RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/the-problem-with-new-yorks-closed-primary-system

We may see an outbreak of democracy in New York, thanks to the Court of Appeals’ decision to throw out state Democrats’ gerrymandered congressional district map. But while the shotgun marriages between Staten Island and Park Slope and between Westchester and Suffolk Counties have been called off, New York still has a long way to go before its elections are truly democratic. That’s because the Empire State remains one of only nine states with completely closed primary elections.

It may sound fair and logical to permit only registered Democrats or Republicans to vote in their respective parties’ primary elections, but in practice this limits voter choice and selects for candidates whose views tend to their party’s extreme wing. Closed primaries also mean that independents—those not enrolled in either party—are the most clearly excluded voters. New York now has more unaffiliated voters (2.75 million) than enrolled Republicans (2.74 million).

Voters who want to join a party or switch parties to have a say in a contested primary are out of luck. One can’t simply walk up and switch party affiliation on primary election day. New York election law requires such changes to be made by February 15, more than four months before the primary. That’s well before the campaign begins in earnest and the views of candidates become clear. It can even be before we know who will be on the ballot, as in the case of disgraced former lieutenant governor Brian Benjamin.

By Henry J. Gomez and Alex Seitz-Wald

CINCINNATI — Buoyed by former President Donald Trump’s endorsement, J.D. Vance prevailed in Ohio’s competitive Republican Senate primary Tuesday and will face off in November against Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan.

In the gubernatorial contest, incumbent Republican Mike DeWine secured the nomination in his bid for re-election, NBC News projects, while former Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley won the Democratic nod.

In a Democratic congressional primary, NBC News projects Rep. Shontel Brown defeated former state Sen. Nina Turner, a progressive insurgent who had previously challenged Brown in a special election last year.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18498/destruction-of-election-integrity

The language could not be any clearer. You can participate as a voter in our American democracy if you are a citizen, over 18 years of age on Election Day, and meet certain state requirements regarding residency and registration – except in some areas of our nation which, inexplicably, now “allow non-citizens to vote in local elections only.”

What still stands unchallenged is that in all federal elections you must be a citizen of our nation where our leaders are chosen by individuals who are either born into that solemn responsibility or have sworn:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America …”

Unless of course if you are living within the five boroughs of the City of New York, where the criteria for voting in local elections has been redefined to meet a Progressive political agenda while broadening the potential for ballot harvesting.

In the closing days of 2021, the New York City Council approved legislation that will allow nearly one million documented non-citizens to vote in local elections. For people seeking to displace our Constitution and alter the very fabric of our nation, this action, coupled with open borders, essentially loads the dice for their candidates, their manifesto, and for non-citizens having an increasingly large say in how America’s cities are run.

In an NPR interview, San Francisco State University political science professor Ron Hayduk suggests that because securing citizenship is a long and challenging task, immigrants should be given the right to vote regardless of their status. But that, Professor Hayduk, is the whole point. One should need to work hard to achieve the priceless gift of deciding how the most populous parts of our country are governed. Allowing non-citizens to vote creates an overwhelming voter advantage on any given Election Day for people who are not American citizens.

Given President Biden’s current dismal showing in the polls, and that last year alone, more than two million new arrivals poured across our southern border — many of whom are being secretly spirited in the dead of night by our government to cities throughout America and with millions more on the way — significant number of Americans are indicating that they are losing confidence in how major issues facing our nation are being managed. The idea of non-citizens lining up to vote will surely have much appeal to those who feel that they cannot win elections if only American citizens are allowed to vote.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/04/30/the-political-earthquake-in-new-york-that-doomed-democrats-in-2022-n1594043

Last Wednesday, the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ruled that the redistricting map Democrats had so carefully drawn that gave them three additional congressional seats as well as effectively destroying the Republican Party in the state was illegal.

Until that moment, the national Democratic Party had been patting itself on the back for stealing a march on Republicans. When the redistricting process began late in 2021, it was widely assumed that the Republicans, with their legislative control of 26 states and the addition of three seats as a result of the census in red states, would have a distinct advantage in redistricting.

But until recently, Democrats had been more than holding their own, largely because of New York’s map — a masterpiece of gerrymandering.

