Abolishing the Electoral College – be careful what you wish for

The New Neo Posted on by

Democrats would love, love, love to get rid of the EC. Their rhetoric is to establish a “make every vote count” democracy (republic? who needs it?). But the actual motivation is that they believe a national vote would favor them tremendously and would eliminate what they consider the disproportionate influence of less populous red states such as Oregon, and of so-called “swing” states such as Ohio.

Note, though, that many of the most important swing states – Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina – are quite populous. Take a look at how high up they are in the rankings of states by population, So they would remain very important, even with a national popular vote.

In fact, they are important swing states not just because they sometimes vote red and sometimes blue, but because they are populous states that do so. Swing states that are small, such as tiny New Hampshire, with its piddly two votes (CORRECTION: four votes; I apparently was thinking of its 2 Congressional districts rather than the EC), can have disproportionate influence in the primaries because they hold theirs early. But by the time of the general election, no one cares much about how New Hampshire goes. That’s true with the current EC system and it would also be true in a national popular vote election.

If Democrats are prone to cheat in big blue cities by manufacturing extra Democratic votes, a national popular vote would seem to make such cheating even more tantalizing and important to accomplish. And in a close election, the recounts would be a complete nightmare.

I wonder, though. Would the Democrats really get what they want? For example, the amount of cheating required might be a bit harder to gauge in a national popular vote. It seems to me it could be easier to do this successfully on a state-by-state basis than on a national one.

Also, in a state such as California in which an overwhelmingly blue vote is a foregone conclusion, perhaps a lot of Republicans stay home on Election Day. After all, why bother to vote when your vote really doesn’t count? But with a national popular vote, they might be motivated into coming to the polls (or sending in those absentee ballots) instead.

The Democrats will continue to push for the end of the EC, of course, because they believe it would help them immeasurably. And perhaps it would.

And yet I seem to recall that one big argument in 2016 prior to the election was that Trump had no EC path to victory, or at least an exceedingly narrow one (see this, for example, a WaPo article that says his path isn’t just narrow, it’s “nonexistent”).

And consider that in a state like NY or California, even if 20% of black votes defect to Trump those states will still reliably go blue and their huge number of electoral votes will go to Democrats. But in a national popular vote, such a shift could substantially cut into the Democrats’ total popular vote enough to deny them the margin of victory. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?

Do I really think abolishing the EC would favor Republicans? No, I do not. But I think it could do so, and that’s why I subtitled this post – addressing those Democrats who would like to get rid of it – “be careful what you wish for.”

[NOTE: Here’s an article from 2013 on why abolishing the EC might benefit the GOP. It’s outdated and assumes some things that changed for the 2016 election, but it’s still an interesting example of thinking outside the box on the topic.]

Delay in posting today

The New Neo Posted on by

I was on the west coast for Thanksgiving, got delayed by the snowstorm coming home, and therefore had a big travel day today (actually, last night; I came on the redeye).

So I’m getting a late start today. But I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the following…

Boy, it gets dark early in New England this time of year. And brrrrrr, it’s cold. And yet the recent snowfall is so beautiful.

The blue wave

The New Neo Posted on by

This:

In states like Virginia — where Democrats now control all of state government — the foreign-born population has grown more than 250 percent since 1990. In 1990, Virginia was home to less than 312,000 foreign-born residents. Today, there are close to 1.1 million, almost four times what the population was three decades before.

Like Virginia, similar regions that were once solidly Republican have been handed over to Democrats due the annual importation of more than a million legal immigrants. Orange County, California, for instance, is now dominated by Democrats, following what the New York Times has described as a “40-year” flood of immigration to the area.

Republicans’ electoral prospects, though, are only expected to get worse because of historically high legal immigration levels, research by Axios, The Atlantic, and the New York Times has found.

Ronald Brownstein, senior editor for The Atlantic, noted this year that nearly 90 percent of House congressional districts with a foreign-born population above the national average were won by Democrats. This means that every congressional district with a foreign-born population exceeding roughly 14 percent had a 90 percent chance of being controlled by Democrats and only a ten percent chance of electing a Republican.

