RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.commonsense.news/p/2022-midterms-voter-prefer-sanity?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

EXCERPT

So why did Republicans perform so badly?

Here’s one theory: Trump.

Trump is poison. Trump lost in 2020 and on Tuesday night he helped lose at least 23 elections.

Think of the candidates Trump endorsed:

Dr. Mehmet Oz. Oz was handpicked by Trump for the Pennsylvania Senate race over David McCormick, a West Point graduate who served in the Gulf War. It’s not as if McCormick, a hedge funder, was anti-Trump; his wife, Dina Powell, was Trump’s deputy national security adviser. But he did condemn the January 6 storming of the Capitol, so Trump endorsed Oz—who ran against John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of the state who had a stroke in May and could barely make it through the single debate he agreed to. And still won. 

Doug Mastriano. The Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate was endorsed by Trump (and in league with the antisemites over at Gab). He lost his race for governor to the moderate Democrat Josh Shapiro by 13 percent and a whopping 600,000 votes. 

Don Bolduc. Bolduc—who claimed during the primary that Trump had won the 2020 election before later reversing his position—ran against incumbent Maggie Hassan for a New Hampshire Senate seat, but lost to Hassan 53 percent to 45 percent.

John Gibbs. Trump denounced the incumbent in Michigan’s 3rd congressional district, Peter Meijer, the only Republican freshman who voted to impeach him over January 6. Then, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee doubled down by funding John Gibbs, Meijer’s MAGA challenger, who lost on Tuesday by 13 points to Hillary Scholten—who turned the seat Democratic for the first time in nearly 50 years.

Tudor Dixon, who ran for governor of Michigan, was endorsed by Trump and said his election was stolen. She lost on Tuesday night to Gretchen Whitmer, the incumbent who called women “people with periods” in a recent TikTok video and had been roundly criticized for her handling of Covid.

Then there is Herschel Walker, who Trump endorsed, apparently unconcerned about Walker’s history of domestic violence, child neglect, and the question of Walker’s basic competence. (Walker’s thoughts on the Green New Deal: “So what we do is we’re going to put, from the ‘Green New Deal,’ millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. So all of a sudden China and India ain’t putting nothing in there—cleaning that situation up. So all with that bad air, it’s still there. But since we don’t control the air, our good air decide to float over to China, bad air.”) The race was so close—a difference of just over 35,000 votes—that it’s headed to a runoff.

Kari Lake was meant to be the new GOP star, and she sang right from Trump’s hymnal on the 2020 election. Her gubernatorial race in Arizona is also too close to call, but she’s 13,000 votes behind Katie Hobbs—the unpopular Democratic secretary of state, who refused to debate Lake—with 70 percent of ballots counted. (It’s impossible to say with certainty who’s going to win. But it’s noteworthy that Maricopa County—by far, the biggest county in Arizona, which Trump lost by two points in 2020—has yet to be counted. What technology does Florida have that Arizona lacks?)

The other big race in Arizona was the Senate contest, in which astronaut Mark Kelly leads Trump-endorsed Blake Masters by nearly 100,000 votes. Masters was backed by Peter Thiel and received assistance from Trump’s super PAC—at least $1.8 million—after Mitch McConnell’s Leadership Fund cut spending in Arizona to divert resources elsewhere.

Now, think about the candidates Trump trashed.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-incumbents-election

The past two years have seen a pandemic, the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the resurgence of urban crime, and a revival of inflation. Democrats and Republicans invested $16 billion in the midterm elections, expecting to profit from these upheavals. Yet astonishingly little about American voters’ preferences appears to have changed. Congress was balanced on a knife’s edge following the 2020 election, and it seems set to remain that way. Despite deep public dissatisfaction with the state of the country, incumbents of both parties appear to have enjoyed record rates of electoral success.

In fact, if Democratic senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Raphael Warnock hold their seats, 2022 will be the first Senate election cycle in which no incumbent of either party has been defeated since the 17th Amendment requiring the direct popular election of senators came into effect in 1914. (In that year, Democrats picked up two open seats from retiring Republicans, plus another from a Republican who had been defeated in a primary.)

This remarkable outcome was not due to an absence of pick-up opportunities for either side. The Senate was split 50-50 going into November 8th, with 21 Republican and 14 Democratic senators up for reelection. Yet the only gain for either party has been made by Democrat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania—filling an open seat, following Pat Toomey’s retirement.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-weeks-red-waves-ron-desantis-election-midterms-donald-trump-voters-gop-republicans-leadership-inflation-crime-border-11668121031

You might have heard that Tuesday’s election produced only one red “wave”: in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republicans rocked. There were in fact several red waves in key states, and they combine to hold an age-old lesson for a whupped GOP. Want to win elections? Run competent leaders.

There’s no shading a miserable GOP night. It’s unclear if Republicans will take control of the House, much less the Senate, and its margins in either chamber will be razor thin. The GOP should have swept a country wildly unhappy with inflation, the economy, high crime, education, the border, you name it. It didn’t, and in many of the races the losses came down to two words: candidate quality.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made that point in August, only to be booed by pundits who disparaged it as another example of “establishment” ignorance of the brilliance of candidates endorsed by Donald Trump. Who’s looking brilliant now?

Pennsylvanians preferred to elect a recent stroke victim rather than take a chance on an untested TV doctor. New Hampshire returned the generally disliked Maggie Hassan to the Senate rather than roll the dice on Don Bolduc, who couldn’t decide two years later if the 2020 election was stolen. Arizonans appear not to have been sold on an unknown venture capitalist named Blake Masters. Georgians have sent scandal-plagued Herschel Walker to a Senate runoff, but he ran behind every other statewide GOP candidate. TV personality Tudor Dixon got crushed in the Michigan governor’s race. Doug Mastriano got routed in Pennsylvania.

Here’s a guy who didn’t get a Trump endorsement this year: Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor stormed to re-election by nearly 20 points, and exit polls show he won practically every demographic: Hispanics, women, white men, older voters, independents, married voters. He won the rural vote (69%), the suburban vote (58%) and the urban vote (55%). His GOP overall had a stunning night. Sen. Marco Rubio won re-election by more than 16 points as his party picked up four U.S. House seats, took supermajorities in the state House and Senate, and locked Democrats out of statewide office.