If you’re wondering how it could be that Fetterman won…
…I’ll recycle the relevant portion of a post I wrote back in early October.
Commenter “huxley” points out the strangeness of John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for the Senate from Pennsylvania, and asks a question:
Then there’s this Fetterman character running for the US Senate in Pennsylvania who looks and dresses like a tattooed reboot of Lex Luthor, Superman’s arch-nemesis in DC Comics.
Fetterman has had a stroke, which seems to have left him with a large mysterious lump on his neck (usually concealed by his hoodie) and damaged his brain. When asked how he was doing in an interview, he responded bizarrely..
Yet Fetterman has been leading in the polls over his Republican opponent. The race has tightened, but this Fetterman could shortly become a new member of the US Senate.
How does this happen?
There’s probably a solid core of Pennsylvania voters – perhaps a quarter or a third, although that’s just a guess – who are hard leftists and cultural warriors who love both Fetterman’s look and his politics.
Then we have the sizable portion of the electorate who are what used to be called “yellow dog Democrats,” people who would vote for a yellow dog if it had the label “Democrat” next to it.
We also have low information voters who are not paying attention, and some of them are reliable Democrat voters as well. In addition, Fetterman has taken a leaf out of the Joe Biden campaign book in 2020, and to a certain extent has kept a rather low profile with the help of an enabling MSM. For example, there has been no debate [at the time I wrote the post], and Fetterman has only agreed to one debate (as opposed the usual two in Pennsylvania) late in the game (October 25, after considerable early voting will have occurred) with special accommodations:
He has done just a handful of media interviews and no press conferences since the stroke and has used closed-captioning in video interviews with reporters.
Lastly, Fetterman’s opponent Dr. Oz isn’t a traditional conservative and many people on the right aren’t enthusiastic about him.
I will add today – now that Fetterman has won – that the closeness of the race indicates to me that, had the debate occurred before any early voting had taken place, Oz might indeed have been the victor instead. That’s of course why the Fetterman forces put the debate off as long as possible and certainly till after a lot of people had already voted.
Lastly I’ll add something from a comment by “Univ of Saigon 68” in that earlier thread:
There’s also the fact that Shapiro, running for governor, will almost certainly win, and since most people vote straight ticket, he will bring Fetterman with him.
There was probably some of that.
Also, I believe that a significant number of Fetterman’s voters realized that if he really is too disabled to perform as senator and needs to quit, another Democrat will be appointed by their Democrat governor. So no biggee. They vote for the party, not the man. I said as much in this post from about two weeks ago:
I have little doubt that many many Democrats literally do not care whether Fetterman is competent or not. The only thing that matters is whether he’s able to say “yeah” or “nay” as the party dictates. He also can be replaced, and the gubernatorial Democratic candidate Shapiro is significantly ahead in the polls, and therefore probably would get to name Fetterman’s replacement, who would therefore be a Democrat. So voting for Fetterman makes perfect sense if a person’s goal is to try to preserve the Democrat majority in the Senate.
Was there cheating in this race? Perhaps. But if so, I don’t think that was a big factor, because I can think of plenty of reasons Fetterman would have won without it. All I have to do is think of the Democrats I know and imagine them in Pennsylvania. I am virtually certain they would have voted for Fetterman, for the party not the man, knowing he could be replaced by another Democrat if needed later. They would never vote for a Republican, period, because it is deeply deeply ingrained in their hearts and minds that Republicans are evil bigoted fascists, present company perhaps excepted. The abortion issue is a factor, too, but they would have voted Democrat even without it.
Excellent points, Neo.
By the way, I was checking on something that I thought I remembered from the primary: in the governor’s race the Shapiro campaign donated to Doug Mastriano big time and probably put him over the top. Mastriano joked that he should send Shapiro a thank-you note, but apparently he failed to realize the reason for the millions of dollars because he ran a very poor campaign.
Or maybe he did that on purpose. Huh. Who knows? All I know is that in the primary I did not vote for either of the Republican candidates who won the primary.
The truly disturbing fact about both Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman is that they were part of the Wolf administration, which made Pennsylvania one of only five states in which infectious Covid cases were sent into nursing homes, causing thousands of deaths. I will never forget this, but apparently most Pennsylvanians are fine with it. It is a sobering thought.
Fetterman succeeds Pat Toomey (moderate Republican).
Trump pushed a TV candidate. No Emmy for this one
There is one relieving consideration (Not a blessing in disguise, as Churchill’s wife said to him after the 1945 election). I think the economy is going to crash in the next two years, more than a simple recession, which has begun several months ago. I sort of dreaded that the Republicans would be blamed since it got really bad after the election. Now, it will be clear whose policies are responsible. New England will freeze, crime will increase, inflation will climb steeply and the supply chain will collapse. Maybe 2024 will be the red wave.
