Tunning red states blue
This is how it’s going in Kansas:
The left believes that mass voter registration campaigns increase election turnout and that high turnout leads to Democratic victories. The trick is getting millions of disengaged eligible voters on the voter rolls in key states, a feat requiring an army of activists and an ocean of money. The left has both. The top 24 leftist voter registration nonprofits spent an estimated $434 million in 2020 alone, much of which came from foundations of “progressive” mega donors sharing the last name “foundation.”
Between July and August 2021, the Kansas Health Foundation pumped $2.9 million into its voter engagement campaign. Recipients were required to report on which “populations” with “health disparities” they planned to engage and how they would incorporate “advocacy and/or grassroots organizing to affect [sic] change on health equity.”…
At the top of the list is the Kansas Appleseed Center, which uses nutrition and public health as cover to push voter turnout campaigns and election “reforms.” The group demands expanded use of absentee ballots and drop boxes to collect them, and it rails against allegations of election fraud.
The left has money, the left has dedicated workers, and the left is patient. This particular strategy is brilliant and completely legal. A state such as Kansas is large geographically, but its population is relatively small. In 2020, for example, the total presidential vote there was 1,341,729.
Will this sort of effort succeed in a red state like Kansas? I don’t know. But I do know that the right had better have some sort of plan to counter it and/or to match it.
It works. Brain washing the youngsters in school works pretty good also. In California, and elsewhere, occasional attempts to give sixteen-year-old kids voting rights. What could go wrong?
Tunnin’, pshaw! Barrel up yer fists redstaters and puncheon ’em blue rundlets in ‘eir hogshead: give ’em a tierce butt kickin’. Cooperly speakin’, of course.
Just like China, actually.
“On Point: Weaponizing Everything, Including Lawyers and Balloons: China’s 1999 Manual for Defeating America”
https://strategypage.com/on_point/2023022121641.aspx
H/T Instapundit.
Opening grafs:
“During its North American aerial odyssey, The Big Chinese Balloon passed within intel-gathering distance of ICBM silo fields, strategic bomber bases, key global logistics hubs (Charleston for example) and major Army and USAF headquarters.
‘ The balloon wasn’t just blowing in the wind. Its calculated military itinerary tells reasonable Americans and Canadians…that the balloon was spying on critical North American defense installations.
‘ Which means it had a War Mission. Note I did not write “pre-War”; I wrote “War.”
‘ I’ll explain why in a moment, but first due praise for The Wall Street Journal’s February 20 article titled: “China’s Newest Weapon to Nab Western Technology — Its Courts.”…’
A most unsurprising similarity…since BOTH essentially have the same result in mind.
They don’t. At least not on par with what’s already on the ground. The Right is at least a generation behind on tech, and two generations behind on organization. And the money isn’t even close.
The Right did an excellent job with grassroots pushes around the country to start working their way from the bottom up with school boards, but the Left is already redirecting resources to counter it.
Well, let a hundred New Palestine’s bloom…and maybe some of those voters will wake up.
Wait! How many crises is “Biden” up to so far?
If it’s anything like it is here in Idaho, they’ve got Democrat politicians and activists pissing and moaning about how they’re in the minority and how marginalized they are. Those Republican meanies won’t make nice with them*. On and on and on.
Until one day they gain the majority, and they no longer care about who’s marginalized, only about keeping keeping their boot on the neck of their Republican adversaries.
* “Republican meanies” in this case means the governor, both senators, and both congressman. A bunch of squishes if there ever were, not to mention horrible on immigration.
The Republican establishment in most states never thinks beyond the next election cycle, is terrified of offending corporate donors (their future employers) and suburban soccer moms, and feels no urgency about stopping Democratic efforts to “transform” the country, which they foolishly imagine to be the same country we had in 1994, albeit with a different mix of last names. All the GOP establishment wants to talk about is tax cuts, reducing business regulation and being good “managers,” and to run never ending highlight films of the long-irrelevant Ronald Reagan.
Meanwhile, the anti-establishment Republicans come across like kooky performance artists (which they almost always are), have no idea how to use power once they get it (see Trump, Donald), make no effort to persuade people who don’t already agree with them, and usually turn off enough marginal Republican and independent voters to ensure defeat.
It worked pretty well on the constitutional change. They lied a lot about what the meaning of the proposed amendment was, it was basically a fix to the courts misruling that purports to find a right to abortion in the Kansas constitution.
They made wild claims about what it would have made permanent law where it would have just put it in the realm of normal lawmaking.
Since they have won that I don’t know that they will make a lot more headway but it is always concerning.
Once a state goes to mail in ballots and drop boxes it’s over for that state. They become NJ or California where Democrats seem to win no matter how badly they do.