FiveThirtyEight:

On Wednesday, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that the congressional map New York Democrats enacted back in February was a partisan gerrymander that violated the state constitution and tossed it to the curb. The decision was a huge blow to Democrats, who until recently looked like they had gained enough seats nationally in redistricting to almost eliminate the Republican bias in the House of Representatives. But with the invalidation of New York’s map, as well as Florida’s recent passage of a congressional map that heavily favors the GOP,1 the takeaways from the 2021-22 redistricting cycle are no longer so straightforward.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/documentary-will-prove-proves-rampant-illegal-vote-trafficking-in-2020-dsouza-says_4426541.html?utm_source=News&utm_

Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza believes that evidence presented in his new documentary, “2000 Mules,” proves that large-scale, illegal vote trafficking occurred in the 2020 election.

D’Souza told The Epoch Times: “2000 Mules will settle the issue beyond a shadow of a doubt by using two powerful, independent modes of investigation. The evidence is so conclusive, so decisive, that it leaves nothing to argue about.”

The film opens in 300 theaters on May 2 and May 4.

D’Souza, who is a contributor to The Epoch Times, said an investigative team used cellphone tracking and video footage to prove that unauthorized intermediaries called “mules” collected thousands of absentee ballots from voters and deposited them in drop boxes for money, which is illegal in all 50 states.

Cellphones emit a unique and identifiable signal or “ping.” Trillions of pings were analyzed by investigators to reconstruct the movements of thousands of mules as they went about their work in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election, the documentary claims.

“Who would have ever thought that investigators could look back in time and discover such things?” D’Souza said.

Investigators also sifted through millions of minutes of video surveillance footage and were able to capture on tape numerous mules stuffing absentee ballot drop boxes, D’Souza said. The videos show the mules taking selfies of themselves as proof of services rendered to their employers in order to be paid, he said.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/top-new-york-court-tosses-out-redistricting-map-in-massive-defeat-for-democrats

“If the congressional maps had stayed in effect, Democrats likely would have expanded their 19-8 majority to 22-4 under the new lines, according to experts’ testimony. The state lost a seat during the most recent census.Because Wednesday’s ruling, a 4-3 decision, came from the highest court in the state, Democrats will likely not be able to appeal.”

New York’s highest court threw out the state’s redistricting maps, dealing a massive blow to Democrats for the 2022 midterm election cycle.

The New York State Court of Appeals sided with lower courts in its determination that the three maps were unconstitutionally gerrymandered and ordered the adoption of a neutral plan to be crafted by a special master.

The maps were “procedurally unconstitutional, and the congressional map is also substantively unconstitutional as drawn with impermissible partisan purpose,” the court said. “We are confident that, in consultation with the Board of Elections, Supreme Court can swiftly develop a schedule to facilitate an August primary election, allowing time for the adoption of new constitutional maps.”

The Democratic-controlled legislature’s decision to draw its own maps when the New York State Independent Redistricting Commission failed to reach a consensus was unconstitutional, petitioners successfully argued.

“Petitioners first asserted that, in light of the lack of compliance by the IRC and the legislature with the procedures set forth in the Constitution, the legislature’s enactment of the 2022 redistricting maps contravened the Constitution,” the Wednesday ruling said. “To conclude otherwise, petitioners contend, would be to render the 2014 amendments — touted as an important reform of the redistricting process — functionally meaningless. We agree.”

Last week, the state’s maps for U.S. House seats and state legislative seats were stricken by a five-judge panel, which found that “evidence of the largely one-party process used to enact the 2022 congressional map, a comparison of the 2022 congressional map to the 2012 congressional map, and the expert opinion and supporting analysis of Sean P. Trende, met petitioners’ burden of establishing that the 2022 congressional map was drawn to discourage competition and favor Democrats.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/can-desantis-get-past-the-donald/

Last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis took two big steps to solidify his popularity with the Republican base, not only in his home state but across the nation.

First, he won the hearts and minds of conservative voters and many independent parents by passing a law that prevents teachers from discussing sensitive topics of gender and sexual orientation with young students (grades three and under). Second, he confronted and defeated one of Florida’s largest and most influential employers, Disney World, on a vital issue. He stripped Disney of its special privilege to govern the vast territory it owns near Orlando.

