What if the polls just stopped working?
Admittedly, this needs work as a plot device for a Stephen King novel. But for politics, it might be pretty awesome.
This week, businessman Matt Bevin won a stunning upset in the Kentucky governor’s race. It was only the second time in more than four decades that a Republican took the governor’s mansion in the Bluegrass State. Bevin’s margin of victory: nine percentage points.
Bevin’s win was big political news for a lot of reasons. Kentucky’s state health-care exchange, Kynect, was supposed to be the shining success story of Obamacare. Bevin vowed to dismantle it, a fatal mistake according to many inside-the-Beltway types.
The results in Kentucky — along with state-senate elections in Virginia — also demonstrated that however successful Barack Obama has been as a president, he’s been terrible for the Democratic party. On his watch, Democrats have lost more than 900 seats in state legislatures, 12 governorships, 69 congressional seats, and 13 Senate seats. The GOP, according to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, has full or partial control of 76 percent of state legislatures.