Senate trade-off: More Obama judges, Trump gets nominees

Now, the Clintons are finished and Obama leaves office in January. In North Carolina-where Republicans hold a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature-Trump won by a four-point margin, even capturing some of the counties that Obama won in 2012. They’ve grossly neglected the lower level elections that make up the foundations of any political party.

The Republican Party is fractured by ideological divisions, led by an inexperienced and unpredictable president-elect, and quite possibly headed for a fratricidal civil war. Barack Obama and his wife Michelle supported Clinton’s campaign for the presidency.

As he grew in power, Obama explained, conservative media made it more hard for him to attract support. I’m sure most progressives would join me in not wanting to run that unsafe experiment.

Boehmer says the Democrats needs to start thinking of their slate of candidates for the future and reconnecting with the middle class and working people, whom he believes they’ve lost over the years.

That’s because Sessions “is the Senate’s highest-profile, most determined and most knowledgeable opponent of comprehensive immigration reform”.

In recent years, the Democratic minority has been more of a factor in the Senate, where Democrats have joined with a bloc of moderate Republicans on issues like guns and the state pension system.

CT may have voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton for president, Richard Blumenthal for US senator and Jim Himes for USA representative, but farther down the ballot was a different story. The party also had its largest majority in the Senate since the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter was president. Democrats have suffered severe political consequences for pushing through the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

The problem for them – and for Democratic hopes of ever taking over the House – is that not enough of their votes are in the right places.

“Part of ways changed in politics is social media and how people are receiving information”, he said, during a press conference in Germany. For another, the party “apparatus is ingrown and entrenched” – the Democratic National Committee “has become irrelevant at best, run part-time by a series of insider politicians”. And if Republicans in the years ahead can raise their state legislative dominance from 32 to 38 states, while retaining their congressional power, they’ll be able to ratify their dream amendments to the U.S. Constitution. That represents about 56 percent of the total.

Conversely, Republicans lost a similar number of voters in southeastern Pennsylvania – about 100,000 – and added about 60,000 voters in western Pennsylvania. We saw a map of that recently, too, showing in how few states do the Democrats control even one legislative house, much less both houses and the governorship. That is a record for the party.

The only thing standing between Senate Democrats and an electoral wipeout in 2018?

New England, long considered reliably Democratic, is a prime example of the party’s demise.

The GOP takeover of state governments was no accident.

Republicans have never had a more positive image than Democrats for any consistent period over the past quarter century. Now, just 15 do. Rank-and-file Democrats are in a far more obstructionist mood right now, in other words, than their counterparts on the right were eight years ago. In 2008, the Republican Party’s favorable image dropped from 40% before to 34% after the election. Where they once controlled 57 percent of such seats, they now control only 43 percent. Nearly two-thirds of all state legislators in the South are Republicans.

Several contestants have emerged, including Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who ran the national party in the run-up to Obama’s 2008 election, and Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a favorite of Sanders and the incoming Senate Democratic leader, Charles E. Schumer of NY. In fact, this is only six states: California, Oregon, Hawaii, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware.

This is nothing more, and nothing less, than asking Trump to absorb the weight of the office he holds, and the message of the election he won.

“In most of the country, having a D beside your name is like carrying a 10-pound weight around your ankles”, said Jim Kessler, senior vice president for policy at the D.C. -based think tank The Third Way.

The Democrats on Monday also picked their No. 2 caucus leaders, tapping newly elected Sen.

Christopher Jones-Cruise reported this story for VOA Learning English.