Of course they lie thry are the party of death and depravity against science honest history in a hundred othet elements
I still think mass voter registration, even fraudulent with mail only, motor voter by the state licensing, and last minute registration opens a big voter percentage, all of a sudden voter turnout isn’t going to become %92 like it does in some places. The difference of real people and that potential gets made up in fraud mail voting.
Mail voting has to be the worse possible way as the tried to show I Arizona no one is checking those scribbles to a real signature.
Remember JK Galbraith and The Affluent Society (1958)? His idea was that America in the 1950s created private wealth, and public squalor, starving the public sector of funds. What we’ve seen since then is that affluence allows and encourages massive transfers of wealth to government, ostensibly to meet public needs, but actually, because people who want something from government have influence over what government does. The roads and bridges don’t get repaired, but hosts of diversity coordinators get hired.
Get a rich enough society and large populations who aren’t contributing to actual production and red states turn blue. What saved capitalism in the 20th century was the growth of the middle classes, but now, a large, anxious middle class finds itself turning more and more to government and to non-profits to support itself, and this means more votes for bigger government.
There’s not much evidence to support the proposition that disaffected, apolitical citizens vote Democratic if you get them to the polls. Lots of them are single, white, working class males, who actually skew very Republican.
I’d be curious if neo knows a single non-voter who would vote Democratic if they did vote.
There’s not much evidence to support the proposition that disaffected, apolitical citizens vote Democratic if you get them to the polls. Lots of them are single, white, working class males, who actually skew very Republican. (Disaffected single non-white working class males aren’t all that Democratic-leaning either.)
I’d be curious if neo knows a single non-voter who would vote Democratic if they did vote.
There is ZERO evidence that most of those non-voters the Democrats are trying to get in Kansas (or elsewhere) are Democrats, liberals, leftists, what have you. But if the GOP continues to stupidly refuse to do ANYTHING about either the abuses of absentee balloting or fighting fire with fire, only bad things can happen.
Republicans need to stop thinking of themselves as defenders of the moneyed few against the Democratic horde and realize the moneyed few are voting for and funding Democrats while the horde is crying out for someone to actually represent them.
Mike
Galbraith was one of schwabs mentors one of the creators of this insane beast we are slouching toward
y81:
The people I know personally all vote.
However, historically speaking, most of these registration drives are geared to Democrat demographic groups, such as black people in inner cities and the youngest voters, both of them groups that skew very blue.
Robert Sendler:
Most states that have mostly mail-in ballots and drop boxes are already blue. One exception, however, is Utah. See this. See also this.
“have no idea how to use power once they get it (see Trump, Donald)”
Why has this retroactive rewriting of Trump’s Presidency become so common? Yes, he had his weaknesses and mistakes but just look at what he accomplished on illegal immigration with the entire Democratic Party, the leadership and much of the Republican Party, the legacy media, and a good chunk of conservative media utterly opposed to him?
Whether it was economic, domestic, or foreign policy, Trump had real and significant achievements that certainly compare favorably with what other Presidents did in office. But it seems like there a widespread desire to pretend Trump was just Tweets and rallies.
Mike
Trump had many achievements, and I greatly appreciate them. But there’s no question that he and the RNC were caught flat-footed in 2020 by the election laws broken and by the probably bogus votes pushed through. I do not understand why Trump’s team promoted the re-election of McDaniel.
Don’t it make my red states blue…
______________________________
Don’t know when I’ve been so blue
Don’t know what’s come over you
You’ve found someone new
And don’t it make my brown eyes blue
–Crystal Gayle,” Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (1977)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udEZ_JjNz4E
______________________________
That was a big song back in the day.
Funny thing. All the photos of Gayle show her having blue eyes. Guess she never got over that guy.
Neo,
Please comment on the Roald Dahl controversy.
Neo:
That’s the point. Once a state goes blue enough to enact mail in ballots it’s a lock…they’re never going back to red again.
Mail-in doesn’t “get out” the vote. It allows the vote to be “fetched”. Dems fetch Dem votes. Republicans so far don’t.
The last Republican elected governor in Washington state was John Spellman in 1984.
“Voting by mail in Washington got rolling in 1983, according to the Secretary of State “Washington Vote-By-Mail (VBM) Fact Sheet.” Prior to then, voters with disabilities or who were 65 or older were eligible for permanent absentee ballots, and other voters could request absentee ballots before each election. In 1983, the state allowed for special elections to be conducted by mail ballot.”
Coincidence? OK, this time it was.
But then there is the 2004 election. Dino Rossi won the election by 291 votes out of nearly 3 million cast. He won the first recount, but by a closer margin (42). Democrats found more uncounted ballots and Rossi lost the second recount by 129 votes.
