Posted on 11/17/2022 9:12:52 AM PST by Starman417
What was supposed to be a red tsunami last week turned out to be a ripple. It didn’t take long for the GOP establishment to place the blame: Donald Trump!
It couldn’t be because Mitch McConnell decided to spend $10 million supporting the treacherous Lisa Murkowski against the state’s GOP nominee, rather than in Arizona, Georgia, or Michigan. No, it was Trump. It wasn’t Kevin McCarthy’s embarrassing attempt to recreate Newt Gingrich’s successful “Contract with America” that galvanized America and brought the GOP 54 seats in a year with 2.99% inflation, with his facile “Commitment to America”. No, it was Donald Trump. It wasn’t that McConnell’s August derision of MAGA candidates claiming the party lacked “candidate quality” while his handpicked Colorado senatorial candidate Joe O’Dea went on to lose by 13 points, 3 times as much as Oz lost by in Pennsylvania. No, it was Trump.
Despite the GOP establishment’s desire to pin their failure on 45 and his supporters, the truth is, this failure has numerous causes.
Needless to say, the GOP establishment is at the top of the list. They failed to embrace the candidates of their own party or execute a compelling national campaign that focused on the kitchen-table issues of inflation, crime, immigration, and parental rights. In reality, 2022 was the single best landscape for a GOP wave in modern times, but rather than focus America’s attention on those issues we had Lindsey Graham threatening Vladimir Putin and sending $50 billion to Ukraine while McConnell and John Cornyn were busy selling out the 2nd Amendment. The leaders of the GOP are grifters more interested in the perks of leadership than winning, and it showed on November 8th.
Beyond the incompetence of the GOP leadership, there were two other issues that drove the election outcome.
Believe it or not, abortion, the third rail of American politics, was one. The Wall Street Journal has a fascinatingly comprehensive analysis of voting patterns, looking at dozens of criteria. One question asked “Which one of the following would you say is the most important issue facing the country?” and compared the voting patterns from 2018. Of the nine issues listed: Economy, Healthcare, Immigration, Abortion, Crime, Climate change, Foreign policy, Covid, and Guns, four had no change measured because the issues didn’t even show up in 2018. Of the remaining five, the Democrats lost support on four by an average of 6%. One they didn’t: Abortion. Of the 9% of voters who said abortion was the most important issue, fully 78% of them voted for Democrats, a 57% increase over 2018. That essentially translates into about 7% of voters. The GOP did an abysmal job addressing the issue of Abortion. They allowed the media and Democrats to paint the GOP as extremists who wanted to force little girls who’d been raped into having babies.
Whatever one’s opinion on abortion, the fact of the matter is that absolute bans on abortion are unpopular virtually everywhere in America and even within the GOP fully 1/3 of the party disagrees with them. This was probably a lost cause from the beginning, but in an extraordinarily contentious election, the GOP leadership should have done a better job addressing the issue. With the leak of Dobbs, the GOP should have known that the Democrats were going to come after them with lies like the one surrounding the little girl in Ohio raped by the illegal alien or the prospect of birth control being outlawed, and prepared. But they didn’t. Indeed, you had the buffoon Lindsey Graham pitching the issue of passing a nationwide ban. Dobbs didn’t ban abortion or outlaw anything, but it didn’t matter because the GOP didn’t have the plan to address the issue, and it showed at the polls.
All of that however is incidental to the real reason the GOP failed: Voting rules, starting with early voting and mail-in balloting. By the time Dr. Oz and John Fetterman met in their debate on October 25th 635,000 of the state’s 5 million voters had already voted, 460,000 of them were Democrats, 320,000 more than Republicans. That number is significant given that post-debate fully 82% of viewers said that Oz won the contest, and he lost by only 225,000 votes. That of course is before even considering the fraud potential inherent in mail-in voting. Mail-in balloting (and in particular universal mail-in voting) essentially provides Democrats with a mechanism to fabricate votes as well as harvest hundreds of thousands of votes from nursing homes, college campuses and other high-density locations. Then there’s the fact that Pennsylvania doesn’t require voter ID and officials seem to have been involved in electioneering on election day itself.
Oz was a less-than-perfect candidate to be sure, but the cards were stacked against him… indeed they were stacked against whoever the GOP nominee was. Democrats learned in 2020 that they could use voting laws to manipulate vote outcomes in their favor and it certainly worked in Pennsylvania.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
R-est prefers to be graceful losers instead of winners....
I’ve been saying this for years, the Democrats play for keeps and the Republicans play for 2nd place.
Like i always say- the rats approach politics like its a blood sport. The GOP? As though they were playing a game of patty cakes.
I’ve always said Republicans bring marshmallows to a gunfight and it’s only gotten worse. It’s probably too late but in hindsight Trump should have formed his own party after the Republicans joined the rats and ridiculed anyone who talked about the obvious steal of 20.
Democrats brought a machine gun to a duel. Republicans thought that they were going to a card game at the bridge club.
I am convinced he did this on purpose to throw a monkey wrench into the conservative base's chances, not unlike the RINOs' response to the tea Party.
Of course help the steal by blaming the victims - you probably think people in Pennsylvania actually voted for Shrek.
Keep blaming the victims - keep piling on with help from neverTrump scumbags and criminal Democrats so no one will want to challenge an incumbent rodent - real smart einstein.
Enjoy your pity party based on stupidity.
The Republican-conservative coalition guarantees the Republicans a nice chunk of the political pie without working for it.
Time for us conservatives to decouple and send the modern Whig Party into the political wilderness..
(by design, the majority of the serfs don't know that yet...but they soon will)
From the industrial revolution, to the digital revolution, to the sucker revolution.
Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose said it best..."it's too late to turn back now"...
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The reason for GOP not sweeping the Senate and the House races is not Trump. It’s also not McConnell. It’s the failure of the GOP at the state level to compete with the Democrats in ballot harvesting. Until they do, we will continue to enter election fights with one hand tied behind our back.
” It’s the failure of the GOP at the state level to compete with the Democrats in ballot harvesting.”
In my town Democrats went door to door leaving flyers. Republicans? Nothing.
“Ballot Harvesting”
You are right about this, and in the mean time all of these articles and posts blaming this or that defeat on campaigning or messaging or quality of the candidate etc. etc ad nauseum, is fallacious and foolish!
“It didn’t take long for the GOP establishment to place the blame: Donald Trump!”
Well, by blaming Trump the GOP “leadership” is tacitly admitting that Trump is the real leader of the Republican party now, not them.
“Trump should have formed his own party after the Republicans joined the rats...”
I think Trump won’t do that because he already had some experience with the Reform party a while back so he knows firsthand what a mess it would be and that it wouldn’t accomplish anything.
A third party might win some day.
But Trump is smart enough to know that it wouldn’t win in his lifetime.
Trump needs to work on the states he won in 16 and lost in 20 plus a couple others. Election oversight and integrity. Easy to describe and difficult to do. But that’s the answer.
Exactly. The dims brought nothing new. Just the same fraud as 2020 which succeeded because nothing much was done to fix things. There were a few things done such as Florida but not enough.
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