https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/11/09/there-would-have-been-a-red-wave-but-one-group-saved-the-left-from-being-completely-obliterated-n1644558 John Della Volpe, a hard-Left pollster and author of a deathless tome entitled FIGHT: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear & Passion to Save America, is claiming that his favorite age group saved the midterm elections for those who love skyrocketing inflation, open borders, rising crime, international ridicule and brinksmanship, and accelerating authoritarianism. […]
https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/08/heres-a-list-of-counties-reporting-issues-at-the-ballot-box-this-election-day/ Election Day 2022 has arrived and unsurprisingly, some Americans are already encountering a myriad of problems when going to cast their ballots at their local precinct. Given the chaotic nature of the 2020 elections — all thanks to an influx of private money into election offices and an unprecedented expansion of unsupervised mail-in voting […]
https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-chooses-status-quo By a relatively slim margin, Governor Kathy Hochul won her campaign to be elected the first woman to lead New York State. Anxiety among the Democrats that she would lose to Long Island congressman Lee Zeldin, who ran a strong race, appears to have been overblown. Hochul’s margin of victory was roughly where the […]
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/09/its-ron-desantiss-gop-now/ ‘The Red Wave.” If you’ve been watching Fox News and frequenting conservative websites the last few weeks (and this commentator admits he does more than his share of both), you were hearing how Republicans were going to have another one of those massive 2010-style seat pickups in the House. Win 56 seats in the […]
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/get-midterms-wrong-red-wave/ How wrong can you be? About as wrong as I was about the character of the midterm elections. I thought there would be a red wave, fueled in part by high-octane orange fuel. Clearly I was wrong. It is no consolation to know that I was hardly alone in my assumptions. Nor is it […]
https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/09/morning-greatness-wheres-the-red-wave/
Election:
Red State Voters Widely Reject Marijuana Legalization In Midterms
Nevada Won’t Be Done Counting Mail-In Ballots For Days: REPORT
Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan Wins Re-Election In New Hampshire
Stacey Abrams concedes to Kemp in Georgia governor’s race
DeSantis’ midterms win cements position as 2024 presidential contender
Possible interference from Beijing looms over elections
Sarah Huckabee Sanders will be first female governor of Arkansas
In Arizona, voting machine glitch gives way to election integrity concerns
WV voters strike down 4 proposed amendments in midterms
Democrat Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers defeats Republican challenger for second term
New York governor race: Hochul beats Zeldin in election to lead Empire State
Republicans pick up hotly contested House seat in Virginia
Rand Paul promises to ‘subpoena every last document of Dr. Fauci’ in victory speech
Florida’s Miami-Dade County turns red for DeSantis: First GOP gov to win in two decades
Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wins reelection in Michigan
Election history in the making: Women, black, gay, Gen Z candidates notch wins
Californians back flavored tobacco ban
DeSantis, conservatives score more Florida school board wins
Budd Smokes Beasley in North Carolina Senate Race
Other morsels:
Twitter to add ‘official’ mark to verified big accounts
Virginia Giuffre drops allegations against Alan Dershowitz, saying she ‘may have made a mistake’
Judge tosses Vindman’s suit against Trump allies
Wes Moore makes history as Maryland’s first Black governor
Ron Klain’s uncertain future inside the White House
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ron-desantis-florida-tsunami-charlie-crist-governor-election-covid-11667964888?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
Ron DeSantis was expected to win re-election as Florida Governor, but the big news Tuesday was the magnitude of his victory. His nearly 20-point rout of Democrat Charlie Crist shows the magnitude of the political change in the once-swing state and may launch the Republican’s campaign for the White House.
The Governor won nearly everywhere in the state, and notably in Democratic strongholds. He won by double digits in heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County, which Joe Biden carried by 85,000 votes and a statewide Republican hadn’t carried since Jeb Bush won re-election 2002. Mr. DeSantis also won Osceola County south of Orlando, which has a heavy Puerto Rican population. He even won in Democratic Palm Beach County.
The DeSantis tide lifted other GOP candidates, as Sen. Marco Rubio won re-election handily. The GOP also picked up two House seats, including the St. Petersburg seat Mr. Crist gave up to run for Governor.
