posted November 05, 2010 10:38 PM         

Republicans gained a historic edge over Democrats in state legislature elections that will have national implications for years to come.

State legislatures in 44 states are responsible for one of the most important political processes: drawing district boundaries for the U.S. House of Representatives.

In a process that usually triggers partisan bickering, the reigning party usually has the upper hand, especially if the governor is also from the same party and cannot veto the legislature's decisions.

Republicans took control of at least 19 Democratic-controlled state legislatures Tuesday and gained more than 650 seats, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The last time Republicans saw such victories was in 1994, when they captured control of 20 state legislatures.

Republicans haven't controlled as many state legislatures since 1928.

Across the country, the map for state legislatures has turned noticeably red as Republicans now control 55 chambers, with Democrats at 38 and the remaining yet to be decided. At the beginning of this week, Democrats controlled 60 of the country's state legislative chambers and Republicans 36.

Tuesday also was a historic day for many state legislatures. In Minnesota, Republicans won the Senate for the first time ever, while in Alabama, they took control for the first time since reconstruction.

The gains were truly of "historic proportions," said Tim Storey, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, pointing out that the last time there was such a wave of state legislature switches was 1966.

"Everything moved in the direction of the GOP," Storey said. "I think Republicans are in the best position for redistricting they have been in since the modern redistricting era began in 1962. And they really have kind of a decided advantage now with the big wins."

The redistricting process that occurs once every decade when the Census is released usually tends to favor the party in power.

Redistricting is important because it not only determines the number of seats a state will get in the U.S. House of Representatives, it also creates boundaries for educational and public institutions.

When the process begins next year, it will mean a big boon for Republicans, who, in addition to state legislatures, also won key governorships.

GOP gubernatorial candidates won races where redistricting battles will be fought most heavily next year such as Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

All other signs also point to a victorious redistricting year for Republicans. In states like Florida, which is expected to gain two House seats, and Texas, which is projected to up its number by four, Republicans maintained their majorities.

Redistricting -- or "gerrymandering," as it's often called by critics because of a salamander-shaped district created by Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry in 1812 -- is a bitter political process with high stakes for both parties.

"You can win a number of seats just by controlling the boundary," said Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at The Brookings Institution.

In an effort to reform the system, California on Tuesday voted to pass a proposition that will test the power of independent commissions formed solely for the purpose of drawing district lines.

A ballot initiative in 2008 created the 14-member California Citizens Redistricting Commission that would be responsible for drawing up state legislative district lines. The commission would require nine votes to enact a plan, three each from Republicans, Democrats and third parties.

The Pennsylvania House of Representatives at the State Capitol is seen in Harrisburg, Pa., Feb. 4....
The Pennsylvania House of Representatives at the State Capitol is seen in Harrisburg, Pa., Feb. 4. 2009. From New Hampshire to Minnesota and down to Alabama, Republicans knocked Democrats out of the majority in key state legislative chambers, making historic gains and seizing critical power to redraw district maps and influence elections for a decade to come. Pennsylvania voters handed control of the state House to the GOP. Republicans also held their majority in the state Senate and gained the governorship with Tom Corbett's win.

Californians passed Proposition 20, which would expand the commission's task to include congressional district boundaries.

The commission, the first of its kind, would test how such a process works. But not everyone agrees that commissions are less partisan than state legislatures.

"The problem is no one has come up with the perfect way," Storey said. "Sometimes, they're called independent commissions, but they're not necessarily independent commissions. But they may actually be just as partisan as legislatures. And, in fact, they are likely to go to legislation and they are likely to end up losing redistricting plans."

Others say the potential for abuse is greater when members of state legislatures, with clearly vested political ideologies, are involved.

"Redistricting is, for better or for worse, a lot of political jousting," said Erika L. Wood, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. "Because those state legislatures hold so much control and because this is done in back rooms, if Republicans are in control they will draw maps that they think will benefit them in the next few years.

"There's always a lot of drama that happens with this," she added. "I've heard people call it a bloodbath."

The redistricting process in Texas in 2003 ended up embroiled in controversy and court delays that escalated all the way to the Supreme Court.

posted November 06, 2010 12:57 PM         

and why is a governor of the same party incapable of vetoing what other members of his party do? is the republican party the nazis who ORDER their members to stay in line?

posted November 07, 2010 12:57 PM         

yes i am getting more and more glad that i live in california for all its faults.

posted November 07, 2010 03:22 PM         

I wonder if you even realize these jerks made every California resident...as well as residents of many other states..contributors to Governor Moonbeam's campaign.

At least Meg Whitman had the character and integrity to spend HER OWN MONEY.

