US Midterm elections

[madz]

Although they still dont know who has won overall the Democrats have more seats in the white house now for the first time in ages...

link here (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6127216.stm)


Good news

[BURLEY MC]

Lets hope the momentum continues into the presidential elections - I am a bit sceptical of these electronic voting systems that they have though.

[Emersion]

the whole thing is a blag

[grande]

While I agree it's a good thing it's not like a revolution has happened.

The Democrats seem to have won Congress (not the Whitehouse, very big difference), and it looks like they've narrowly missed out on the Senate. The situation that saw the Republicans in control of Congress, the Senate and the Presidency is very rare and hasn't happened for a very long time. The sitting President is more often than not faced with a Congress in control of the opposition, so this election has just restored the status quo really.

Obviously this will be an improvement on the situation as it was. The other opint worth making is that although the Democrats will now have more control over budgets etc including what is spent in Iraq, they are highly unlikely to do anything dramatic. Now they are moving back in the right direction as a party any sudden moves against the war/to withdraw from Iraq (I'm not saying that's what I think they should do) would immediately alienate large portions of the voting public.

I also saw something on BBC breakfast with someone talking about the significance of votes from Americans abroad which I though was quite interesting. Basically saying how these votes which in the past wouldn't have been cast have actually been a deciding factor in some states.