What a Difference a Year Makes. 364 days after the
sobering results of the 2016 elections, health care and HIV advocates
finally had some election returns worth cheering about on Tuesday night, as a
slew of progressive candidates tore through their conservative opponents in 2017’s
off-year elections. On the eve of the one year anniversary of what can arguably
be described as the low point of modern American liberalism with the election of Donald
Trump as the 45th President of the United States, an energized
electorate did its part to send a stern message to Republicans across the
nation: the bigoted and harmful policies of the current administration and Congressional leadership have not gone unnoticed and “the resistance” to a politics that denigrates and
marginalizes women, people of color, the poor and the sick is not going away
any time soon. Here are some of the
highlights of Tuesday night’s results:
Landslide Victories
in Virginia and New Jersey: In what was undoubtedly 2017’s most
high-profile race, Democrat Ralph Northam made quick work of the Trump-backed
Republican Ed Gillespie on Tuesday evening, winning
the governor’s race in Virginia by a decisive 9 point margin. The election,
which was being watched closely by both national parties and was seen by many
as a referendum on President Trump’s first 10 months in office, has bolstered
the confidence of Democrats going into the 2018 midterms, showing that the
party is indeed capable of turning the newfound energy of grassroots
progressive movements in the age of Trump into electoral victories.
The path forward for Republicans in the wake of Gillespie’s
loss is considerably less clear. While President
Trump blamed the loss on Gillespie’s unwillingness to fully embrace him
& his policies, the exit
polls told a different story. In a less surprising, though no less
important race, Democrat Phil Murphy defeated Republican Lt. Gov Kim Guadagno
to regain control of the governor’s mansion in the Garden State for the
Democrats after Gov. Chris Christie’s 8 years in office.
A Historic Night for
LGBT Candidates: Perhaps the biggest and most welcome surprise of the night
was the
election of Danica Roem, the first openly transgender person to ever be
elected to a U.S. statehouse (transgender woman Althea
Garrison was elected to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1992, but
she was not openly transgender during her campaign). Roem, a 33-year old
Democrat who has never held public office, defeated 13-term Republican
incumbent Robert G. Marshall, a man who tried to pass a transgender bathroom bill
earlier this year and who has called himself Virginia’s “chief
homophobe”.
In addition to Roem’s historic win, not 1, but 2
black transgender candidates were successful in their bids for Minneapolis’
City Council, with Andrea Jenkins and Phillipe Cunningham winning their races
this week. Meanwhile, in the pacific northwest, the City
of Seattle elected Jenny Durkan as their new mayor, making her the first
lesbian mayor in Seattle’s history and the first woman to hold the post since
the 1920s.
Medicaid Expansion
Wins Big in Maine as Ohio Drug Pricing Initiative Flounders: For health
care advocates, the most encouraging result of the 2017 elections came in
Maine, where citizens voted overwhelmingly for a ballot initiative that would expand
Medicaid services to 70,000 residents on Tuesday night. The vote, which
would make Maine the 32nd state (along with D.C.) to expand Medicaid
since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), was huge for a number
reasons, none more so than the fact that it serves as perhaps the clearest
electoral rebuke of the Republican party’s ACA sabotage efforts to date. Republican
Governor Paul LePage, who has vetoed 5 separate attempts to pass Medicaid
expansion through the state legislature, has already raised objections to the
initiative’s passage. Governor LePage, whose term limit
comes up next year, has said that he will not implement medicaid expansion in Maine unless the state legislature allocates the money to fund it. Given the success of Maine’s
Medicaid vote, similar ballot initiative are currently being planned for a
number of other states in 2018, including Idaho, Nebraska and Utah.
At the same time, a controversial drug pricing ballot
initiative in Ohio was soundly
defeated by voters after a prolonged and expansive ad campaign between
those for and against it. The initiative, known alternately as The Ohio Drug
Price Relief Act and Ohio Issue 2, was opposed by nearly 4 out of 5 Ohio voters
as uncertainty
over both the initiative’s purpose and effectiveness lead Ohioans to vote
against it. Issue 2, which was funded almost entirely by California-based AIDS
Healthcare Foundation and strongly opposed by the pharmaceutical industry, was
the most expensive ballot issue in Ohio history and one of the most confusing.
For a rundown of why the initiative failed so spectacularly, click
here.
Posted By: AIDS United, Policy Department - Thursday, November 09, 2017
|
Comments
(0)
|