November 7, 2012
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We won! (Ish.)
JDN 2456239 EDT 11:05.
We won the most important election: Barack Obama remains President of the United States.
The rest of the outcomes were… mixed. Here in Michigan, all the proposals failed, both the bad ones (1, 5, and 6) and the good ones (2, 3, and 4). The Senate remains Democrat-controlled, and the House remains Republican-controlled.
Gary Johnson received about 1% of the vote, and Jill Stein less than 0.5%. The two-party system remains quite fully intact.
Honestly, the best single explanation I can give for this result is status quo bias. America stood together, and with one voice, said: “Better the devil we know than the one we don’t.”
It could certainly be a lot worse: We dodged a lot of bullets (for the people of Iran, literal bullets) not electing Romney. The bad proposals were more bad than the good proposals were good. Now unencumbered by a re-election campaign, Obama may do more bold actions than he was willing to do before.
In all, I guess I’m happy with the election results. But I’m also vaguely disappointed; we could have made things better, and instead we decided to leave them pretty much where they were.
