Category: Elections

Tuesday Takeaways.

What, if anything, did the midterms tell us about the country — other than underwhelming Republicans could still take the House and Senate?

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, American elections radically changed to mail-in and early voting. They did so in a wild variety of state-by-state ways. Add ranked voting and a required majority margin to the mess and the result is that once cherished Election Day balloting becomes increasingly irrelevant.

Election Night also no longer exists. Returns are not counted for days. It is intolerable for a modern democracy to wait and wait for all sorts of different ballots both cast and counted under radically different and sometimes dubious conditions.

The Democrats — with overwhelming media and money advantages — have mastered these arts of massive and unprecedented early, mail-in, and absentee voting. Old-fashioned Republicans count on riling up their voters to show up on Election Day. But it is far easier to finesse and control the mail-in ballots than to “get out the vote.”

The country is divided in more ways than ever. America’s interior just gets redder and the bicoastal corridors bluer.

Exceptional Republican gubernatorial or senatorial candidates like Lee Zeldin, Tudor Dixon, and Tiffany Smiley in blue states like New York, Michigan, or Washington cannot win upsets against even so-so Democratic incumbents — even during a supposedly bad election cycle for Democrats, laboring under a president with a 40 percent approval rating.

Similarly, media-spawned leftist heartthrobs like Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams can burn through hundreds of millions of dollars. But they still cannot unseat workmanlike Republican incumbents in Texas and Georgia.

Out-of-state immigration has only solidified these red-blue brand polarizations.

Over the last decade, millions of conservatives have fled California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania to Florida and Texas.

The former states got bluer as New York governors like Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul said good riddance to fleeing conservatives — who were welcomed as refugees to red “free states.”

As voters self-select residences on ideological grounds and the deleterious effect of blue-states’ governance, the country is gravitating into two antithetical nations. Americans vote not so much for individual personalities as blocs of incompatible parties, causes, and ideologies.

Debates count for little anymore, especially after the disastrous performance of winners Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman and Hochul.

Democrats often limited or avoided them altogether. And the Republican charging and complaining that they did so meant little at all.

Democrats still voted for Democratic candidates, regardless of Fetterman’s clear cognitive inability to serve in the Senate and despite President Joe Biden’s failures, harm to the middle class, and unpopularity.

Most Republicans are similar party loyalists, but not quite to the same degree — at least if some feared supporting a hardcore Trump-endorsed candidate might give them grief among family and friends.

Winning or losing means revving up party bases, not running as much on a variety of issues. Biden’s vicious attacks on conservatives as semi-fascists and un-American worked. When he recklessly warned that democracy’s death was synonymous with Democrats losing, he further inflamed his base.

Biden also goaded young people to vote by temporarily lowering gas prices through draining the strategic petroleum reserve, offering amnesty for marijuana offenses, and canceling half a trillion dollars of student loan debt. He told young women that they would die without unlimited abortions. And most of that mud stuck.

In contrast, Republicans wrongly assumed all voters, red and blue, sensibly cared most about spiking inflation, unaffordable food and fuel, an open border, and a disastrous foreign policy.

Americans do worry, but also demand concrete solutions that they often did not hear from even insightful critics of Biden’s ruinous agendas.

Moreover, in the last days of the election, Biden and the media effectively smothered those existential issues by claiming the country was threatened by insurrectionists and pro-life fanatics. Stooping to claim the attacker of Paul Pelosi — a crazed, homeless, nudist, illegal alien — was the veritable tip of the supposed MAGA insurrectionary spear proved to be effective Harry-Reid-style, October-surprise demagoguery.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis likely emerges as the dominant force in conservative politics. His landslide win in Florida carried all down-ticket statewide candidates throughout Florida, which has become as utterly red as California has turned all blue.

Related: What Happened on Election Night? I Think I Have Some Answers

To the degree Republican gubernatorial candidates not supported by Trump easily won their races in states like Georgia and Ohio, they helped Trump-supported senatorial candidates. To the degree Trump-supported gubernatorial candidates lost badly such as in Pennsylvania, they hurt Trump-supported senatorial candidates.

Trump’s pre-election unexpected attack on DeSantis may have turned off a few thousand independents and Republicans from voting for Trump-affiliated candidates. And his pre-midterm boast that he would likely run for president may have scared — and energized — some last-minute, hard-core anti-Trumpers and Democrats to go out to vote.

Pollsters got it wrong — again. But this time once trustworthy conservative pollsters had little inkling that the simmering left-wing base was enthused by wild talk of abortion and insurrection. The real under-polled voters were not silent, wary Trump supporters, but this time around seething upscale women and college students.

Final takeaways?

Democratic opposition to a flawed and impaired Biden running again in 2024 will recede. Republican loyalty to the unpredictable Trump could fade.

