Conservative: Va. Election Really Tells Us Very Little

Despite “much wishful thinking from liberals,” Tuesday’s big Republican losses in Virginia do not prove the contention that Donald Trump is obliterating long-term GOP chances, contends David Harsanyi at The Federalist. Fact is, “there’s really nothing unprecedented about cyclical pushbacks in politics.” Back in 2009, the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency — when, unlike Trump, he enjoyed high poll numbers — Republicans captured both the Virginia and New Jersey governorships from Democrats. Eight years earlier, in George W. Bush’s first year, Dems did the same to Republicans. In the end, “maybe voters are instinctively averse to those in charge because those in charge always let them down. And maybe once a president is elected, the other half intuitively begins working to strip him of power.”



From the left: Democrats Still Need a Message

For “all the euphoria over Tuesday’s result, the Democratic Party is still in trouble, especially in red states and swing states that didn’t have many elections Tuesday,” warns The Daily Beast’s Jonathan Alter. But the party may have found a basic message: Respect. Trump, he says, “has offered Democrats an opening to be the party of decency, diversity and democracy.” But for that to work, “Democrats can’t be mean themselves.” That means avoiding “cheap shots,” like the Virginia ad featuring a pickup truck — sporting a bumper sticker for GOP candidate Ed Gillespie — terrorizing children. It also means “Democrats also have to respect each other, not purge ‘neo-liberals’ and posture as truer to the populist faith.”

Culture critics: Why Campus Rape Trials Are Still Unfair

Since 2011, note K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor at The Weekly Standard, “the federal government has required all universities that receive federal money to provide ‘training or experience in handling complaints of sexual harassment and sexual violence’ to adjudicators and investigators.” But “the ideological regimes used on many campuses are designed more to stack the deck against accused students than to ensure a fair inquiry.” And “no school discloses the contents of its training materials to accused students before commencing the disciplinary process.” Yet while Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has rescinded some of the Obama administration’s orders, most of the training mandate remains in place — and “the secrecy of almost all the training materials has enabled them largely to escape public scrutiny.” So the accused still don’t know “what they’re up against.”



Libertarian: Black-on-Black Racism at Cornell

Is Cornell’s Black Student Union “engaging in racism — against blacks?” asks Larry Elder at Town Hall. The BSU complains that Cornell “admits too many blacks — from Africa and the Caribbean,” at the expense of “Black Americans who have several generations (more than two) in this country.” But wait, he says: “Isn’t the mantra of modern higher education ‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion’ and ‘overcoming disadvantage’? If so, black African and Caribbean students would seem to nail all three.” The problem, according to Elder, is that it’s “tough to explain why so many black foreign applicants outperform America-born blacks on what some call ‘culturally biased’ standardized tests.” That might be solved by giving “failing urban schools some competition through vouchers to give parents greater choice in where to educate their children.”

Numbers-cruncher: Connecticut’s Long-Term Cash Woes

After four months without a budget, Connecticut recently adopted a bipartisan $41 billion spending plan, “which closes an alarming $5.1 billion deficit,” reports Red Jahncke at National Review. But “the relief may be short-lived, since the new budget itself forecasts big future deficits,” given “sharply escalating public-sector labor costs.” Indeed, it “projects a plunge back into a deep $4.5 billion deficit in the next biennium and a deeper abyss thereafter.” For this year, the budget “closes the deficit mostly with artful gambits, one-time gimmicks and wishful estimates.” After a two-year wage freeze and a reduced hike in benefits, “wages and benefits expenses will explode.” So “Connecticut’s outlook is dire.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann