There’s a theme here.
“He’s tried to rip health care away from our families, and he’s cutting public education,” Andy Beshear, Kentucky’s Democratic candidate for governor, said about his Republican opponent Gov. Matt Bevin in a TV ad.
It’s a strategy we’ve seen before from Democrats — namely, in the 2018 midterms: Portray Republican incumbents as extremists who are hurting ordinary families and instead promise common-sense solutions. The strategy has proved highly effective, too. Last night, Beshear evidently pulled off a big upset, beating Bevin in a state that voted for Donald Trump by 30 percentage points. Beshear leads by 5,000 votes, or 0.4 percentage points, in the latest count, and he has claimed victory.
“As it turns out, when the governor slashes social programs in one of the poorest states in America, voters don’t want to re-elect him. Even if the president tells them to,” The Atlantic’s Alex Wagner wrote. It’s a also reminder, Slate’s Jordan Weissmann wrote, that “Obamacare and Medicaid are fairly popular for all their flaws and fixing/expanding them rather than starting from scratch is probably a good national policy pitch.”
A few other themes from last night’s elections:
Virginia. Democrats flipped both houses of Virginia’s state legislature. They already hold the governor's office, so they now control the state government for the first time since 1993. “Democrats plan to move swiftly to pass tougher gun safety regulations, protections against discrimination for LGBTQ residents, and an increase in the minimum wage,” wrote HuffPost’s Daniel Marans. Amanda Litman of the progressive group Run for Something wrote: “Flipping VA blue didn't happen in one election cycle. It took *years* of investing, organizing, hard work, recruiting great candidates, and losing a little (or a lot) until we finally won big.”