Florida has been trending to the GOP for some time, and previous two-term Governors Mr. Bush and Rick Scott did much to demonstrate effective Republican governance. But Mr. DeSantis won by fewer than 34,000 votes in 2018. He was leading Tuesday by nearly 1.5 million with 90% of the vote counted. Florida Democrats are going to have to rethink their campaigns in the state.
In his victory remarks, Mr. DeSantis credited his pandemic policies, stressing “freedom” over mandates, and “education” over “indoctrination.” He expanded school choice in the state, which has helped win minority voters. He opened the state for business and classroom instruction earlier than most Governors did—decisions that were widely derided in the national and Florida press. But the voters seemed to appreciate those policies and rewarded him.
Mr. DeSantis is thought to have presidential ambitions, and his victory speech sounded like it. A national campaign is a much larger challenge than running even a large state like Florida, and Mr. DeSantis will have to cut down on his extensive use of the vertical pronoun if he wants to rally a movement.
But there’s little doubt that his Florida success will grab the attention of voters outside the Sunshine State. You can bet Donald J. Trump was watching—unhappily.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/election_forecast.html
We have reached the point where “too close to call” does not cut it. Unfortunately, there are probably more “too close to call” Senate races than in any other recent cycle. It is also the case that sometimes the House and Senate go in different directions even when there is a strong movement towards one party or the other In House races as there often is in a new President’s first midterm. In 2018, the Democrats picked up 40 House seats but lost Senate seats in Florida, Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota, while picking up seats in Arizona, and Nevada. In 2020, Republicans gained more than a dozen House seats but lost a net 3 Senate seats (4 in total, losing 2 in Georgia, Colorado and Arizona, and regaining Alabama).
At the moment, the Senate is divided 50-50, and the House has 220 Democrats and 212 Republicans with 3 open seats — 2 formerly Democrat-held seats in Florida, and one formerly Republican held seat in Indiana. The GOP needs a net pickup of 5 House seats to gain majority control assuming they win the open Indiana seat.
Pretty much every serious analyst of the House races believes the GOP is favored to regain control. Most of those who look at individual races — Cook Political Report, Larry Sabato, and 538 — are forecasting GOP gains of around 20 seats. About half of those gains are expected to come in seats now regarded as tossups (many more seats in the tossup category are now held by Democrats than Republicans).
RealClearPolitics (RCP) believes the GOP will win about 30 net seats assuming the two parties split those in its tossup category. The fact that Democrats are playing defense and pouring in late money and surrogates in many places where they won comfortably in 2020 suggests GOP strength and the potential to have bigger gains if the Party wins a large share of close races as it did in 2020.
The every-ten-year redistricting after the census resulted in a small net gain for the GOP. This gain was smaller than the net effect of court-ordered redistricting in Pennsylvania and North Carolina before 2020, which moved about a half dozen seats towards Democrats in the two states. The most gerrymandered states at this point are Illinois by and for the Democrats (14-3), and Ohio by and for the Republicans (12-3). In New York State, an attempt to create a 22-4 map for the Democrats was so egregious that a state court threw it out. With the strong challenge by Lee Zeldin in the governor’s race, Republicans could now win 8 or 9 House seats in the state.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/07/news-of-the-gops-demise-was-greatly-exaggerated/
Barring an 11th-hour catastrophe or widespread cheating, Republicans are expected to stomp Democrats across the board in Tuesday’s election.
Polls show Republicans with a big edge on issues that matter most: By double digits, voters trust Republicans to handle inflation, the economy in general, and crime. Democrats only hold a slight edge on education, a longtime Democratic advantage that’s been slipping away in the post-lockdown era.
GOP candidates are competitive in races previously considered safe for Democrats, including Senate seats in New Hampshire and Washington. Republicans are not just poised to take control of the House and the Senate but possibly a handful of governorships and state legislatures, which will have a huge impact on how the 2024 presidential election is handled.
Even more alarming news for Democrats is eroding support among reliable constituencies. Latinos, blacks, and suburban white women—voters who often represent the winning margin for Democratic candidates—are moving in the direction of the GOP this year while working class whites, once the crown jewel of the Democratic Party, continue their exodus from the party that now caters to the rich and overly credentialed.
Which raises an important question: What does Bill Kristol say now?
Kristol, a founding father of the modern-day neoconservative movement who sold his soul, reputation, and part of his sanity to left-wing billionaires in his insatiable lust to destroy Donald Trump, warned for years that Trump would destroy the Republican Party. Since 2016, the notoriously-wrong pundit has predicted any number of doomsday scenarios related to Trump, most notably the demise of the GOP.