Let's see how California fares under the weight of all the new debt Governor Moonbeam and the public employee unions pile on in new benefits.

posted November 07, 2010 04:16 PM         

for your information the unions VOTE on what they do as bodies. unlike corporations whose members do what the BOSS tells them they will do...or clock out the door. THAT is the difference between government running the country and corporations running it.

do you really not see the difference?

yes she spent her own money. but in case you haven't heard she promised many in PUBLIC jobs continued support on state pensions in return for their support. in other words her so called policy was dispensable when it came to getting votes.

give it up jwhop, even whitman stated on air that when brown was governor california was a much better place.

posted November 10, 2010 11:19 AM         

so congrats on the voting in of several major lobbyists so they can have a DIRECT influence on where the money goes...where they want it to and their sponsors do...while only considering how much profit is in it for them and theirs.

posted November 10, 2010 03:16 PM         

unions have their corruptions too. haven't said otherwise. but once again i repeat, that the management of COMCAST don't have to worry about the public voting with their pocketbooks if there is nothing else available on the air. and when they have that in their pockets we will have a lot less choice about what to ingest as entertainment and news....nor will we be able to vote t hem out, will we?

posted November 19, 2010 08:34 AM         

First, House Democrats re-elected Nancy Pelosi to be their minority leader after historic-level losses. It's like promoting Custer had he survived Little Big Horn.

I'm sure there's a strategy in there somewhere.

Now, the far-left is pushing President Obama to go into unconstitutional overdrive abusing Article II executive power through use of executive orders and regulations to create policy that is the constitutional prerogative of Congress.

Did anyone tell the far left about this Tea Party thing, which is creating an unprecedented, renewed concentration on the limits of constitutional authority?

Coming after the left was relentless in claiming that President George W. Bush abused Article II executive power, the Obama administration's earlier aggrandizement of power, such as creating Government Motors, and more recently, the TSA's new invasive airport screening angering everyone -- and which even the ACLU opposes -- we can only conclude that the Democratic Party has a political death wish.

posted November 19, 2010 05:01 PM         

i fail to see what benefit there is in the corporate sponsored and guided tea party getting in the mix. it just obscures things even more.

posted November 22, 2010 11:47 PM         

Further, O'Bomber interfered in the bankruptcy laws of the United States...illegally and illegally....screwed the secured GM bondholders....in favor of his comrades in the auto workers union.

Further, that IPO GM issued at more than $30 per share is way above the natural market for GM shares...AND, those who bought those IPO shares are going to get their financial clocks cleaned.

posted November 26, 2010 10:37 AM         

Dissatisfaction with O'Bomber's Marxist Socialist agenda led by Pee-Lousy and Reid swept even long standing demoscats right out of office.

Now, it's up to elected Republicans in the House...and those in the Senate...even in the minority there to prove to voters they got the message of lower taxes, smaller, less intrusive government, repeal or defunding of O'BomberCare until it can be repealed and a government out of the private sector dedicated to creating "the conditions" conducive to job creation...but not in the business of bailouts and/or of creating jobs in government.

How well they carry through on their campaign promises...and whether or not demoscats attempt to thwart the will of voters...will determine whether or not a new tsunami forms to remove them and/or the remaining demoscats in November 2012.

The Republican Mandate
By Robert Stacy McCain on
11.24.10 @ 6:08AM

Ann Marie Buerkle was outspent by a 5-to-1 margin in her campaign against incumbent Rep. Dan Maffei in New York's 25th district. Maffei was a phenomenal fundraiser -- of his $2.7 million total, the freshman Democrat collected more than $1.2 million from PACs -- and the district had voted for Democrats in the past three presidential elections, delivering 56 percent for Barack Obama just two years ago.

When Buerkle first declared her intent to run for the seat, she said, "People looked at me like I was crazy. They said, 'He's got so much money. How are you going to beat him?'"

But beat him, she did. Yesterday, after all the absentee ballots had been counted and Buerkle still maintained a 567-vote lead, Maffei conceded. Combined with a win for Blake Farenthold in Texas -- where Democrat Rep. Solomon Ortiz finally conceded Monday in the 27th District -- Buerkle's victory brings to 63 the number of House seats gained by Republicans in the mid-term election. That's the GOP's biggest net gain in any election since 1938, and gives Republicans 242 House seats -- the most they've held since 1949. Their majority is bigger by 12 seats than the one captured by Newt Gingrich's GOP in 1994.

The sheer size of the electoral tsunami that swept Buerkle and scores of other Republicans into Congress has been underplayed by the major media, which have preferred instead to focus on the failure of the GOP to capture a Senate majority. But the electoral math always favored Democrats in this year's Senate campaign, and Republicans still scored important Senate pickups in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Arkansas, North Dakota and Wisconsin. (Would anyone have bet two years ago that the GOP could defeat Russ Feingold in 2010?) The survival of Harry Reid as Senator Majority Leader -- the only good news for Democrats in the mid-terms -- was predictably the big story in the liberal press in the immediate aftermath of Election Day. And so the enormous Republican gains in the House have not yet been fully comprehended by most Americans.

Part of the reason for this is that so many races remained undecided on Election Night. By the time most people went to bed on Nov. 2, it was clear that the GOP had recaptured the House majority, but the extent of their victory was not yet known. Even a week after the election, nine contests still remained undecided, and many Democrats delayed conceding in close races. It was not until last Wednesday that Rep. Melissa Bean conceded to Republican Joe Walsh in the 8th District of Illinois, and not until Friday that Rep. Bob Etheridge conceded to Renee Ellmers in North Carolina's 2nd District. This slow-motion trickle of additional GOP pickups meant that the big victory didn't produce the kind of jaw-dropping astonishment it should have inspired.

