Election Results: California Dem Wins, Republicans Pretending to be Dems Lose and Wisconsin is On Deck

 Maybe Elections are the National Pastime

A special election was held for a House seat in California’s 36^th District, and this race was pretty much under the radar.  The district is solidly Democratic and there were no burning national issues to argue about.  The Democrat won by about 9 points, and although the usually reliable Nate Silver saw this is a disappointment for Democrats, the result seemed about right for a low turnout, low key race. 

Of more importance is the situation in Wisconsin.  Following Gov. Scott Walkers and the Republicans legislative victories in removing collective bargaining rights from state workers, recall elections were started against legislators of both parties.  In order to disrupt the process Republicans (yes, those same ones that strongly support “integrity” in the election process when it involves discouraging non- Republican voters) fielded false Democratic candidates, forcing the Democrats to have a primary before the recall elections themselves.

The results

All six Wisconsin Democrats won their recall primaries today, easily fending off challenges from “protest” candidates put forward by Republicans to delay the general elections

An intersting thing is that the forcing of a primary by the "fake Republican Democrats" may have helped the Democrats in that it put them in the news and gave them more recognition than they otherwise would have had.

And attention will now be turned to the recall elections themselves.  This will be the first significant test of the ability of Democrats to fight back against what they view as Republican extremism at the state level, and the results will be interesting.  Stay tuned for the results later this summer.

In New York State the issue continues to be the State Assembly and State Senate’s approval of same sex marriage, as groups opposed to that legislation gear up to defeat lawmakers who approved it,

“There’s a lot of discontent out there,” said the Rev. Jason J. McGuire, the executive director of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, which tried unsuccessfully to persuade lawmakers not to approve same-sex marriage this year

Rev. McGuire apparently being unaware of the irony that a group supporting Constitutional Freedom is working actively against the rights of a group of citizens.

This sort of activity is common after major change  in the social or economic environment, and most of the time (but not all the time, see Wisconsin above) the opposition just fades away after a brief spurt of activity immediately following the change.  Once most New Yorkers opposed to same sex marriage see the lack of horror coming out of legalization, they, like their neighbors in Massachusetts who experienced the same thing they will go quietly about their business.