Well, that was ugly. I won’t pretend that I enjoyed last night. Neither the election results nor the CAV’s game were anything I wanted to watch. And yet I did. I flipped back and forth from the various television news outlets, including PBS which was pretty good, to the game in hopes of seeing anything that I would find positive. I didn’t. Tough night. So congratulations to those who won last night, the Portland Trailblazers and darn near anyone with an (R) next to his/her name, and let’s move on to the annual election wrap-up.
Ohio – One more time, with feeling…
Bob Hagan, is a Youngstown Democrat. There is no backing down. He doesn’t need to be pretend to be anything he’s not. And so if he asks a question on Facebook such as today’s “What went wrong? Why did our voters stay home?” It is to elicit real answers from the community that he represents. At last count there were over 140 responses. Some were thoughtful. Some were constructive.
Elections have winners and losers. If the losers don’t learn anything from the election than they will lose again. But both winners and losers can take the wrong lessons from an election. That’s one of the reasons we get to do this all again every couple of years.
John Kasich won Tuesday evening. Well, the win was codified Tuesday, but it really happened months ago. Why? Weak candidate? A media vendetta? An unpopular president? Take your pick. What it wasn’t was an outbreak of Kasich fever. Hundreds of thousands of Ohio voters, people who cast their ballots four years ago for Ted Strickland, didn’t cross over to the Kasich fan club. There was no love fest. The Democrats stayed home.
2010 Kasich votes – 1,889,186 Strickland votes – 1,812, 059
2014 Kasich votes – 1,922,241 Fitzgerald votes – 989,117
Kasich received 33,055 (unofficial vote tally) more in 2014 than he did four years ago, one percent of the total votes cast this year. Ohio didn’t excitedly vote for Kasich. We dumped Fitzgerald. It may be a little too early to play Hail to the Chief.
Goodbye Harry Reid
I was reviewing the client’s health insurance renewal. As has been the case several times already, he and his family, staunch Republicans, are big winners under Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. He reluctantly admitted that there might be some good to the law but he was anxious to change the subject. He excitedly talked about the defeat of Harry Reid. “He is a bad man, a very bad man. Have you read anything about him?” “Well yes I have,” I told my client. And I wouldn’t vote for either Mitch McConnell or Harry Reid. That surprised him. If you only watch FOX or MSNBC you wouldn’t realize that Mitch and Harry are two sides of a worthless coin.
My little corner of the world is filled with the concerns, mine and my clients’, about health insurance. As noted in my recent insurance post, there has been an amazing lack of intellectual honesty about Obamacare. I want to know how yesterday will affect my clients. I’m still guessing that it won’t. It is just hard to accept how cynical politics can be.
We bemoan, each election, our pathetic voter turnout. The American public chooses to not participate. By the time Election Day arrives we know just enough about the candidates to disqualify them. The policeman smiling next to the politician is probably an actor, or worse, a cut and paste job. There is little truth and nothing positive. Proud news organizations have sullied their reputations.
Over 800,000 Ohioans, people who had voted four years ago, skipped this year’s contest. Those aren’t 800,000 votes for Kasich. That is close to a million people who were too fed up to participate in what turned out to be a one percent landslide.