re: #259 Jay C

Good. 54 Senate seats will make a nice present for the new Administration….

Interesting thing, though in this year’s Senate election: so many of the (D) challengers to sitting Republicans are NOT (and never have been) elected officials.
Greenfield (IA)
Harrison (SC)
Kelly (AZ)
McGrath (KY)
Hegar (TX)
Gross (AK)
… all good candidates, of course, but it just seems to me that one factor aggravating the red state/blue state “problem” - i.e. the Republican lock on too many elected seats (in statehouses, Congress and the Senate) is the lack of a good Democratic “bench”. Yeah, I know, having the best candidate in the world isn’t going to help when most of the voters in your (district/state) assume that any (D) is a Tool Of Satan (often literally), but it just seems (and I would LOVE to be proved wrong here) that the national Democrats have tended to downplay the importance of “downticket” and statehouse races: while Republicans have long made said positions the bedrock of their political influence.

Let me tell you about Texas, where Democrats don’t win statewide offices, and, outside blue cities that haven’t been gerrymandered, don’t win local elections. You aren’t going to build a bench under these conditions.