A joke that is making the rounds is that for Democrats this has been more of a Hanukkah election than a Christmas one in that each new day seems to bring new gifts.

Maine had introduced ranked-choice voting, something that should be adopted everywhere. This is where people mark their ballots in order of preference for candidates. If no one wins 50% of the vote, then the second choices of the voters who voted for the last place finisher are taken into account, and if that does not produce a clear winner, then the third choices, and so on. There are various ways of doing this but all these methods enable people to vote for the people they like best and not fear that they are ‘wasting’ their vote by voting for someone who has little chance of winning and thus enabling the person they hate most to win.
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Although he lost his race against Ted Cruz for the senate seat in Texas, Beto O’Rourke ran a spirited campaign in this deep red state and came close, and by inspiring increased Democratic voter turnout, likely helped other Democrats in down ballot races defeat incumbent Republicans. One little noticed result is that 19 black women ran for judge positions in Harris County and all of them won. That was not all.

Democrats won all 59 judicial races in Harris county in Tuesday’s midterm elections. In one of the most eye-catching and significant results, the longtime incumbent Republican county judge, Ed Emmett – in effect, the county’s chief executive – lost to Lina Hidalgo, a 27-year-old first-time candidate who immigrated from Colombia as a teenager.

The morning after the election, Glenn Devlin, a juvenile court judge in Houston who is one of the defeated Republicans, reportedly released most of the defendants who appeared in front of him after asking them whether they planned to kill anyone.

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After listing the 15 reasons, he concludes:

That’s more than a dozen bits of truly bad news for Republican, and it’s only going to get worse as they stare down the long barrel toward 2020, where the Senate map is massively in favor of Democrats; the economy is likely to be on a downturn; and Donald Trump will probably have long-since worn out his welcome with his one-trick pony. In other words, they’re getting more and more desperate, knowing that a historic shellacking is probably headed their way in two years.

And this desperation is showing. Over the next two years Republicans can nominate some more conservative judges to the lower courts, but that’s about it. With Democrats controlling the House; the filibuster controlling the Senate; and a man-child controlling the White House, they’re in for a very rough two years.
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Another week, another gunman goes into a crowded venue and opens fire, this time killing 12 people, wounding 16 others, and then apparently killing himself. This time the event took place late on Wednesday night at 11:20 pm at a crowded country and western themed bar and grill frequented by college students at nearby Pepperdine University in an affluent area near Los Angeles.
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Now that I have had time to reflect on the election and shift my attention away from the high-profile elections, my early lukewarm feelings need to be revised. It looks like Tuesday turned out to be pretty good for Democrats and bad for Donald Trump. If you needed to see that Trump was not happy, one can read the transcript of the press conference that he held on Wednesday where he was even more peevish, mean, and spiteful than he usually is. He even name-checked several Republicans who he claimed lost their congressional races because they did not ’embrace’ him (that narcissism and desperate need to be loved surfacing again) while ignoring those who did embrace him but lost anyway.
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Glenn Greenwald and Victor Pougy compare yesterday’s election in the US with last month’s election in Brazil to show how awful it is here.

That a country poorer than the U.S., with a much shorter history of democracy, can hold such seamless, fair, participatory, and efficient elections proves that the opposite outcome in the U.S. — massive voter disenfranchisement, multi-hour voting lines, pervasive machine malfunctions, and elections that are not decided until weeks after the fact — are very easily avoided and thus likely intentional.
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Rachel M. Cohen provides a run down of some of the ballot initiatives that passed yesterday, including one important one in Michigan that reader Mark Dowd has pointed to.

FROM STATE LEGISLATIVE races to the House of Representatives, progressive candidates made a dent in the 2018 election season, and will be relatively well-represented in federal and state-level governments next year. But it’s not just elected office: Left-wing activists also made their voices heard through ballot initiatives across the country. On Tuesday night, progressives walked away with some wins and some losses on that front.

They made gains for Medicaid expansion, public education, and voting rights. But they lost other battles, like on criminal justice reform, nurse-to-patient ratios, and universal home care.

Cohen’s article is worth reading.