Election 2022 results
[Scroll down for UPDATE.]
Here’s a thread to discuss tonight’s election results.
As I said earlier, I’m planning to wait quite some time before discussing the results myself. But I thought I’d start a thread for anyone who wants to talk now.
UPDATE:
It’s very late, and which party will be in charge of the House and/or the Senate still isn’t clear except for this: it has been a deeply disappointing and almost frightening night for the right. That’s true even if we manage to hold onto the lead in the House, and even in the very unlikely event we take the Senate.
I plan to post my thoughts tomorrow on what happened and why, but I’ll just summarize here by saying that indeed, a mind is a very very difficult thing to change. In other words, I believe the country is fairly evenly divided and in order for the GOP to dominate an election, a significant number of Democrat voters must change their minds. That’s not happening in sufficient numbers at all, except in a state such as Florida.
It seems that the Democratic half of the country has no trouble whatsoever voting for far leftists and even people who are cognitively challenged (even far leftists who are also cognitively challenged). The only thing that matters to them now is party designation. There is virtually no crossing over, and party is everything and power is everything.
There is much more I could say, but I plan to save it till tomorrow.
At 10:22 pm Eastern, it looks like the GOP will take the House and barely take the Senate but the election was more of a Red High Tide than a Red Wave (outside of Florida, where Democrats were absolutely annihilated).
If I had to guess, I would say the media treating Biden like he’s a constitutional monarch with no responsibility at all for anything may have somewhat disconnected voter anger at the state of things with their view of their local Congresscritters.
Mike
Mike
MBunge – It couldn’t have anything to do with all of the terrible Trump candidates in PA, NH, AZ, GA, etc. Nah, couldn’t be that.
Sarah Huckabee Gov. of Arkansas!
Bauxite – were they all terrible?
I Callahan – Kari Lake isn’t terrible (though she’s down quite a bit right now with 50% of the AZ vote in). J.D. Vance isn’t terrible. That’s about it.
(I’d say that Oz didn’t turn out to be terrible, but neither was he the best candidate to win in PA.)
How many more winnable races do we have to lose before we kick Trump to the curb?
‘Trump’s fault’, that’s funny. No Red Tsumami as far as I can tell, but an impressive state-wide change in Florida, no doubt about that.
According to Fox, Vance has won in Ohio, and Kemp in Georgia.
You’re awfully quick to blame Trump for what hasn’t even happened yet. Lake was up in the polls for weeks. You can’t get me to believe she’s going to lose now unless you’re willing to admit that there was cheating going on.
As for the others – once again, what makes you so sure of they’re all losing? No one is calling any of these races yet.
A disappointing night so far, given high hopes. Meh.
Well, so far Trump candidates have blown very winnable races for PA gov and NH Senate.
I’ll revise my opinion if Walker, Masters, Lake, Oz, and/or Dixon pull it out. Other than Walker, it’s not looking good for any of them and Walker looks to be headed to a run off. That’s four and maybe five other winnable races down the toilet because of candidates who would have never been nominated but for Trump’s endorsement.
Meanwhile, Kemp and DeSantis, the two Republicans with conservative records and a history of standing up to Trump won comfortably.
You do the math.
I Callahan – So if Lake underperforms her polls, that proves cheating? Biden significantly underperformed his polls in 2020. By your logic, that proves that Republicans were actually the ones cheating in 2020.
Kari Lake really gets under the Left’s skin. Personally, I find her impressive.
Like 2020, it is impossible to tell who is ahead because we have no idea how many votes are left to count. I surfed various sites with the data, and there are enormous contradictions in state % counted, but then you go to the sub-regions of a state, the numbers don’t add up in any way. For example, when I click on GA, it shows 94% counted, but when I go to Fulton County, or Cobb County, it shows 30 or 50% counted.
This is a huge problem- we need to know before the counting starts how many ballots were cast by closing of the polls. This is a number that is easy to get, and yet no one wants to go get it. Everything is a black box.
And Trump has now punished a post celebrating Republican John O’Dea’s loss to Democrat Sen. Michael Bennett in CO.
Make America great again . . . by keeping a Democratic Senate to continue confirming all of Biden’s radical nominees. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
With the data I have, the Republicans might pick up a net of 4 House seats (there are a lot of GOP seats in NY and CA that they could well lose tonight). In the Senate, the Democrats are going to win PA, WI, and hold all the rest except, maybe, NV in which I have no data yet. However, I think if they lose WI, PA, GA, and AZ, they will also lose NV. It is quite possible the Democrats keep both chambers, and no longer need Joe Manchin for anything.
Published a post, not punished
Yancey Ward – it’s not all lost yet. Johnson is ahead in WI right now and so is Walker in GA, but not by enough to avoid a runoff.
But the R team might need Walker in GA to get back to 50 if NV doesn’t go our way.
Gee, wouldn’t it have been nice if we hadn’t punted NH and PA or if we’d picked a candidate who could have run within a point or two of Kemp in GA.
WRT to Trump, we need to thank him for what he accomplished as President, and wish him a happy retirement.
He will always have a faithful following, but his recent totally egregious comments about DeSantis demonstrate that he is a loose cannon, and is just getting looser. I would like to think he would get more control of himself’ but history suggests otherwise. He seems to be unable to control his resentments and shows a vicious spirit to the world. So, I think he will divide the GOP; and when DeSantis wins the nomination a certain number will stay home out of spite.
I may be wrong of course. I would like to be.
Bauxite, Walker ain’t going to win a run-off, and he probably won’t get the chance to run for the run-off anyway. Warnock will be declared the winner by tomorrow morning. Johnson is toast give the way Wisconsin vote totals come in during 2018 and 2020. Milwaukee alone will put Barnes over the top sometime after midnight.
Yancey Ward – Then we’re really going to miss NH and PA. Let’s hope Laxalt provides a nice surprise in NV.
The most recent news from House races in upstate NY is positive, at least.
I think there is no chance Laxalt wins. The Democrat cheat machine was on full blast tonight. You can’t overcome the fraud in the big cities with states with this much mail-in-voting. It is just too easy to cheat, and too hard to stop without ending mail-in-voting altogether. Voting in person is much harder to game because someone has to walkin the door and sign in to get a ballot. With mail-in-voting, there are no controls that can’t be easily overcome with people in the right offices.
I now don’t think the Republicans are going to win the House- Speaker Pelosi will be back with about a two to four vote edge at least.
With all the harm Democrats have done to this country in so short a time, one would think that winning the Senate would not be difficult. Unless there are some surprises very soon, this doesn’t look like it will happen. I must confess I do not get it- do the citizens of this country want an open border, sky high crime, unaffordable gasoline and freezing homes in the winter? I doubt it. The only answer that makes sense to me is that the Republicans have not presented the best candidates. There is something about them that drives enough voters away to make capturing the Senate a pipe dream.
Looks like Yvette Herrell (R, NM-2) is losing to a “defund the police” regressive. If so, that will turn NM blue instead of purple.
Right now, the Republicans have declared victories in 185 House seats. My count of the ones outstanding that they are leading in is another 29 seats. So, if they won all 29 of those, they would have 214 seats- not a majority. There are few seats with no vote totals that that they will win, but they are not likely to win all those 29 I mentioned. More than a few of them are in deep blue states where the late vote counts are almost 100% deeply leaning Democrats. I am guess the GOP ends up with a net of 4 new seats- two short of a majority. The Senate will be 52-48 Democrat.
There is only one GOP winner tonight- Ron DeSantis, but he has no chance of winning the Presidency in 2024 unless the Republicans get serious about restricting mail-in-voting. Where it is tightly controlled, they win with ease. Where it isn’t, they don’t. With Evers and Shapiro winning in WI and PA tonight, and Hobbs likely winning in AZ, Republicans won’t be winning those states in 2024.
