CHAPTER 11
Minority Party Status
On the way to work the morning after the 1980 November elections, Priscilla recalled Senator Callahan’s predictions. Everything—Reagan’s landslide and that coattail effect resulting in a Democratic loss of the Ohio Senate—had all come to pass.
But she had not been prepared for the long faces and despair of politicians and staff. And despite the senator’s warnings, she was shocked at how they expected the election returns to affect almost every aspect of their political lives. Democrats in the Ohio Senate had lost their majority, not by the anticipated one seat, but by three. Their eighteen-to-fifteen majority was flipped into the exact opposite and placed them squarely into minority-party status.
The first words out of Senator Callahan’s mouth when she
