* 11:30 p.m. -- Democrats very well may have retained control of the Senate if national Party leaders and the White House had not pressured vulnerable Senators like Pryor of Arkansas, Landrieu of Louisiana, Hagan of North Carolina and Begich of Alaska to pass the Senate Gang of Eight's comprehensive amnesty and immigration-doubling bill.
Republicans helped themselves capture the Senate today by using massive advertising and other campaigning to tie Democratic candidates to Pres. Obama's immigration crusade. Their immigration approach fed into middle-class insecurty about increasing lifetime work permits to foreign workers in a time of declining real wages in a country with a giant labor surplus.
While Republican candidates had varying approaches to immigration issues, the overall national tenor of the Republican approach was to attack the idea of giving work permits to millions of illegal aliens to directly compete with struggling Americans for jobs. For the most part, Democratic candidates -- both incumbents and hopefuls -- tried to change the subject. Virtually none of them campaigned as champions of the Obama and Gang of Eight immigration efforts.
Republican candidates were helped by the overall immigration message that used immigration policy to turn the image of the Party from one carrying water for corporate America and the wealthy to one concerned about fairness to wage-earners and their families. It is a message that will be necessary if Republicans are to attract the working-class votes necessary to win the White House in 2016. And it is one that Democrats will need to learn again if they are to stop Republicans from making long-term in-roads into a traditional part of the Democratic base.
Today's elections significantly increase the strength of the anti-amnesty, pro-worker immigration policies among Members of both the Senate and House. For example, Senator-elect David Purdue of Georgia is rated by NumbersUSA as a "True Reformer." That means he signed a survey pledging support to eliminate Chain Migration of non-nuclear family, eliminate the visa lottery, eliminate birthright citizenship for births to illegal aliens and a number of other immigration-reduction policies. Purdue is a Republican replacing Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss who was part of the 2007 Senate group that proposed the Kennedy/McCain/Bush amnesty but who withdrew after being booed at the state convention.
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12:30 a.m. -- Chuck Todd just said on MSNBC that tonight's results put an end to comprehensive immigration reform and especially to the President issuing and executive amnesty. He was responding to another's talk that Obama absolutely cannot go forward with executive amnesty as that would be a huge affront to the voters of today and set off a political civil war. Rachel, however, insisted that he should do it because every Republican is going to hate him anyway. Democrats on MSNBC panel are telling Republicans that they have to fix their Hispanic problem or they may control Congress for a long time but only get to the White House when invited for dinner.
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10:40 p.m. -- Gardner's big Republican win over Democratic Sen. Udall is big enough that nobody can claim that any anticipated drop in Hispanic voting was the cause.
Pro-amnesty pundits all day have been spinning the idea that if Democratic Senators lost tonight it would because too many Hispanic voters stayed home as a protest against Obama for NOT giving out his executive amnesty BEFORE the election.
At this moment, we don't know that there was a drop-off in the percentage of Hispanic voting compared to the last mid-term in 2010. But if there was a drop-off, it is almost impossible for it to have been big enough in Colorado to had caused Udall to have lost by such a big margin.
And Colorado was the only state with a large enough Hispanic voter registration for that demographic to be a factor.
Gardner is going to need a lot of help from Colorado citizens to have a better understanding of immigration and the law of supply and demand in the labor market. Thus far, his positions on immigration are very weak. Nonetheless, he did not emphasize immigration policy in his as-of-just-two-months-ago wildly improbable race to victory. Immigration just wasn't an issue in this contest.
Nonetheless, it is useful to note here that Sen. Udall is yet another Democrat who went off the cliff for Obama's massive increase in foreign labor.
And I must add one other sad note. Sen. Udall comes from a distinguished family of conservationists who have a long history of preserving national natural wonders and resources for future generations. We at NumbersUSA have tried since his entry into the Senate to persuade him to stop the federal government's coercive population growth program in which immigration policy has been the main factor in the U.S. population growing by some 25 million while Udall is in office. Not only has Udall supported current immigration policies that will double U.S. population to more than 600 million the end of this century but he has consistently voted to increase that rate of growth. Udall's immigration policies will arguably contribute to more natural habitat destruction this century than all the nature that his family has been a part of saving in the past. A very sad tale, but one that too many environmentalists are part of because of blind adherence to a high-immigration ideology. One wonders how much better Sen. Udall would have done today if he had told Coloradoans that he would fight for an immigration policy that would greatly slow the rapid population growth that currently is rapidly destroying the quality of life in Colorado that most citizens there value the most.