And if the +4 is right, it will all be due to Florida.
It is the rise of mail-in-voting. 10 years ago, absentee voting was limited to special cases. Today it isn’t. I personally think the fraud in a state like PA can be as high as 500K votes, and a million in CA. Red states that implement no-excuse mail-in-voting quickly become blue states. That is what we are seeing in the last 3 elections. Until that is dealt with, the GOP ain’t winning the Presidency, and will find it increasingly difficult to win the House.
WOW. THE WAR PARTY BLAMING THE BEST PRESIDENT OF MY LIFE FOR ANOTHER ELECTION FUVKERY BY ENEMY ACTION?
I guess I am really the man without a country. Nobody but Trump has the gonads to name names — so, let’s kill the messenger!
Yet the simplest polls like “Right Track/Wrong Track?” — which were 70% WRING in ‘16, and are virtually the same now, aren’t confirming evidence for a change vote?
Yancey “ And if the +4 is right, it will all be due to Florida” where DeSantis REFUSED THE BIDEN NAZI/DOJ Election Hall monitors — pure coincidence, I’m sure!
ANOTHER miracle election! Against all the populist noise and against the hostility against the mannequin at the podium — can’t you rubes admit that you’ve been robbed once more? By our evil Ruling Class? That voting does not work to achieve change here anymore?
Unfortunately, [my votes today didn’t count].
But it would have been so much worse if I had not [voted at all].
The abortion issue, mail-in balloting, and super early voting in PA. What’s not to dislike?
Fox polling has people buying into climate change and even the Biden energy policy at about the 50/50 level. And 68% of people think the FBI is doing a good job.
WHAT’S FRIGHTENING IS THAT EVIL MUST BE CINFRIBTED AND DEPOSED DIRECTLY — because there is no more illusion of voting our way out of tyranny.
Maricopa fraud notes (2022 edition), comments at the Gateway Pundit:
??? • an hour ago
It sounds like Arizona DimLibs purposely made Tabulators go ‘broke’ in almost 45 Precincts out of 223 . Oh surprise! They’re in Conservative areas. That’s huge. Many are so understaffed they can’t process people quick enough. The Judge denying those in line to vote is the same thing that is happening in Nevada with the DNC suing to keep their lines open and being rejected. I can’t take the Herschel/Warlock SeeSaw! If neither gets 50% there’s a runoff.
AZ-Man • 24 minutes ago
Something I noticed today as I stood in line for about an hour to vote. Many, I mean many people walked to the entrance of the voting place and just showed a signature on their mail-in Ballot. Nothing else! Some were carrying 2, 3, 4 or more. One person bringing several ballots to be counted! Hmm! Oh, bye the way, “My Ballot” could not be read by the “tabulator”. Don’t worry, it will be counted later tonight. That’s what I was told. So Sad!
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A relative of a lawyer fighting AZ voter suppression says 36% of these “broke” election night, resulting in long lines.
Harmeet Dhilon says none go these failures were near colleges and universities.
HOW, um, “magical.”
TommyJay
Why are you watching faux?
“ Fox polling has people buying into climate change and even the Biden energy policy at about the 50/50 level. And 68% of people think the FBI is doing a good job.”
The old man handed over the reigns to his far Left sons last winter, just before Jerry Hall divorced him
Neo, please try to get a good night’s sleep!
Hispanic Conservative • an hour ago
I live in AZ and this is shocking that racist Katie Hobbs is winning and most republicans are getting beat with 50% of the vote in…
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Texan1st Hispanic Conservative • 32 minutes ago
I noticed that all the counties that went for Lake are 70+% reported yet the counties that went for Hobbs and barely at 50% or less reported. Guess they have to wait and see how many votes they need in the blue areas before they claim they are 100% reported. Because once they say they are 100% reported they can’t add votes after that.
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Precisely how vote stealing is organised to work: as needed, in demand by the most powerful organisers!
EARLIEST MORNING NEWS ROUNDUP by Jim Hoft at thegatewaypundit:
HEADLINES — BLOOD MOON BLOODBATH… Democrats Steal Midterms, Communism Comes Home to America… Crime, Inflation, Record Gas Prices, War, Open Borders and Corruption WIN BIG
In a normal time, in a normal country, voters would reject record gas prices, record inflation, record crime rates, war and corruption.
But not today.
Once again, Democrats proved they can survive anything as long as they have their fraud.
Americans reject every single dish the Democrats served. Yet, Democrats shocked Americans on Tuesday to win the US Senate, steal battleground states, and possibly keep the US Congress in Nancy Pelosi’s control, one of the most corrupt and dishonest politicians in US history.
Republicans dominated in states like Florida and Ohio, states Democrats have not yet stolen with their mail-in ballots, bloated voter rolls, ballot trafficking and manufacturing operations.
But Democrat John Fetterman, who never held a job and cannot form sentences, won in Pennsylvania. Colorado stole popular conservative Lauren Boebert’s seat with their mail-in voting. Georgia elected a Trump-hating governor but Marxist radical Raphael Warnock who likes to scream about whitey at his church won the first round of the Senate race.
California and New York proved to America that once the communists take control there is no going back – to civility.
The Witches of Eastwick won Michigan.
Ron Johnson is barely leading in Wisconsin to another black Marxist radical who wants to empty the prisons onto the streets of America.
And in Arizona, a red state, we are supposed to believe Kari Lake and Blake Masters are going to lose?
By morning we will see the true damage.
Tuesday was a blood moon. It turned into a bloodbath for Republicans.
Republicans believed they would have a great midterm. They forgot that America is now under the control of the Communists.
God help us.
Life is about to get REALLY painful.
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REALLY painful! And that’s even before the shooting has started.
MORE but about Michigan and AZ steal:
ShortyQ BettyDribble • 9 minutes ago
BettyD- it did look good earlier, like 2020. But then the mass ballot drops were happening. The graphs look identical earlier in the day, then one candidate would get 1/2M votes dropped for them. That changed everything. In Attourney general race in MI Deperno was lead until a few minutes ago, then they did the standard middle of the night 300,000 ballots for the demNAZI. That’s what’s happening. The demNAZI’s went for it all tonight.
NIMBY • 32 minutes ago
Here you have it we are to believe despite 70 percent people disapproving of the direction of the country, record inflation, record crime, and war in ukraine that the democrats somehow got exactly what they needed. Nope didnt really happen we all know now beyond a shadow of a doubt that the country is corrupt and elections will not fix it.
I live in Maricopa and can tell you ive never met a single democrat, at my many jobs, out and about or any where. This state is red and we have now watched them screw up multiple elections..so the people i know everyday voted for a person who didn’t even campaign and hid from her opponent, has no policies worth a damn and inspires nobody. Yeah it is being stolen again and will continue to happen until the people fight back. I am not surprised but the blatant in your face cheat is shocking.
Sarah Hoyt nails the DISTRACTORS, of whom we have too many here:
As I write this late on the 8th, the tsunami is resolving itself into a wavelet.
Or rather, the tsunami has been overfrauded into a wavelet. And it might be frauded away to a Dem win before I wake tomorrow.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us who were awake and remember [last time]….
I told you so. And I don’t want to hear “I guess people really care about abortion” when poll after poll said that wasn’t it. I don’t want to hear about “People love tyranny” because people DON’T. Do try for once in your life to have a spine.
What did you think would come from letting state after state get swallowed up by fraud? It never occurred to you it would become national? Affect national elections? When you saw the cancer spread, you thought it was someone else’s problem, far away?
If you find excuses for this now, if you buckle under, if you don’t look at the sheer weirdness of the numbers, you’re collaborating with the oppressors. You might as well shave your head now and save us time later.
