@The Aspie Corner

From Tampa Bay Times:

Two days after Florida's election, a U.S. Senate seat remains in limbo, the governor's race moved to within recount range and the Democratic candidate for agriculture commissioner assumed a narrow lead.

Welcome to recount-ageddon.

Even for Florida, home to the most notorious recount in modern history, this election is heading toward an unprecedented conclusion. Three statewide races and three statehouse races appear headed to a recount.

From here on out, Florida is in uncharted territory.

In two South Florida counties, results continued to trickle in the Democrats' favor as workers made their way through thousands of uncounted ballots. Gov. Rick Scott announced in a Thursday evening press conference that he, as a candidate, is suing Broward and Palm Beach counties for what he said is a lack of transparency.

By mid-Thursday, for the first time since Tuesday night, Democrat Andrew Gillum inched close enough to Republican Ron DeSantis to force an automatic recount in the governor's race. As of Thursday evening, just 36,219 votes separated the two in a race with 8.2 million ballots cast.

Meanwhile, Republican Rick Scott saw his lead in the Senate race over Democrat Bill Nelson shrink to 22,000 votes Thursday morning. By the end of the day, Nelson trailed by just 15,079 votes and his team saw a path to victory.

"At the end of this process Sen. Nelson is going to prevail," said Marc Elias, a veteran Washington, D.C., recount attorney hired by Nelson. "I am very measured in how I treat what I say. When I say it is currently a jump ball … I mean that."

Not that it matters, though. The Repig Terrorists will still have a stranglehold on 'Murica's Wang and Debbie Wasserman Shill will do all she can to keep it that way.

two of our local
@dfarrah
congress critter candidates (including my own) to run on Med 4 All.
"Can't do it, this is a Conservative district, Wink... "
yeah, well, guess what? Conservatives want Med 4 All too. 52% of Repubs favor Med 4 All.
They wouldn't pull that trigger, went with "access for all" instead. And lost.
Dims need to run on Med 4 All in 2020. It is THE winning issue.

well.

If they had made healthcare the number one issue, IMO, they would have had a huge blue wave. (not that they mean to actually do anything about healthcare.)

Even the fox people made a similar assertion and noted that the dems win on healthcare (and this was even before the Kavanaugh stuff).

@gjohnsit

The result is an electorate polarized into two camps, with very little room for compromise; a nigh-intractable electoral split that I’ve termed a cold civil war.

The link is to an article that says this:

This is a longstanding divide in America, one that accelerated under President Barack Obama. But President Donald Trumps’s 2016 campaign, the most racially divisive in modern history, escalated this into a kind of cold civil war. Trump’s victory was a kind of political Fort Sumter, a sign that a smaller and more racially conservative part of the country would not accept social change without a fight.

To which I say: Balderdash. I've been calling our political situation a Cold Civil War for over a decade. Civil wars, cold or otherwise, are fought primarily, not with divisive election rhetoric (though propaganda plays its part, as in all wars), but with the actual exercise of power. The political Fort Sumter in this case was the Republicans' all-out attack on Bill Clinton, in which they pulled out every stop to:
A. Prevent him from governing effectively
and
B. Somehow get something on him that would justify impeachment and removal from office.

In the aftermath of that we saw an unending parade of seditious behavior that, in almost any nation anywhere prior to about 1870, would have brought the perpetrators to the block, the gallows or the guillotine:
A. The Brooks Bros. riot
B. The Florida and Federal Supreme Courts both thwarting the counts in Florida in defiance of their own ideological biases.
C. The onslaught, beginning under Bush but accelerating after Obama's election, of voter suppression techniques, carried out with shameless disregard for morality or ethics.
D. The Supreme Court's preposterous finding that certain Civil Rights era protections of the franchise were no longer warranted.
E. The bizarre, explicit, seditious (and, incidentally, oath-violating) refusal of the Republicans in the Senate, even when in the minority, to allow the duly elected President to exercise his executive authority.
F. The spectacular gerrymandering of 2010-11

And so on. There is your Cold Civil War, a phrase I've been using for over 10 years. (Might be interesting to go back to dPOS and see when I first employed it there, though I think I thought it up before I ever logged in to that site. And I'd have to care a lot more about the answer before I'd actually go back there to find out.) The CCW isn't the part where you rhetorically whip your supporters into a frenzy -- the CCW is the part where you exercise whatever power you can, however you can, without regard to law or morality or ethics (as in regular old hot war), to attack the power of the enemy.

And the fundamental problem we've had all along is that only one side is fighting the war -- and it's the side that considers people like us to be the enemy.

Vox

But the emerging conventional wisdom among Beltway centrists is the opposite: that Democrats overreached, tacking too far to the left and ending up with a mediocre-at-best result.

“Don’t listen to Democrats who portray these midterms as an important triumph. In 2016 and again this year, liberals listened too much to one another and not enough to the country as a whole,” writes the New York Times’s Nick Kristof, a center-left columnist.

“The result of the midterms means, if nothing else, that the president survived his first major political test more than adequately,” Bret Stephens, Kristof’s fellow columnist on the center-right, wrote the day after Kristof. “Unless Democrats change, he should be seen as the odds-on favorite to win in 2020.”

These two columns, and several similar ones published in recent days, follow basically the same script. They argue that the most progressive parts of the Democratic Party are to blame for the party’s allegedly weak performance in the midterms.
...
Pundits made the point that had Democrats not skewed so far left, incumbents in red states like Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota could have hung on. Yet Beto O’Rourke came closer than any Democrat to winning a Texas seat in decades, while Ohio labor populist Sherrod Brown handily won a state that grows redder by the cycle.
Democrats flipped — as of Friday morning — nearly 40 seats in the house. It is, as Cook Political Report analyst Dave Wasserman notes, the largest Democratic House wave since Watergate.

@The Voice In the Wilderness
families fight families.

anyone know what happened in that race where the Republican clown's siblings did an ad saying he sucked for realz?

I'm guessing no relation to Barry Sadler

@edg
I like your new pic! You're smiling, and look as though you lost a lot of weight. The old one looked a little like, well, a mugshot. Hopefully that wasn't rude to type out loud. (Been told more than once that I lack decorum. So there's that.)

Democrat challenger

My god, are there no editors? The usage requires an adjective -- Democratic. Sheesh.

@BernieOrBust from getting things done is rather the point. The leadership won't give up power until you pry that gavel from their cold, dead fingers.

My burning red father who voted for trump and still digs him was recently diagnosed with cancer. He has a cheap, shit, Medicare advantage plan, and can’t get the level of care he needs with it. He is steaming mad and rants on a regular basis about needing SINGLE PAYER healthcare in the U.S.!!!! I about fell out of my chair the first time he said that.

People need/want comprehensive Medicare For All type healthcare! Dems are increasingly realizing this, but they should embrace it full throttle, and push for it like crazy.

The old guard need to retire positions of leadership, and let the new, young, energetic crowd start getting stuff done minus all the corporate influence.