Dash: Democrats #39; race card message is false
Actress and Fox News contributor says midterm candidates were elected on merit.
By: Steven Ross
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Dash: Democrats' race card message is false - Video
Uprising Excerpt of Roberto Lovato on Obamas Executive Action, Democrats, Mexican Crisis
By: Uprising with Sonali
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Uprising Excerpt of Roberto Lovato on Obamas Executive Action, Democrats, Mexican Crisis - Video
Published: Sunday, 11/23/2014
BY TOM TROY BLADE POLITICS WRITER
As Ottawa County resident Chris Redfern prepares to relinquish the reins of the Ohio Democratic Party, candidates to replace him, grass-roots party activists, and county chairmen are engaging in listening tours, meetings, and rounds of phone calls to try to figure out who should lead the party and how to break out of its recent cycle of electoral failure.
Democrats are also looking inward, questioning their message as well as the candidates that have been spreading that message.
The state party is emerging from a political debacle with a gubernatorial candidate, Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald, who failed to raise enough money to be competitive. Republican incumbent Gov. John Kasich carried 86 of Ohios 88 counties, including Lucas County, normally a bastion of Democratic voters.
An issue thats getting some consideration is whether the partys stock of liberal policy positions is turning off, rather than energizing, Ohio voters.
Democratic frustration is understandable. As a force in the Statehouse and at the congressional level, the party appears to be running on fumes. It holds none of the five statewide elected offices, only one of seven Ohio Supreme Court seats, and minorities in the state House and Senate.
While Ohio has favored President Obama in the last two presidential elections and has a Democratic U.S. senator, Sherrod Brown, its state elections have trended Republican for more than two decades. Republicans have won five of the last six elections for governor. Republicans have controlled the state Senate for the last 22 years and the House for 17 of those years. Democrats controlled the House in 2009 and 2010.
Source of woes
Some blame the Republican wave election of 2010, which gave the GOP total control of the apportionment of state legislative and congressional districts and thus the power to squeeze Democrats into as few Statehouse and congressional districts as possible.
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Democrats in the state House elected a new leadership team on Saturday as the group shifts into its new role as the chambers minority party for the first time in more than 60 years.
EGOLF: Elected House minority leader
During a caucus meeting held Saturday at the Roundhouse, the Democrats elected Rep. Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, to serve as House minority leader when the Legislature goes into session on Jan. 20.
WILLIAMS STAPLETON: Hew House minority whip
Rep. Sheryl Williams Stapleton, D-Albuquerque, was elected minority whip. Rep. Patricia Roybal Caballero, D-Albuquerque, was named the Democrats caucus chair.
Egolf, a Santa Fe lawyer and political progressive, was named to lead the House Democrats after their top leader, current House Speaker Ken Martinez, D-Grants, declined to seek a leadership role in the new term. The Democrats second-in-command, current Majority Leader Rick Miera, D-Albuquerque, did not seek re-election this year.
Republican House members earlier this month nominated Rep. Don Tripp, R-Socorro, to serve as the new House speaker. With a 37-33 majority in the House, Tripp is expected to have the votes to be elected speaker when the full House convenes in January.
Egolf, who has served in the House since 2009, said he will work to highlight policy differences in debate with the new Republican majority.
My job as leader will be to show New Mexico, when appropriate, the difference that comes from putting Republicans in charge instead of Democrats, and there are going to be very clear differences, Egolf said.
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House Democrats elect new leadership
When Barack Obama was inaugurated nearly six years ago, Democrats ruled the roost in the nations capital, with solid majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives. Now, after Mr. Obamas second midterm election, Democrats are a distinct minority on both sides of the Capitol.
That in itself is not unusual. Mr. Obamas two most recent predecessors, Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican George W. Bush, were in similar positions at the six-year mark of their presidencies: with congressional majorities in the presidents party giving way to the hegemony of the opposition. And six years into his presidency, Ronald Reagan saw the demise of the Republican-controlled Senate that he had helped sweep into power in 1980.
But whats distinctive about Mr. Obamas presidency in this regard has been the magnitude of his partys congressional losses. Democrats emerged from the 2008 elections with 256 House seats and 57 Senate seats. After this months elections, the Democrats are likely to have 188 House seats and 44 Senate seats (not including the two independents that caucus with Senate Democrats), according to Kyle Kondit, managing editor of Larry J. Sabatos Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
Altogether, that would represent a loss for Democrats of 68 House seats and 13 Senate seats since 2008. After six years in office, no other president in the past half-century has seen his party lose more than 50 House seats or more than a dozen Senate seats.
One needs to go back to Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s to find the presidents party suffering such congressional carnage as the Democrats have experienced under Barack Obama. Mr. Eisenhower helped sweep the GOP into control of both houses of Congress when he was first elected in 1952. But after his second midterm election, in 1958, Republicans were a distinct minority in both chambers. They had lost 67 House seats and 14 Senate seats from the halcyon days when Ike was initially elected.
Then, Republican congressional losses represented a return to normalcy, as Democrats ruled Congress for the bulk of the period from 1932 to 1994. In a sense, that is what has happened again. Neither party of late has boasted the near-monolithic control of Capitol Hill that the Democrats long wielded. But for most of the past two decades, Republicans have enjoyed the upper hand in both houses of Congress. And now, with continuing Democratic losses, they do so again.
Rhodes Cook is a political analyst and publisher of a bimonthly political newsletter.
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Whats Distinctive About Democrats Losses Under Obama? Their Magnitude.