If you give a d*mn about the republic, about liberty, about America, speak now. And loudly. It’s the only safety those of us already exposed have. It’s the only safety any of us have. And the only chance of restoring the country.
This is not time to go wobbly. I’d say be not afraid, but if you’re not afraid right now, you’re an unholy idiot. Be afraid, but protest and make noise and stand up as much as you despite your fear. Because it’s the only way we survive as a free people. It’s the only way…
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/11/09/cancer/
Instapundit swimming in COMMENT
https://instapundit.com/i-hate-to-say-i-told-you-so-cancer-i-told-you-so-and-i-dont-want-to-hear-i-guess-people-really/
I was impressed by the nastiness of the message Democrats spread before the election: “Democracy is in danger”, even “Republicans are ready to kill”.
Could it be they were anticipating the reaction to what appears to me as fraud of massive dimensions?
Paolo — yes, of course it was battlefield prep. Sarah Hoyt continues in the fraud problem:
I’m in a group right now with people crunching numbers, and the fraud is evident. The races the democrats cared out got flipped by turning just those votes for the dems. That’s the flexibility of dominion at work, and the way they can turn a vote into the other.
We have a massive, huge, bizarre fraud problem. This morning, in my red district, 90% of the people chose to vote on machines. Because it’s so much faster and more convenient. And of course, completely unverifiable and unsafe.
Frankly in the primaries, my husband — my very own personal husband — went in ahead of me, and when asked if he wanted paper or machines, took the machines.
Because of course he did. It was early, he was tired, work has been feral, and he wanted to vote with the least amount of fuss. So machines.
And he’s not stupid and lives with a political junkie, who has told him all the problems with the machines multiple times. And for heaven’s sake, he’s a programmer. He knows anything linked to the net can and will be hacked. Heck, around the election of 2020 he poked around what was going on and pointed out the only reason for the machines to be set up was they were had to be to facilitate fraud.
But two years later he’d forgotten and headed for the machines. How much more the people who hear about the machines, and are under the vague impression that has all been disproven?
Of course they assume their friends and neighbors are tyranny freaks who want to be stepped on so badly they don’t care if they’re starving and freezing.
I can’t give you the numbers. I’ll try to get a friend who is a number person to do a post for me soonest. But the numbers stink. Or to quote Larry in 2020 “Fuckery is afoot.” And how.
We have a serious fraud problem.
LET ME SAY THAT AGAIN: We have a serious fraud problem.
Which means we can’t vote our way out of this one. You know what? It was always a possibility, always baked in….
In Minnesota, the LEAST liked officeholder was Muslim pro criminal AG.
He was EXPECTED to lose.
Minnesota – Attorney General Election Results
Minnesota Secretary of State Website ^ | 08 November 2022
Posted on 11/08/2022 11:17:11 PM PST by zeestephen
Keith Ellison – Soros AG and neo-Marxist radical – leads his GOP opponent by 1.7% with 93% of precincts reporting. This tells me that the political situation in the USA is completely hopeless.
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FRAUD CANNOT BE DEFEATED BY ELECTIONS! It is useless.
Tonight has been very disappointing. The vast majority of Americans feel the Country is going in the wrong direction. Florida went Republican, because they have free and fair elections. Arizona does not when your Secretary of State is running for Governor and does not recuse herself from handling this election.
Our elections are not fair. They are corrupt. And voter suppression does exist for Republican’s; LA closes voting locations because of weather, Arizona turning people away because of voting machines not working, and the list goes on.
We live in a brave new world where hope is hard to find politically. But the USA has beautiful places and incredible people. Maybe this is where we see the beauty in our Country.
I don’t have a rosey outlook in the long term for the country.
We have been sending children to Marxist Seminaries for 4 decades, it’s total indoctrination first working on politics now genders to destroy the family.
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“Destroy the family, you destroy the country. The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation”. And “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” —Vladimir Ilyich
I voted. In my district they didn’t ask for any ID. The person who came after me asked if he needed to show ID which the person working the desk said no. She didn’t even hesitate to give her answer. All you needed was your name, date of birth and to clarify your address. No state ID or voter card needed …. But I needed my license to drive to the polling station and was carded to purchase a lottery ticket after I voted. Because the law or something. At my nearest grocery store you’re carded at the checkout when you purchase alcohol. Voting? “We don’t check for ID because voting is a right” or something along those lines.
Hello TJ, yes, I read Hoyt’s piece and it’s sad. I also see a lot of conservatives demoralized and questioning Trump, as if he were responsible for the unexpected results.
I can’t understand why Americans, the GOP in primis, allowed self-evident garbage like “voter suppression” become a respectable concept; history shows that humans cheat whenever possible.
In Italy we are able to have uncontested elections – even by a left party adopting “Fascist alert!” as the leading slogan – because strict in person vote, on paper, in a precisely designated site is mandatory; not only we have to show an identity document (usually the “Carta d’Identità”, which the town office issues to citizens in a very short time, everybody has it), but we also have a personal electoral-card stamped by an official at the polling station each time we vote. The exceptions are minimal and cannot impact the outcome by design.
I’m boggling at the absurdity of your system, you simply cannot have confidence in the results, each and every time.
Paolo Pagliaro:
We are boggling at the absurdity of our system as well, and have little to no confidence in the system at this point. But many Republicans actually have been fighting to change it and it’s been a losing battle in most states (Florida is an exception; they improved their system under DeSantis).
In states controlled by Democrats there is nothing the Republicans can do (states set their own voting rules, by the way). In states controlled by Republicans the rules are already much tighter. Usually the rules have been loosened when the Democrats are in control, and when the Republicans try to change the rules back to tighten security the courts often won’t let them.
During COVID all sorts of rules were loosened supposedly because of COVID, and some of that is very hard to undo because many people have come to like the convenience of early voting and mail-in voting. It’s a very very VERY bad situation, but it didn’t used to be like that in this country. The changes are fairly recent, and have led to tremendous turmoil.
The wind and rain are really howling outside.
I spent much of last evening hassling with airline and rental car websites, so D. and I can get home from soon-to-be Hurricane Nicole. Being your own travel agent sucks.
From past experiences, I wasn’t interested in following the election results real-time. Catching up this morning, I see the only big waves happening are outside my room on the beach.
Vodkapundit has been my go-to guy for election commentary. He excerpted the following tweets, which suggest GenZ made the difference:
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Mike Davis @mrddmia
Interesting. And 18- to 29-year olds don’t answer unknown numbers (pollsters) calling their cell phones.
John Della Volpe @dellavolpe
·
One thing I know already. If not for voters under 30 … tonight WOULD have been a Red Wave.
CNN National House Exit Poll:
R+ 13…65+
R+ 11…45-64
D +2…..30-44
D +28…18-29
#GenZ did their job.
https://pjmedia.com/liveblog/2022/11/07/vodkapundit-live-blogs-the-2022-midterm-elections-n231
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huxley, please do let us all know when you reach home– and stay safe in the meantime.
First cut: It is urgent that we run DeSantis in 2024, not Trump. Rightly or wrongly, Trump is too toxic to too many unthinking people.
Party designation IS the only thing that truly matters. I have rolled my eyes for decades at the BSD “I vote for the man not the party” BS that conservatives…”conservatives” have consistently been stupid enough to fall for. Ooh, they putting on they big-boy pants and moving beyond “mere” ideology! What philosophical blindness that is. Yes, let’s put personality above political philosophy! That’s high school popularity contest mentality. But such is the way “the grownups in the room”, the “smart” conservatives…”conservatives” think. And then they wonder how they could possibly lose.
Where is the discussion of turnout?