It is truly inconceivable that any even moderately intelligent and rational person might have chosen the unspeakably disastrous Fetterman (not that Oz was an inspiring candidate), but one must take into account the unfortunate fact that voters also opted (in gubernatorial races) for Newsom in CA, Whitmer in MI, Pritzker in IL, and Hochul in NY, all of whom are utterly incompetent and destructive (the first two being at least somewhat telegenic, which no-one would claim of the other two). One can only conclude that far too many citizens are far too easily propagandized by the deceptive and partisan media into mindless and irrational choices. Brain-washing really does work.
Let’s also not forget that, beyond covering up his brain damage, the media allowed Fetterman to dress, talk, and act in a way that would have gotten any Republican candidate crucified every day in the press.
Mike
Absolutely on point, Neo. All of it. What we are seeing with increasing frequency is a feature not a bug of leftism: individual candidates are of little consequence, and elections are largely for show. Indeed, it’s better to have an elected official of limited capacity, as he will be more subservient to the demands of the party* leadership. Biden is the clearest example of this phenomenon, Fetterman now is another. I’ll think we will see many more in the near future; not necessary cognitively impaired like those two, but utterly vacuous in their public persona.
*By ‘party’ I don’t simply mean the Democrat Party leadership, but the broader leftist establishment (Administrative state-Academia-MSM Complex)
j e:
I have said over and over that propaganda works. I see evidence of it almost constantly in the people I know. It is a huge factor in all elections, now that the MSM has become a propaganda arm of the Democrats.
Mike K: “New England will freeze, crime will increase, inflation will climb steeply and the supply chain will collapse. Maybe 2024 will be the red wave.”
If all that happens how can you even believe that there will be a 2024 election?? Or even a country at that point?
@Mike K:New England will freeze, crime will increase, inflation will climb steeply and the supply chain will collapse. Maybe 2024 will be the red wave.
An unscrupulous one-party government will have no trouble at all pinning the blame on the kulaks and wreckers in a powerless minority. Done so often by so many that this isn’t Godwin’s law either.
The phrase will be “Republican obstructionism”.
gene hackman nearly stole it as lex, kevin spacey didn’t work because hes not really acting he’s a sociopath,
they took the blue print of the half dozen rotten boroughs, and just embiggened it,
Time to repeal the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prior to, had US Senators chosen by the state legislatures. This amendment was ratified in 1913.
US Senate races today draw in massive amounts of $$$$$ from OUT OF STATE parties and donors; groups that have no interest at all in the citizens of the state or in the internal affairs in that state.
In effect, today’s US Senate races are mini-national elections .
US Senators realize that their bread is buttered by out of state, big money interests and if they wish to receive their share of campaign $$$ they had better suck up to whatever national organization will pony up the bucks. The interests of their state’s citizens is secondary; just provide the requisite lip service to the state’s citizens to make it appear the needs of the state’s citizens are paramount.
Anyway, here is an interesting take on these elections from Sara Hoyt:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/11/09/cancer/
Not sure what to make of her comments, but it is rather interesting that it appears to be the same voting districts that always have voting “problems.”
the consequence
https://twitter.com/Keggs719/status/1590301523111997440
Neo says, “I have said over and over that propaganda works. I see evidence of it almost constantly in the people I know. It is a huge factor in all elections, now that the MSM has become a propaganda arm of the Democrats.”
An additional dimension of the problem with the MSM is what a new post in Quillette calls “the morphing of news into entertainment” or “how deeply triviality—for that is what it is—has integrated with substance within single forums and on single screens [or] the dominance of news by stories from the cultural industries, with constant features on summer blockbusters, celebrity brouhahas, and endless analyses of the ‘meaning’ of a popular song or Netflix series. . . .The problem here is that the principles of justice, accountable government, and democratic representation which news is supposed to uphold have become measured by technologies and symbols that did not exist when the principles were originally conceived.”
The author–a Canadian–outlines the evolution of the current MSM regime and defines it as “cacophonocracy”: “rule by discord”:
Cacophonocracy is not a system of government, obviously, but it’s what happens when the possibility of broad consensus among the governed deteriorates to unmanageable extremes. Cacophonocracy is the sheer volume of I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I exchanges that have displaced the imperfect but orderly dialogues between people and their institutions we knew in generations past. It’s manifest in the ongoing political clashes around objectivity and neutral authority, whereby what’s persuasive rhetoric to you may be dangerous disinformation to me, and one person’s fair and balanced is another’s partisan propaganda. It’s manifest in the prominence of advocacy or commentary over beat journalism, with multiple daily deconstructions of what pundit X said on talk show Y about candidate Z’s Instagram post.
https://quillette.com/2022/11/07/cacophonocracy/
I’ve noticed the peculiar mix of obsession with celebrities, fashion, and other superficial concerns with what used to be mainstream news for some time now. Endless stories about Tom Brady’s divorce, the ongoing Harry-and-Meghan road show, Madonna, the Kardashians, and whatnot appear on the same “news” page as serious matters. Cacophonocracy helps to explain why political propaganda works as well as it does in the current situation: people whose attention is constantly distracted by “infotainment” make poorly informed and unreflective voters.
