the headline it generates. But the party needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. That happened in both Delaware County and in Virginia where control in the legislature shifted from Republican to Democrat by a 53-43 seat margin. This is where you make gains with reversing the gerrymandering and voter suppression and return democratic values and fairness into governance. It will be tough too because Citizens United has yet to be addressed. But Tuesday was music in the ears.

and it looks like the Repub leg is gonna try and overturn it. If that happens, hopefully it will trigger a Dem backlash, but with years to go before next election, it would be a chance for Repubs to do more harm.

But I'll take all the good news I can find. Seeing the Dems generate local enthusiasm around the country is very heartening.

We need help.

I grew up here and my sister ( still lives in bucks county) alerted me on Wednesday morning
check out philly.com
they say some areas have been republican districts for over one hundred years!!!

with Democrats taking over control of Chester County and Bucks County governance. One of the other Counties hadn't been in (D) control since the Civil War.

As a note, 2 of the 3 counties had also produced 2 new (D) congresswomen in 2018 after our previously-gerrymandered congressional seats were fixed (Chester County, with a new PA-6 and Delaware County, with a new PA-5).

poco a poco.. town boards, road commissioners, city councils, county supervisors and on and on up the chain...

it's a hard battle back, i will say...

where Democrats lost a bunch of seats in the NJ state legislature and in some of the Counties in South Jersey. The legislature there is still majority (D) but still...

It seems that with the blue cities getting darker blue and the purple burbs getting bluer, the GOP is consolidating more and more into the small town & rural areas and making them red.

We have had the same dem mayor for 28 years. Tuesday a repub won !!

And if I HAD to vote for a repub, this guy would be one of the few I could stomach... well.. he IS a repub !!!

This may not be too bad for us as the town board is generally on the slightly but clearly liberal side of things.. very protective of the environment, and the well-being of the citizens who live here..

but still.. even though it was very close.. humm....

But what has been happening over the past 10 years is that radicals within the party have been targeting them (complete with outside funding) during the primaries and have been slowly replacing them with the crazies.

So after a couple instances of "primarying" as an intimidation tactic, any remaining ones start pivoting and acting like the crazies. It's just insane.

It appears the DNC/DLC/DLCC are on a more long term plan now, and not just focusing on the presidential election every four years.

That's a good thing.

It was the Koch bros effort to infiltrate the Democratic Party.

You're probably right. Can't keep my acronyms straight any more.

Senior moment.

and occasionally, though getting old beats the alternative, it comes with a cost.

was that we finally got rid of the "super-majorities" of (R)s in our state legislature. So with our having re-elected a (D) governor also in 2018, he can veto the heck out of any crazy shit that the GOP puts forward and they can't override it.

that contributed to some of the Dem success this cycle, and hopefully leads to more equitable re-districting on the next go-around.

Come to think of it, PA has benefitted from the re-districting work being done, too.

and that pretty much sealed it (and the federal courts refused to hear any arguments from either side about it because it was a "state issue" ). And then having finally managed to get a Democratic governor elected in 2014 (booting Corbett (R)), which allowed (D)s to finally start challenging the gerrymandered districts. THEN we had had an election in 2017 (I believe) that shifted the state Supreme Court to majority (D), and their ruling to redraw the lines withstood all the challenges and the court itself drew the new lines to comply with the state Constitution's requirement for "compact and contiguous" districts.

The laughing-stock original PA-7 looked like this before it was completely redrawn and renumbered. The bottom right-hand portion of that is now part of the new PA-5 encompassing Delaware County that was mentioned in the OP -



(and when the redrawing happened, the GOP loons threatened to impeach the (D) justices on the state Supreme Court )

My state (WA) does re-drawing through a three way panel, Dem, Rep, and a Judge who is presumably non-partisan. Our current map generally favors Dems by a tad the last time I ran it through one of those gerrymander programs, but it's not that bad. We are pretty blue overall, but like most states there is a large urban/rural divide that breaks down red/blue.

Hopefully, Penn and other states move to a more equitable situation. I'm no fan of Dem gerrymandering either.

but it's been mostly blocked by the GOP.

However the shocker of the week was that the GOP legislature and the governor actually came to a compromise to start making some changes in our voting where the (D)s gave up straight-ticket voting (much to the consternation of many Democrats here in Philly) in exchange for "no-excuse" mail-in absentee voting! ACTUALLY just read it and apparently this is allowing regular "mail-in voting" too - up to 50 days before (and you can be put on a list to always get your ballot by mail)!

https://patch.com/pennsylvania/newtown-pa/7-big-changes-voting-pa-just-signed-law

https://www.governor.pa.gov/newsroom/governor-wolf-signs-election-reform-bill-including-new-mail-in-voting/

I remember doing telephone town halls with my State Senator and always asking about whether anything was happening with "early voting", etc and here we are!

there are some polling places for handicapped and such, but essentially they mail the ballots to us and we fill them out and mail them in, postage free now.

Sadly, it seems the participation rate still isn't very good.

It's pretty much getting people motivated to vote period - whether they go to a polling place or mail it in. There is always a subset who will complain that it "doesn't matter".

that this is a genuinely Big Deal.
I like to think that the former brave Democratic congressman from this district, the late great Bob Edgar (as I remember, himself the first Democratic congressman to represent that district since Reconstruction, elected in the late 1970's thanks to Watergate), would be grinning broadly right now.