My guess is that, with low turnout, the Trump-supporting Reps more often didn’t vote more than the embarrassed-by-bad-results Dems who didn’t vote.
Huxley’s D+28 for GenZ is also important, responsible Republicans aren’t cool, and maybe never will be.
“Trump is too toxic to too many unthinking people.” — this might be true, but few of 74million voters in 2020 wish they had voted Biden. I’d guess that there are less than 60 million votes for Reps in 2022.
Lazy-comfy mail-in votes are not available in most democracies. I’m more likely to blame fraud-friendly mail-in voting than “Trump”. Tho Trump’s comment against DeSantis (De-Sanctimonius) was certainly an own-goal, highly magnified by a media which has usually ignored most of Trump’s highly attended rallies.
Trump can take credit for Pennsylvania. It is obvious to me that DeSantis or someone other than Trump needs to head the ticket in 2024.
I said in the other earlier election thread last night at about 730pm, the red tsunami already looks like a 3 ft breaker. I get up this morning and sure enough.
I think TJ has the right of it. AZ was definitely stolen, as well as PA. I voted for the first time here in FL….very limited mail-in. In person required a photo ID and then was matched to a signature required then and there. The poll worker even looked at the ID and then at my face.
We are in a very bad place where the power belongs to a Soros backed cabal who can put up senile, mentally incapable candidates, and outright cheaters (Hobbs as SoS and refuses to excuse herself) and know there will be no problem installing these people.
I don’t necessarily blame Trump, though he could be a factor and should fade away. The takeover of the education system is paying off big time, as well as the infiltration of Soros. Obviously 50% of the population is happy with a communist style US. What the other 50% do now is a a big question. Our votes don’t matter anymore, so the next logical step is…………..
As a Californian, until we have paper ballots on one day, obtained by way of a photo ID, instead of a sticker, a purple finger and mail-in ballots restricted to the overseas military, I don’t expect to know what the real results would be.
R+ 13…65+
R+ 11…45-64
D +2…..30-44
D +28…18-29
#GenZ did their job.
Voters born during the years running from 1978 to 1990 voted for Barack Obama by a margin of 2.3 to 1 in 2008. Here we see with the 1978-92 cohorts that it is much closer. To some extent, support for the Democratic Party is a life cycle phenomenon. What is curious to me is that ca. 2000, young voters split about evenly between the parties and ca. 1986 young voters favored Republicans by a modest margin. This effect appeared between 2000 and 2008 and I’m not understanding it.
Of course, these are exit polls, so the mail-in voters are not assessed.
The takeover of the education system is paying off big time,
The schools were not run by conservatives ca. 1970 where I lived, though they were not obnoxiously politicized. The students enrolled in them voted Republican more often than not 15 years later. There was an abrupt shift in the political dispositions of young people between 2000 and 2008. Was the experience of schooling in 1995 really so different from what it had been in 1987?
I have a simple(ton) question. The red tsunami occurred in Florida, but nowhere else. Why?
For all the reasons given above, without the elimination of absentee and mail-in voting, along with early voting, things will only get worse for the GOP and conservatives.
As for Trump, I think this election result demonstrates that he is no longer the leader of the Republican Party. He was very successful getting his candidates on the ballot but utterly failed to promote and endorse candidate that could win. Just look at Oz vs Fetterman – you have to blame the PA voters but also acknowledge that Oz was not strong enough as a candidate to defeat that guy.
Florida has honest elections. Plain and simple.
We have the worst election integrity in the world. For a reason. The Democrats aren’t just cheating their asses off, they are laughing at us.
Why would anyone assume that Fetterman beat Oz? No evidence that a majority of citizens casting honest ballots voted for a vegetable.
Don’t blame Trump because Dems cheat. That’s crazy. No Republican can win in Penn. They manufacture as many votes as they need.
Grandpagrumble, in NC, we retained a Senate seat, turned the Supreme Court and Appeals Courts red, and made some modest local gains (in my county, a school board seat). Texas dispatched the idiot Beto, and Georgia got rid of Stacey. No tsunami, but solid in some regions. It’s just going to be a longer fight than many of us hoped for.
The Arizona thing looks fishy as heck, but other than that – mail-in votes disadvantage Republicans by encouraging a lot of low-information, low-propensity voters to vote.
It’s terrible for the country that our elections are decided by low-information, voters but you’re never going to win an argument to return to in-person voting absent smoking-gun level proof of fraud, which is unlikely to ever materialize.
Therefore, if you don’t want progressives to govern in perpetuity, the answer is to find a way to win with an expanded electorate. Plenty of Republicans did that yesterday.
How do you lose with an expanded electorate? Trumpisim.
A lot of folks around here say that they’d rather be governed by Democrats than “RINOs” or “Mitt Romney Republicans.” (Even Trump said he preferred Stacey Abrams over Kemp.) Leaving aside the absurdity of calling someline like Kemp, DeSantis, or Ron Johnson a RINO, I hope they really mean it because they’re about to get their wish.
Preferring Stacey Abrams over Kemp is insane, and if Trump said so, that proves he’s around the bend.
The Arizona thing looks fishy as heck, but other than that – mail-in votes disadvantage Republicans by encouraging a lot of low-information, low-propensity voters to vote.
Actually, it encourages a lot of non-existent voters to vote.
May I inject a couple of hopeful items into the gloom? Twitter either becoming free speech or failing entirely; Facebook (aka Meta) with huge financial losses and layoffs.
Kate – Here it is. This was in September:
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-stacey-abrams-might-very-well-better-georgias-governor-gops-kemp-1632786
And here’s Trump last night celebrating Republican John O’Dea’s loss in blue Colorado:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2022/11/09/trump-celebrates-a-gop-loss-n2615713
After he encouraged Republicans not to vote for O’Dea because O’Dea wouldn’t publicly agree that the 2020 election was stolen:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/desantis-endorses-odea-colorado-senate-race-bucking-trump
The man is pure poison.
Art Deco – Perhaps, but if you can’t prove it you’re just spitting into the wind.
I’m really surprised by the shift to the left by young people; this explains in part the unexpected results.
Also in our recent elections in Italy there was a similar phenomenon, even if not so prominent. For sure, social media have a huge impact on youth, and you have a school system incredibly ideologized.
PS: Thank you for the clarification, Neo.
Bauxite, I agree that Trump has made himself poison. Let us acknowledge his great accomplishments as president and tell him his time has passed.
Paolo, I think the ideologized education is a big factor. Conservatives are beginning to deal with that, and perhaps some of these young voters will learn from experience as they get older.
I continue to believe that those of us who are traditional Christian or Jewish believers must continue to support training up our young people in the way they should go, in a society increasingly without behavioral guardrails.
Kate – I don’t disagree. To your point and Paulo’s, young people in the US haven’t really been through hard times.
Why can’t you just solve every problem by doling out government money and accept adults’ every desire on social and family issues? If you haven’t lived through the consequences of those cultural choices, you may not be able to answer. And, if you can’t answer that question, the people who want to turn off the government money spigot or encourage traditional moral behavior with respect to social and family issues are going to look like evil monsters who want to make others suffer.
I think that’s the problem with kids. A heavy round of stagflation might address the first part. I don’t know what will address the second.
Of course, these are exit polls, so the mail-in voters are not assessed.
Exit polls, even more so than other polls, are BS to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Politics itself is not the answer. It is the tail of the dog. What makes it wag is it’s emotional demeanor. Politics is a reflection of the culture. We have utterly FAILED to influence the culture. We fear what others might think of us if we say even the most moderate thing about Trump (and before him, W, and before him, etc. etc. etc.) meanwhile they suffer ZERO embarrassment openly supporting Fetterman, Biden, Kamala, etc. etc. etc. These things are decided 6, 12, 36 months before any election. Expecting some sort of political “science” to show you to the promised land is utter folly.
