Arizona, bringing up the rear

The New Neo Posted on by

What on earth is wrong with Arizona? Why does it take what seems like years for a state with a moderate-sized population to count its ballots? There are only about 7.4 million people in the entire state of Arizona. That makes it smaller than New York City. And yet Arizona lumbers on, and we still don’t even know for sure who its senator will be, Gallego or Lake, although Gallego has been consistently in the lead. Luckily, the presidential race is already decided and Arizona isn’t needed.

But what gives? (the article is from yesterday):

It’s taking far longer than expected in multiple counties across Arizona to count ballots and report election results.

The delay means numerous congressional, statewide, and local races have yet to be called, including a U.S. Senate contest and races that would help determine the balance of power in the U.S. House. Voter advocates are warning that voters won’t have enough time to fix any problems with their ballots if the counting goes on too long. …

The long, two-page ballot that many counties had in this election was to blame for delays in at least some instances. For example, in Maricopa County and Pima County, it’s taking longer to remove mail ballots from their envelopes and unfold and inspect them.

In other counties, the problems vary. Cochise County is experiencing a mechanical problem with its tabulators that’s causing them to operate slowly …

In both Yavapai and Pinal counties, tabulating polling place results from Election Day took much longer than expected because of unclear voter marks that had to be sorted out before results from the polling place could be reported. …

Yuma County still had 40% of its ballots to count as of Thursday night, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. It’s unclear why. …

A coalition of dozens of voting rights groups are concerned that, because of the delays, voters will not have enough time to respond to counties that flagged a mismatched or missing signature on their mail ballots. Under state law, the deadline for fixing those issues is Sunday, while counties had not yet reviewed hundreds of thousands of voter signatures on ballots across the state as of Thursday night.

Whatever is going on – and it appears to be plenty – it undermines the already low trust in the integrity of the election process in the state.

Here’s an article that appeared today:

In Arizona, official tallies were 83% complete by mid-morning on Saturday with Trump leading at 52.7% and Harris at 46%, or about 180,000 votes ahead. But enough ballots remain uncounted – 602,000 as of late Friday night – for the state to remain undeclared. The state sensationally flipped to Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2020.

Indeed. It’s a very good thing that the presidency is no longer in doubt, even without Arizona. But there is that Senate seat, and those House seats. The latter in particular could be highly important.

Also:

In the key US Senate race there between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Ruben Gallego, Lake, who always denied that Biden won the White House fairly in 2020, was trailing the Democrat 48.5% to 49.5%, or by around 33,000 votes, mid-morning on Saturday.

So it’s still up in the air. More [my emphasis]:

The delay in reporting the races falls largely on Maricopa county, the fourth largest in the US, where the state capital, Phoenix, lies. The county on Friday evening reported 351,000 ballots yet to count. Some have not been through the first step of verifying the voter signature on the outside of the envelope. Officials expected ballot counting would continue for 10 to 13 days after election day.

There is no excuse for this – none. But here are the excuses offered:

The long process for counting ballots is in part explained by the lengthy two-page ballot itself with election workers taking nearly double the usual amount of time to separate the two sheets from the mail-in envelope, lay them flat and check for damage, according to Votebeat.

In Cochise county, a mechanical problem with tabulators caused them to work more slowly.

According to the Arizona Republic newspaper, part of the state’s problem is “early-late” votes – early voting ballot papers that were filled in don’t get dropped off to be counted until election day itself.

“We have a substantial number of voters who take their early ballot and they kind of keep it on their kitchen counter for, like, three weeks,” state representative Alexander Kolodin told AZ Central.

Kolodin, a Republican, is considering a proposal that would require early ballots to be returned in advance of election day, giving time for election officials to go through the process of verification.

Ya think?

It’s almost as though Arizona wants to be in this position. And people can be forgiven for being very very suspicious.

Election 2024: now it can be told

The New Neo Posted on by

So now it’s crystal clear that the entire Kamala Harris campaign and the many-years-long anti-Trump legal crusade were exercises in gaslighting. We knew that the entire time, of course, but still it’s so strange to see it played out.

The court cases? It was all a game to keep Trump from being elected. Although Letitia James is still playing.

