A lot of people were disappointed with the results of yesterday’s election. A lot of Democrats at least. I’m not much of a statistics person, but Politico gives a really good, accessible map depicting which states went red and which blue, and you can tell from a glance what the overall result was: red.
I’m sure people who were watching the results come in live on the news last night can say a lot more about specific victories and losses, but I just want to point out one victory which I found out about from Trisk’s Political Outreach listserv, and which you can support no matter which party you belong to: The 2010 election was host to the largest number of openly gay candidates in history, and these candidates were overwhelmingly successful.
The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund is a political group which campaigns for and endorses LGBT candidates. Their mission is “to change the face and voice of America’s politics and achieve equality for LGBT Americans by increasing the number of openly LGBT officials at all levels of government.” According to the blog gaypolitics, “At least 106 of the [Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund] group’s record-breaking 164 endorsed candidates were winners as of Wednesday morning.”
That’s pretty awesome. Not to say that simply because a candidate is openly LGBT-identifying makes him or her a good candidate. But that more and more candidates feel they CAN come out, and aren’t worried it will jeopardize their election, and in return that people are not discriminating against them BECAUSE of their sexual orientation, well that’s pretty encouraging.
Cool. Progress, perhaps?
see also http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2751#more-2751 for a discussion on red vs. blue as chosen colors. Interesting.
ah bad link with the close-parens:
http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/results/house
My most interesting map was the district-bubbles map (one version available here: http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/results/house).
See the sizes of the bubbles for the ’06 midterm and see the sizes for this one.
From ’02 (mid) to ’04 (prez), districts were generally the same color as the earlier election but more strongly so. Bush’s ’06 midterm took away a lot of the Republican edge, but also significant numbers of Dem districts were reduced towards moderation. Obama’s election drew out lots of blue in the cities but also lots of red in less-urban districts. Then yesterday – and compare this to ’06 especially – red districts got even redder and blues *that didn’t switch to red* got even bluer.