Bauxite:
“Pure poison”
Otay.
Rent free.
Time to shift targeting to Death Santis?
And furthermore…re Trump…Trump, regardless of what you think of him has shifted the culture. He has been the lightning rod that has illuminated what absolute crap out conservative…”conservative” politicians are. He raises the issues that neither the GOPe nor especially the media want people thinking about. That alone is worth political legions.
WTP, it’s worth a great deal. I honor his accomplishments. But we have to look forward. Who can carry conservative ideas into future electoral victories and better policies? That’s what’s important.
I don’t blame Trump for this result. My problem with Trump is for 2024. He has already started to “bad mouth” the most effective Republican in the country; and it is not on his performance. Just mean spirited invective. As I have said, when DeSantis beats Trump for the nomination, I expect many Trump supporters to sit out the election, and that will affect many other races. Sigh.
I suppose that this election tells us where the country is; unfathomable though it may seem. If the Biden/Schumer/Pelosi party cannot be cast aside now, the future is bleak.
TJ, do you have anything else to add?
“How do you lose with an expanded electorate? Trumpisim.“
Except…two years ago Donald Trump lost and Republicans did better than expected in both the House and Senate.
I wouldn’t say Trump bears no responsibility for last night’s underwhelming performance but blaming him for everything is stupid. O’Dea in Colorado, for example, publicly dissed Trump during the campaign. And it was Mitch McConnell who decreed that Republicans should run on nothing, advocate nothing, propose nothing and just be not-Biden. And, of course, the various shenanigans like how many people in Pennsylvania early voted for Fetterman with no idea how brain damaged he was or the ridiculous disaster in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Most importantly, we’re not really going to be able to get rid of Trump because the next Republican will be treated exactly like Trump. EXACTLY. Because they got away with it the first time.
Mike
MBunge – “Except . . . two years ago Trump lost and Republicans did better than expected in the House and Senate.”
Thank you for making my point for me.
MBunge – Also, they’ve run the same playbook against DeSantis. Remember when he was accused of “literally killing people” during COVID? Or when he was accused of falsifying COVID data by that huckster Rebekah Jones? Or when the DOJ began investigating him over immigrant flights?
I’d say that DeSantis handled it a wee bit better than Trump. Maybe just a little bit better, as in 17 points in Florida better.
Who can carry conservative ideas into future electoral victories and better policies? That’s what’s important.
But again, it is not the politics that matters. It’s the culture. Trump moves the culture. Getting panties in a wad over what Trump may or may not *seriously* do two years from now is missing the point. Trump is going to Trump. As is his right. Focus on the cultural changes that are needed. Stop making everything about him. It’s a distraction. And nothing anyone says is going to influence what he does. Which is how it should be. My feeling at this point is that he is an incredible stalking horse that we would be bloody stupid to carelessly toss aside.
Thank you for making my point for me.
The point >>>>———->
—-
—-
—-
(Your head)
Doesn’t look like we’re voting our way out. Didn’t vote our way in either.
The institutions that deal with elections are dominated by Dems. Didn’t get that way by voting, and it didn’t get that way in a day.
The Dems are not going to all of a sudden start governing effectively after these races are counted and they find they still have their slim majority. They will keep doing what they did only more so. They’ll treat the lack of an overwhelming defeat as a mandate, as they always do.
Effective change will have to be from the bottom up, and from citadels such as Florida, and probably take at least as long as it took to get here.
right tell it to hung cao, whose family caught the last flight out of saigon, who committed many years in the sandbox in grateful service to his country,
those who enabled the wholesale invasion of the country, were not held accountable, honestly how much death and misery are these elois willing to countenance,
WTP – Trump has certainly moved the culture. . . much farther to the progressive left as the voters run away from him and his candidates!
Trump has certainly moved the culture. . . much farther to the progressive left as the voters run away from him and his candidates!
BS. Get your panties out of a wad and think for yourself. He has put the focus on the issues that were considered beyond the pale. He has provided an example to the worthless “don’t go to war with people who buy ink by the barrel” GOP rinos that you can stand up to the media and win. DeSantis was a p***y himself until he saw what Trump was able to accomplish. Many other GOP candidates are now showing backbone. If you push back, there is indeed a risk. But caving in to the media is long-term stupid. Trump has exposed the fake news media for the clowns that they always have been. He changed the culture in doing so. The culture was not going to be changed by wussies like Karl Rove and George Will. He fights. I appreciate any man in the arena who fights over those who fear getting their pants dirty.
Added: Ultimately it is the issues and principles that matter. Individual’s petty character flaws are beside the point. Don’t let other people drag you down into a personality-cult mentality.
Until unlimited mail in ballots are stopped, Republicans will keep losing, Given the Democrats crazy policies, I expect a war or economic collapse, or both, in the next few years. Maybe that will change some minds but I fear what happened to Weimar could repeat.
they did things that were inexplicable, except they would not be held to account, on the lockdowns, on the bipartisan road to kiev, the enabling of the green nude eel, the mutilating of the minds and bodies of children,
Miguel:
Who invaded Ukraine again? Was it actually Roosia or some manifestation of your imagination. Do try to focus.
You know, the elections in 2024 and how to oppose the Brandon junta for the next two years.
Bauxite nails it. Ticket splitting in the Senate races was at historic levels last night, except in Florida. Trump is toxic and there is no denying it. When will Republican leadership begin to speak openly about it? DeSantis is the future.
As I said yesterday, my expectations were modest (GOP House of at least 225 seats and at minimum maintaining a 50/50 balance in the Senate); that still seems possible, even reasonably likely.
My initial takeaways:
1. This is now a center-left country; the reasons are many, but the conclusion is inescapable. We need to recognize and accept it.
2. Yes, Biden is deeply unpopular, but a fair amount of his unpopularity comes from disenchanted progressives angry he hasn’t gone far enough. They still showed up and voted Democrat
3. Neo is correct. Many, many voters will vote for a Democrat no matter how weak, absurd or disgusting the candidate may be. Biden, Fetterman, Hochul, Whitmer and many others are glaring examples.
4. Abortion, abortion, abortion! The results we are seeing are the results that seemed likely in July…just after Dobbs. Back then, I said that decision was terribly timed and would have a large, negative impact for the GOP, particularly among suburban, middle class, professional women (and a fair amount of men). I’m surrounded by people like this in my personal and professional life: it was all they talked about politically from late June until yesterday. Still, I thought the issue had dissipated in the public’s mind over the last few months. Apparently it hadn’t.
5. Trump is finished. I’m finished with him. Of course I’ll vote for him if he’s the nominee in 2024, but he shouldn’t be. His past successes were many, and I appreciate him for what he’s done, but he is now a hindrance to the conservative movement and the GOP. He should exit with grace and dignity.
6. Florida was a great success; it was what we expected for the rest of the country. DeSantis is unquestionably the strongest, most accomplished and successful conservative politician in this country since Ronald Reagan. I still would rather see him stay in Florida and build on his successes there for the next four years. But he is clearly the strongest Presidential hopeful for 2024. By far.
7. Let’s not go down the rabbit hole of fraud. I’m sure there was plenty and I’m sure it materially impacted a few races. But this isn’t 2020.
