2012 US Election Recap

Though it's sort of old news by now, I can't let the US elections pass without commenting on them briefly. In an earlier post, I talked about my own choices on the ballot I had received. Unfortunately, since I was voting in very conservative, overwhelmingly Republican Texas, not a single candidate I voted for won. On the national level, however, the results were considerably more gratifying. Though I voted for Jill Stein myself, I definitely wanted Barack Obama to win reelection over Mitt Romney, and as I noted in my other post, assuming my vote swap partner followed through, I helped ensure he got an extra vote in Florida, where it was much more useful than my vote in Texas would have been (for that matter, I even contributed a few dollars to his campaign). So I was very pleased to see him win quite convincingly over Romney. I was also very happy to see some good Democratic candidates for Senate like Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, and Heidi Heitkamp win, and some truly awful Republican candidates defeated. Though the House results were not as good, some of the worst extremists on the Republican side were defeated. Also, there were many positive state referendum results, including three states approving same sex marriage, two states legalizing recreational use of marijuana, and one voting to allow the children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition.

Though overall the results of the election were about as good as I could reasonably have hoped for, being the cynic that I am I can't help but note the downsides as well. As mentioned earlier, the Republicans held onto the House and while some of the very worst extremists were defeated, there are still a lot of awful right-wing congresspeople left. A perfectly reasonable measure to require labeling of GMO foods was defeated in California thanks to heavy spending by Monsanto and similar dangerously powerful groups. While the Green Party's Jill Stein came in fourth overall and received close to three times the number of votes that the Green Party candidate got in 2008 and four times the votes of their 2004 candidate (she also got the most votes that any female presidential candidate has ever received in the general election), she still got far fewer votes than she deserved to get (less than half of 1%), and the party's Texas candidates didn't get all that many votes either, though the ones in races without Democrats did get enough to guarantee ballot access for the party next time around (5% was required and I believe two of them got 8%). The extremist Ted Cruz easily won election as a US Senator from Texas. And I still find it disturbing that people like Romney, Ryan, Akin, McMahon, etc. could even come close to winning big races. Finally, the fact that House Republican leaders like John Boehner and Pete Sessions both made the ridiculous assertion that the elections showed that the American people opposed tax increases, when not only did Obama and most of the Senate Democrats (the vast majority of whom have called for the wealthy to pay higher taxes) win but the Democrats even won more of the popular vote in House elections than the Republicans (who kept their majority mainly due to gerrymandering of Congressional districts) does not bode well for reasonable compromises on budget issues.

Despite these caveats, I have to consider myself generally happy with the results of this election. If this election actually forces the Republicans to reverse course and move back toward the center a little, rather than going further and further to the right as they have been doing, then it will prove even better. But for now, it has to be considered just one victory in a long war.