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9:45 p.m. -- Networks finally call New Hampshire's Senate race for the incumbent Jeanne Shaheen who previously had been a very popular governor. The fact that she was in the race for her political life with former MASSACHUSETTS Senator Scott Brown was due to only one issue, as far as I can see it -- immigration.
Brown was getting nowhere until mid-summer when he started hammering Shaheen for her support for Pres. Obama's amnesties and mass foreign-worker importation. Quickly, he cut Shaheen's big lead in the polls in half. And as Brown pushed the connections between immigration and the American worker more, he turned the race into a toss-up.
Shaheen was savvy enough to try to cover over her obvious vulnerability. She voted against Pres. Obama in a procedural vote in September in which Majority Leader Harry Reid made it possible for vulnerable Democrats to vote to block Obama's promised executive amnesty while ensuring that the effort would be defeated by one vote. We can hope that newly re-elected Sen. Shaheen will next year live up to the image she portrayed to voters of putting American workers' interests ahead of the open-borders interests of the national leadership of the Democratic Party.
We can all thank Scott Brown for providing the impetus for Sen. Shaheen to be a much more responsible voter on immigration issues in her second term. But as always, that is likely to depend on how much constant pressure and education citizens such as those who are members of NumbersUSA will provide.
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8:35 p.m. -- Arkansas Sen. Pryor loses to Rep. Cotton. Sen. Mark Pryor's flip-flop on immigration is an excellent example of this year's election phenomenon of the political consequences of turning away from your state's agenda to embrace Pres. Obama's agenda. Pryor used to take a reliably pro-worker position on immigration in line with the wishes of Arkansas voters. Then in 2013 under tremendous pressure from the White House, he switched. Today, he lost his job to Rep. Cotton who has aggressively taken the pro-worker, less-immigration approach that Pryor abandoned.
I was shocked in 2013 when Sen. Pryor voted for Obama's pet bill that would have given lifetime work permits to around 10 million illegal aliens and would have doubled legal immigration over the next 10 years for a grand total of around 30 million lifetime work permits for foreign workers. Before last year, Pryor had been one of the Democrats that we at NumbersUSA had been able to promote as taking a traditional pro-worker, tight-labor-market immigration position. His was one of the votes that killed the Kennedy/McCain/Bush amnesty in 2007. His was one of the votes that killed Obama's DREAM Act amnesty in 2010. Between those actions, we featured him at a NumbersUSA symposium for his concern for protecting American workers.
After all of that, why would he vote for an even bigger amnesty and foreign worker increase in S. 744 in 2013, especially with an election coming up in 2014? I've always speculated that the national Democratic leaders who control the big campaign money gave the previously anti-amnesty Democrats a sense that their funding of the 2014 campaigns would be far more helpful if they switched. What we know for sure is that every one of those Democrats did switch to back Obama on further flooding an already engorged labor market with too many workers chasing too few jobs.
As much as Pryor tried to campaign as somebody who was independent of Obama, his flip-flop on immigration was a glaring suggestion of the opposite conclusion. Pryor lost his Arkansas seat to Republican Congressman Tom Cotton who arrived in Congress and aggressively spoke and acted for limited immigration to protect American workers just as Pryor was abandoning that position.
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8:00 p.m. -- It's official: Dave Brat will bring his pro-worker immigration policy into Congress and replace the corporate lobbyist immigration leanings of former Majority Leader Eric Cantor. If Republicans hope to compete for the 2016 Presidential prize, they will need to figure out how to be seen by voters as the Party of productive wage-earners and not the Party of Wall Street. That was Brat's framing of his race last spring and it was a key factor in setting off all the GOP pro-worker immigration advertising that filled the Senate campaigns this fall.