I still would rather see him stay in Florida and build on his successes there for the next four years. But he is clearly the strongest Presidential hopeful for 2024. — Ackler
I’ve been communicating with a few conservative friends. One mentioned that she heard people (presumably in FL, maybe the DeSantis acceptance speech) chanting “Two more years!” “DeSantis in 2024” I presume is the point.
i’ll chalk it up to fraud, without any other countervailing explanation, when the diesel runs out, so will the fun and games, when the dollar is dethroned as prime currency, likewise,
People in the US make fun of Florida, usually due to any absurd news headline that becomes viral, or because of the state’s inhabitants, but currently it’s the only state that I tend to respect. A stark contrast to the likes of California and NY.
yes california is a rolling fetid dumpsterfire, and new york has no wheels,
I was listening to Rick Grenell on Newsmax, and he thinks, based on the number of votes left to count (400,000) in Arizona and how those ballots are falling for Lake/Masters that Kari Lake has a good chance of winning the governor’s race, and Masters still has a shot at winning the senate race.
In addition, a Republican will likely be the Attorney General in Arizona.
Grenell also said Laxalt will win Nevada.
WTP, you sound a lot like Trump with your diatribe.
Strange that you refer to the man who served with the Seals in Iraq as their legal advisor as a p****; as compared to the man who bragged that he went to a military school. (Admittedly I don’t know how much time DeSantis spent in forward areas, but he served.) Politically DeSantis stood virtually alone through the Pandemic; and has fought the Progressive craziness at every turn.
If you cannot see that Trump has gone off the deep end since the 2020 election, then you need to take a fresh look. I don’t blame him for being angry; but I do blame him for not accepting reality. It is done.
It is possible to appreciate the policies that Trump instituted as President while lamenting that he has gratuitously, and consistently made enemies within the GOP, as well as beyond. With his mean-spirited attacks on DeSantis he has even managed to piss off Conservatives. Despite a core of diehards. there is no way in hell that Trump can win another election. His self-absorption is becoming toxic to many people across the spectrum. The best that he can do for himself, and for the country, is to eat his disappointment, accept an elder statesman role, work to unify and energize the GOP base, and throw his support to the people who have a chance of winning. That could be his revenge. Unfortunately, that is apparently a foreign concept to him.
Was the experience of schooling in 1995 really so different from what it had been in 1987?
Art Deco – the answer to your question is, Yes, education changed in those years. I graduated college in 1987, worked for four years, and came back to Grad School in 1991. Everything had changed. The kids I encountered on campus were already indoctrinated by Political Correctness and Identity Politics. I was liberal then and completely thrown for a loop by the younger kids “Group Think”. Not one of them challenged the Orthodoxies of political correctness. Very few of them thought independently and all submitted to a vocal minority who invariably dominated class discussions.
It was so dispiriting because I was a liberal and wanted to stay a liberal. But group think pushed me away and I began my politically journey to the Right afterward.
The difference I think is that indoctrination started earlier in those kids’ education and followed them into adulthood. I’ve lost quite a few friends since then and it makes me very sad. But I got tired of censoring myself in group discussions and had to leave.
The other point about this election is obviously that polls are now worthless.
Ackler:
I’m in fairly close agreement with you.
Yes, education changed in those years. I graduated college in 1987, worked for four years, and came back to Grad School in 1991. Everything had changed.
I was referring to primary and secondary schooling, primarily.
I was an institutional employee during those years and saw nothing resembling what you report. Again, the young split their votes between the parties about evenly in 2000. The median vintage of those voters would have been the 1976 cohort.
I’m disappointed in the results but not shocked. While I believe that Joe Biden was elected with the help of fraud, it is also true that the election was very close and roughly half the country doesn’t have a problem with a corrupt, mendacious dotard as its leader. People who voted for Biden are capable of quite a bit of idiocy.
I naively thought that Fetterman’s disastrous debate performance would have cost him the election. I was obviously wrong. The same people that have no problem with old Joe have no problem with electing a seriously mentally impaired slob to represent them in the Senate.
I think it is foolish to blame this election debacle on a handful of Trump supported candidates that underperformed. The election was disappointing across the board. The poor showing in the house and several governor’s races cannot be reasonably pinned on Trump.
I would prefer that Trump step aside and endorse DeSantis but that’s not going to happen. Trump’s narcissism is always going to be a problem but he has almost singlehandedly transformed the Republican party from a collection of elitist globalist losers to a party that has broad appeal to a vast number of working class Americans whose concerns have long been ignored. Rejecting the core values of Trumpism — border security, fair trade, and a non-interventionist foreign policy — will alienate millions of new Republicans and doom the party to irrelevance. DeSantis would be smart to endorse Trump when Trump announces his candidacy. Ideally I’d like to see DeSantis as VP running things behind the scenes while Trump does what he does best — trolling the media and his opposition.
Republicans should not “move on” from the stolen election of 2020. This isn’t some minor policy quibble. We can’t have a functioning system when a huge part of the electorate distrusts (and justifiably so) the election process. Any candidate who does not make election integrity a core part of their platform should be opposed.
Despite my disappointment with the election results and my concerns about the fraud inherent in wide-scale mail in voting, I think we are going to see some very hard times in the next two years, which will give the Republicans a great opportunity to win in 2024. We will then have a lot work to do to begin to restore the faith in our government and its institutions.
the problem is this crew, of pirates wants to abolish the filibuster pack the court, and end fossil fuels, thats as bill paxon said in aliens ‘game over man’ there is no end to the damage they can do,
Thanks, Neo.
I will add one other point, which I mentioned a couple weeks ago. While the white working class has shifted significantly to the GOP in the last few election cycles, a significant segment still votes Democrat, often reflexively. These are often (but not always) older voters who remain entrenched in their belief that the Democrats are for ‘the little guy’ and Republicans are for ‘the rich’. No amount of evidence that the Democrats are no longer the party of JFK, Clinton or even Obama (at least what he claimed to be in 2008) will convince them otherwise.
then it’s a recipe for suicide, if objective evidence can’t persuade them,
https://raheemkassam.substack.com/p/blame-trump-for-the-red-trickle-nonsense
murkowski objectively is a destroyer, and mcconnell gifted her 11 million, kelly (i’m convinced is one of the guest foes on law and order) had aereal superiority when it came to blake masters, because he helped tear down the border,
“Ideally I’d like to see DeSantis as VP running things behind the scenes while Trump does what he does best — trolling the media and his opposition.”
No way that works as Trump will never, ever, be president again. He’s too toxic now especially to MotR and independents. I hope he fades away, but I know that won’t happen. The real problem then becomes the usual GOP circular firing squad where the diehard Trumpers refuse to give up and destroy the chances of someone like DeSantis.
A large reason for me to move to FLorida was the changing political environment here. I would love to see DeSantis stay on a governor. However, for the good of the country he needs to run in 2024
physicsguy:
I agree 100% that Trump attacking DeSantis has a huge risk of generating “the usual GOP circular firing squad where the diehard Trumpers refuse to give up and destroy the chances of someone like DeSantis.”
Trump is almost a Shakespearean figure of tragedy. Great accomplishments, great flaws. At the moment his flaws are overwhelming his accomplishments in most people’s eyes. He has a chance to do great damage with this anti-DeSantis business. I see plenty of people on the right who revere Trump jumping onboard.
I’ve written about this anti-DeSantis stuff before, back it when began on some blogs a couple of months ago, here and here.
Once again, as in 2020, Washington has voted Democrat on the federal and most statewide races. It is confounding. Inflation and shortages are affecting all voters. Crime is out of control in the larger cities (all Democrat run). Businesses cannot find workers. Illegals are moving into our rural (farm country) communities. Homelesssness and addiction continue to rise. Major industries (Boeing, Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Paccar, etc.) are suffering and will soon begin to shrink. (There’s a Ded induced recession beginning.) How does this happen? Are voters really that dense? Or, if you’re conspiracy minded, is the vote count rigged?
