So, Where Are We?

I know it’s hard to tell, even a week after the election. So many things are happening. So many things are still undecided. So many important votes have to be counted, or re-counted, or not counted at all.

Then there is the question of what will happen in January, after the new Congress is sworn in. And what will happen before January, while the old Congress is still in power. And who will be running the Justice Department and whether there will be any more Supreme Court nominees.

And the border wall, and the caravan, and all those troops stringing barbed wire across miles of empty desert, and told to shoot at kids throwing rocks by the President and told not to shoot at all by their non-coms.

And mass shootings, and climate change, and the mounting cost of natural disasters.

Hey, do we really need another Kent State to distract us? Oh, yes, this may be a generational thing. If you don’t know what happened at Kent State because you are too young, I’ll give you a hint. Some National Guard troops assigned to keep order at a college where kids were demonstrating had rocks thrown at them and thought they were in danger. So they shot, and killed some of the protesters.

That was in 1970. Four students were killed and nine more were wounded. It’s now the fourth thing you find when you do a Google search for “Kent State.” You should look it up as a reminder of the reality behind Trump’s words.

Our President is old enough to remember, but maybe he was doing a deal that day and wasn’t paying attention. That day, or the next day, or the day after that.

Anyway, with all those big things happening - and a lot more big shadows slowly filling out and becoming reality - what are the take-aways from the election? In short, where are we?

Well, I can’t tell you. I don’t know what will happen over the next few months any more than you do. But, what I can do is highlight some of the things that aren’t being talked about much in the media or by the candidates, and which may turn out to be really, really important.

                                                    But where to start?

Well, I like numbers and demographics and number crunching (it’s a learned habit), so let’s start by looking at the vote. More people voted last week than in any other off-year election, but - since our nation has been growing for three centuries - it doesn’t really mean that much.

There are always more people in the voting pool. What really matters is the percentage of voters who took the trouble to cast a ballot that counts.

We had about 113 million people vote - more or less - and that came to 48 or 49 percent of the eligible voters. That’s right, more than half of us didn’t go to the polls or even cast an absentee ballot.

It was a pretty high number for an off-year election. It sure beats recent highs like the 36.8 percent vote in 2014 and the 41 percent vote in 2010. Yep, for all the fire and fury, as a nation a lot of us just don’t care. It kind of explains why politicians sometimes ignore protesters.

Now you can do a lot of deep digging on this, looking for voter suppression or lack of interest on the part of some minority groups, the difficulty the elderly and the handicapped have in getting to the polls or getting a mail-in  ballot, or the willful efforts of some people - including local officials - to keep other people from voting.

There are so many arguments that people of every political stripe can argue why the low turnout matches their prejudices. Here’s one take-away - the people who benefit from low voter turnout tend to be the ones already in office or their supporters. After all, they are the people making the rules that determine how we vote.

Now let’s look at the myth of which party will control the Senate and the House of Representatives next year. A lot of people thought they knew when the election results came in. Democrats have the House and Republicans kept the Senate.

Well, cracks are already starting to show. We still don’t know for sure who won a couple of key Senate races. It might even make sense for Florida to hold two elections, one in the Summer which could be re-counted and argued about for months - a kind of new tourist attraction, especially for people who watch court TV shows. Then they could hold another one in November, when all the problems have been corrected.

                                         Now, What Is It All About?

We just have to look at the big picture. A lot of what will be happening over the next few months is just a bridge to 2020, and those forces - remember the shadows taking for I talked about - are really interesting.

Again, some facts. Off-year voters tend to be older, whiter and more conservative than the voters who come out in Presidential race years. Not an opinion, just a fact. Look it up yourself, or ask any politician or anyone who sits behind a desk at the polling place and hands you a ballot.

So, the voters in two years will likely trend younger, include more minorities and be a little more liberal than the ones who voted last week. Now everyone in the House runs for re-election every two years. The Senate is different. It has six-year terms, so only a third of the members are ever on the ballot at the same time.

Last week, about two-thirds of the Senators whose terms had expired were Democrats, and the vote was set up for Democrats to lose some seats. A rigged election if I ever saw one. in two years, the Senators running for re-election will break the other way, with two-thirds of them being Republicans. Guess what that means!

Now, lets take a look at what the Democrats and Republicans really won on Election Day.

The Democratic side is easy. We just don’t know. They haven’t held power in the House since 2009, and it’s still not clear what their agenda will be or how it will play out. Should be interesting.

The Republicans have gotten rid of some of their veterans and have a batch of fresh new faces who - in the election - stood firmly behind Donald Trump. Just imagine what happens when they find the members of that other branch of government don’t do what they want.

                                                          The Best Part

A more interesting question - and not many people are asking it right now - is could there be a complete control of our government in 2020,  just like the Republicans hold right now?

Well, it’s not at all unusual. In the last 100 years, the Democrats held the White House and both houses of Congress for 35 years, and the Republicans had them all for 16 years. It kind of puts things in perspective.

And is anyone sure what the new crop of Senators and House members will be like? Will Mitt Romney turn out to be a Trump yes man? Fat chance of that. Will a Senator who saw their reliable red state turn blue this year stand firmly behind the President’s demand to shut down our government if his border wall is not funded? Or what will they say when someone asks them what is happening to those immigrant children taken from their parents and still held in detention camps? Sooner or later, someone will notice.

Then there’s the question of what will happen when the President submits another budget with a trillion dollar deficit, or one that cuts the debt by cutting Medicaid and Congress has to vote on it?

Just like the current crop of Democrats, I don’t want to even talk about indictments until there is actually a Democratic majority seated in the House of Representatives. But, I will bet a cup of coffee and a donut that some Republican Senator from a state that is no longer solidly Republican may bring up the topic in the next month or two.

You know, one of those people who will be facing re-election in two years and who saw the Trump wave break against their party in his state.

Hey, when there is a revolution brewing, it is a lot better to be ahead of the crowd and leading it than being chased by them.