2011 Election Results

Ohio Issue 2 went down this week, by a three-to-two margin, 61% to 39%.  It was outspent roughly three to one.  The total “We Are Ohio” campaign was “more than $30 million”, most of which apparently came from out of state (source: first article again):

Labor went all in. National unions are estimated to have spent some $25 million on a methodical and unified campaign against the initiative . . . .  

Rick Santorum

(Warning: This entry talks about some pretty gross stuff.  If you don’t want to be exposed to it, you may be better off just skipping this whole entry.)

A number of people are currently running to be the Republican nominee for president in 2012.  One of them is former senator Rick Santorum.

Santorum is a fiscal conservative and a foreign-policy conservative, but what’s really “politically incorrect” nowadays is that he’s also a social conservative.  He is strongly against homosexuality, for example. 

Election 2010

If I remember correctly, it’s pretty usual for the president’s party to lose seats in Congress in the mid-term election of his first term (although it may not be usual for him to lose as many as he’ll lose tonight).  Today I remembered that I wrote a poem in celebration of the trend-bucking 2002 mid-term election, when Bush’s party gained seats and a majority. 

Cincinnati Endorsement Compendium

Update (November 15th, 2009): The link below doesn’t seem to be working; so, on the off chance that anyone is still looking for the election results, you can find them here instead.

Update (November 3rd, 2009): A local news station offers running tallies of today’s election results.

If you happen to be a Cincinnati voter, and if you’re planning to vote in this fall’s off-year elections (coming up next month, Tuesday, November 3rd, polling places open from 6:30 a.m to 7:30 p.m.), at least if you’re like me, you’re wondering, How am I supposed to choose among all these candidates I don’t know anything about?  If you occasionally listen to the radio or watch TV or read anything even somewhat related to current events, it’s easy to have an opinion every four years or so about the presidency, etc.  Unfortunately, unless a candidate aggressively mails me multiple fliers about himself (which one of them is doing two of them are doing!), I find it more difficult to form an opinion on Mr. Smith J. Smithson of North Avondale, not only because I’ve never heard of him, but also because the areas of public policy he has “positions” on aren’t things like war and abortion but things like how the city should collect unpaid parking fines and whether the public schools should continue “CGCS benchmarking”, which I’ve also never heard of.