The results of Tuesday’s midterm election suggested no clear narratives about blue waves or red tides—Democrats took the House, while Republicans bolstered their Senate majority. America’s most repulsive senator, Ted Cruz, held onto his seat in deep-red Texas by the skin of his teeth, edging out the charming Democratic up-and-comer Beto O’Rourke. (“If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” fellow Republican Lindsey Graham once joked of his colleague’s popularity.)
Nevertheless, plenty of other assholes lost last night, proving that there is justice in the world, inconsistent though it may be. Let’s take a look at all the people who deserved to lose, and actually did:
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Kris Kobach
Republican Kris Kobach lost the race for Kansas governor to Democrat Laura Kelly, thank the fucking lord. Kobach made a name for himself as the head of Trump’s very crooked and now-defunct “Voter Fraud Commission,” created to affirm the president’s bogus claims that millions of undocumented immigrants voted in the 2016 election.
As VICE News noted, “Kobach, who is affiliated with the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a hard-line anti-immigrant group, has been the architect of some of the most anti-immigrant laws in the county.”
Kelly won 48.7 percent of the vote, while Kobach got 43 percent, meaning it wasn’t even close—Kansas voters rejected this fucker with their entire hearts. Good for them!
Scott Walker
Although he hasn’t conceded yet, Scott Walker, the two-term Republican governor of Wisconsin and former presidential hopeful, lost to Democrat Tony Evers by a slim 1-point margin. Walker is a notoriously anti-union conservative, who signed a bill that ended public workers’ collective bargaining rights, and later gave a $4.1 billion subsidy to the company Foxconn to entice it to open a factory in his state—based on the number of jobs created by the factory, this works out to about $230,000 in subsidies per job. In response to his loss, Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, released a terse statement: “Scott Walker was a national disgrace.” Note the past tense.
Kim Davis
The Kentucky county clerk who became famous for hating the idea of gay people getting married so much she went to jail rather than issue a marriage license to two men won’t get the chance to deny anyone anything again after losing to Democrat Elwood Caudill Jr.
Jason Lewis
Lewis, the Republican representative for Minnesota’s second district, once complained that he can’t call women “sluts” anymore. “It used to be that women were held to a little bit of a higher standard. We required modesty from women. Now, are we beyond those days where a woman can behave as a slut, but you can’t call her a slut?” he said on his radio show in 2012.
Per CNN’s KFILE, that is one of many disgustingly sexist things Lewis said on his radio show:
In another instance, while arguing that “young single women” vote based on coverage of birth control pills, Lewis said those women were not human beings and were without brains.
On Tuesday, Democrat Angie Craig, who will be the first openly gay mother in Congress, beat Lewis by over 5 points.
Dana Rohrabacher
The former Reagan speechwriter, best known as “Putin’s favorite congressman” thanks to his baffling fondness for Russia, has represented California’s Orange County in Congress since 1989, but on Tuesday, he lost his seat to Democrat Harley Rouda. Rohrabacher, a staunch Trump supporter, has made news for his bombastic personality—in 2013, he left a condo he rented “a shockingly horrific pigsty, a dump worse than a college fraternity house of unhygienic slobs unfamiliar with the most basic tools of cleaning,” according to the OC Weekly, and in the 1990s, “he famously arm-wrestled [Vladimir] Putin, then a lowly deputy mayor, in a Washington dive bar,” as Politico recounted.
Aside from his weird Russia stuff, Rohrabacher has a slew of abhorrent ideas. Earlier this year, he said he thought homeowners should be allowed to refuse to sell their houses to gay and lesbian buyers. He also apparently told an undocumented activist, “I hate illegals!” and suggested he could have her deported. (His press secretary disputed that).
In any case, he is an asshole and he lost.
Dave Brat
Far-right congressman Dave Brat lost his Virginia House seat to Democrat Abigail Spanberger in a close race. Brat has been called as “the poster child for the Tea Party,” and came to political prominence when he won the Republican primary against House Majority leader Eric Cantor in 2014, one of the signs back then the GOP was turning hard to the right.
In 2017, Brat complained, “Since Obamacare and these issues have come up, the women are in my grill no matter where I go. They come up—‘When is your next town hall?’ And believe me, it’s not to give positive input.”
In Spanberger’s victory speech, she said, “We won an unwinnable district by doing exactly what every campaign should do. We focused on the needs of the people, the voters.”
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