Bloomberg’s “Everytown for Gun Safety” group, which sunk millions into the Virginia contests to wrest control of the state Senate, took heart from one high-profile victory. And here to talk about it all is NPR’s national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
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Next year, a number of less objectionable marijuana measures will be on state ballots. Sort it out for us.
Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an adviser to Republicans nationally, said conservatives do have options.
Democratic candidate Jack Conway won Carroll County’s vote, but could not win over the rest of the state in his bid for Kentucky’s next governor, losing to Republican candidate Matt Bevin in the General Election Tuesday, November 3. In four states where Democrats have control of both houses of the state legislature, consistent of Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, there is a Republican Governor, while the remaining states that have full Democratic control also have a Republican Governor.
SIEGEL: Obamacare – or a version of it, anyway – seemed to be running smoothly in Kentucky.
Bevin won the election by about 9%. What lesson do you draw from that? In Kentucky, less than a third of registered voters went to the polls.
He also campaigned against Obamacare, a sensitive issue in a state where the Affordable Care Act has extended coverage to roughly 500,000 people, mostly through an expansion of Medicaid under Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear.
However, as awareness has grown of the potential impact of such a radical change of course, Bevin changed his tune, saying that he would not throw off the hundreds of thousands who have gained coverage through Medicaid, but that he would limit the growth in enrollment. He suggested maybe he’ll work with the administration on a Medicaid waiver to come up with a Kentucky-formulated way to expand Medicaid the way other red states have done. “It’s just that we have to have candidates that articulate him”, he said. Bevin’s top economic priority is making Kentucky a Right To Work state.
Bevin’s proposed plan is to transition residents on Medicaid through kynect to the federal health insurance exchange by 2017, when the federal subsidies are reduced.
In Ohio, the marijuana proposal rejected by voters is expected to be followed in 2016 by a more conventional legalization initiative, one that doesn’t give exclusive growing rights to private investors. In San Francisco, there was another ballot initiative which voters defeated, and that would’ve curbed the use of Airbnb rentals. Apparently, the media isn’t telling the truth about what Americans want – but there is no denying that election results do tell the truth.
In Washington state, a proposal backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen would add state penalties for anyone who imports certain animal products for commercial purposes, such as elephant ivory or rhino horns.
SIEGEL: Didn’t – didn’t do it.
Now, the two will lead Kentucky, expanding the GOP’s hold on power in a state once dominated by Democrats. He will want to slash programs aimed at benefiting Kentucky’s poor, of whom there are many and majority are his supporters, the very turkeys that voted for Thanksgiving. McAuliffe, a longtime confidant of presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, campaigned hard to pick up at least one seat so that he could tap his Democratic lieutenant governor to be a reliable tie-breaker.
SIEGEL: Well, do these off-year elections tell us anything about what might happen next year? (You may not have known it was even happening.) And it proved one thing: Republicans have an absolute stranglehold on governorships and state legislatures all across the country. In the South, the last blue vestiges are being eliminated. Democrats, despite all their promises that they’re going to be better at this, are just not on the playing field yet. Asked Wednesday whether President Obama feels at all responsible for the erosion in the ranks of Democratic office-holders at the local level, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest stressed the president has “strong support for an agenda that has shown tremendous results in terms of allowing our country to recover strongly from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression”.
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SIEGEL: Thanks Mara. That’s NPR’s national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