Trump the fascist Hitler? Hey, let’s have a smooth transition to give power to the fascist Hitler – although of course they are probably cooking up something behind the scenes despite the smiles. I seem to recall a smooth transition in 2016, on the surface, while the knives were being sharpened.

A discussion of what’s been going on this time:

Thing is, a lot of Democrats believed them and have been in a state of panic for quite some time, and are feeling anguish now. These voters might have a cause of action against the media and Harris and should try to sue them for pain and suffering. That’s a joke, of course, but the feelings are not a joke. Political operatives and politicians might be able to turn it on and then off like a switch. But most people aren’t made that way.

Charlemagne is wondering about it all:

There’s a lot of analysis of the race going on, and I’m participating. But it really all boils down to the fact that the Democrats and the press couldn’t fool enough people into thinking Kamala Harris was a person they wanted to lead the country. This wasn’t because she’s a woman, or black, or Indian. It’s because she was obviously incompetent and astoundingly incoherent – plus phony and grating. The icing on the cake was that she had nothing of substance to say and no record worth defending.

As I’ve noted before, this race should have gone about 20 to 80 Harris to Trump. I’m very happy that Trump won and won handily, but it’s astonishing that Harris reached the numbers she did. It’s a testament to party loyalty and/or ignorance and/or the extent to which people have taken to heart the relentless propaganda that has painted Trump as nearly demonic.

NOTE: You probably haven’t noticed that, when Harris was chosen as the Democrats’ nominee, I created a tag for posts about her – a tag, but not a category. I did the same thing for Biden when he was nominated in 2020. The hope in each case was that I’d never have to switch to making the tag into a category, because the person would lose the election. Biden, of course, ended up as president, and that meant that “Biden” became a category. For Kamala, I’d be happy if she remains a tag indefinitely and never graduates to “category.”

Jonathan Turley on the election and its effect on the lawfare against Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Turley is one of those lawyers I came to deeply respect years ago. He’s an Independent, as far as I can tell, but more importantly he’s a person who’s not afraid to follow the truth wherever it leads him. Sure, now and then I disagree with him; what else is new? But most of the time I think he’s spot on, as well as informative about the law.

And so I bring you this column of Turley’s written the day after the election:

Nearly two years ago, I wrote that Democratic prosecutors’ lawfare campaign against Donald Trump would make the 2024 election the single largest jury decision in history. Now that the verdict is in, the question is whether prosecutors will continue their unrelenting campaign against the president-elect and his companies.

The jury’s decision: acquittal

More [emphasis mine]:

The election reflected a certain gag sensation for a public fed a relentless diet of panic and identity politics for eight years. The 2024 election will come to be viewed as one of the biggest political and cultural shifts in our history. It was the mainstream-media-versus-new media election; the Rogan-versus-Oprah election; the establishment-versus-a-disassociated-electorate election.

It was also a thorough rejection of lawfare. One of the things most frustrating for Trump’s opponents was that every trial or hearing seemed to give Trump a boost in the polls. As cases piled up in Washington, New York, Florida and Georgia, the effort seemed to move more toward political acclamation than isolation.

Now, these cases are now legal versions of the Flying Dutchman — ships destined to sail endlessly but never make port.

If there is a single captain of that hapless crew, it is Special Counsel Jack Smith. For more than a year, Smith sought to secure a verdict in one of his two cases in Washington and Florida before the election. His urgency was seemingly shared by Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, but by few other judges or justices.

Around 2 am, Smith became a lame-duck prosecutor. Trump ran on ending his prosecutions and can cite a political mandate for it. Certainly, had he lost, the other side would be claiming a mandate for these prosecutions.

Trump’s new attorney general could remove Smith and order the termination of his continued prosecution. That is less of a problem in Florida, where a federal judge had already tossed out the prosecution of the classified documents case, which some of us saw as the greatest threat against Trump.

In Washington, Chutkan, who proved both motivated and active in pushing forward the election interference case, could complicate matters. Under federal rules, it is up to Chutkan to order any dismissal. …

In the end, Trump read the jury correctly. Once the lawfare was unleashed, he focused on putting his case to the public and walked away with a clear majority decision. It is unlikely that this will end all of his lawfare battles, but it may effectively end the war.

I don’t think these cases are going anywhere even if one or two sputters on, because there’s always appeal to SCOTUS and I don’t think the Court would let a guilty verdict stand.