Both moves are popular in their own right — the first with parents, the second with Republican voters and perhaps others. That popularity is important, but commentators have missed the subtext, why those battles matter so much for DeSantis’s political prospects. What his legislative victories demonstrate is that DeSantis is willing to fight hard against formidable opposition on high-profile issues, including cultural issues. That is exactly what Republican voters want today.

The key word here is fight. The go-along-to-get-along days of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush are dead and buried. The undertaker was Donald Trump. His eagerness to take on those fights has been central to his success. DeSantis is showing he is just as willing. In fact, he’s trying to show that, like Trump, he is not just willing but eager. He relishes the battles with Hollywood leftists, teachers’ unions, woke corporations, and federal bureaucrats. And he wants to show he can win those fights.

DeSantis’s victories put him at the forefront of his party on a theme that really matters to Republican voters, and to many independents as well. They don’t think K Street lobbyists, unions, Hollywood celebrities, federal bureaucrats, and big corporations are on their side. And, except for the lobbyists (who go wherever the money is), they know these groups are all firmly attached to the Democratic Party. Republican voters want a leader who will confront these entrenched groups — not reluctantly but eagerly — and beat them. That’s exactly what DeSantis showed them last week.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dem-pollster-issues-frantic-warning-on-midterms/

Perfect storm incoming! Not only are the American people angry with how the Democrats are running things, they’re angry in a whole lot of different ways at the same time. Democratic pundits are already whining that the media are to blame for not telling citizens about all the good news — everyone has a job and the economy is growing — but the media are unable to mollify people who have half a dozen reasons to want to thrash the Dems.

Mark Penn, a Bill Clinton pollster, in today’s New York Times:

These economic blows are just one element in a cascading set of problems all hitting at the same time. It combines the nuclear anxieties of the 1950s and ’60s with the inflation threat of the ’70s, the crime wave of the ’80s and ’90s and the tensions over illegal immigration in the 2000s and beyond. This electorate is not experiencing a malaise, as President Jimmy Carter was once apocryphally said to have proclaimed, but has instead formed into a deep national fissure ready to blow like a geyser in the next election if leadership does not move to relieve the pressure.

Americans think the economy is weak, inflation is effectively giving them a major pay cut, the border is being overrun, criminals are roaming unchecked, Covid policy is a mess, Vladimir Putin is more dangerous than ever before, and political correctness amounts to a national gag order. Any one of these things could be enough to cost Democrats the House; in the fall of 2014, you may recall, America was in a state of anxiety about mass illegal immigration and a threat from Ebola that turned out to recede quickly, and harshly punished the party in power. Republicans gained an astonishing nine Senate seats, and 13 in the House.

America today is facing real, undeniable problems, and most of them are strongly associated with the Democratic Party. The rout is coming, and Democrats are doing almost nothing to avoid absorbing painful punishment in November.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/25/who-do-dems-want-in-2024-right-now-anybody-but-biden-ii-tipp-poll/

Yes, it’s very early. But if given the choice right now, which Democrats do Americans want to see run for president in 2024? The perhaps not-so-surprising answer emerging from the latest I&I/TIPP Poll seems to be: “Anyone but Joe Biden.”

In our April opinion poll, we asked Americans of all political affiliations across the demographic spectrum “Who do you want to see run for president on the Democratic ticket in 2024?”

Just 19% of those responding answered “Joe Biden, 46th president of the United States.” The rest of the choices were spread among 18 candidates, along with “other” (6%) and “not sure” (28%). Put another way, 81% of Americans don’t want Biden to run again.

Specifically, other names on the list included (in declining order of preference) Vice President Kamala Harris (7%), Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (6%), former First Lady Michelle Obama (6%), former Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton (4%), former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (3%), and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (3%).

Trailing in the preference race is a long list at 2%, including losing 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Massachusetts Rep. Joe Kennedy.

A third tier of candidates includes California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Luhan Grisham, all at 1% preference.

The data come from the April I&I/TIPP Poll of 981 registered voters.