I sure that the MSM propaganda machine is certainly a big factor in many of these races where the Democrat won despite many voters expressing unhappieness with the current state and direction of the country. I think social media plays a role somewhat as well, and perhaps Elon Musk can help correct some of that evil, but who knows?
yes the daily mail, which is good on some political aspects is exhibit a, tmz is another, tiktok is a weapon that the chinese state has aimed at us,
a virus operates by preventing the proper functions, of an organism, progs operate mostly the same way, through media academia et al, large swath of the medical scientific establishment does as well, the narrative of the sky dragon, see climate change that has led some portion of gen x as well as z to a suicidal path,
John Tyler:
That amendment will never be repealed, IMHO. Not enough support for that.
If it was just a case of Pennsylvania voters getting it “gooder and harder” then I would shrug and say they deserve it. But they have foisted their authoritarian goals upon the rest of us and that makes my blood boil.
I agree with John Tyler, even if Neo is correct about the likelihood of a change. Who is a senator supposed to represent? The citizens of that state? Yes, but only indirectly. A senator is supposed to represent the state’s legislature and defend and support their authorities.
I saw Fetterman’s acceptance speech. The one thing that Fetterman said that got his crowd cheering was his pledge to defend a woman’s reproductive rights.
Fetterman like Sundowner mostly hid away letting the Democrats Propaganda Ministry do his punching for him. The powers that be mailed 250,000 unsolicited ballots out to be scooped up by the faithful.
He is a Marxist, getting criminals out of jail, will vote against any energy he can. And voting is all he can do, nothing else.
Doubt he will make a few months before being replaced by Shapiro.
Another O-Dark Hundred vote dump and the GOP does nothing. I guess that they struck their deal before the election.
The only thing that matters is whether he’s able to say “yeah” or “nay” as the party dictates.
A demonstration of what “faction” means & why religion was excluded as test for public office. Almost worked. For a while.
miguel cervantes,
Meghan Maureen’s tweet to those who voted democrat says it all:
“You just told the people who destroyed your kids lives and your businesses and acted like dictators for over 2 years that it’s ok. You gave them permission to do it again. And they will.”
Ballot stuffing is a regular feature of Allegheny county elections. It’s usually done in the primary, because the predominance of the D party. The party bosses control the stuffing machine, so that whoever they want wins the primary, then the straight ticket voters put them into office. Lower turnout in the primaries makes the job easier, but the tools and the people to do it are available in a tight general.
I bailed out of W.PA a long time ago, but I still have family members there (a couple of which have held local elective office), but the real source of my certainty is personal observation. My parents were part of the D machine, and I heard specific plans to add “votes”. I can’t believe it’s changed.
It doesn’t say anything complementary about Democrat voters, that they vote in a hive mind, and refuse to think for themselves.
I suppose it’s a lot easier to live that way. Thinking requires effort.
I think many folks underestimate the absolute hatred of Trump and all he touches. Oz was an outlier; a newb, a guy known from TeeVee from the Oprah show, AND endorsed by the Orange Demon? He would have lost to a dead dog by a higher margin.
If Fetterneck can win with an aborted fetus implanted in his neck, maybe a pro-life candidate should try doing the same with a living one and carry it to term. Gen Z voters love that bizarre stuff.
It’s worth a try.
Fetter-thing made a Senate seat Blue. Chucky calls the shots. Fetter-thing may not have to speak or comprehand for his sngire 6 year term. He is the perfect candidate. The less he says, the better,
Ote that when Fetter-thing was selected, the GOP stood around playing “pocket pool”. they must have got their cut early. Doesn’t say much for the Pennsylvania GOP. They will accept anything the Democrats shove forwaed,
.The pay must be good.
I don’t buy it for a minute! Because the 2020 Election was never really post-mortemed and the guilty punished, 2022 was essentially the same as 2020. Repeating the same policy and procedure and allowing democrats and big companies to steal elections but expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.
Let’s also not forget that, beyond covering up his brain damage, the media allowed Fetterman to dress, talk, and act in a way that would have gotten any Republican candidate crucified every day in the press.
Yes. At this point, though, it taps into a very deep prejudice in the electorate. I haven’t voted for a Democrat in years, but if it were a contest between a Democratic slob and a very polished, too professional Republican, I might feel emotionally closer to the slob, because for years the media has been turning Democrats’ vices into virtues and Republicans’ virtues into vices. There’s a feeling of sympathy for guys who may be crooked or incompetent or stupid, but seem to be regular guys, fighting the system and putting it over on The Man. I wouldn’t vote for him, but there’s a tug there, and it’s very strong with some people.