Also there’s this, although I don’t know if anything will come of it:

As President Obama once said, when he was riding high: “Elections have consequences.”

Will the Democrats ever understand what happened in this election?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or will they continue to lie to themselves that Trump’s win was due to sexism and racism, despite the fact that Trump increased his share of votes from all minority groups?

Although Democrats exhibit a few glimmerings here and there of actual understanding, I just don’t think it’s widespread. And besides, because Democrats have built their entire pitch for many years on identity politics and abortion and fear of the right, what alternative pitches do they have? If they faced the bankruptcy of their ideas, it would require an entire overhaul.

Then again, it’s sobering that Harris didn’t lose by sixty points, as she should have. She was that poor a candidate. However, the MSM probably accounted for much of her support, because the way they frame the news still matters to a significant number of people. There’s also habit – it’s hard to vote for a Republican when you’ve only voted for Democrats for your entire life. Take it from me. And Donald Trump is strong stuff for an entry-level vote.

Weightlifting

The New Neo Posted on by

No, not that kind of weightlifting.

This kind:

I can’t remember the last time I saw Caroline Glick smile, but there it is. Of course, she’s aware that the road ahead isn’t easy. But she’s allowing herself a few moments of celebration, and for those moments she looks as though a great weight has lifted from her shoulders.

I feel much the same way. Looking back, I never felt this way when Trump was elected in 2016, although I do recall feeling relief that Hillary Clinton would not be president. But I thought Trump was an untried, untested blowhard – which, come to think of it, he was. It only took a few months to start feeling better about his presidency, and somewhere about halfway through I really started enjoying it. But I was aware that it might end after the 2020 election, and when COVID and lockdowns occurred, I became fairly certain that Trump would not be re-elected.

Looking back, I see from this post of mine, written in March of 2020, that I correctly saw what a future Biden presidency would hold:

The near-certainty that the Democratic nominee will be Biden raises the specter of the Democrats coming back and picking up where Obama left off, only worse. We dodged that bullet in 2016. But the question has always been whether that was only a little blip on the long Gramscian march and the Democrats’ hope for permanent takeover of the American electorate. Simply put: will the US inexorably move further and further left?

Biden’s supposed “moderation” is only such compared to Bernie. And I doubt that a single one of my Democrat friends (who are quite typical, politically, of much of the Democratic electorate) would hesitate to vote for either Biden or Sanders or any other sentient (or semi-sentient) being if that person becomes the Democratic nominee. They hate Trump with a white hot passion.

Biden’s running mate will probably be a woman, someone like Klobuchar or Kamala Harris (remember her?). Someone female and young, preferably ethnic although Biden really doesn’t need that since he already has the black vote pretty well sewn up because of his Obama connection.

I believe Biden as president would be more a less a figurehead, and the people in charge would be the same people who were prominent in the Obama administration, doing the same things only more so because they feel the country is ready for more open leftism. The Deep State will really go to town, as well. Legislation, however, depends on who controls Congress. If it’s the Democrats, the sky’s the limit.

I have never for a moment understood why anyone would have seen Biden as a potential moderate, but perception of his supposed middle-of-the-road quality was one of the main reasons he became president. For the next four years, for the most part, blogging consisted of chronicling a series of bad decisions with bad results.

When Trump announced he was running again, I wasn’t happy. I knew that his support in the GOP primaries would be very strong and would be enough to eliminate other and younger contenders such as DeSantis. And Trump came with several steamer trunks of baggage, actually a long caravan. Simply put: I didn’t think he was likely to win the general.

Tuesday night proved me wrong, I’m happy to say. And now I get to enjoy a period in which, like Caroline Glick, I can do a little happy-dance. It’s not that I’m unaware of the enormity of the problems looming. And I certainly don’t think it will be smooth sailing or anything resembling it. But there is a sense of relief and some of the weight has lifted for now.

And quickly, we get to enjoy news like this:

Qatar has told the political leaders of the Hamas terror group that they were no longer welcome in the Gulf state, Israeli media reported on Friday.

According to the Hebrew-language Kan outlet, the decision was communicated to the Palestinian jihadists “in recent days.”

“Recent days” – how many? Let’s guess.