“In 2005, the vote-by-mail system Washingtonians know began to take root in a larger way. The Legislature established vote-by mail in all elections, but left it to counties to decide whether to do so. Soon, every county had switched to all-mail voting but for one: Pierce County.”
Democrats stole the 2004 election, and everyone knows it.
Rossi ran against Gregoire again in 2008, but lost by 200,000 votes then. Did the switch to mail in voting help insure the election wasn’t close?
https://mynorthwest.com/1011269/dean-logan-california-gubernatorial-race/
Democrats stole the 2004 [Washington governor’s] election, and everyone knows it.
Brian E;
That one scarred me.
Most Republicans have lives. Politics is peripheral at best.
Hard-ore Democrats are like a religious cult. They never rest and are always trying to push the cult values onto others. They are like water, infiltrating every crack and weak spot. Always looking to advance their cause. It seems they never rest and are never satisfied.
I don’t know many of the hard-core cultists. I do know a lot of people who vote for them. They’re mostly well-meaning, mostly normal people who don’t pay much attention to the news. But when they do watch TV news or listen to radio, it’s the MSM. So, they get the Democratic propaganda. And now we’re finding out that social media is also a part of the propaganda effort. Would an honest media change things? IMO, it would certainly help. Many LIVs might vote for better government.
Then we have to learn to harvest ballots, register voters, clean up voter rolls, and oversee the counting of the votes. Easy, right? 🙂
@ huxley > “Don’t it make my red states blue…”
Speaking to the points raised by most of the Salon, this post by Morse argues that, even if somehow we got a “national divorce” between conservatives and leftists, it wouldn’t last, because the Left would then attack the new Red America (and how I despise the pundits who deliberately switched the traditional colors for Left and Right!) with the same tactics it has used successfully to date, until it had to be divided again; then, again; then, again.
What happens with Zeno’s Paradox applied to countries?
https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2023/02/20/lets-say-marjorie-taylor-greene-got-her-wish-on-a-national-divorce-n706111
“It would take a while to transform Red America into the America you see today, but not as long as you think. We would eventually return to where we are now, only with a smaller territory.”
RTWT – it’s a very succinct, and persuasive, explanation of how we got where we are now.
It’s also analogous to a metaphor well-known in the 2A community, The Cake Analogy (which I also call The Parable of the Woke):
https://thelawdogfiles.com/2010/09/ok-ill-play.html
(Long Q&A between LawDog and a fictional gun grabber)
Some of that has been reversed, but we by no means have the full cake back.
BONUS: The Cake Analogy in cartoon format:
https://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/2013/11/08/cake-and-compromise-illustrated-guide-to-gun-control/
A conversation at Sarah Hoyt’s blog, culminating in a general formulation of the Cake Analogy:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/09/07/things-fall-apart/#comment-873879
There may be hope yet for getting some of the cake back, or baking a new one.
https://notthebee.com/article/high-school-kid-levels-woke-school-board-tells-them-hes-leaving-district-because-of-discrimination
No transcript of the short video, but a very articulate young man, of the sans-melanin variety, gave a very well written and delivered speech that totally ripped his high school’s policy of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” by giving examples of how their actions were the exact reverse, resulting in the demonization, demoralization, and depression of the non-BIPOC majority of students.
Which he no longer will be among, as he sang this swan song before announcing he was moving to a private school with no DEI-CRT-BLM discrimination.
Predicting that he would himself become President or a person of note someday (and he well may do so), he concluded, “It’s a shame you won’t be able to say I’m an alumni of RHS.”
There’s not much evidence to support the proposition that disaffected, apolitical citizens vote Democratic if you get them to the polls. Lots of them are single, white, working class males, who actually skew very Republican.
Much depends on where you live, but “disaffected” skews results. Plenty of non-voters aren’t disaffected. They just aren’t interested. Democrats can raise issues that appeal to those voters to get them to the polls. They appeal to the fears and resentments of minority groups and young, unmarried women, or they can just ballot harvest and pick up the ballots without the voters actually going to the polling places. Hence the big emphasis on getting ballots from college campuses and nursing homes, whether those votes were legitimately cast or not.
“Once a state goes to mail in ballots and drop boxes it’s over for that state. They become NJ or California where Democrats seem to win no matter how badly they doI…”
For the most part, the Dems aren’t after more voters, but more voter registrations. These new registered voters don’t all of a sudden get interested in voting, drop everything, and go vote every two years. They are for the most part apathetic. That’s why they weren’t registered before. With Motor/Voter you typically have to positively decline not to be registered. But for the Dems, the registrations are the key, and it’s better that their new registrants don’t try to vote, because the Dems can safely vote in their stead.
