2018 Midterm Snapshot: Dems Score at the Polls

Phil Murphy, New Jersey Democratic governor-elect

It's been damp, cool and rainy most of the day here in Hamilton, New Jersey.

Reflective, perhaps, of the fact that almost a year ago the lowest American presidential voter turnout in 20 years elected a man who may well be the most unqualified, unpopular, divisive and ethically-repugnant candidate ever elected to the highest office in the land.

But today is another election day, and this morning I felt a measure of quiet political optimism for perhaps the first time since inauguration day back in January.

As I usually do if I'm in the office and don't have an appointment scheduled or phone calls to make, this morning I started off my day at work listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.org.

While I was particularly interested to listen to what other New Jersey voters had to say about election day during a segment when Brian fielded calls from Garden State listeners, his overview of the elections in New York and around the country were informative and got me fired up to cast my own vote.

Knowing it was going to rain, I cut out at about 11:20am to drive over and vote at the local senior citizens center that serves as my local polling place - fortunately it's only a three-minute drive from work so I was there, signed in, cast my vote and was back in the office in about eight minutes.

Now obviously I'm eager to see the lackluster, remarkably unproductive, scandal-plagued era of Republican Governor Chris Christie come to a merciful end, but I think Phil Murphy is the best candidate to represent the changes that most New Jerseyeans want to see.

Overall, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kim Guadagno, Christie's lieutenant governor since 2009, ran a fairly unimaginative and uninspiring campaign.

NJ Republican candidate Kim Guadagno 

With the state hovering dangerously close to the border of fiscal crisis with issues like massive infrastructure spending needs and a looming pension crisis that keeps getting kicked down the road (including by Christie...), Guadagno tried to dazzle voters.

Not with innovative ideas, sound fiscal policy or a plan to boost sagging wages, but with vague promises to cut taxes by eliminating unidentified "government waste".

Which is little more than Republican code-speak for cutting state government jobs and gutting social spending programs - the same kind of "Starve the Beast" nonsense that sent the Kansas economy spiraling into fiscal free-fall under Republican anti-tax fetishist Gov. Sam Brownback.

Aside from Guadagno's divisive xenophobic fear-mongering about immigration, Guadagno followed her notoriously short-tempered boss' unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign tactic and took a hard ideological-right in an attempt to drum up support among the hardcore right-wing conservatives that went for Trump here in New Jersey last November.

Desperate to close the gap between her and Murphy, in the final weeks of the campaign she finally sunk to the level of running bogus attack ads falsely claiming that Murphy's support for making New Jersey a sanctuary state for undocumented immigrants (NJ is one of the most diverse states in America) meant he wanted to shield violent criminals who are in this country illegally.

A simplistic bush-league Republican tactic that's been used by the GOP in campaigns around the country (including by Virginia Republican candidate for governor Ed Gillespie) to try and gin up the irrational conservative paranoia peddled by Trump and his cadre of xenophobic advisers and cabinet members. 

Virginia Democratic governor-elect Ralph Northam
and Republican Ed "Dixie Boy" Gillespie (right)

That same strategy backfired on Gillespie in Virginia tonight too, the former Republican National Committee chairman was soundly beaten by 54% - 45% by Democratic candidate for governor Ralph Northam.

Who, as NBC reported, benefitted from the boost of strong opposition to Republican attempts to destroy healthcare, Trump, and a strong state economy guided by outgoing popular Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe.

Like Guadagno donning the cloak of xenophobia, Gillespie really misread the temperature of Virginia voters.

Especially when he took up a pro-Confederate statue cause in the waning days of the election to try and draw support from Trump voters - as RNC chairman, he was actually fairly moderate and advocated for more inclusiveness.

Frankly I find it remarkable that with all the challenges we face in this country, Trump and his chief of staff John Kelly seem consumed with making a revisionist view of the Civil War and the Confederacy the main domestic focus of a White House trying to pull off a massive tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthiest percentage of Americans by Christmas.

Guadagno never strayed into "Confederate statue territory", but trying to embrace Trump's anti-immigrant hysteria at the last minute backfired for her here in New Jersey too - she won a mere 14% of the Hispanic vote and a paltry 9% of the African-American vote based on today's election results.

There are a healthy amount of Trump voters here in Jersey, but overall Garden State Republicans tend to be more moderate in the mold of my Congressman Chris Smith.

Chris Christie argues with a voter outside a polling
station earlier today

So I think Guadagno resorting to hate and bigotry to boost her sagging poll numbers didn't do much for her image as someone who was going to unify the state and bring something different to the NJ Governor's Mansion.

She's a pretty good communicator with some solid experience as a prosecutor and Monmouth County Sheriff, but regardless of what she did, it was going to be tough for her to get the stench of Christie and Bridgegate off of her.

Did you hear about him getting into a public argument with a NJ voter outside a polling station earlier today?

Believe it or not, Christie is so unpopular (14% approval rate according to one recent poll) that the most unpopular presidential candidate in modern American history is actually has a higher approval rate here in the Garden State.

Aside from the weight of the Christie baggage, Guadagno was also clearly a sounding board for people who might not have been all that excited by Phil Murphy, but hated Trump more and were eager to send a message to the Embarrassment-in-Chief and the Republican Party that tapped him as their candidate.

But the polls are closed in the east and the voters have spoken.

While professional pollsters and analysts will dig deeper into today's election results in the coming days over an election in which strong Democrat turnout led to decisive victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governor's races and the mayoral race in New York City by Bill de Blasio, there's little doubt that the Democratic base is fired up.

