RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/12/nevertrump-fraternity-parties-on/

Is Peggy Noonan back in the driver’s seat? The title and argument of her Wall Street Journal column Thursday made me wonder. “Maybe Republicans Will Finally Learn,” she intoned, explaining in a subhead, “If they aren’t serious about policy, they’ll nominate Trump in 2024 and lose a fourth straight election.” 

By “Peggy Noonan,” I do not just mean that particular columnist. I mean the generators of The Narrative tout court. As a paid-up member of the establishment, Noonan has long been a Trump opponent. If you have your finger in the air, you know that that’s the way the wind is blowing. It happened in a nonce. 

Of course, the NeverTrump speakers have been blaring that message since 2016. But someone flipped a switch, and the other bank of stereo speakers suddenly came to life, spouting the same message: The horrible ogre Donald Trump lost the midterm elections for the GOP. Not only that, he said disobliging things about two of his possible GOP rivals, Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia. Be done with him!

I happen to be a fan of DeSantis and Youngkin. Both are talented politicians and credible future GOP presidential candidates. But having witnessed Donald Trump’s inventory of epithets for his Republican rivals in 2016 (“Little Marco,” “Low Energy Jeb,” “Lyin’ Ted”), I am not really surprised that he is honing that rhetorical sword. Some people think it happened all of a sudden a week or two back. In fact, it has been developing for some time. Do I like it? Not really. But no one who has watched Trump over the last six years should be surprised. We don’t yet know whether he is running in 2024. Probably, we will on Tuesday when he makes his advertised big reveal. My bet? He will run. 

The establishment thinks so, too, which is why you cannot turn on the news or open a newspaper without encountering warnings that there is serious “GOP pushback” to the idea. 

The “Dump Trump” meme, active since he won the 2016 election, has acquired new energy following the midterms. We were promised a red wave. It didn’t materialize. It must be Trump’s fault. 

Was it? Ninety-three percent of the hundreds of candidates Trump endorsed won their primary contest in the 2022 election. Eighty percent won in the general. That is a far higher percentage of wins for Trump-endorsed candidates than ever before. In 2018, for example, only 59 percent of the candidates he endorsed won in the general. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/gop_must_insist_on_a_return_to_pre2020_election_system_in_competitive_states_or_die.html

It’s entirely possible that the Republicans will not win the House. If they do, it will be by a razor thin margin under circumstances that should have produced a blowout.

The main reason for this second in a row reversal of all historic electoral precedent is plain to anyone who wants to look and be honest:

Florida has an electoral law that most closely recreates the US election DAY mechanics of all time prior to 2020: No mass mailing of unrequested absentee ballots to all registered voters – only those registered voters requesting an absent ballot no later than 10 days before the election get one; and their ballot is counted only if received by a specific date.  In Florida there was strict enforcement of date deadlines, and larger percentages of voters than elsewhere voted at the polls.

Ergo: in Florida there was fast counting and quick results; and much less time for shenanigans.

And a Republican blowout.

In Florida there was no collecting/harvesting of ballots. And – even more important – no voting by that substantial segment of the Democrat party base that’s too disorganized and generally out of it to either remember to go to the polls or to request an absentee ballot.

The mass mailing of millions of absentee ballots, coupled with lengthy return periods and allowed methods of return (e.g., unsupervised drop boxes) has, in a multitude of ways, expanded the Dem vote.

It may save them both the House and Senate this time.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/gwendolynsims/2022/11/13/saving-america-why-blaming-president-trump-has-little-to-do-with-the-path-to-victory-in-2024-n1645360

Like many voters on Tuesday evening, I watched with a fluctuating mixture of guarded optimism, anticipated resignation, and angry ambivalence as the voting data rolled crawled in. Nearly five days later, we still don’t know the final outcomes of key races. After the disaster that was the 2020 election, how on earth did we end up here in 2022?