We saw how they did it here in AZ the last two elections. Soros helped elect Katy Hobbs as Secretary of State. She oversaw the corrupt 2020 election, where FJB won the state’s electoral votes forFJB, and Kelly won the Senate race. With GA, the Dems probably won at least 3 Senate seats through voter fraud, giving them a working majority. And identified voter fraud in all 5 swing states won the election for FJB. She worked with Maricopa county officials to steal the election. They did the usual Dem tricks of printing up their own ballots, and sneaking them in, going through nursing homes picking them up there, often after helpfully filling them in, etc. we know what happened, because the state senate investigated, and found between 500k and 750k questionable, and likely bogus, votes for FJB and Kelly, and their margins of victory were, if I remember correctly, 10k and 20k respectively. The Republicans tried to tighten up voting laws to protect against this in the future, and the McCain backed Republican Gov Ducey signed them into law.
In 2022, with Hobbs still Secretary of State, and ran for Governor, not recusing herself, for obvious reasons. She never bothered to campaign, announcing that she had something else in mind. The FJB DOJ interceded to make sure that volunteer drop box watchers weren’t allowed close to the drop boxes. Signature verification systems were cranked up, so that the signatures had to be verified manually, and then the higher level county employees doing it, allowed in tens of thousands, and probably many more, bogus signatures. Moreover, the Maricopa County election supervisor had a demographic map up on his wall, showing where the Republicans were in his county, and, after the printing and counting machines had been verified and certified the day before the election, switched the programming to print ballots 1 inch smaller in Republican polling places. This resulted in them not scanning. The Republicans, who had waited to Election Day to make sure that their votes were counted, ended up in extremely long lines all day. Some tried to go to another polling place, only to discover that they had supposedly already voted, because they hadn’t been told that they had to check out, and how to do it, etc. Then a judge forced the polling places to close as required by law, even if there were still locks long lines of voters trying to vote. Moreover, the legally required audit trail of ballots for Maricopa County was mostly missing. Millions of ballots that shouldn’t legally have been counted, but were. That was Katy Hobbs’ plan, that they would steal from the election, instead of campaigning, and she is now the governor, by a tiny fraction of the half million, so far, of identified fraudulent votes cast and counted. As well as Kelly, and the other top state offices. All by maybe 1% of the votes counted.
That’s how the Dems win elections in these swing states – they massively cheat. They get control over the voting apparatus, manufacture Dem ballots out of thin air, use ballots for people who don’t live here anymore, are otherwise illegal, etc. The supply of those ballots is why the Dems do these voter enrollment drives. Republican votes aren’t counted, or are prevented from voting. And then they fudge the counts.
The key Soros strategy is to fund the “minor” offices like Sec State and DA. Then they can destroy cities and fix elections. I have never figured out why Soros wants to destroy cities with crime. Maybe he is an anarchist at heart.
California had already turned blue before mail in balloting. The GOP establishment loves to blame Prop. 187 for alienating Hispanic voters, but that was in 1994, and by 1992 California had already gone blue, voting for Clinton, Feinstein, and Boxer.
So what changed?
1. The housing bubble of the late 1980s burst, at the same time the USA as a whole was experiencing a mild recession. In So Cal, it felt almost like a depression.
2. All 3 major auto makers had pulled out of southern California by 1992, which also affected the tire makers and every other industry that supplied parts and components.
3. Military base closures, with the downstream effects of that.
4. Aerospace companies tightening their belts, with the subsequent loss of high paying engineering and technical jobs.
All of the above contributed to an exodus of people who largely voted Republican. By the end of Pete Wilson’s second term in 1998, CA was deep blue.
MJT – Time for a divorce. I do not see any other way, because of all that you note. Sad thing is, I don’t see a path to a divorce…
Hope these folks will enjoy their communal farm jobs. No industry, China will keep all of that.
JJ “ Hard-core Democrats are like a religious cult. They never rest and are always trying to push the cult values onto others. They are like water, infiltrating every crack and weak spot. Always looking to advance their cause. It seems they never rest and are never satisfied.”
Federal, State and local spending constitutes 44% of all GDP. Highest in peace time. THE Left Rules.
I cannot see how the non-Left can win an election again, nationally.
The latest rumor, esp here in AZ, is that Katie Hobbs has long been on the payroll of the Sinaloa cartel, along with some of the judges. We shall see. Even if she is, nothing can probably be done about it with Dems, after stealing the last election, now controlling the law enforcement and Justice agencies in AZ.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/arrestkatiehobbs-trending-on-twitter-following-explosive-claims-that-sinaloa-cartel-uses-money-laundering-bribes-to-control-katie-hobbs-and-others/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/watch-forensic-investigator-john-thaler-joins-brannon-howse-following-explosive-claims-that-sinaloa-cartel-uses-bribes-money-laundering-to-control-maricopa-county-elections/