RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/11/03/democrats_face_historical_headwinds_in_tuesdays_midterm_elections_148415.html

Regardless of all that wispy smoke Democrats and their allies in the news media are blowing, key polls suggest Republicans are still likely to win back control of the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections and have a better than even chance to take over the Senate.

Historically, one of the strongest indicators – perhaps the strongest indicator – of how a party will do in midterm elections is the job approval rating of the incumbent president. Parties of presidents who are down in the polls usually lose congressional seats. Parties of presidents up in the polls generally gain seats in the midterms.

In other words, how a president is doing a reliable predictor of how Americans will vote in congressional elections.

The latest October Gallup Poll has President Biden’s job approval at 41% among registered voters. Among voters dissatisfied with how things are going in the country, three of four disapprove of Biden. With numbers like that, most Democrats on the ballot should be running scared.

Key indicators suggest Americans are in a sour mood over a slew of issues.

COVID and its disruptions of everyday life still have people anxious. High cost of groceries, gasoline, and mortgages are straining family budgets. Rising crime and murder rates in cities have people fearful. And the relentless tide of illegal immigration at the southern border poses serious physical and financial challenges to communities struggling to absorb migrants.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-hollywood-power-brokers-mugged?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

“This is like a breaking point,” said Nicole Avant, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas under Barack Obama and is the wife of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos. We were talking about Los Angeles, where she was born and grew up and met her husband. “Who is in charge here? How is this happening? It’s the drug addicts in front of people’s houses, it’s people naked in the street—there’s so much chaos, and Rick is the opposite of that, and we just need to reel things in and do things in a different way.” She was referring to Rick Caruso, the billionaire real-estate developer running for mayor of the second-biggest city in the country.

Avant is black Hollywood royalty. Her father, Clarence Avant, now 91, was a legend in the music industry, managing the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Freddie Hubbard and Bill Withers. They called him the Black Godfather. 

So you might think that Avant would be supporting Karen Bass’s bid to be mayor of Los Angeles. Bass, who is black, is a six-term Democratic congresswoman. In 2020, she was on Joe Biden’s vice-presidential shortlist. Days ago, Obama, Avant’s old boss, endorsed her.

But Avant is backing Bass’s rival, Caruso—who was a Republican for years, and then, in 2011, switched his registration to “decline to state,” and then, in January of this year, switched to Democrat, just in time to run for mayor in a city overflowing with Democrats.

To Avant, to any number of Caruso supporters, all that is beside the point. Los Angeles, they say, is heading toward a cliff and everything is at stake in this election.

Avant said she found it “very insulting” when Bass supporters told her she had an obligation to support Bass because she’s a black woman. “I don’t ever vote on race or gender,” Avant said. “I’m a free thinker. People told me not to support Barack Obama and to support Hillary Clinton for the same reason, because she’s a woman. You can’t win.”

“The concept of hiring the best person for the job, especially in a situation like this, is not gone,” Bryan Lourd, co-chairman of the Creative Artists Agency and a Caruso supporter, told me. “I don’t think this city survives with more of the same old ideas about leadership.” (CAA is the biggest shop in town and represents, among many other celebrities, Scarlett Johansson, Steven Spielberg, Ava DuVernay and Reese Witherspoon.)

https://victorhanson.com/how-the-projectionist-game-is-played-part-two-election-denialist/

Think of any recent leftwing accusation against the Right. Then automatically assume that it is evidence of the accuser’s own culpability for the very charge he levels against others. In other words, the Left projects upon its opponents exactly what it fears is most incriminating among its own ranks. As a general rule, leftwing projectionism is a sign of culpability.

Donald Trump did deny the integrity of the 2020 election and does to this day. While he is probably wrong that the final and “real” popular vote count would have given him a popular vote victory, he is right to lodge legitimate objections to the way the balloting was conducted in some states on the following bases:

a) The Left funded a massive effort to change balloting laws in key pivotal states under the cloak of the Covid pandemic in spring 2020. The effect of liberal state court decisions or administrative edicts was often to nullify the state legislatures’ laws and rights to establish voting procedures. More practically, they changed state laws on the books that governed the rejection rate of non-Election-Day ballots. The result was the rejection rate dropped in many states even as they were flooded with historic numbers of non-Election Day ballots, most of them for Joe Biden.

A normal 3-5 percent rejection rate fell, depending on the state, to between 2.0 and 0.5 percent—despite more than 102 million ballots not cast on Election Day. Ballots that did not match registrars’ lists, that had incomplete or wrong names, that did not have full addresses, or that did not have signatures or signatures that matched the printed names, were often accepted. And there may have been many millions of such ballots that in prior elections would have been summarily rejected.