US Mid-terms: Rays of Republican Hope. By John Hinderaker.
Obviously, the midterms were bitterly disappointing. … Nevertheless, the Sun continues to rise and conservatives will continue to fight, so we may as well look for rays of hope. Here are a few.
Gridlock in Washington, maybe:
Assuming Republicans narrowly take the House — which looks like a good bet on paper, although it will require some exceptions to the rule that Democrats always win when it takes a week to count the ballots — … a Republican House … can block most of the Democrats’ craziness for the next two years. …
Republicans beat Democrats 52-47 in the total vote:
When the counting stops, there will be somewhere around 4 million to 5 million more votes cast for Republican candidates than for Democratic candidates. …
Republicans won every age group over 30:
Of course, we got clobbered among young people. But at least we know where we need to concentrate our efforts. In 2020, Democrats focused on enabling mail-in voting on account of covid. That worked well for them. But mostly overlooked was the fact that more or less shutting down the colleges and universities hampered the Democrats’ efforts in those venues. This year, they were back to their old tricks. They carried out massive voter registration drives among students and organized buses, often with pizza and sometimes with beer, to take them to the polls to vote Democrat. …
Republicans gained with minorities:
This year the GOP won around 40% of the Hispanic vote (with a lot of variation among geographies and specific demographic groups) and 13-14% of the black vote. Asians, another diverse group, are also moving toward the GOP, with around 40% voting Republican this year. …
Men don’t vote Democrat:
The Democrats can’t get men to vote for them. The gender gap continues to favor Republicans, as the GOP won male voters by 14 points, while the Dems carried women by only 6 points. …
Abortion:
I think it is fair to say that Dobbs, while correct, cost Republicans the election. States where abortion initiatives were on the ballot went especially badly for the GOP; if there was an exception, I don’t know what it was. …
Trump:
Trump’s inserting himself into the news during the last stage of the campaign played into the Democrats’ hands by enabling their absurd claim that the election was, somehow, all about Trump.
If Power Line’s poll is any indication, and I think it is, only a small minority of activist Republicans want Trump to be the party’s nominee in 2024.
I think his appeal will continue to fade as time goes by. Trump did his country, and to a lesser extent his party, a lot of good. But at this point he is a serious liability, and I am hopeful that the midterms decisively broke his grip on the GOP.
The future:
We continue to be a bitterly divided, 50/50 country. It is like trench warfare in World War I: party loyalty is so strong, and power so evenly divided, that even the worst inflation in decades, millions of illegal immigrants and spiraling crime can move the line only a yard or two.
Vote counting might have something to do with it. You think it is mere coincidence that the Dems win just enough close seats to retain power, and that those seats were where the people in charge are Dems?
The Dems must have been so embarrassed in 2020, with all those videos of Democrat vote counters putting the same ballots through the counting machines multiple times, pulling boxes of ballots out from hiding under the table when the Republican poll workers had gone home, confining Republican scrutineers to 100 feet from the vote counting, Zuckerbucks, and so on. This time the Dems are so much better organized — it’s so much harder to say how they did it. Yet they did.
The red wave materialized 52 to 47. Yet the Democrats have retained control of the Senate and may well win the House as well. The Washington establishment is still running the country, unimpeded. The dumb old Republicans are left scratching their heads.
The Republicans need to insist on paper ballots, voter ID, almost no exceptions to voting in person on the day, purple fingers, counting by hand, and scrutineers from both sides watching the ballots at all times. The current system is not credible.
But the uniparty Republicans will not support that, so the system of masked authoritarianism limps on. How long has it been running? When was the will of the electorate last reflected in the result, before the unexpected accident of Trump 2016?