Yet, the voters have voted for the status quo. What are they thinking? IMO, they’re not thinking. They don’t connect the problems we have with the politicians that are in office. Washington state is now a one parity state like California. When we moved here 29 years ago, it was liberal, but sensible. Now the state has livable areas, but Tacoma, Seattle, Billingham, and even Bellevue (used to be staunchly GOP) are on the Democrat track to perdition. If I wasn’t so old, I would consider relocating. Too late now.
I donated to and volunteered for Tiffany Smiley. Shed had a good message, a charismatic personality, and an inspiring life history. She campaigned tirelessly all over the state. Yet, the voters chose, the humorless, low energy, Democrat party apparatchik over this energetic, uplifting younger woman with good ideas and conservative values.
Like Biden, Murray couldn’t attract a crowd, nor did she try to campaign much except for smear ads on TV. She lost both debates with Smiley, and it made no difference.
From now on, I am going to give my small dentations too GOP candidates in swing states where they have a chance. No more money to Washington state GOP candidates – it’s a waste of time and money. The state is now a one-party state.
Americans are unhappy with the state of the country and don’t want Biden to run for re-election. So they went out and made sure nothing will change and almost guaranteed that Biden will run in 2024.
To paraphrase Mencken, democracy is people getting what they want and getting it good and hard.
By the way, if the economy crashes in the next two years, Florida is not going to be immune to that. How appealing will DeSantis be then?
Mike
MBunge:
It will depend on how DeSantis handles it. For example, Florida was hardly immune to COVID; au contraire. But people didn’t blame DeSantis because they liked the way he handled it compared to most of the other states. A terrible economy might be analogous in that he wouldn’t be blamed for the problem but he might get credit for the way he navigates it compared to other governors of other states.
I would love to see DeSantis run in 2024 but if this involves a confrontation with Trump, it will split the party. I think a lot of people don’t appreciate how popular Trump is to a large section of the country and how loyal they are to him. It could be that things will be so bad in 2024 that DeSantis could survive this. But there are a lot of people who couldn’t care less about the mean things Trump says.
“It will depend on how DeSantis handles it.”
Neo, they invented a conspiracy with Russia to beat Trump. They denied him credit for a booming stock market and record-low unemployment. They ignored him achieving the greatest advance in Middle East Peace in two generations.
I’m not saying DeSantis can’t overcome it. I’m not saying he’ll handle it worse than Trump. But he wouldn’t change the dynamic.
Mike
MBunge:
Of course it won’t change the dynamic. I never indicated it would.
DeSantis was excoriated over his COVID policy and plenty of other things, quite viciously. He handled it well and it didn’t hurt him. That could be the case if there are worse economic woes to come, as I explained.
“DeSantis was excoriated over his COVID policy and plenty of other things, quite viciously.”
DeSantis got about 1/50th of the abuse Trump received on a good day and for a relatively short amount of time.
The only point I want to make about Trump and DeSantis is that Trump has already been through the worst of it and we KNOW how he responds. They’ve barely even started with DeSantis and we don’t really know how he’ll hold up when he’s targeted every day by every news source for over a year.
Mike
WTP, you sound a lot like Trump with your diatribe.
Strange that you refer to the man who served with the Seals in Iraq as their legal advisor as a p****; as compared to the man who bragged that he went to a military school.
Yeah. Didn’t bother with the rest of your NeverTrump-style diatribe. But…but…but bone spurrs!!!11! The derangement syndrome runs deep. I like DeSantis …a lot…but gimme a break with the “served in Iraq with the Seals”. He was a JAG officer. Like Beau Biden except he didn’t die there. DeSantis nearly lost to a pathetic drug addict gay prostitute client. While he was a fairly strong Trump supporter he only found his footing pushing hard after covid. He closed beaches needlessly, however he did see through the BS…maybe even before Trump, I think, though from a far less hard pressure perspective. He definitely learned and I’ll cop to being a bit over the top with p****y but it was Trump’s inspiration that gave him backbone.
Again, I am not in any way saying Trump is a superior candidate *at this point* to DeSantis. I am saying that this obsession with Trump, the fear mongering, blaming him for things that happen in an election he wasn’t even in is both extremely counterproductive and borderline insane. At this point he’s an asset to be used. He accomplished a hell of a lot that the NaverTrump crowd tried to do for decades and FAILED time and time again to do. Blaming him for endorsing people, winners or losers, is just plain stupid. Don’t be a tool for the left. The man knows how to push their buttons and expose their lies and even criminal behavior.
Trump’s narcissism is always going to be a problem but he has almost singlehandedly transformed the Republican party from a collection of elitist globalist losers to a party that has broad appeal to a vast number of working class Americans whose concerns have long been ignored. Rejecting the core values of Trumpism — border security, fair trade, and a non-interventionist foreign policy — will alienate millions of new Republicans and doom the party to irrelevance.
This.
Did the suburban woman vote materialize?
Trump was on the ballot yesterday. Abortion was on the ballot yesterday.
The only ad I saw run by Patty Murray in Wa. was a picture of Smiley with Trump, with the message if you vote for Smiley you’re voting to ban abortions. Now, I live in a deep red portion of the state, so she might have run other ads in the deep blue portions, but did it work? Smiley didn’t come close to the polling.
I’m guessing it had an effect here and elsewhere in the country.
When I open a tab in my browser, a msn page opened with stories from various sources. Everyday, Trump would be the focus of a significant portion– with a very negative story. It’s corrosive effect over time probably did make a difference.
These two issues may have made a difference of a few percent– enough to affect races around the country.
Projecting to 2024, either Trump or DeSantis will still have a leviathan bureaucracy working 24/7 to protect their turf.
}}} In other words, I believe the country is fairly evenly divided and in order for the GOP to dominate an election, a significant number of Democrat voters must change their minds. That’s not happening in sufficient numbers at all, except in a state such as Florida.
The problem with this analysis, Neo, is that it assumes an actual 50/50 split in Dems vs. GOP, when it’s really 33/33/33 — Dems, GOP, and “will vote either way”.
That last category should have STRONGLY swung — even if only for a single election to repudiate the Dems’s insane policies — and yet it apparently did not.
This says that literally half the nation has gone completely insane… or we really truly do have Official Banana Republic Grade® elections.
MBunge:
I doubt you were paying much attention to the abuse DeSantis got if you can say that. It was a LOT more than that, and it was very very vicious.
what struck me in the go around through fox and some newsmax, is how totally oblivious they were to the consequences, tucker and laura have some conviction about what needs to be done, hannity is like some bad grammaphone, gutfeld had the right degree of absurd, but the anger is probably off the charts today,
because this is a ‘travesty of a mockery of sham’ for what we would consider a functioning democracy, well what we thought possible, the criminal actions of cuomo and whitmer and co, should have been made accountable,
@MBunge
“Mike,”
You make good points, but I find it ironic that you do not seem to thread the needle that this stuff has been going on for a long time, and that it has affected many people, including you.
Such as when during the Roundup when I expressed my post-mortem on the Bushes by talking about the left’s Big Lies about the War on Terror such as Saddam’s connections to Al Qaeda and possession of WMDs, and you nakedly denied both by assertion, and indeed were shocked since “these things are not really in dispute anymore.”
So I ripped into you with counter-evidence.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/11/04/roundup-66/#comment-2651486
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/11/04/roundup-66/#comment-2651489
But I think this ties in to what Neo says about Propaganda Working. It has the possibility to make that which is false and even quite nakedly false into something that is not in dispute. You correctly identify this with Trump and DeSantis, in large part because you support Trump and DeSantis. As do I. But you not only do not support the Bushes (as I no longer do) but apparently believe they were outright lying about basics like “Is the Army of Muhammad an Al Qaeda front group?” and “What are the legal classifications of those artillery shells with mustard gas heads?”