If you import enough people from other more leftist cultures who are not dissatisfied with leftism, and if the left controls the education of nearly everyone’s children, this is the predictable result. As the left knows full well.

The Democratic field is demoralizing Democrats

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve had a number of conversations with Democrats in recent weeks that have all gone about the same way.

The person asks me who is my favorite Democratic candidate (for the most part, these people think they’re talking to a fellow Democrat). I say I don’t know and that the field is poor, and then throw the question back at them and they agree with me that it’s poor.

They agree with a furrowed, worried brow. Sometimes they say something like, “Well, I’d like Biden if there wasn’t all this Ukraine stuff and if he wasn’t so old.” Several said maybe Bloomberg, because they’re not afraid of a Bloomberg presidency – which indicates to me that they’re actually afraid of most of the other candidates. But they agree that Bloomberg is unlikely to win the nomination.

They don’t seem to know what hit the Democratic Party. They don’t just express lack of excitement, they express bewilderment and puzzlement. I’ve not encountered anyone so far (granted, the pool I talked to is small) who has expressed a particle of enthusiasm for any Democratic candidate.

It must be very very depressing for them. They hate Trump. He seems to them like a sitting duck, and the presidency seems to be ripe for the taking. And yet as they look around they don’t see a single person in the vast Democratic Party who they believe can do it. And these Democratic voters don’t know why.

Voter enthusiasm is a big deal in elections because it affects turnout, which can be ultra-important. This is one of the reasons that Democrat leaders and the MSM keep pounding on Trump’s awfulness, even making things up. It’s their only hope – to energize Democratic voters against Trump rather than for anyone.

[NOTE: Neither Hillary Clinton nor Michelle Obama’s name has come up as a possible candidate during these discussions, either, by the way.]

What happened to Matt Drudge?

The New Neo Posted on by

This columnist asks the question but doesn’t have an answer.

I don’t have an answer either. I’ve never been a big Drudge reader to begin with. I barely was a small one; only looked in occasionally. But I did notice at one point that the site had become very anti-Trump. Very.

I don’t know when it happened, and I don’t know why. I can’t say I even care, to be honest, although I’m mildly curious. But for those of you who do care, I’ll hazard a guess. Maybe Drudge doesn’t like to march with the crowd; maybe he’s a contrarian. Or maybe there’s money in it, somehow.

That was two guesses, wasn’t it?

Wave Kamala goodbye

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember when Kamala Harris was the It girl who would lead the Democrats to victory in 2020?

Well, not so much:

Kamala Harris dropped her presidential campaign on Tuesday after months of failing to lift her candidacy from the bottom of the field — a premature ending for a California senator once heralded as a top-tier contender for the nomination.

While Harris had qualified for the December debate in her home state, she was running dangerously low on cash — lacking the resources to air TV ads in Iowa — and her staff was gripped by long-running internal turmoil.

I think what went wrong was quite simple. Harris seems to be the sort of person who doesn’t grow on people. The more exposure she got the worse she did. As I wrote back in August in a post entitled “Why is Kamala Harris fading?”:

Have you ever noticed how voters can forgive a candidate almost anything if they like that person? One of Hillary’s big problems, for example – one Obama correctly sensed in the 2008 race, when she was his main rival — is that she’s “unlikable.”

So is Kamala Harris, IMHO.

Likability isn’t what I tend to look for in candidates, although it’s a plus because any president is someone we’re going to hear a lot and see a lot for quite a few years, and it helps if we like that person. And of course different people have different criteria for who’s “likable.” For example, I never really felt Obama’s likability; for me his policies got in the way. But I could see that he had a kind of smooth, polished charm that would appeal to a lot of people.

I don’t know what it is about Harris – I’d describe it as a certain harsh quality – but she just isn’t especially likeable. A lot of things about a candidate can be changed, but not that.