During the 2016 GOP nominating convention, Kristol lamented that the Republican Party “had fallen into the grip of a vulgar demagogue with a thuggish retinue.” A year later, Kristol declared the GOP wasn’t salvageable, promising to start an independent party as an alternative to a Trump-hijacked Republican Party. Kristol and his NeverTrump cohorts transformed into full-blown Democrats by the 2018 midterm elections. Trump, Kristol claimed in 2018, was a “cancer metastasizing at a rapid rate” within the GOP.
“I think the party brand is getting much more enmeshed in everything Donald Trump says and stands for; the whole future of the Republican Party is now an open question,” the former aide to Vice President Dan Quayle openly mused that year. (Shortly thereafter, the owner of the Weekly Standard, the influential magazine Kristol launched in 1995, shut down the publication.)
Kristol endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and pushed for the full-scale annihilation of the Republican Party, including governors who were “killing Americans” by reopening their states’ businesses after the pandemic and “banning masks.”
https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/06/the-pathetic-democratic-pantheon/
Over the last few months the four icons of the Democratic Party—Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi—have hit the campaign trail.
They’ve weighed in on everything from “right-wing violence” and “election denialists” to the now tired “un-American” semi-fascist MAGA voter—and had nothing much to say about inflation, the border, crime, energy, or the Afghanistan debacle. In this, they remind us just how impoverished and calcified is this left-wing pantheon.
So why should we take anything they say seriously, given their own records—and especially given their mastery of projecting their own shortcomings upon others as some sort of private exculpation or preemptive political strategy?
Still Hopin’ and Changin’?
Barack Obama this past week has assumed the role of surrogate president. He is storming the country, while Joe Biden mopes at home or visits shrinking blue enclaves so he can claim post facto, “At least I was out there stumping.”
Over the last six years, we have become accustomed to Obama’s periodic getaways from one of his three estates. It is always the same. From time to time, he reenters politics to remind us that he did not just cash in on his presidency to become a multi-millionaire. Instead, he is still the Chicago “community activist” of his youth. And so, Obama will not be overshadowed by the Biden crew that is enacting all the crazy things he as president had warned were a bit much even for him.
At the funeral of the late John Lewis, Obama turned his eulogy into a political rant. He weighed in on the “racist” filibuster, the “Jim Crow relic” that he desperately sought in vain to use to stop the appointment of Justice Samuel Alito.
At campaign stops, he deplores “divisions” that he, more than any modern figure, helped create. The entire left-wing vocabulary of disparagement for the white lower-working classes (e.g., deplorables, dregs, chumps, irredeemables, etc.) got its start with Obama’s putdown of Pennsylvania voters who rejected him in the 2008 primaries as “clingers.”
In interviews, Obama suddenly now blasts harsh rhetoric—this from the wannabe tough guy who stole the “The Untouchables” line about bringing a knife to a gun fight. Well before crazy Maxine Waters’ calls to arms, Obama advised his supporters “get in their faces.”
Still, on the campaign trail, Obama appears not so much animated as stale. It is as if he has been suddenly stirred from a long coma that commenced in 2008. It’s the same old, same old—sleeves rolled up. He still resorts to the scripted outbursts of mock anger. And the nerdy prep school graduate still amateurishly modulates his patois—now policy wonk, now breaking into the Southern African-American pastor accent when an audience needs more preachy authenticity.
He still tries to rev up his crowds with the familiar attacks: Republican demons will cut Social Security, the MAGA semi-fascists are captives of Donald Trump (as if the Democrats have not ceded their souls to woke hysterics), the Republican fanatics will all but kill women by denying abortions, and extremists unlike himself are dividing the country.
On and on, Obama shouts about social justice. And then he wraps up and must decide to which of his mansions he will fly home (via private jet)—Kalorama, Martha’s Vineyard, Hyde Park, or soon the Waimanalo estate.
Obama offers no solutions much less hints at his own culpability in his sermons. There is nothing about the open border he helped birth. Nothing about Biden’s failed energy policies now bankrupting the middle class that were simply a reification of his energy secretary Steven Chu’s perverse wishes for European-priced gas (“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”).
There is nothing about Obama’s old boasts about shutting down coal plants and skyrocketing electricity (“Under my plan . . . electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”).
