All the races yesterday were good news for the Democrats, even some that went completely under the radar. Check this out:
Unexpected victory in an unexpected place:
After 13 years, Mississippi Democrats have broken the Republican Party’s supermajority in the Mississippi Senate. Voters elected Democrats to two seats previously held by Republicans, reducing the number of Republican senators in the upper chamber from 36 to 34—one fewer than necessary to constitute a supermajority.
When a party has supermajority status in the Mississippi Senate, it can more easily override a governor’s veto, propose constitutional amendments and execute certain procedural actions.
The Mississippi Democratic Party called the victory “a historic rebuke of extremism.”
Bolts points to this one, which will be very important for the next elections as long as Trump and his minions are on a jihad against voting rights:
Three Democratic justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court have defeated an unusually high-profile Republican bid to unseat them. They secured large statewide victories on Tuesday, following an historically expensive campaign centered largely on the court’s role in defending voting and abortion rights.
The results preserve Democratic control of this all-important court for at least two more years. Barring any unexpected retirements, Democrats will enjoy a 5-2 majority until the next Pennsylvania Supreme Court elections, which are slated for 2027.
And Tuesday’s results mean that Republicans are now unlikely to win an outright majority until 2029 at the earliest; the best they could hope for in two years is to force a tie on the court.
Conservatives made no secret that they were hoping to take back the court in time for the next presidential race. In this most populous of swing states, the supreme court has in recent years ruled against Republicans in several high-stakes election lawsuits. Since flipping the court in 2015, the Democratic majority has struck down a Republican gerrymander, upheld mail-in voting against conservative attacks, and rejected every one of Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania lawsuits to invalidate the 2020 presidential election.
“The projected victory for the three of us speaks well of our democracy,” one of the winning justices, David Wecht, told Bolts on Tuesday night. “We all campaigned on the basis of vindicating the Pennsylvania constitution’s free and equal elections clause, and we’re all committed to continuing to vindicate that right.”
Democrats may have a blue wave building. But a lot of what has to happen is just grinding it out in state and local races like these.
By the way, if you haven’t seen all the results go on over to Bolts. They have it all. Reading it is like a tonic after the last years of self-flagellation and second guessing. Democrats won big everywhere just a couple of weeks after 7 million people showed up to protest in the streets.
We ain’t dead yet.