The Pnyx: Midterm results
Joshua Schuetz
Staff Writer
By the time you read this piece, the midterm elections will have passed, their results known, and their implications dissected and debated in the media.
At the time I am writing this, the democrats are overwhelmingly favored to win the House, and the republicans will retain control of the Senate. As the results come in, it seems likely that the polling was more or less correct.
Broadly speaking, the election results at the time of this writing are generally in lockstep with the conventional wisdom, something which might surprise those of us accustomed to shock and dismay, since the 2016 election.
Reporters and laymen have become more distrustful of pollsters since 2016, not entirely without cause. However, it seems that this lack of trust was somewhat misplaced, if the results at the time of this writing hold.
Democrats won the House, flipping vulnerable republicans and holding on to enough seats to form a majority. They did not win the Senate, mostly because far more democrats than republicans were up for re-election, creating a structural disadvantage.
Turnout is projected to be far higher than usual for midterm elections, possibly in excess of 50 percent, a marked improvement from 2014, when turnout was beneath 40 percent.
Democrats are projected to hold 24 of 50 governor’s seats at the time of this writing, which was also predicted by the polls. In short, it appears that the conventional wisdom has gotten the 2018 elections right.
Of course, it doesn’t matter who wins. There will be no Social Security or Medicaid for you millenials when you get old, and MSU will still be celebrating the diversity of all the latest cultures we have bombed into the stone age, offering tuition breaks to the surviving elites from those cultures to study Engineering at MSU because we don’t have the decency to educate our our own children in math and science. But such is neoliberal capitalism: explort all your manufacturing jobs and import cheap labor and professionals from the desperate cultures we have ravaged over the years.
I am an MSU alumnus retired in Cambodia where back in the seventies Pol Pot tried to make Cambodia great again by committing genocide on the Vietnamese and Cham minorities as well as the the perceived elit liberals in the cities. Of course, now if you come here, you will not see the homelessness you see in Washington DC where people sleep on subway grates to stay warm. No homelessness here, and very little next door in Bangkok. You would love Bangkok. It’s so much safer than Minneapolis with all its minorities mingling together at Nanna and Asok on Sukumvidt every evening.