Super Tuesday

Thoughts from an eventful Tuesday night.

Midterm Election

I don’t write much about politics here anymore. I try not to devote too much time to that realm since it tends to get my blood boiling. Try as I might, though, politics is much harder to avoid than it used to be. Both because it has infested every aspect of our lives and because of the damage our Shithead in Chief has done.

I’ll only touch briefly on the national results, which were mostly fantastic from my point of view. Ohio, Iowa, and Texas all flipping multiple state-wide seats seemed unfathomable when this cycle began. Maybe pick off one of those, but not all of them. Kansas sending a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in 92 years?!?! Pretty sure all my dead, native-Kansan grandparents are rolling over in their graves. Plenty of other good news on top of those races, which were mostly called in the 90-or-so minutes after we got back from basketball. We still ended up staying up past midnight watching NBC.1

We didn’t fully into the act here in Indiana, as we were not voting for either senators or governor. We did flip my old US House seat in the 5th district, which had been Republican for three decades. Not only did Carmel and the other Hamilton County suburbs deny the Republican incumbent, but she was defeated by an openly gay man who often wore a Protect Trans Kids shirt while campaigning. Talk about going against the (perceived) prevailing winds! We have several HamCo friends who are raising trans kids so we felt especially happy for them.

Also worth noting had the Shithead in Chief gotten his wishes and Indiana redistricted, I would have been voting in the 5th district race, and the results could have been even more pronounced. Which would have been an extra ironic result.

The significant race I did get to vote in was Beau Bayh, Evan Bayh’s son, becoming our new Secretary of State. I had mixed feelings about Bayh all along. We actually gave some money a year ago to a woman who was also going for the SecState nomination.2 The criticisms that Bayh is not a true Hoosier are completely valid. And the race seemed cherry picked for him, as the incumbent is so corrupt that the state R’s had to kick him to the curb at their party nominating convention this summer. Replacing the problematic incumbent with a vanilla, no-name R seemed like a way for the R’s to hang onto the seat. Making the odds longer for Bayh was former Indianapolis Republican mayor Greg Ballard jumping into the race as an independent. He was relatively popular when he left office. I feared that while he wouldn’t garner many votes outside Indy, he might peel off enough centrist voters in the metro area to cut into Bayh’s margins.

Bayh still pulled it off. Impressively, he did so not just by winning Marion, Lake, and Monroe counties, the state’s three solid Blue areas, but picking up votes in deeply conservative southern Indiana. I guess his name, and his background as a Marine, paid off with those folks.

You can’t help but look ahead to the next big election even while the midterm votes are still being counted. I wonder if Bayh will set his sights on the governor race in two years. I would suggest the Senate race, but Todd Young is very popular, and even has a moderate, contrarian streak that leaves him about as close to bipartisan as you get from an R these days. Two years as secretary of state probably isn’t enough to go for either of those offices. Although, given some of the true maniacs who will run in the R primary in 2028, maybe that’s plenty of experience to take a shot at the big job. Regardless, Indiana Dems have their first rising star in ages.

Most significantly for us, yesterday was L’s first opportunity to vote. We ran over to our polling place around 7:45 and were back within 30 minutes. She got applause from the room for being a first-time-voter when she put her ballot into the box.

I was disappointed that none of the Department of Justice “observers” sent to Marion County were at our polling place. Nor were there any other “independent eyes” milling about. Weird how an area that is predominantly prosperous and white - although there are big swaths of immigrants who live in several apartment complexes between our house and the church we vote at - didn’t get any attention from the goons. The only folks politicking were two nice ladies encouraging folks to vote to retain the public school district’s existing funding referendum.

That’s more than I wanted to write. A good day. Now the Dems just have to not fuck this up. Which I’m not confident won’t happen. Yes, the overly broad Affordability issue needs direct attention, and was a key element to the Dems’ success. But they were also elected to stem the tide of corruption that streams from Shithead, and hold him and his minions accountable. Force him to use his pardon pen often for the next two years so when the next presidential cycle rolls around voters remember who was either an active participant in his corruption and law breaking or just remained silent and did nothing to stop it.

HS Hoops

Last night was also opening night for girls high school basketball. Luckily that kept me away from the TV until later, so I didn’t have to sweat early numbers from Georgia or wherever.

CHS took on LC, a recent power that lost a ton of talent in the last two senior classes. We had no real idea what to expect.

The night began ominously, as the JV game might have set a record for longest JV game that did not involve overtime. 96 minutes to play a 28 minute game. So many turnovers. The refs were calling fouls like they were being paid by the whistle. Liberal use of timeouts. And some pretty bad ball thrown in.

Because of that, varsity started a full half-hour late. The game was tight all night, the Irish eventually falling by five. We never trailed by more than six, and had a brief lead midway through the final quarter. Little things killed us, though. We missed 10 free throws, going something like 3-13. LC, meanwhile, probably shot the opposite, only missing three. We missed so many layups, both contested and uncontested. We had an 8-0 run in the third quarter that could have been even bigger had we not missed three layups and a short jumper in the midst of it. When we did get the lead, we gave up back-to-back 3’s.

Our girls looked a little unorganized, seemed gassed late, and the rotations were weird. All standard stuff for an opening game. It didn’t help that our 6’3” girl got two fouls in about three minutes to start the game, and another starter also had two fouls in the first seven minutes. LC has two girls that are 6’4” and sometimes played them together. That made it tough for a short-ish team that doesn’t shoot well from outside to find good looks.

L played 13-14 total minutes. She missed her only shot when she had a wide-open 3 from the corner and decided to drive, then stumbled over her own feet as a big rotated over and put the ball off the bottom of the backboard. She grabbed two rebounds, had one turnover, and was called for two fouls, one of which was absolute garbage.

She also had one of the plays of the game. She was guarding a girl at mid court and forced a loose ball. Both players dove for it, rolling over each other and the ball. The ball popped into the air and L reached her legs up and caught it between her feet. As the LC girl tried to grab it, L picked it out with her hands and chucked a pass to a teammate 10 feet away while lying on her back. That girl zipped a pass inside to a cutter. Who naturally, given how the night went, blew the layup.

I told S that play was clearly her influence on our daughter.

A perfectly winnable game, if we just either hit free throws or layups.

The biggest positive was there were a ton of CHS kids at the game.3 Easily the best road crowd we’ve ever had. L and her teammates have been recruiting friends to come for weeks. I told several to be sure to come to home games, too, so we might finally have a good environment there.

A week off before the Irish play their Jesuit sisters.

  1. Weird election first for us. We switched to the YouTubeTV mostly sports package two months ago, so we don’t have any dedicated news networks. We stuck to our NBC affiliate and when they switched to the 11:00 local news, we flipped to the NBC News app on AppleTV. We got Steve Kornacki but not all the MSNBC, errrrr, MS NOW faces I’ve watched for decades. ↩︎

  2. Indiana does not have primaries for many down-ballot, state wide offices. Rather the parties pick them at their conventions. We have no idea if our lady had much party support when Bayh was selected. ↩︎

  3. LC is a mile from CHS, so it is an easy drive for kids who either live on the east side or stuck around campus after class. ↩︎