Election roundup
Sadly, Chris Chocola, once South Bend’s Congressman, was defeated in his bid for reelection. I don’t like his politics or his attitude, but his name is awesome.
Back in my home district of WV, Alan Mollohan won re-election. I first met him back in 1988, and have rooted for him to lose ever since.
Arizona voters chose to ban putting cows in veal crates and pigs in gestation crates. This measure was strongly opposed by Big Agriculture, and it’s a tribute to both activists on the ground and the common-sense compassion of Arizonans that it passed.
John Robb says that, Iraq-wise, we’re just getting more doomed.
Comments on the local media
The Telegram & Gazette has at least one podcast. A nice start. They should consider making it easy for you to download the mp3 to your iPod, and should add an RSS feed. (Podcast purists would claim that mp3 download + RSS is the definition of a podcast.)
As mentioned on this week’s Saint Kermit, “the Republican Party in Massachusetts is evaporating.” The GOP ran fewer statewide candidates for Massachusetts offices (3) than the Green-Rainbow Party (4)! Some are even suggesting that statewide elections should be nonpartisan, because the Democratic primary is where the real election is taking place.
And so Worcester’s most marginalized, least-politically-organized morning show audience probably isn’t the Democracy Now crowd, but those listening to WTAG radio. The day before the election, the Worcester Republican Blog noted:
I just finished listening to the morning talk show on WTAG in Worcester. From 5-9am, they took phone calls from listeners and asked them who they’re voting for. Here are the results of their unscientific poll:
- From 5-7am, the calls were roughly 60% for Lt. Gov Kerry Healey, the rest split between Patrick and Ross.
- From 7-8am, the calls were all for Healey.
- From 8-9am, the calls were split, but the majority were for Healey.
Statewide, Healey got 35% of the vote. Thanks to WoMag for pointing out this article. (Great Newsweek article on why some in the GOP were optimistic despite the polls.)
So NECN has video of an anti-war demo in Worcester last week, but Indymedia doesn’t. Shame on us.
Louisiana has a system where the general election is essentially an open primary. You’ll see a wide slate of candidates in November, and then if nobody gets 50%, the top two have a runoff in December; that can be two candidates from the same office.
I think the best solution to this — and a number of other political problems in the U.S. — is some form of instant-runoff voting. It’s tough to get these things passed, though, because it’s unlikely for state legislatures to push through anything designed to lessen their power.
What about local contests? I like how in California the municipal and county elections (as well as the State Superintendent of Schools) are all nonpartisan. So the candidates for mayor are just running as themselves, not as members of parties.
That might be fascinating if a state legislature went non-partisan. You might see factions form along unexpected divisions.
Here in southern Indiana, Baron Hill took his seat back from Mike Sodrel, in one of these “moderate conservative democrat” victories. Sodrel is a complete jerk who is against any federal minimum wage at all and in favor of the Mexico fence. Hill is vaguely pro-life and vaguely pro-gay, which seems the blueprint for the moderate conservative democrat. The biggest reason, methinks, for Hill’s victory is that Sodrel (and Chocola) are being held responsible for the governor’s plan to lease one of our toll roads to a German company for 70 years, which would provide the state with a single shot of income while charging its citizens for both use and upkeep of the road for generations. Further, they’re being held responsible for the governor’s choice to move most of the state to daylight savings time, which is just annoying.
Incumbents in WV never lose.
I wonder how many of the new wave of so-called “conservative democrats” are Catholics. The liberal blogs are all saying, “hey look, they’re really liberal, and let me list the reasons why…” and the conservative blogs are, of course, doing the opposite.
Wouldn’t it make more sense for Indiana to just be in the Central Time Zone to line up with Chicago? I was there this summer and it seemed pretty weird.