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BATON ROUGE, La. Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy has defeated Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, denying her a fourth term and extending the GOP's domination of the 2014 midterm elections that put Republicans in charge of Capitol Hill for the final two years of President Barack Obama's tenure.

With Cassidy's victory, Republicans will hold 54 seats when the Senate convenes in January, nine more than they have now. Republican victories in two Louisiana House districts Saturday including the seat Cassidy now holds ensure at least 246 seats, compared to 188 for Democrats, the largest GOP advantage since the Truman administration after World War II. An Arizona recount leaves one race still outstanding.

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Democrat Mary Landrieu defeated in Louisiana Senate runoff

Thousands of refugees are fleeing Syria for Sweden. Photo: TT

After the nationalist Sweden Democrat party called for Sweden's snap election to be a 'referendum on immigration', a group of veteran politicians has called on the nation's other political groups to engage in debates about refugee numbers or risk losing votes.

Writing in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, four politicians from Sweden's conservative Christian Democrat and Centre parties said that while the Sweden Democrats were wrong to call for immigration to be cut by up to 90 percent in Sweden, the country's immigration and integration strategies deserved a more openly critical discussion.

Currently none of Sweden's centre-right or centre-left parties are against the country's liberal immigration laws, which have resulted in the country taking in more refugees per capita than any other nation in the EU.

All of the mainstream parties have so far refused to enter into immigration discussions with the Sweden Democrats - a group with Nazi roots that has sought to establish itself as a populist party and scored almost 13 percent of the vote in September's general election. It is now the third largest political group in parliament.

"To categorically ignore the Sweden Democrats' presence in parliament is to give them a populist free ticket instead of fighting their xenophobia," the former politicians wrote in Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter on Friday. "We believe that the parties should be able to converse with the Sweden Democrats."

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Immigration debate intensifies in Sweden

BATON ROUGE, La. Mary Landrieu, the last Deep South Democrat in the U.S. Senate, was defeated in a runoff election Saturday by Bill Cassidy, a Republican congressman who incessantly attacked the incumbent for her support of President Barack Obama.

With Cassidy holding more than 60 percent of the vote, the Associated Press called the victory for him shortly after the polls closed at 8 p.m. in what had been the last undecided Senate race of the midterm elections. The Republicans gained a total of nine Senate seats in this cycle, giving them 54 senators and firm control of the upper chamber when the 114th Congress convenes in January.

For Democrats, Saturday's outcome was yet another sobering reminder of their party's declining prospects in the South, a region they dominated for much of the 20th century. Landrieu was the last statewide elected Democrat in Louisiana, and Cassidy will join a fellow Louisiana Republican, David Vitter, in the Senate, making it the first time in 138 years that a Democrat from the state has not sat in the Senate.

Speaking to supporters at the Crowne Plaza Hotel here, Cassidy said, "This victory happened because people in Louisiana voted for a government which serves us but does not tell us what to do. Thank y'all."

Even though Landrieu narrowly edged out Cassidy in a multicandidate primary in November, his victory was widely expected. A second conservative candidate with a significant following, Rob Maness, ran a strong third in the primary, and subsequently endorsed Cassidy.

As in much of the South, Louisiana has seen many white Democrats defect to the GOP. Compounding Democrats' problems was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which forced roughly 125,000 reliably Democratic voters to permanently relocate to other states.

Landrieu is defeated in Senate runoff in Louisiana 12/07/14 [Last modified: Sunday, December 7, 2014 12:14am] Photo reprints | Article reprints

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Landrieu is defeated in Senate runoff in Louisiana

Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press President Obama greeting audience members after speaking at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans in 2010, on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In some Southern states, the Republican advantage among white voters is nearly nine to one in presidential elections, a level of loyalty rivaling that of African-Americans for Democrats.

After President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he reportedly told a fellow Democrat that the party had lost the South for a long time to come. It took more than a generation for old Southern loyalties to the Democrats to fade, but that vision is on the verge of being realized this weekend.

If Mary Landrieu, a Democratic Senator from Louisiana, loses re-election in Saturdays runoff election, as expected, the Republicans will have vanquished the last vestige of Democratic strength in the once solidly Democratic Deep South. In a region stretching from the high plains of Texas to the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas, Republicans would control not only every Senate seat, but every governors mansion and every state legislative body.

Democrats held or controlled nearly every one of them when Mr. Johnson signed that bill in 1964. And they still held a majority as recently as a decade ago. Ms. Landrieus defeat would essentially mark an end to the era of the Southern Democrats: the conservative, Southern, white officials, supported by white Southerners, whose conflicted views helped define American politics for half a century.

Today, nearly all of the Democrats holding federal or statewide office in the South will represent so-called majority-minority districts or areas with a large number of new residents from outside the region. Democrats will control Senate seats or governors mansions only in Virginia and Florida. Not coincidentally, those are the two Southern states where people born outside the state represent a majority of the population. These Democrats bear little resemblance to the Southern Democrats who won by attracting conservative white voters.

The dramatic decline of the Southern Democrats represents the culmination of a half-century of political realignment along racial and cultural lines. Some of it is about Obama; most of it is about the longer-term realignment of white voter preferences, said Guy Molyneux, a Democratic strategist. The shift has contributed to the polarization of national politics by replacing conservative Democrats, who often voted across party lines, with conservative Republicans who do not.

Southern Democrats allowed the party to pass sweeping social programs, like the New Deal and the Great Society, even as they opposed civil rights legislation. They allowed Democrats to hold the House and the Senate, even when the party was at a severe disadvantage in presidential elections. The new alignment makes it all but impossible for Democrats to enact their agenda on issues like climate change, immigration and income inequality. It gives the Republicans a real opportunity, despite all of their demographic challenges, to control the House, Senate and presidency after the 2016 presidential election.

In some states, the Republican advantage among white voters is nearly nine to one in presidential elections, a level of loyalty that rivals that of African-Americans for Democrats. What has changed is that Southern white voters are now nearly as hostile to born-and-bred Southern Democrats, like Ms. Landrieu, as they were to John Kerry or Barack Obama.

White supremacist Democrats seized control of the South after the end of Reconstruction, the period that followed the Civil War. They instituted so-called Jim Crow laws disenfranchising African-American voters, who favored Republicans, the party of Lincoln. The so-called Solid South all but unanimously supported Democrats for more than half a century, with states like South Carolina and Mississippi routinely offering Democrats more than 95 percent of the vote, even to losing presidential candidates.

The Democratic hold on the South in presidential elections began to change in 1948, when the Democratic National Convention backed President Harry Trumans position on civil rights. Many Southern Democrats left the convention and nominated Strom Thurmond as the presidential candidate of the States Rights Democratic Party.

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Demise of the Southern Democrat Is Now Nearly Complete

The Democrat-Academia junk science axis digs in
The Democrat-Academia junk science axis digs in.

By: Cappleman

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The Democrat-Academia junk science axis digs in - Video