How big was the wave? Consider the example of Republican operative Vince Kreul, 26, who worked for three losing congressional candidates during the 2010 campaign season -- first for Rick Barber in Alabama's 2nd District, then for Les Phillip in Alabama's 5th District, and then for Kerry Roberts in Tennessee's 6th District. All three of those candidates lost their primaries, but the GOP candidates who won those primaries (Martha Roby, Mo Brooks and Diane Black, respectively) all won on Nov. 2, capturing seats that had previously been held by Democrats. And Vince Kreul also ended up with a winner, working for the campaign of Morgan Griffith, the Republican who defeated 14-term incumbent Democrat Rick Boucher in Virginia's 9th District.

The defeat of Boucher, who had kept his rural coal-country district in the Democrat column for 28 years -- even surviving the 1994 Republican landslide -- was a clear sign of just how deep the GOP wave was. It continued a trend of partisan realignment in the South, defeating long-serving Democrats in districts that had not elected a Republican since Reconstruction. In Florida's 2nd District, Steve Southerland defeated seven-term incumbent Allen Boyd by a margin of more than 30,000 votes. In South Carolina's 5th District, Republican Mick Mulvaney won by more than 20,000 votes over 14-term incumbent John Spratt, powerful chairman of the House Budget Committee.

The wave was also a wipeout for the "Blue Dog" Democrats, defeating 28 of 54 members of the moderate coalition, including Indiana's Barron Hill, who lost the 9th District by a 10-point margin to Republican Todd Young, and Mississippi's Gene Taylor, a 10-term incumbent who lost the 4th District by 10,000 votes to Steve Palazzo.

Democrats seeking to minimize the extent of their defeat pointed out that most of their losses involved House seats in "swing" districts that had been lost by the GOP in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Maffei, for example, was one of 22 first-term Democrats (out of 26 elected in 2008) to lose re-election. "Republicans won by taking back the very seats we had took from them," D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said in a Nov. 11 post-election panel discussion at Georgetown University. True, but the wave also defeated a dozen Democrats who had been in Congress for at least a decade, including several incumbents who had been in office more than 20 years. In Pennsylvania's 11th District, 13-term Democrat Paul Kanjorski lost by a 10-point margin to Lou Barletta. In Missouri's 4th District, 17-term Democrat Ike Skelton was beaten by Vicky Hartzler. In Minnesota's 8th District, 18-term Democrat Jim Oberstar was edged out by Chip Cravaack.

Despite the stunning size of the Republican victory, pundits and pollsters were quick to declare that the election did not represent a "mandate" for the GOP. For example, pollsters quickly produced surveys claiming that a majority of Americans favored preserving the Democratic health-care law. Yet that bill was enacted without a single Republican vote and repealing it was the centerpiece of winning campaigns for scores of GOP challengers like Buerkle, who overcame enormous disadvantages to defeat Maffei.

In the final weeks of her campaign, Buerkle said in an interview yesterday, the incumbent Democrat was reportedly spending nearly a quarter-million dollars a week on TV ads attacking her. "We decided we couldn't beat him on the money, but we could beat him with the grassroots," she said of her strategy. "We did 21 parades, 20 town halls, Rotary clubs, chambers of commerce.… This campaign has really been a victory for the people, to show that the people could make a difference."

Those people did make a difference, and in the process made laughingstocks of pundits who said they couldn't do it, chief among them E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post.

"It will be very hard for Republicans to take the House if they don't break the Democrats' power in the Northeast -- and they still have to prove they can do that," Dionne wrote five weeks before Election Day, in a column that featured this quote from Dan Maffei: "When we do retain the majority… people are going to look at the map and see that the Northeast held." Dionne predicted: "Absent a Republican wave of historic proportions, [Maffei's] seat now seems out of the GOP's reach."

Unfortunately for Maffei and Dionne, that "Republican wave of historic proportions" came crashing ashore Nov. 2 with enough power to flip six seats in New York into the GOP column. In addition to Buerkle's hard-fought win in the 25th District, Republicans also captured previously Democrat-held seats in the 13th, 19th, 20th, 24th and 29th districts. New York's six GOP pickups was the most of any state. Republicans gained five seats in Ohio and Pennsylvania, while adding four seats in both Florida and Illinois. If such widespread victories are not a mandate for House Republicans to oppose the Democrats' liberal agenda, whatever could be?

Buerkle seems determined to live up to her campaign promises. At a press conference yesterday in Syracuse, a reporter asked whether she needed to "moderate some of [her] positions," given her narrow margin of victory.

"I don't think that anyone would ask me to compromise my principles," Buerkle answered. "I think the consensus vote was we need less government, lower taxes, we need to do what's right… to get our economy back on course."

Turning that "consensus" into policy is the Republicans mandate.