RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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

A Pennsylvania state representative who died last month was reelected on November 8 despite that fact.

You can probably guess the representative’s party affiliation. Yes, Democrat Anthony “Tony” DeLuca, who passed away October 9, won in a landslide, garnering over 85% of the vote. At the time of DeLuca’s death, it was too late for officials to change the election ballots, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

DeLuca, Pennsylvania’s longest-serving state rep, easily defeated Green Party challenger Queonia “Zarah” Livingston, who is alive. (Livingston is a far-left extremist who ran on a platform including “environmental justice,” and “ending the war on drugs.”)

This is the same state that elected John Fetterman, a man who lived with/off his parents until he was 50 and who has been afflicted with severe cognitive difficulties after suffering a stroke early in his campaign.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/09/tuesday-takeaways/ What, if anything, did the midterms tell us about the country—other than underwhelming Republicans could still take the House and Senate? During the COVID lockdowns, American elections radically changed to mail-in and early voting. They did so in a wild variety of state-by-state ways. Add ranked voting and a required majority margin to the […]

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/11/09/trump-wrongly-blamed-for-sup-par-gop-performance-n1644514 The Republicans had a pretty good midterm election despite what pundits are claiming. The GOP must win three of the remaining four Senate races to win control of the upper chamber — a goal well within reach as Republicans lead in Nevada and Wisconsin. And the party is within spitting distance of a House […]

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/10/morning-greatness-progressives-launch-dont-run-joe-anti-biden-campaign/ Election: Florida Republicans’ Historic Performance, By the Numbers Understanding the Underwhelming GOP Performance Democrats fortify their blue wall — and Electoral College math — for 2024 Minnesota elects first transgender state lawmaker Universal free lunch ballot measure passes easily in Colorado Rep. Kevin McCarthy has announced his bid for House Speaker ‘Vote Like A […]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-jim-crow-2-0-dies-in-georgia-voters-midterm-election-raphael-warnock-brian-kemp-stacey-abrams-11668035286?mod=opinion_lead_pos3 Control of the House and Senate still hangs in the balance, but one Tuesday result was clear: President Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” rhetoric about state voting laws was a nasty political distortion. The Georgia Secretary of State website reports that by Wednesday afternoon’s counting, 3,957,880 voters had cast a ballot in Tuesday’s election, slightly […]

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/10/americans-want-big-changes-in-immigration-policy-after-election-ii-tipp-poll/ Among the many different issues that roiled the electorate in this 2022 midterm-election cycle, perhaps none had as large an impact as illegal immigration. On this issue, American voters remain fed up with the status quo and want major changes made, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows. Given the more than 500% increase in illegal […]

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/09/no-tipping-point-yet-will-it-ever-come/ The “red wave” that many believed was going to ka-whoosh from Rhode Island to Seattle did not occur, with the evening turning out to be more of a red trickle – except, of course, in Florida which saw a red hurricane. But, at a national level, even the trickle was possibly just enough for […]