It looks like I was about right in regards to the House, and perhaps even mildly too pessimistic about Republican prospects. In relation to the Senate I was off. It is likely that there’ll be 53 Democrats (the late returns from the two states where Dems are leading come from liberal precincts) and de facto Democrats (Joe Lieberman + Bernie Sanders) and 47 Republicans and de facto Republicans (Lisa Murkowski will probably win her write-in bid, though it will be a while). Seeing that only about ~1/3 of the 100 Senate seats are up for a vote in a given election that’s a pretty big error, as I was off by 3 Senate seats. But then again, I was basically guessing, and not even making a particularly informed one at that. Just got lucky on the House prediction.
In the halls of weirdness, we now have two Punjabi American Republican governors in the Deep South (Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley). And Hansen Clarke won his Detroit area seat as expected. His late father was Bengali*, and his mother is African American. He was raised Muslim, and converted to Roman Catholicism as a young adult. His wife is Choi Palms-Cohen, a woman adopted from Korea at the age of three by an interfaith couple. She was raised both Jewish and Catholic, and considers herself an agnostic (I’d like to see survey data on kids who raised in two very different religions in terms of how many become detached from religion as adults).
* Hansen Clarke was born in 1957, so his father was a citizen of Pakistan. Additionally, the biographical details all say that his father died when Hansen Clarke was a child, so there’s a high likelihood that he predeceased the foundation of the state of Bangladesh. So calling Hansen Clarke a Bangladeshi American is anachronistic, though I think it is justifiable. But I’ve changed “Bangaldeshi” to “Bengali” just to be a bit more general.
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