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.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_establishment_is_trying_to_divide_and_conquer_maga.html
There are videos making the rounds showing President Trump standing on stage in Miami’s pouring rain while imploring Americans to get out and vote. The metaphor is striking. There’s Trump, battling the elements, lively as ever, refusing to give up, insisting on finishing what he’s started. Citizen Free Press appropriately notes that “President Trump is truly a force of nature.”
I know that the months ahead will make for some spirited political debate among friends, but I encourage you to cement in your minds this quintessential image of Trump unbroken and unbowed. Whatever else can be said about the man (and there is plenty), he remains the only leader in our times unafraid to stand alone. When other self-proclaimed allies run the other way or look for somewhere safe to weather the approaching storm, Trump stands inside the tempest, demanding that it give up and surrender. That’s something that will forever separate him from those who pretend to be him.
It has become normal to deconstruct Trump’s public appeal to something as basic as he fights! Yet it is not just that Trump fights; it is why he fights that has attracted such a diverse voting coalition unlike any other political movement today.
Consider the Republican Party’s consensus issues before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator and changed everything. By and large, Republican politicians defended the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without question. They ignored the harms of illegal immigration as a taboo issue equated with racism. And they dismissed discussion of revitalizing American industry and manufacturing as unrealistic in a globalist system where cheap slave labor is plentiful overseas.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19104/close-china-consulates
Beijing reportedly has… used the station to track Chinese individuals of interest to the regime and, short-circuiting legal procedures, to persuade those Chinese to voluntarily return to China.
“[T]hey are very bold because they know they can do as they like and the State Department won’t do a damn thing.” — Maura Moynihan, author, to Gatestone, October 2022.
Prior to the recent indictments, the U.S. government often let off Chinese agents with only a warning, sometimes because of intervention by the State Department.
Law enforcement is essential, but it is hardly an answer to China’s massive campaigns against the United States.
One solution is to deny Chinese wrongdoers the safe havens they enjoy in America. China’s principal safe heavens are its embassy and consulates.
[T]he U.S. should also be closing China’s non-diplomatic presences — primarily banks and companies — to even out the situation.
China uses every point of contact to try to bring down America, and American institutions are now being overwhelmed by the onslaught. It may sound drastic to some, but the survival of freedom and democracy in America critically depends on getting the Chinese regime out of the U.S.
The best way to do that is to expel the military officers, spies, agents, provocateurs and criminals finding protection in China’s diplomatic presences in the United States. Nothing else would better communicate resolve to Beijing than getting dangerous Chinese actors off American soil.
The Biden administration should of course be shutting down the Chinatown police station, as well.
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://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/09/airbus-still-does-business-with-putins-russia-but-also-wants-u-s-defense-contracts/
One thing made clear by Vladmir Putin’s war against Ukraine is how out of touch his calculations were regarding Ukraine’s ability to fight, the strength of his forces, and the willingness of the international community to push back against his unhinged brutality.
That last point might be the most surprising of all given the lack of a similar response to Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea and other aggressions in recent times. Countries — including famously neutral Switzerland — and an impressive number of private companies joined in sanctions and/or took similar steps that have hurt Putin’s ability to impose more pain on the Ukrainian people.
French aerospace giant Airbus is one of the more notable exceptions to the laudable private-sector efforts.
Instead, Airbus is ignoring sanctions on Russia and has gone as far as to successfully pressure the European Union to exempt it from sanctions. Interestingly, their position comes at a time when they are simultaneously attempting to expand their contracting work with the U.S. Defense Department.
Airbus needs titanium to manufacture planes. Titanium and titanium alloys are widely used for aircraft. Titanium’s density is 60% that of steel, so it is lightweight but also strong and resists corrosion. Airbus gets about half of the titanium it uses from Russia.
After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Airbus continued dealing with Moscow, even going so far as to stockpile more Russian titanium while other plane makers balked at the same chance.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-left-obliterates-morality/
Daniel Patrick Moynihan could never have imagined how far down America might define deviancy when he penned his seminal essay Defining Deviancy Down.
The diplomat, scholar and four-term Democratic Party senator from New York theorized that deviant behavior had become so pervasive, we must redefine it simply to cope as a nation.
“I wrote that there is always a certain amount of deviancy in a society,” Moynihan said of his 1993 essay. “But when you get too much, you begin to think that it’s not really that bad. Pretty soon you become accustomed to very destructive behavior.”
Millions of Americans are now accustomed to some of the most destructive behaviors imaginable, and recent examples of this demonstrate a breathtaking repudiation of human morality.
An American president publicly expressed support for the surgical mutilation of children. Taxpayers are funding drag queen story hours for three year olds. High school girls are banned from their own locker room because they are uncomfortable sharing it with a boy. A teacher badgers her students not to “judge people just because they wanna have sex with a 5-year-old.”
What used to be defined as medical malpractice, criminal molestation, voyeurism and rape is not only acceptable, it’s encouraged and, in some cases, required. It is deviancy defined so downward, it’s positively subterranean.
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.