One thing you can say about Bloomberg News…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is that at least it’s being honest about what it’s doing:

Didn’t the MSM pretty much stop investigating Democrats some time ago? They just don’t admit it.

People with Trump Derangement Syndrome lack a sense of humor

The New Neo Posted on by

Do they really not get that Trump is joking when he’s joking? Or do they just not get the jokes themselves? Or are they pretending not to understand, in order to criticize him all the more?

For example:

WaPo was dumb enough to tweet, “Trump tweets doctored photo of his head on Sylvester Stallone’s body, unclear why.” Most responses seemed to be laughing at WaPo for saying that what was obviously photoshopped was “doctored” — as if something hard to detect and sneaky was going on.

But Team Trump was witty enough to say, “Washington Post claims – without evidence – that @realDonaldTrump shared a ‘doctored’ photo.”

That’s not — as Newsweek imagines — a dispute of WaPo’s “claim” that the photo did not show the real body of Donald Trump. It’s making fun of WaPo for saying what didn’t need to be said.

I believe it is also intended as mockery of the use of the phrase “without evidence” in reports on the impeachment hearings.

Of course.

Here’s the photo in question:

It’s funny, folks. You know, as in “meant to be humorous”? Those who detest Trump don’t need to actually find it funny. But they should know it’s intended to be.

If I had to guess, I’d say that Trump’s most vociferous critics do not believe he has any ability to make a joke about himself. So they are always taking him seriously and are outraged at just about anything he does or says. After all, joking about oneself is a somewhat advanced thing to do, in the sense that one has to step back from oneself and be able to entertain at least a smidgen of self-mockery.

With this photo, Trump is combining self-promotion with a bit of self-deprecation. He knows his torso isn’t ripped like that of Stallone as Rocky. Au contraire, Trump’s rather pudgy. He also knows that the press thinks he’s delusionally narcissistic and doesn’t even realize what his own body looks like. So he’s teasing them, daring them to do exactly what they have done, which is to fail to see the humor.

At the same time, he’s portraying himself as a hero, a fighter. Also an underdog – isn’t that what Rocky was? It doesn’t hurt, either, that Trump has a background in professional wrestling – not as a wrestler, but as a character. I know that Rocky was a boxer, not a wrestler, but Trump is using the image of his own head on Rocky’s body to send a message as in WWW, which is to play a character:

Trump has had a sporadic relationship with professional wrestling promotion World Wrestling Entertainment since the late 1980s; in 1988 and 1989, WrestleMania IV and V, which took place at the Atlantic City Convention Hall, was billed as taking place at the nearby Trump Plaza. He has appeared in several WWE storylines, including a scripted feud with WWE owner Vince McMahon leading into a proxy hair match at WrestleMania 23 in 2007 and a storyline in 2009 in which Trump “bought” and later “sold” Monday Night Raw. In 2013, he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame as part of the weekend festivities surrounding WrestleMania 29. McMahon and his wife Linda – who later served under President Trump as the Administrator of the Small Business Administration – have also made donations to Trump’s endeavors, including a combined total of $5 million to the Donald Trump Foundation after Trump’s WWE appearances in 2007 and 2009, and $6 million to his presidential campaign in 2016.

The press is the last to detect and/or acknowledge Trump’s humor. Somewhere I read a comment observing that the press is playing Margaret Dumont to Trump’s Groucho Marx:

Margaret Dumont was intentionally funny in those roles. The press is not.

When it’s lost Adam Schiff…

The New Neo Posted on by

…then impeachment isn’t going so well.

Schiff in a recent interview with Jake Tapper:

Jake Tapper, CNN host: Do you think President Trump should be impeached?

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee: I want to discuss this with my constituents and my colleagues before I make a final judgment on it.

Tapper: And you’ve also said that what you’ve seen is, “far more serious than what Nixon did.” Explain to me how you have not come to the conclusion that the president should be impeached? I mean, it sounds like you think he should be impeached.

