The Republicans won a special South Carolina House election on Tuesday, but the Democrats overperformed by double digits compared to their performance in the 2024 presidential election.
Republican John Lastinger won 62.3 percent of the vote in the election for the 88th district seat, beating Democrat Chuck Hightower, who secured 37.7 percent. This gave the Republicans a net win of +24.6 percent over the Democrats.
This represents an improved performance for the Democrats compared to the 2024 presidential election, when President Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in the district by 67 percent to 32 percent, according to The State newspaper. In that election, the Republicans won with a net margin of +35 percentage points.
We don’t have enough time for ‘positive trends’ to be worth much.
There isn’t a single Republican in the House who I want to see stay in office. That said, trying to get every single one out just isn’t going to happen. A “positive trend” doesn’t mean anything in districts as strong as this one, but there are plenty of purple districts where that positive trend means a flipped seat. And all the gerrymandering to secure more seats means each seat is less safe (those blue voters didn’t disappear, even if their district essentially did) so that could backfire as well.
Remember when W was the worst president ever and the Democrats made huge gains and then took over the government permanently and got everything done they wanted?
Yeah me neither.
No, but during the eight years after him, we did get:
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act
- Affordable Care Act
- Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy
- Removal of 180-limit for wage discrimination claims
- Withdrawal of US forces from Iraq
- Paris Climate Agreement
- Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
- Clean Power Plan
- Shepard & Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act (allows crimes motivated as gender identity to be prosecuted as hate crimes)
- Death of Osama bin Laden
Saying they didn’t get “everything done [that] they wanted” is disingenuous to the achievements accomplished and shows a lack of understanding of how progress is made.
- CFPB is gone
- Wall Street is such legalized gambling that they literally legalized gambling
- Health Insurance is still bullshit and now the subsidies are gone through an unforced error on the Dems part
- DADT is repealed but the Coast Guard is still debating swastikas and nooses, and let’s not forget what’s happening to trans service members
- US forces are now in Venezuela
- Paris Climate Agreement is now totally forgotten
- DACAs are being sent to Salvadoran torture prisons
- AI is destroying clean power
- The president now commits hate crimes regularly
- Osama succeeded in panicking the US into its own decline
But my point isn’t that things were fixed, but that they’ll never be fixed. There will be a slight leftward swing, there will be a couple minor victories that nobody is really happy about, and then a huge rightward shift that undoes all or most of it.
Because this has been the pattern for my entire fucking life and it’s getting older than I feel.
Yes, progress is fragile and needs constant defending. This is an important observation you have made.
And Americans constantly refuse to defend it.
To the point that I think they want to be this way and don’t want to bother stopping them anymore.
They are completely fine with what’s happening. It would be pretty obvious if that were not the case.
They’d be fine with it if minorities got none of the benefits
We had an intact election system for reasonably fair mid terms and a pres election for that to happen. I am absolutely not confident America will get fair enough elections in the midterms in 10 months, nevermind 3 years from now. All while potentially irreversible structural changes are taking place making it impossible to remove the right wing from any branch of government. I don’t think waiting for the presidential election or for the trends we see now to pan out is anything to pin hopes on.
We have the time we have.
What is, is.
What will be, will be.
Everyone gets it. I was responding to just such a statement.
So, the Democrat candidate did better than the last election but still got absolutely annihilated. Woo. Yay. Happy Day.
This is such a non-news story for anyone but a DNC staffer it’s ridiculous. Maybe someone wants to breathlessly report on how much better or worse the green party candidate did last election as long as we’re talking about things that don’t actually make any difference.
If you “outperform by double digits” and still lose by a double digit margin that just highlights how terrible you are, and how fucked we all are. Had they managed to win that seat or even get things close enough that the loss was in question that would be a news story, this is just reading political tea leaves.
Means nothing if the seat is still GOP
Crazy thing…
When you don’t hoard all the wealth from state parties and prevent them from fighting in every election, we win less seats than if we put a legit effort into winning every possible elections.
But it takes billions to have a coin flip chance at convincing voters a neoliberal is better than a Republican, that’s just been the reality of American politics for decades.
If we stop shoving neoliberalism down voters throats, we don’t have to continuously rob the state Dem parties to pay for the one presidential campaign every four years.
Slow news week?