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7:35 p.m. -- Romney on Fox continuing to talk nonsense about immigration as if it doesn't relate to the oversupply of labor that is driving down wages and driving Americans out of the labor market. Fortunately, he has pulled back from his weekend comments predicting a GOP Congress would pass an amnesty right away. And he did say on executive amnesty that Obama has to follow the law, and if he doesn't there will be "very serious consequence."
But the worst is his talking about getting things right for the millions of people waiting to immigrate the right way.
See my comments at 2:40 p.m. for why that way of talking is in direct contradiction of where the GOP put its ad money to try to get control of the Senate.
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2:40 p.m.. -- If Republicans take Senate seats away from Democrats tonight, it will be under a huge aerial attack of ads by Republicans tying Democrats to amnesty and an uncontrolled surge for foreign workers, according to the latest tabulations on TV advertising by Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group.
While the Republican ads establish their candidates as opposed to Pres. Obama's immigration reforms and actions, Democrats are NOT running ads bragging about or arguing for the superiority of their support FOR comprehensive immigration reform, according to the Weekly Standard political magazine: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/gop-hammers-democrats-obamacare-spen...
Observing what voters were being told about the Parties from the ads, the Weekly Standard (which used to support higher immigration levels) stated:
. . . if Republicans take the Senate, it would be hard for objective observers not to view the result as a repudiation of the Democrats on immigration, spending, and -- most of all -- Obamacare. Such a result would be quite interesting, in light of previous proclamations. . . . in the wake of the 2012 election, an army of mainstream pundits and Republican consultants declared that the immigration issue would doom Republicans until they dutifully hopped aboard the amnesty train. But neither Obamacare nor amnesty is good for Main Street America, and Main Street Americans get to vote--even if the New York Times's opinion pages wish it were otherwise."
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2:20 p.m. -- IMMIGRANT TURNOUT UNLIKELY TO BE FACTOR IN CONTROL OF SENATE
Pro-amnesty pundits are starting to spin that Democratic losses tonight will be the result of Obama NOT giving out his executive amnesty BEFORE the election. Even though the percentage of immigrant voters is very small in all but a couple of the battleground states today, these pundits are claiming Democrats may lose because Obama delayed the amnesty until promised action AFTER the election.
The pro-amnesty pundits say Obama's decision has angered so many immigrants and their families that many of them will stay home today.
See Major Garrett's quotes from the pundits at: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/did-obamas-immigration-punt-backfire/
But the immigrant vote is so small in all but one of the states that only if a Democratic Senate or Governor candidate loses by a very small margin tonight can a potential depressed voter turnout among immigrants be said to have been a factor in the loss.
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1:25 p.m. -- OBAMA'S IMMIGRATION POLICIES IMPORTANT PART OF HIS FAILURE TO FULFILL PROMISES ABOUT THE MIDDLE CLASS
Stopped by the Linda's Cafe greasy spoon for a long breakfast at the counter and read every political word in the Washington Post. Quite a few references to the failure of Obama to get a comprehensive immigration reform law as feeding into his image of weak management and as discouraging some of his base voters who want the amnesty.
But what I didn't find was how Obama's obsessive years-long talking about the need to give work permits to tens of millions more foreign workers feeds into his image as a President who has no sense of what it is like for most Americans to be stuck in a decades-long wage depression, in significant part because of the country's giant surplus of workers.
Wage-earning Americans know that there are too many workers chasing too few jobs. They have no leverage.
But Pres. Obama talks only about the country's need to add more workers from OTHER countries.
To the extent that Obama's Party suffers in election returns tonight, a large part of the blame surely rests on his failure to followup on his promise after the 2012 election to use this term to stabilize the middle class and help those trying to rise to the middle class. He undercut all his efforts to fulfill that promise not only by continuing to support adding a million more lifetime work-permit immigrants each year (as required by current law) but by breaking federal law and giving out hundreds of thousands of temporary work permits to younger illegal aliens and by stating that one of his highest goals was to pass a bill that would give out around 30 million lifetime work permits over the next 10 years.
How could any of the 18 million Americans who want a full-time job but can't find one think this is a President who wants to make it easier for them to be comfortably middle class? And how could the millions more Americans who have seen real wages declining for everybody but college graduates think the President's Party cares about their middle-class status when every single Senator of that Party voted to give out 30 million lifetime work permits to foreign citizens over the next 10 years?