Schiff: Well, I certainly think that the evidence that’s been produced overwhelmingly shows serious misconduct by the president. But I do want to hear more from my constituents, and I want to hear more from my colleagues. This is not a decision I will be making alone.

I bet he’s already heard a fair amount more from his “colleagues.”

Another makeover (or two)

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, it’s the same person:

Again, the before and after is the same person, but as someone says in the comments, her own family might have trouble recognizing her:

And no, I don’t get a kickback from The Makeover Guy. I just love these transformations. I notice that they also usually lift the person’s spirits tremendously. There’s a little light in their eyes that wasn’t there before.

Are some 2018 Democratic voters moving back to Trump?

The New Neo Posted on by

Interesting:

Nearly two-thirds of Trump voters who supported Democratic congressional candidates in the 2018 midterms that flipped control of House to Democrats reported they would back the president over the three candidates currently leading in the Democratic primary, according to the Times.

Further, the new polls show Trump maintaining or strengthening his edge in the six key battleground states that swung the election in the Republican’s favor, particularly among white working-class voters who flipped to Trump after eight years of backing President Barack Obama while Democrats continue to fall behind this critical voting bloc.

“The poll offers little evidence that any Democrat, including Mr. Biden, has made substantial progress toward winning back the white working-class voters who defected to the president in 2016…

On reading that, I’m wondering why – if they really were Trump supporters – they voted for the Democrat candidates for the House back in 2018. Did they not realize that flipping control of the House to the Democrats would be very likely to lead to the impeachment circus we have today? Didn’t that factor into their votes at all?

I think the answer for a lot of people was “no.” How many people today actually understand that when you vote for a candidate in your Congressional district, you’re not just voting for candidate A or candidate B, you’re voting for Speaker of the House and control of all the committees and the agenda? I think a surprising number of people are ignorant of that fact, although I’ve never seen a poll measuring it.

Of course, there’s also the phenomenon of Democratic candidates in a swing district promising that they won’t just vote in lockstep with the Democratic leadership. They’ll be their own man or woman. But when push comes to shove and the issue matters, they just about always vote the Party line.

And of course, whether such a candidate does or doesn’t end up voting with the Democratic Party, voting for a Democratic candidate for representative in your district is a vote for Democratic leadership of the House. Whether or not that particular representative votes with the Democrats on any particular issue, that person still helps create a Democratic Speaker of the House and Democratic majority. The majority party sets the agenda and essentially runs the show, and it’s a game of numbers in which that particular individual representative’s vote hardly matters except under very rare circumstances.

But I bet if you were to poll one hundred random people on the street, you wouldn’t get more than a quarter who understand those facts.

Time to consider using neo’s Amazon portal for your holiday gifts

The New Neo Posted on by

Wow, that snuck up on us, didn’t it?

Now that Thanksgiving is over, we feel the hot breath of Christmas and/or Chanukah on our necks. If you care to solve your gift-giving dilemmas by turning to that online colossus, Amazon, please use the Amazon widget on my right sidebar to click through for all your Amazon purchases (now and at any other time of year). Or, if you’re on a cellphone, scroll down till you see it towards the bottom of the text, under my photo and the “donate” button.

When you do that, you’ll also be giving a small but still not insignificant gift to neo-neocon (it adds up, folks), and without spending any extra money yourself.

I thank you all in advance, and I thank all of you who’ve already done your shopping through my blog. I’ll be bumping this up and/or re-posting it every now and then until Christmas.

If you’re not an Amazon fancier, you could donate through Paypal and that “donate” button, of course. Hey, you could even do that if you are an Amazon user. I appreciate every single penny.

In case you have ad blocker or something of that sort, and the Amazon widgets don’t show up on your computer, go here. You can also click on any Amazon book link within a post and anything you order during that click-through gets credited to me. I believe it’s true even for things you put in your cart but don’t order till a bit later, although there’s a time limit on how long they can be there and still get credited when ordered (I’m not sure what that limit is, though, so best to order sooner rather than later).