{"id":31888,"date":"2010-11-03T12:05:21","date_gmt":"2010-11-03T20:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=7551"},"modified":"2010-11-04T17:30:20","modified_gmt":"2010-11-05T01:30:20","slug":"the-mid-term-elections-in-the-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2010\/11\/03\/the-mid-term-elections-in-the-usa\/","title":{"rendered":"The mid-term elections in the USA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It looks like I was <a href=\"http:\/\/elections.nytimes.com\/2010\/results\/house\">about right in regards to the House<\/a>, and perhaps even mildly too pessimistic about Republican prospects. In relation to the <a href=\"http:\/\/elections.nytimes.com\/2010\/results\/senate\">Senate<\/a> I was off. It is likely that there&#8217;ll be 53 Democrats (the late returns from the two states where Dems are leading come from liberal precincts) and de facto Democrats (Joe Lieberman + Bernie Sanders) and 47 Republicans and de facto Republicans (Lisa Murkowski will probably win her write-in bid, though it will be a while). Seeing that only about ~1\/3 of the 100 Senate seats are up for a vote in a given election that&#8217;s a pretty big error, as I was off by 3 Senate seats. But then again, I was basically guessing, and not even making a particularly informed one at that. Just got lucky on the House prediction.<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-7551\"><\/span><br \/>\nIn the halls of weirdness, we now have two Punjabi American Republican governors in the Deep South (Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley). And <a href=\"http:\/\/www.voanews.com\/english\/news\/usa\/First-Bangladeshi-American-Elected-to-US-Congress-106618549.html\">Hansen Clarke<\/a> won his Detroit area seat as expected. His late father was Bengali*, and his mother is African American. He was raised Muslim, and converted to Roman Catholicism as a young adult. His wife is <a href=\"http:\/\/arborweb.com\/articles\/ann_arborite_choi_palms-cohen_full_article.html\">Choi Palms-Cohen<\/a>, a woman adopted from Korea at the age of three by an interfaith couple. She was raised both Jewish and Catholic, and considers herself an agnostic (I&#8217;d like to see survey data on kids who raised in two very different religions in terms of how many become detached from religion as adults).<\/p>\n<p>* Hansen Clarke was born in 1957, so his father was a citizen of Pakistan. Additionally, the biographical details all say that his father died when Hansen Clarke was a child, so there&#8217;s a high likelihood that he predeceased the foundation of the state of Bangladesh. So calling Hansen Clarke a Bangladeshi American is anachronistic, though I think it is justifiable. But I&#8217;ve changed &#8220;Bangaldeshi&#8221; to &#8220;Bengali&#8221; just to be a bit more general.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It looks like I was about right in regards to the House, and perhaps even mildly too pessimistic about Republican prospects. In relation to the Senate I was off. It is likely that there&#8217;ll be 53 Democrats (the late returns from the two states where Dems are leading come from liberal precincts) and de facto [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32000,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31888\/revisions\/32000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}