Tuesday was quite the night! I was on hand in Palm Beach to hear my former boss announce he’s running again for his old job. The response was electric. The ballroom at Mar-a-Lago was packed to the rafters with former White House officials, MAGA supporters, and a host of media. And the speech was remarkable: forward-looking, positive, and a celebration of all that Americans celebrate and fear has been endangered in the last two years. Please, if you didn’t see it, you should.
But will it be enough? After the midterms, can Donald Trump run and win to become the 47th president of the United States? What Red Wave?
What really happened a week ago? What happened to the “red wave”? Just for the record, the Democrats were as convinced of a Republican sweep as the “experts” were. Just watch the soon-to-be former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) squirm in her chair and disown the New York Times’ predictions of defeat to Andrea Mitchell. And while we’re at it, can we just jettison the assumption that there are any actual “experts” left? Even the best in the business, Robert Cahaly, chief pollster for the Trafalgar Group, got it wrong on my national radio show, AMERICA First, just days before the election.
Something is happening in our elections that pollsters and analysts simply cannot track, let alone predict. And it must be understood if we wish to see a MAGA 2.0 in two years’ time.
The first is what Cahaly has labeled “submerged voters.” A sizable portion of the electorate simply cannot be engaged in representative samplings that reflect the larger populations proclivities, and therefore predicting polling is always a bust. There are multiple reasons for this, including the early voting patterns established in states which mail out millions of ballots unrequested since COVID, as well as Trump supporters who refuse to answer any pollster truthfully in an age of rampant cancel culture. Ballots Not Votes
The second is far more important, and one that the conservative establishment seems wholly unable or unwilling to address. American elections have been radically restructured since 2020, yet the Republican Party thinks it can use its old playbook for a game whose rules have been completely changed. Today, elections are about ballots, not votes. If the GOP doesn’t understand this one fact, it is condemned to more and more losses until it internalizes the difference and reacts accordingly.
Republicans are a leery lot. We’re leery of government and we are leery of early voting. We believe that the safest way for us to practice our sacred right to vote is if we go to the polling station, identify ourselves, fill in the ballot by hand, and then place it into the ballot box or scanner with our own hands. We believe that has to be the most secure way to express your choice. Otherwise there is no security to the chain of custody of our ballot. If I have to mail it in, if I give it to a harvester, for example, what guarantee is there that my vote will arrive where it needs to arrive and be actually counted? None. If you want something done, do it yourself.
And thanks to this sensible attitude, we are being handed our backsides in states where the Democrats—and quiescent Republicans—have turned election day into election month.
Or worse. In Pennsylvania, the powers that be decreed there would be 50 days of voting. And more than half of Pennsylvania voted for the medically compromised Democrat before John Fetterman had even debated Dr. Mehmet Oz, and opened his remarks with “Good night, everyone!” They voted early based solely on tribal affiliation.
The point here is not whether Oz was a better candidate than Fetterman. (Would you trust the Democrat senator-elect even to walk your dog?) The point is the other party changed the rules of the game, organized to exploit those changes, and got busy while we stuck to our old habits.
This pattern was repeated all over the country, where the Democrats could get away with it. Just look at Arizona. A woman who hid from the public and the press, who was a disaster whenever a journalist managed to corner her, won against one of the most charismatic, attractive, and sharp-witted candidates America has seen in easily a decade. But it does matter if Kari Lake can walk on water politically when the Arizona GOP was so utterly incompetent that they didn’t even have enough printer cartridges on election day to print voters their ballots. If the Democrats had been running the printers, there would have been spare cartridges and then some. And you know it, too. Blame the Guilty
So who do we blame for the midterms? It’s trendy right now to blame President Trump. Really? Was it his job—from Mar-a-Lago—to stop -- excerpt, rest at link above --
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
Thu Nov 17, 2022 1:22 pm (Last edited: Thu Nov 17, 2022 1:23 pm)
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