Turn Off, Tune Out And Drop Out

The votes are in and they have been counted. The great red wave that everyone expected never materialized. The expectation going into the election was that the Republicans would score an easy victory, picking up about forty seats in the House and enough Senate seats to gain the majority. Because America is a haplessly corrupt society, we may never know the final results, but someone will assign final numbers and it will be a slim victory for the GOP.

Of course, the flash analysis will come pouring out of the media, most likely blaming the results on Trump and the insurrectionists. You see, just as the media warned, democracy was on the ballot and this time democracy own. The Republican side of the uniparty will happily go along with it. They will expedite their plans to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024 for the good of our democracy. The whole thing is ridiculous but we are ruled by ridiculous people so this is to be expected.

The main question out of this election is about the legitimacy. Should we believe that the brain damaged hobo was the people’s choice in Pennsylvania? This is a good bellwether for this election, because John Fetterman is as close as we have come to putting a horse in a Senate. His opponent is ridiculous by normal standards, but in comparison to Fetterman he is Cicero. We are now required to pretend that a brain damaged hobo won the Pennsylvania Senate race.

The reason this particularly race is key to the legitimacy question is that there is no answer that supports the democratic system. If everything was above board and the people did vote for a brain damaged hobo, then this is proof that the public should never be trusted with such decisions. The openness to voting for a brain damaged hobo should be a disqualification to voting. On the other hand, if the vote is rigged again, then there is no reason for people to bother voting.

Of course, you can shift the question further up stream. What kind of political system produces a brain damaged hobo and a Turkish carny as the two options? Before you even get to the question of election integrity, you have to see that the system has problems far deeper than vote rigging. This turns up all over the ballot. In Georgia, the choice for Senate was between a brain damaged former football player and guy who used to hustle old black ladies for donations.

In Massachusetts, they are celebrating the first openly lesbian governor. Before Maura Healy was famously gay, she was famously stupid. Given the centrality of Massachusetts in the American empire, it is a good representation for how our democracy actually works. Politics in that state have been dominated by drunkards, perverts and degenerates for generations. The system they have imposed on the country selects for increasingly ridiculous candidates.

If we accept wholesale vote rigging is now a feature in many states, there is a limit to how much can be done. Historically, the Democratic machines used to be worth about five percent in the areas they controlled. That is enough in reasonably close elections, but not enough to overcome a wave election. All of the polling and history said this should have been a historic blowout of the Democrats, even when adjusting for the shenanigans that are now a feature of our democracy.

In other words, the results speak to something more than shenanigans. Either people skipped the election, seeing no point in it, or we are now locked into a partisan divide that makes elections pointless. Going back to Pennsylvania, either Oz lost because people thought he was just as ridiculous as Fetterman or partisanship has made elections in the state meaningless. After all, elections pivot on the ability of people to change their minds from election to election.

The current vote totals in Pennsylvania say that about five million ballots were counted in the Senate race. The governors race, which got far less attention, garnered the same number of votes. In 2020, 6.9 million votes were counted. What this says is that close to 30% of the entities that filled out ballots in the 2020 election decided that they had no reason to fill out a ballot this time. This strongly points to the conclusion that voters were given no reason to vote for either party.

Put another way, the polling shows that people are angry about the economy and the culture, but they did not see hope in either party. They were not even moved to strike out at the ruling party. Harry Truman famously said “If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time.” In this age, given the choice between a uniparty zombie and uniparty opportunist, people will choose the zombie.

The people endlessly yapping about democracy will no doubt claim that democracy won this time, but the turnout numbers suggest otherwise. The uniparty offered up a series of ridiculous choices and 30% of the voters stayed home. They refuse to follow the script because the directors showed no interest in the drama. Neither party offered a compelling reason for anyone to vote, so they were left with the partisan zombies and civic nationalist dead enders.

For the people hoping democracy lost the election, this is a good result. The exit polls show that over 75% of the vote was white. Outside of the freaks and crazies, that cohort currently has little or no representation in our democracy. The best thing they can do is boycott the process until they have a party that will represent their interests. Perhaps the midterms were the start of quiet quitting leaking into politics. Turn off, tune out and drop out of a system that has nothing to offer.

Guam Elects First Republican House Delegate Since 1993.

Guam has elected a Republican as its non-voting delegate to Congress for the first time since 1993, an encouraging development for the GOP in the first 2022 midterm race called.

Republican James Moylan, a senator in the Guam legislature, has defeated Judith Won Pat, former speaker of the Guam Legislature, according to the Pacific Daily News.

Partial, unofficial results from the Guam Election Commission showed Moylan leading with 17,075 votes to Won Pat’s 15,427.

Moylan is only the second Republican to be elected to the delegate seat since its creation in 1972, according to the report.

Democrats will maintain control of the Guam legislature, however, with nine seats to the GOP’s six seats.

Guam’s incumbent Democratic Governor Lou Leon Guerrero and Lieutenant Governor Joshua Tenorio also defeated former Republican Governor Felix Camacho and Guamanian senator Tony Ada by 11 percentage points.