Krystall Ball at the Huffington Post writes an excellent article, entitled, of course, "The Democratic Party Deserves to Die." Much has been made of the white working-class voters widely presumed to have delivered the Presidency to Mr. Trump -- as it should be, since our economy is crushing them! -- but Ms. Ball really takes you there, not just by describing (in paragraph 4) Democrat elitism almost as good as Thomas Frank usually does, but by showing us how her forgotten Ohio hometown could soon be your hometown if we're not careful. And yeah, trying to make a truck driver into a computer programmer is a bit like making everyone into a nail because you have a hammer.
More from the "Americans Aren't Stupid" file: voters in four states approve minimum wage hikes, while voters in South Dakota rejected a law that would have lowered the minimum wage for workers under 18. South Dakota voters, you may recall, also voted for a campaign finance disclosure initiative on Tuesday, this as they were delivering their electoral votes to Mr. Trump. My great worry now is that more states will get rid of ballot questions like Michigan did in 2012 ago after voters repealed their emergency-manager law. You'd think that'd be, you know, unpopular, but politicians only care about their popularity with their big donors -- unless we get in their grills and stay there.
In other good news, Maine voters approve a referendum that would institute ranked-choice (or "instant runoff") voting for state and federal elections. Voters would rank their choices for state and federal offices from 1 to 5; the candidate with the fewest "1" votes gets eliminated, with their votes going to those voters' second choice, and so on until someone gets a majority. Ranked-choice voting would have eliminated the entire reign of Gov. Paul LePage (first elected with 38 percent in 2010, then 48 percent in 2014), but third-party candidates are more persistent in Maine than elsewhere; now voters have limited the damage they can do, while still giving them a place in the process. (I'm not that invested in the notion that Hillary Clinton might have won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, etc. if those states had ranked-choice voting, though I suppose she might have.)
Kudos to Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post for asking the obvious question about the three states that legalized recreational marijuana on Tuesday: what happens to enforcement of the federal prohibition of marijuana under a Donald Trump Justice Department. President Obama, after all, essentially let Colorado and Washington state alone after they legalized marijuana in 2012. Naturally Mr. Trump has given mixed signals about it -- though neither Messrs. Giuliani nor Christie, both mentioned as possible Attorney General picks, have ever seemed particularly flexible about the matter.
Finally, in news almost as good as Evan "the Lesser" Bayh's utter drubbing in his attempt to win back that Indiana Senate seat he abandoned in a fit of pique in 2010, notorious Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff Joe Arpaio lost his re-election bid by 10 points. Mr. Arpaio was notorious for all his many attempts to prove he had bigger balls than the undocumented immigrants he detained, often making them wear pink underwear or work in 145-degree heat, which latter item certainly qualifies as torture. Yeah, we'll really miss that old coot -- unless, I suppose, he turns up in Mr. Trump's Administration.
Comments