Another thing about a second Trump term is that he’s more seasoned. Yes, he is also facing the challenges of undoing the damage the Biden administration did. But he knows the ropes, as it were. And I like to think that his four years out of power, his legal struggles, and his survival on July 13, have deepened him in some way. This time around he’s got the help of smart guys such as Vivek and Elon, and the calm of Tulsi Gabbard – plus, well, I’m not 100% sure of RFK but I guess we’ll find out. I have no idea how long this very interesting coalition will last, or what fruit it will bear, but I do find it intensely unusual and potentially very good.

And what of the left? They’ve tried internal sabotage, lawfare, and catastrophizing. Two of their acolytes tried assasination. Now they are rending their garments. But I’m not sure their lies will be as effective this time. And I think they will lose control of the House.

And another bonus: I don’t see Kamala Harris making a political comeback in 2028. Or ever. Biden? He looked happy making his speech the other day, and sounded more coherent than he has in four years. Have a happy retirement, Joe, and keep wearing that MAGA hat. What Obama might be cooking up I really don’t know. But one thing I think we can safely say is that this will not be his fourth term as president.

So, what about those polls?

The New Neo Posted on by

I finally gave up on ascribing any meaning to the polls this election cycle. The only thing they seemed to be saying with any consistency was that the race was balanced on a razor’s edge, but that even that could be wrong and either candidate actually could win decisively.

Well, thanks a lot; that’s very helpful.

But before I gave up on polls altogether, I noticed that a pollster for Rasmussen named Mark Mitchell, who frequently put out videos on YouTube, was saying something very different, and he was consistent too. He was saying (1) Trump would win not only the Electoral College but the popular vote as well, and (2) the other pollsters who said it was close weren’t just mistaken, they were lying.

I watched him for several weeks and he kept saying the same thing. But I finally stopped watching because I had no way to know if he was correct or way off, and I didn’t want to give myself false hope.

Well, now he gets bragging rights, big time:

So although it’s true that most pollsters were wrong – Mark Mitchell says purposely so, in what amounted to a psyop designed to bring in more money to Harris from donors and to keep her voters from becoming apathetic – they weren’t all wrong.

And take a look at this graphic:

Don’t mess with the Amish

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, the Amish:

The state’s famed “Pennsylvania Dutch” registered to vote in “unprecedented numbers” in response to a January federal raid on a local raw milk farm in Bird in Hand, Pa., a source familiar with the situation told The Post. …

The Amish community saw the move as an overzealous reach by the government and was planning to vote for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, whose party favors less government intervention.

“That was the impetus for them to say, ‘We need to participate,’ ” the source said of local Amish voters. “This is about neighbors helping neighbors.”

The Amish community rallied around Miller, who cited his religious beliefs as a reason for not adhering to Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

I would imagine there are a number of communities of a religious bent that don’t ordinarily vote in large percentages but who aren’t especially happy with what they see as government overreach.

What went wrong in the Harris campaign? Maybe the dogs just didn’t like it

The New Neo Posted on by

This election has generated so much to think about that it could serve as subject matter for posts for years. And yes, books will be written about it – although not by me.

So I’ll just start tackling topic after topic, trying to pace myself, knowing that I’ll only be able scratch the surface of what has happened.

I’ve already read many articles on the post-election fights within the Democrat Party in which one group blames another. For example, there’s this one that describes the war of words between the head of the party in Philadelphia and the Harris campaign:

McPhillips added: “If there’s any immediate takeaway from Philadelphia’s turnout this cycle, it is that Chairman Brady’s decades-long practice of fleecing campaigns for money to make up for his own lack of fundraising ability or leadership is a worthless endeavor that no future campaign should ever be forced to entertain again.”

The criticism directed at Brady, the longtime head of the Democratic City Committee, came shortly after the former member of Congress told The Inquirer that he felt no responsibility for the red wave that descended on the state.

Brady said money was an issue, and criticized the Harris campaign for paying only about “half” of the money the city committee requested for its get-out-the-vote effort. Those funds, otherwise known as “street money,” are used to pay committee members to get out the vote.

