Democrats have plenty of reasons to be feeling blue

The verdict is in, and the results aren’t pretty for Democrats. Polling had indicated that the Grand Ole Party (GOP) would likely have some success in the 2014 mid-term elections, and the pollsters were correct.

In fact, Republicans easily won back control of the Senate by winning at least seven seats and Republicans  expanded their majority in the House of Representatives to at least 243 seats  to the Democrats’ 178 seats.

Pete Gallego, a freshman representative from Alpine, lost his seat in the 23rd Congressional District to Republican Will Hurd by a slim margin of 50 percent to 48 percent. This seat had been dubbed as the most competitive seat by political observers. The 23rd District is huge, and it sprawls from the outskirts of San Antonio to parts of El Paso, and it includes 29 counties and two time zones.

The Associated Press reported the results at 12:29 a.m. on Wednesday stating that Hurd had won the race by as few as 2,000 votes, with all precincts reporting.

“I want to congratulate Will Hurd on winning this hard fought race,” said Gallego in his concession speech on Wednesday morning.  “While the airwaves were flooded with millions of dollars in attack ads, Will and I managed to keep things relatively positive and I hope he continues that positivity as he heads to Congress.”

In the Texas gubernatorial race, Greg Abbott easily defeated state senator Wendy Davis by a margin of 59 percent to 39 percent. Abbott replaces Rick Perry as governor, the longest serving governor in Texas.

In other races, the writing was on the wall for Democrats early Tuesday evening with the announcement that Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell (Senate Minority Leader) had won re-election against Alison Lundergan Grimes.

Grimes had been viewed as a potential threat to McConnell earlier in the year because of McConnell’s negative popularity numbers, but Grimes made a series of mistakes, including an interview with the editorial board of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

One of the members of the editorial board asked her whether she had voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and she refused to answer the question. Instead, she skirted the question by insisting that she had a constitutional right to refuse to answer the question. She said she was a “Clinton Democrat.”

It was a ridiculous answer to a very simple question. McConnell was asked the same question, and he quickly responded that he had voted for Mitt Romney in 2008 and previously for George W. Bush.

In New Hampshire, incumbent Democrat Jeanne Shaheen won re-election as U.S Senator against Scott Brown, who had previously lost to Democrat Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts.

That was perhaps one of the few bits of good news for the Democrats on election night.

In one of the ugliest gubernatorial races in the country, incumbent Republican Rick Scott eeked out a win against for Republican (turned Democrat) Charlie Crist. Both candidates had extremely high negative popularity ratings, and it was a toss-up as to which candidate Floridians could tolerate.

This is President Obama’s sixth year in office, and he is suffering from the second-term blues. His popularity numbers are hovering around 40 percent, and Republicans took full advantage of tying every Democratic candidate to Obama. The tactic worked.

President Obama didn’t do any favors for Democrats when he said a few weeks ago in a speech that although he wasn’t on the ballot in 2014, his policies were on the ballot. It was a huge gift for Republicans.

With the House and the Senate now in control of Republicans, Obama is very much a lame-duck president. If he had any plans to further his agenda, it will now be curtailed by the Republicans.

In the past six years, he has vetoed only a handful of bills. It is almost a certainty that he will have his veto pens ready for the flood of bills that will be sent to his desk by the new Republican majority. Of course, it would require a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress to overturn his veto.

Democrats have no one to blame for the dismal 2014 mid-term election results other than President Obama.

This president has done a terrible job of communicating with the American people.

Interestingly, Obama is known for delivering beautiful speeches, but as Hillary Clinton reminded him in 2008, they’re only speeches. In other words, Obama has not delivered the goods he’s promised in his speeches, and now he and his fellow Democrats will pay the price for the next two years.

The good news for Democrats?  Regardless of how badly they were beaten down this election cycle, this was a cyclical trend.

The bad news for Republicans?  Enjoy the win while it lasts. Citizens United v. FEC will be overturned.

It doesn’t matter how the Supreme Court tries to justify its ruling; a corporation is not a person. That’s absurd. When the millions of dollars from corporations stop flowing to both parties, candidates will have to raise their own money, as they had in the past. And that’s a good thing.