8 Aug 2017 4:11 pm
You got that right.Misty » 08 Aug 2017 2:57 pm » wrote:And the downward slide continues.
Democrats Are in Deep Trouble
Losing the governor of West Virginia to a party switch is just the latest sign.
By Peter Roff | Contributing Editor for Opinion
Aug. 7, 2017, at 4:40 p.m.
If the Democrats and Republicans were engaged in a real war – what they're all doing now is just political combat of the messiest kind – West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice's defection to the GOP after just a few months in office might be a signal it's time to sue for peace.
"Today, I will tell you, with lots of prayers and lots of thinking, I can't help you anymore being a Democrat governor," Justice said last week at a rally with President Donald Trump in Huntington. "So tomorrow, I will be changing my registration to Republican."
Say what you want, governors don't change parties every day. The last to do it was Lincoln Chaffee, the governor of Rhode Island, who had been elected as an independent but joined the Democrats midway through his single term in office as a prelude to an all-too-brief flirtation with his new party's 2016 presidential nomination. Before that is was Buddy Roemer who, as governor of Louisiana, joined the GOP back when George Herbert Walker Bush was president.
Justice's decision to join in the GOP while chief executive of a state the Democrats as recently as 10 years ago owned from top to bottom is a huge, Las Vegas strip-style neon sign telling the Democrats they're in more trouble than they know.
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With Justice, the number of Republican governors is up to 34, the highest in history. The number of states where the GOP has control of the governorship and the state legislature is up to 26, including Nebraska where the legislature, while unicameral and officially non-partisan, is dominated by registered Republicans. By comparison there are just six states – California, Oregon, Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii and Connecticut – where the Democrats are in charge (and the clock is running on a few of those).
There are lots of reasons the partisan division has become so lopsided in favor of the GOP. The Democrats and their friends in the government departments of elite universities and on the editorial desk at the New York Times will say it's because the legislative district maps are drawn unfairly, because the votes of non-whites are suppressed in the South and in rural areas, and just about any other excuse they can think of to suggest the Republicans are cheating. In truth, the voters just aren't buying any more what the Democrats have to sell....
The realignment GOP strategists have anticipated since 1980 is at hand. All the Republicans have to do to become the permanent majority is to deliver on what they promised, continue to grow their vote, and prove the disparate wings of the party – the economic conservatives, the social conservatives, the Trump voters, the Reagan Democrats and those who join the party because they are born into it because … Lincoln – can work together to get things done.
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-j ... in-trouble