Then there’s the Biden people versus Harris people versus Obama people issue. For a good example of a piece describing that brouhaha, please see this:

President Joe Biden is furious that he is being blamed for Kamala Harris’ failed campaign and is going to war against his detractors in a bid to reunite the Democratic Party behind his middle-class credentials.

Biden remains convinced that his longtime ties to the trade unions and working-class men would have swayed the 2024 presidential election vote in his favor. Right to the end of the campaign, he insisted he would have beaten Donald Trump. …

The president’s circle was enraged that the finger-pointing had already begun in the Harris campaign within hours of Trump’s resounding victory, with most of the barbs aimed directly at the Oval Office.

According to Politico’s ‘Playbook’, Biden loyalists were especially bitter over unnamed quotes in a Politico article claiming the president was the “singular reason” for the damning defeat and saying a Democratic primary race would have given Harris more time and opportunity to run a better campaign.

The Biden aides blamed Barack Obama’s advisers for the Harris missteps that ultimately cost her any hopes of the White House.

You get the idea. Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.

Most of these articles assume that politics is a game that’s all about tactics and strategy. And I have little doubt that tactics and strategy are huge. But they’re not everything. And they can’t overcome a lousy product. I don’t think the Democrats have learned the lesson illustrated in this classic story, which is that maybe the dogs didn’t like it:

Once upon a time a pet food company created a new variety of dog food and rolled out a massive marketing campaign to introduce the product. Despite hiring a first-rate advertising agency, initial sales were very disappointing. The agency was fired and a new agency and a new campaign was launched. Sales continued to disappoint. If anything, they fell even further. In desperation, the CEO called in all of the top executives for a brainstorming session to analyze what had gone wrong with the two campaigns and how a new campaign might revive sales.

The meeting went on for hours. Sophisticated statistical analysis was brought to bear on the problem. One VP argued that the mix of TV and print ads had been messed up. Another argued that the previous campaigns had been too subtle and had failed to feature the product with sufficient prominence. Another argued that the TV ad campaign had focused too much on spots during sporting events and not enough on regular programming with a broader demographic. Another argued the opposite–not enough sports programming had been targeted. After the debate had raged for hours, the CEO felt they had accomplished very little. He asked if anyone else had any theories that might explain the failure of the new product. Finally, one newly hired employee raised his hand and was recognized. Maybe the dogs don’t like it, she said.

In recent years the Democrats have been serving the American people some dog food that tastes like – dare I use the word? – garbage. Of course, some dogs like garbage, but a lot of dogs want something tastier. To use another famous saying, this time one ascribed to Lincoln – you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, you cannot fool all the people all the time. If the deception is too egregious, you will have trouble fooling enough people to win an election.

The truth is that they managed to accomplish it in 2020 (or was there a large cheating factor? More about that in another post coming soon). They didn’t manage in 2024, in part because I think the public recognized that Biden hadn’t been as advertised. People have experienced the Biden administration and suffered from many aspects of it. Then there was the obvious deception later on, as Biden’s cognitive powers declined further and the pretense was maintained that he was fine. More trust was broken when there was a sudden admission by the party that Biden needed replacement, and then instead of asking the people what they might want, Harris was installed as substitute. Then there was the further pretense that she was “joyful” instead of strangely inauthentic and tremendously inarticulate. Plus plenty of other obvious lies such as the idea that inflation was caused by widespread price gouging rather than the Biden/Harris policies. And that Harris was supposed to simultaneously be of the administration and yet not of the administration. That was too much of a bogus Zennish koan for the public to swallow.

And on and on and on. No amount of “messaging” and “narrative” will change those things. But the Democrats seem to think they can say anything and people will believe it. Vance is “weird” says Walz, one of the weirdest candidates ever. Kamala is the gracious uniter, as she spews mendacious venom about Trump and Republicans. And on and on and on some more.

You can summarize the whole thing by saying that this election represents the triumph – for the moment, anyway – of reality over imagology. “Imagology” is a word used by Czech author Milan Kundera in his book Immortality, in the following passage :

…[C]ommunists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

…[S]ince for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.

:

I think it’s a brilliant description, but I think that often reality, if obvious enough, can break the power of the imagologues, and that we’ve just seen a demonstration of that. And now we’re seeing the imagologues blame each other for not using imagology effectively enough, when in fact (to mix the metaphors) maybe the dogs just didn’t like it.