This is being written hours ahead of the opening of polling places on the East Coast for the 2018 mid-term elections. What comes next is a collection of thoughts about the whole scene.
Legitimate Elections
Democrats have spent the past two years trying to undo the results of the 2016 Presidential election. They thought they had it locked down and suddenly their polls turn out not to have been accurate and they felt cheated. The didn’t try to understand why they lost and have tried to find any reason at all to explain their failure.
The Russians did it!
Voter suppression!
And the real kicker: the election was illegitimate.
So whatever happens today, is the election legitimate?
This is a question that has to be answered before the polling places open. In countries without a tradition of free and fair elections the opposition parties try to get the attention of anyone who will look at them and say the election has been rigged.
If the Democrats win enough House and Senate races to retake majorities in those chambers are the elections legitimate? Suppose that the Republicans manage to hang on to their majorities. Are the elections legitimate there?
Suppose that the leader in a given election is a Republican but he only leads by a couple hundred votes. Suddenly Democrat poll workers “find” more ballots in the trunk of a car that hands the election to the Democrat. This happened in Minnesota in the 2008 race for US Senate between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. Fishy for honest observers but just dandy for the Democrats because their guy won.
Democrats don’t seem to understand the dangerous game they are playing. If they are only going to respect the results when they win they will set a dangerous precedent for future elections. “We’ll win at the ballot box or else revolution! – er, resistance.” hardly seems like a smart way to conduct election campaigns.
Ghosts of Kavanaughs Past
Democrats clearly orchestrated a smear of Brett Kavanaugh hoping to revive their war on women meme and convince gullible women to vote against Republicans. What they tried to do to an upright family man, consummate professional and pillar of the community was unconscionable.
While some partisans will never stray from the party it is striking that this line of attack got any traction at all. Let’s hope that most women understand that if something like this can be done to a man of impeccable reputation and with many high connections that it can utterly destroy their fathers, husbands, brothers, sons and nephews. Rewarding this kind of blatant and untrue attack will only increase the likelihood that other inconvenient men will be in the cross-hairs in the future.
Latina Actresses Get Out the Vote… For Democrats
The Today Show ran a feature on Hispanic actresses that are trying to turn out Hispanic voters. The piece that ran on Monday, November 6th described their efforts and included the usual pap. The ladies want “our communities to be enfranchised and make their voices heard,” and “when everything the President says is an attack on our community,” and on and on.
The identity politics here border on the absurd. Donald Trump speaks about people who come over the border illegally and how he wants to prevent their entry and deal with those who have overstayed their visas. Donald Trump does not talk about Hispanic communities in a negative way. This is reminiscent of when Republicans talk about cracking down on crime and the Democrats scream that this is just racist talk against black people. The Democrats are the ones making the connection between blacks and crime even though they tend to go ballistic when someone like Colin Flaherty does the same thing. Reducing Hispanic voters to single issue cardboard cutouts about illegal immigration is insulting.
No doubt that in 2016 those actresses wanted women to vote their lady parts. Now they demand that Hispanics vote their skin color or ethnicity. It would be so nice if they stuck to voter education campaigns that encouraged people to educate themselves about the options on the ballot.
Outcomes
There is no point in trying to make a prediction. The afterglow of being right doesn’t last and incorrect prognostication lives out on the Internet forever.
I do hope that voters have seen what just two years of the Trump administration have brought the country. Unemployment is declining, the stock market is strong, taxes are lower and people have more take home pay. These and others are reasons for the American people to vote Republican and reject the Democrat’s politics of envy and fear. Hopefully enough voters will be illuminated by the time they are alone with their ballot.