By Reginald Stuart
WASHINGTON, DC — Razor thin elections across the nation last week, kept Democrats in control of the nation’s political agenda, defusing former President Donald Trump’s efforts to shift the nation’s political gears into a hard right political conservative direction.
With final resolution of this fall’s elections possibly days away, former President Donald Trump has hopes voter results next month in Georgia will resuscitate his derailed campaign to return to the nation’s top political post in the White House.
Otherwise, victorious Democrats across the country have sustained their control of the United States Senate despite the widespread losses by devout conservatives championed by former President Donald Trump.
Trump, who has unsuccessfully fought the results of the 2020 election in numerous courts cases, had championed, yet did not get the voter support earlier this month he hoped would set the political stage for his bid to be re-elected in 2024.
While making several significant gestures in several states, from approving the legal sale of marijuana for health reasons to guaranteeing in state law the right of a woman to have an abortion, the voters signaled they were done with the so-called 2020 election denial campaign and political disruption by Trump and his followers. Many solid followers of Trump failed to win their contests last week in key national contests.
The importance of Georgia’s Dec. 8 U.S. Senate runoff election has taken a different meaning to voters in that key Southern state; whether the voters will reenforce the sentiment voiced by voters in Ohio, Michigan and Nevada, among other states, that they want to end Trump’s domination of the nation’s political landscape.
Control of the U.S. House of Representatives, meanwhile, depends upon the voter count in less than 20 House congressional districts, mostly in the western part of the country where vote counts were expected by some election officials to extend past Thanksgiving.
The final voter count of this fall’s contests, by voters and respective local officials, has Democrats and Republicans pondering the impact of the sharp political divide across the country stirred by the fiery rhetoric of former President Trump and his supporters. It has spurred debate in both parties about their future political strategies.
Nashvillians elected conservative businessman Andrew Ogles, a Middle Tennessee State University alum and former mayor in Maury County, to serve them from the politically redrawn Fifth Congressional District.
The election of Ogles, who touts his conservative values, ranging from enacting a state law to bar women’s access to legal abortions in certain cases, to supporting tax funding of school vouchers to support private schools and prayer in schools, gives the conservative Republican a victory his party has not won in more than a century.
The Fifth District, based in Nashville, has been the home of all federal offices in Middle Tennessee, served as a major hub in efforts in the 1960’s to end racial segregation in education, employment, and human relations. It has also been a magnet for entertainers, higher education institutions and publishing.
The Republican state legislature’s reconfiguration of Tennessee’s Fifth District and Ogle’s election as the region’s new Congressman to Washington, put in gear the desire by many in the area to take Middle Tennessee out of the lead of people touting and promoting social progress.
Like the stunning sinking of the Titanic, last week’s election, sent progressive Democrats in Washington packing their bags and the ambitious new U.S. Representative from Middle Tennessee readying to take the Fifth District helm from outgoing Rep. Jim Cooper. For sure, the election outcome resets the political power decks in Nashville and here in Washington.
Rep.-elect Ogles was fired up last week as Republicans had hoped to snap the Democrats progressive agenda, lead by President Biden. That bid has quickly been tampered by squabbling within the Republican Party over whether it can weather another effort by former President Trump to salvage his political stature.