From my perspective tonight's results are a clear reflection that a majority of Americans are fed up with Trump and a Republican-majority House and Senate who've yet to pass a single piece of meaningful legislation on behalf of the American people in over nine months.

Next year's midterm elections are a long ways away, and a lot can happen before then, but if today's results are any indication, November 6, 2018 could be a rude awakening for Trump - one he won't be able to shrug off as "fake news" with a tweet.

As I said, I was quietly optimistic this morning, and I'll sleep much more soundly tonight than I did on election night last November.

Kaepernick's Cause Célèbre

Colin Kaepernick (center) kneels before the San Diego
Chargers game last Thursday September 1st.

From the perspective of a former professional football player, it's been fascinating to watch the varied reactions to San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernik's decision to sit or kneel on the sidelines during the playing of the national anthem before preseason games as a means to protest the disparate treatment of people of color by some police officers in America.

His actions have drawn intense media scrutiny for good reason.


Case in point: the public request of 34 different New York City council officials yesterday, including Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Public Advocate Letitia James, issued to Mayor Bill de Blasio demanding that the city change it's policy to allow the release of the NYPD disciplinary records of Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD officer who killed Eric Garner after placing him in an illegal choke hold caught on video over two years ago.

The city has been dragging it's feet on filing charges against Pantaleo for months, and the city council members made their public demands on Tuesday after Mayor de Blasio tried to duck responsibility for putting pressure on the NYPD by insisting that the New York State Legislature must change the laws governing the release of disciplinary data for the NYPD.

So Kaepernick isn't just kneeling for nothing.

I think it goes without saying that the NFL star's now-infamous sideline protest also includes the systematic racial bias entrenched in local, state and federal judicial courts as well, which, as we've learned from Department of Justice analysis of places like Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland, go hand-in-hand with the biased policing practices particularly common in communities where people of color are the majority.

Actor Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale Station

Some regard his decision as disrespectful to the flag and the country, like the Santa Clara Police Officers Association (the union that represents the approximately 70 police officers who provide security at 49ers home games) which sent a letter to the team saying officers may boycott working San Francisco home games if the team does not discipline and rebuke Kaepernick for what they regard as anti-police statements.

The SCPOA letter also accused Kaepernick's "anti-police" statements as being "inaccurate and completely unsupported by any facts"-maybe the SCPOA should show Fruitvale Station at their next union movie night.

The critically-acclaimed 2013 film directed by Ryan Coogler depicts the last day of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old African-American who was unarmed and being held face-down by Bay Area Rapid Transport officers on the platform of a subway platform in nearby Oakland, California when a white officer shot him in the back and killed him in front of horrified onlookers who also captured the incident on video.

Many others, including the President, see Kaepernick's actions as the legitimate exercising of his 1st Amendment right to freedom of expression - according to a Washington Post article NFL players and even fans from other teams may begin joining Kaepernick in sitting during the national anthem when the NFL kicks off this weekend.

Personally speaking, those kinds of political or personal expressions weren't really a part of the landscape of the National Football League when I played in 1992 - 1994.

It's not that players didn't feel strongly about such issues, that was the post-Rodney King era after all when excessive and unjustified violence against people of color by police officers was first truly coming into the mainstream global spotlight, and I can tell you from personal experience that more than a few African-American teammates that I played with during my time with the New York Giants experienced instances of being pulled over for "Driving While Black" by local police in different parts of north Jersey for no other reason than being black and driving an expensive vehicle.

Kaepernick in his younger days

In the early 90's the use of and access to social media via hand-held cell phones was not a part of the mainstream as it is today.

So NFL players really didn't have the kind of readily accessible outlet to express beliefs or opinions the way they do today, when almost every college and professional athlete has a Twitter or Instagram account to use as a platform for personal expression.  

I don't know Colin Kaepernick, so I can only speculate that, like many other people around the world, he got fed up with the slew of unjustified shootings of innocent people of color by some members of law enforcement that have dominated the headlines in recent years.

When I see him these days with his beard and large Afro as he now looks in the photo up at the top, my sense is that he's matured and evolved in his sense of self-awareness of his own racial identity.

He's noticeably different than he was as a younger player with his close-cropped hair, and though he's of mixed race ancestry, he's not someone that I pegged as distinctively "African-American" in appearance.

Honestly, I thought he was Hispanic when I first saw him on TV a few years ago.

Now obviously if you'd read this blog, you know I don't mean that in any kind of demeaning way, black Americans come in many different shades; I have relatives in my own family who run the gamut of skin color from Kaepernick as he appears in the photo above, to really really dark-skinned.

Having been raised in the suburbs of Bethesda, Maryland and West Windsor, New Jersey, I  know what it's like to be "the only black guy in the class", so my guess is Kaepernick has had to deal with his own kinds of issues with peers, some family members and strangers in terms of his race.

He was adopted by a very loving white family in 1987 after his birth mother made the difficult decision to give him up for adoption; in fact he refuses any contact with her even though she's tried to connect with him - check out noted sports writer Rick Reilly's ESPN.com article on Kaepernick's complex upbringing for more insight.

The NFL is a tightly-run ship in terms of conduct and behavior on and off the field, so I have to admire Kaepernick's defiance of those happy to cheer him when he's throwing touchdown passes, who do a 180 and view him with contempt or anger when he expresses an opinion that doesn't jibe with their own.

Lest we forget, he's using his position in the spotlight to bring needed attention to one the paramount  issues of justice and human rights facing this country; the systematic disparate treatment of people of color by some police officers, which can and has led to the loss of innocent lives.

If there's a better way for an athlete to make use of his fame, I'm not sure what it is.