Some political pundits were quick to enthusiastically point at President Trump and his meddling in races as the reason for such lackluster GOP results on Nov. 8. While it’s hard to know for certain, Trump’s insertion of himself into races that were fairly in hand did tend to complicate matters by shifting the focus from the race to Trump himself. Truthfully, a lot of us Republican voters are tired of always having to spend our time and money defending Trump instead of showcasing the candidates and GOP policies. Let’s just say that Trump’s tact doesn’t seem to help our candidates in the long run.

And of course, Trump’s already still up to his old tricks, attacking fellow Republicans like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis. Trump’s also teasing a yuge announcement at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 15 despite the GOP’s current need to focus on the runoff race in Georgia. Will the former president delay his announcement and stop sucking the air out of every race? That remains to be unclear at this time.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/10/the-1980s-hangover-and-the-gop/

Recriminations about who is responsible for the fizzled “red wave” on Tuesday began as soon as the disappointing results trickled in that night.

Fingers immediately pointed at Donald Trump; the Wall Street Journal editorial board, mouthpiece for the establishment wing of the GOP, on Wednesday branded Trump “the Republican Party’s biggest loser.” NeverTrumpers at the “conservative” Washington Examiner also blamed unexpected losses on the former president. “These midterm elections have made it crystal clear that voters want to move past the chaos and dishonor of the 45th president,” editors wrote on November 9. “They want the security and sanity that a competent and effective leader can provide. The Republican Party needs to recognize that, too, and act accordingly.”

Of course Trump deserves part of the blame for what we are told is a humiliating defeat. He is, by every measure, the leader of the Republican Party. Candidates jockeyed for his endorsement and he hosted get-out-the-vote campaign rallies across the country. 

Trump owns a few duds, most notably longtime quack Dr. Mehmet Oz, who lost the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race to part-vegetable John Fetterman. But Trump isn’t solely culpable for a midterm election that, for now at least, defies the historical precedent that the party in charge of the White House suffers double-digit losses in Congress. (Republicans are still favored to win the House but by a much smaller margin than predicted.)

Exit polls, however, seem to contradict the idea that Trump played a major factor in the unexpected outcome. According to a comprehensive survey of more than 18,000 voters taken on November 8, 54 percent said Trump was not a factor in how they voted; 47 percent said the same of Joe Biden.

If there was a protest vote—only 28 percent said they voted Democrat to oppose Trump—it appeared to have little impact. For the most part, opinions of elected officials, party preference, direction of the country, and views on the economy were fairly even between Democrats and Republicans, who held a three-point edge when asked which party should control the U.S. House next year. Favorable ratings for both parties hover around 40 percent—ditto for Trump and Biden

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2022/11/11/trump-unloads-on-desantis-again-is-it-working-or-is-it-a-bridge-too-far-n1645009

Former President Trump unloaded on Florida Governor DeSantis today in an email to supporters. Here’s the email in its entirety. Read it for yourself, and then I have a few questions.

NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post (bring back Col!), is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious, an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations, who didn’t have to close up his State, but did, unlike other Republican Governors, whose overall numbers for a Republican, were just average—middle of the pack—including COVID, and who has the advantage of SUNSHINE, where people from badly run States up North would go no matter who the Governor was, just like I did!

Ron came to me in desperate shape in 2017—he was politically dead, losing in a landslide to a very good Agriculture Commissioner, Adam Putnam, who was loaded up with cash and great poll numbers. Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would Endorse him, he could win. I didn’t know Adam so I said, “Let’s give it a shot, Ron.” When I Endorsed him, it was as though, to use a bad term, a nuclear weapon went off. Years later, they were the exact words that Adam Putnam used in describing Ron’s Endorsement. He said, “I went from having it made, with no competition, to immediately getting absolutely clobbered after your Endorsement.” I then got Ron by the “Star” of the Democrat Party, Andrew Gillum (who was later revealed to be a “Crack Head”), by having two massive Rallies with tens of thousands of people at each one. I also fixed his campaign, which had completely fallen apart. I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen…

And now, Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games! The Fake News asks him if he’s going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, “I’m only focused on the Governor’s race, I’m not looking into the future.” Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer.

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.