PAYING THE PRICE – AT 11:20 A.M. ET:  As they say, decisions have consequences.  From Fox:

Incumbent Senate Democrats in battleground states who opposed the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination appeared to have paid a price on Election Day, with senators Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Indiana's Joe Donnelly, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Florida's Bill Nelson all suffering defeat.

In fact, every Democrat incumbent who opposed Kavanaugh in states rated "toss up" by Fox News lost their race. In contrast, the lone Democrat who voted for Kavanaugh, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, won his race.

"Every Dem Senator in a competitive race who voted against Kavanaugh lost," tweeted Tom Bevan, Co-founder of RealClearPolitics. Fox News polling offered evidence the Kavanaugh issue was a major problem for those battleground incumbent Democrats.

A Fox News poll from early October, just before the Kavanaugh confirmation vote, found 34 percent of North Dakotans said they would be less likely to vote for Heitkamp if she voted against Kavanaugh, with just 17 percent saying it would make them more likely to vote for her.

In Missouri, among the 28 percent of voters who said they could still switch candidates, almost twice as many said they'd be less likely to support McCaskill if she opposed Kavanaugh.

COMMENT:  There must be an entirely new mechanism put in place to insure that the abuse of Judge Kavanaugh never happens again.  It violated the American sense of fairness, and I'm sure that many women saw their son up there, or their husband, or brother, or father. 

It was that intrinsic American sense of fairness that brought down Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.  His cause, anti-Communism, was never very controversial.  His methods were, and the American people made clear their feelings.

Let us see if the Democratic Party will correct its methods, or yield once again to the blindness of identity politics.

November 7,  2018