This is especially jarring for me both because I was born in California and so was inundated by it, and also because I am a major gamer who enjoyed going to the movies. And while the movies were consistently left wing and Prog, Games were significantly less so but they still regularly popped up. Whether it was among games that were notably left wing (Such as Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines) or those that were more or less apolitical (such as the Ace Combat series) I saw allusions to this “truth” pop up everywhere. Propaganda Works, and it is insidious because once it reaches a certain point it is like a drowning man trying to reach for air in the Marianas Trench.
The reality is that the left does not really care about the vast gulf between the Bushes and Trump; they care about them being The Enemy and Opponents for the executive power. Which is why they will omnivorously smear their enemies and concoct Big Lies. There’s been an ugly, conspiratorial undercurrent to the Democrat Party since at least the William Jennings Bryan years, and they’ve happily been smearing their opponents as Nazis since at least 1944, if not earlier, in spite of the Republicans in those elections both being not so different from the Roosevelt status quo but on average being more anti-Nazi.
We fail to correct this at our peril, regardless of how much we like or hate the given person. Because if they can do it to Trump or Dubya, they can and will do it to you.
“I doubt you were paying much attention to the abuse DeSantis got if you can say that. It was a LOT more than that, and it was very very vicious.”
Neo, go count up how many articles appeared in the NYT about DeSantis. Then go count up how many articles appeared on Trump. Go check how many minutes DeSantis got on the evening news or cable networks. Then check how many minutes Trump got.
The suggestion DeSantis has gotten anything even remotely close to the treatment Trump received is silly.
Mike
Turtler.
My ass remains unkicked. On the subject of Iraq, EVEN THE EVIDENCE YOU QUOTE DOES NOT SAY THERE WAS ANY SORT OF ACTUAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SADDAM AND AL QAEDA. NOR DOES IT SAY THERE WAS AN ACTIVE WMD PROGRAM IN IRAQ BEFORE THE WAR.
The problem is that people like you demand to be talked to like you are babies, not adults capable of understanding how the world works. For example, I’m sure Saddam wanted to be well-informed about Al Qaeda and what it was doing. There may have even been times when he considered or attempted to utilize Al Qaeda as a weapon against his enemies. But I’ll bet you that you can’t find any evidence that Iraq supported Al Qaeda as much or in the same way the United States supported/propped up a host of horrific people during the Cold War.
Mike
Bunge being a Bunge.
All caps doesn’t make it so, sonny.
A bit late to the ball, princess.
Oh, the horrors of history. Things from the olden days when everybody was stupid.
The Black Knight Bunge suffers a flesh wound, kicks without legs, and strikes without arms. Ever undaunted, never defeated, just ask him.
@MBunge
And this is where I talk about missing the point.
Largely agreed, though this ties back into my point. Trump was flogged both because he was viewed as particularly “Un PC” and unhelpful, but also because he was simply in the top spot.
Then prove it.
Assertions without evidence are meaningless. Provide evidence I cannot tear apart in five minutes using captured and translated Baathist Party documents.
And no, the Intel Committee’s politicized blatherings do not fit the bill, as I pointed with many of the torturous and counter-logical leaps they made in an attempt to try and pretend that the old WMD dug up in Saddam’s realms were somehow not WMD, and that he did not there.
OOOH, ALL CAPS. BECAUSE THAT TOTALLY MAKES YOU LOOK SANE AND RESPECTABLE!!! BUT I CAN DO THAT TOO!
HELL, I CAN EVEN DO IT IN BOLD. SO LET’S GO FROM THERE>
FIRSTLY: YES, THE SOURCES I LINKED DO SHOW THAT THERE WAS WMD IN IRAQ, UNLESS YOU ARE INCOMPETENT ENOUGH TO CLAIM THAT MUSTARD GAS FILLED ARTILLERY SHELLS ARE NOT WMD, WHICH IS LAUGHABLE. THE QUOTES I MADE DID NOT CENTER AROUND THEM BECAUSE I PRIMARILY EXCERPTED FROM THE IRAQI DOCUMENTS SERIES ABOUT TERRORISM, BUT WE BOTH SHOULD KNOW WHAT SOMEONE USING A MUSTARD GAS FILLED ARTILLERY SHELL WOULD BE CHARGED UNDER.
SECONDLY: DEFINE “ACTUAL RELATIONSHIP” AND WHY I SHOULD CARE ABOUT SAID DEFINITION.
THE SOURCES I QUOTED UNDERLINED THAT SADDAM KEPT OPEN DIPLOMATIC CHANNELS TO AL QAEDA AND THE AL QAEDA ECOSYSTEM, AND THAT HE GAVE FUNDING, INTELLIGENCE, AND SHELTER TO AGENTS AND CELLS HE KNEW WERE LOYAL TO OSAMA BIN LADEN. INDEED, THE WIDER SOURCES (WHICH I LINKED) SHOW THAT THIS AID INTENSIFIED AFTER 9/11.
Navel gazing about specific definitions of an “actual relationship” are not only utterly besides the point, but are actively counterproductive in most cases. The evidence shows Saddam had an uneasy but productive alliance with Bin Laden and the AQ Ecosystem, well below a lot of the pre-war claims but absolutely different from the claim there was none.
Most of which got swept under the table because of various politicized hacks and the MSM, who had no reason to walk the neophyte through the challenging-to-experts relations between AQ, the Army of Muhammad, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and the other front groups, vassal groups, and the like that characterize modern terrorism when doing so would actively hurt their narrative.
There are advantages to being talked about to like babies.
There’s a reason why most American based MSM outlets began writing at a grade school level. Because they recognized that is a reading level most literate people have, and that it makes their message (true or false) easy to explain.
You wanna know who doesn’t write at the level of “babies”?
The Institute for Defense Analyses and its Iraqi Perspectives Project.
Which features INCREDIBLY dense, leaden text talking about documents in a foreign language, complicated subjects like foreign relations, many complicated organizations (often going under different names), different people, and footnotes aplenty. To read it is to understand why its findings were never widely known anywhere, let alone in the Western Public.
But they’re important because they drive a stake through the heart of the idea that Saddam had no connections to Al Qaeda, and should drive a stake through the idea that he had “no direct connection” to it, if you actually understand what the Army of Muhammad was.
If the extent of his connections were that, we wouldn’t be talking and the Iraqi Perspectives Project -as well as others- would be several volumes shorter.
But as we can see, it was not limited to that.
You lost that bet before you ever posted it, even setting aside the deliberately wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed, and vague definitions of “supported… in the same way the United States supported/propped up…”
And later, in excerpts from translated Iraqi Government document summarizing its alliances..
And it goes on.
I already talked about Abu Sayyaf and its vassal relationship to AQ and alliance with Saddam’s Iraq. I could go on for quite a while. But they handily show that Saddam had as close a relationship as the US did to most of the “host of horrific people” you could cite, and a closer than several (for instance, the US kept at arm’s length from most Afghan Mujahadeen than Saddam’s Iraq did from Abu Sayyaf).
In any case, it handily destroys the idea that there was no alliance between Saddam’s Iraq and Al Qaeda, albeit an opportunistic and on-and-off one. But there’s a reason why funds seized from Saddam’s Iraq are still going to 9/11 victims. Which if your claims were true would be a miscarriage of justice (one of several unfortunately).
But nobody likes to admit they’ve been duped, and apparently you would rather lie to my friends the EOD veterans about the legal status of the things they dug up and destroyed at risk of life and limb than admit that maybe you condemned Bush too much.
That’s as futile as it is disgusting. But it’s also Self-Defeating, in much the same way the reliance on the “direct connection” is in the MSM narrative.
Propaganda works, and this is one key example. And it’s going to keep working until and unless we are willing to confront it root and branch.
Turtler – thanks for good reminders, esp. of MSM lies against Bush on Iraq.