Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Hopeful.
I hope so. I’m not very hopeful. You should be seeing more disgust than you are and we have the added problem of widespread vote fraud. On top of that, you win control of Congress, and who is there in charge but Bit*h McConnell and Kevin McCarthy. For everyone like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz you have a couple of mediocrities who have no creative ideas and just collect donor dollars.
McConnell and McCarthy fortunately are running against Schumer and Pelosi not Washington and Lincoln. Politics is always the art of comparison, something conservative critics of Trump too often forgot. Vote fraud will be of as much use to the Democrats this year as it was in Virginia last year.
I’m afraid of counting our chickens before their hatched. But I’m prayerful….
I sure pray you’re right about the vote fraud DM. My gut tells me otherwise. Cheating, fraud and grifting is what the Party of Satan does best.
My gut tells me otherwise.
People were saying that in 2021. Very tiresome. The margin of fraud only matters in very close elections. It isn’t going to be close this go round.
I’m afraid of counting our chickens before their hatched.
No chicken counting here, but an assessment of how the eggs are currently doing.
While I think vote fraud is always a potential issue, I don’t think it’s going to be able to move the needle in this election. It took tremendous effort, money, a “pandemic,” ignoring state constitutions and the collusion of many entities to do so in only a handful of states for one election, and even then the margins were razor thin; the overall spread is (I think) too great across the board to accomplish this on any large scale. I don’t think the structure, financing or organization exists to do so for so many smaller elections when the dynamics differ more prominently from locale to locale. I don’t doubt the will is there to try it, but the execution would (I think) have to be even greater in a more diffused context, and given some states tightening up election laws, would have to be even more overt.
It’s not the comparison between McConnell / McCarthy and Schumer / Pelosi I’m thinking about, but what McConnell / McCarthy will be willing and able to accomplish with majorities. Previous experience does not encourage.
Taking Democrat control away from House and (with luck) Senate is victory enough for me. Anything positive McConnell and McCarthy can accomplish in spite of this administration will be gravy.
Biden (or at least his handlers) will be a very lame duck, and I’m all for that.
I pray for a ‘red tide’ because otherwise this whole county will not only look like California but even communist China as that is the direction the demoncrats are taking us.
Previous experience does not encourage.
Different makeup, especially in the House. 2018 got rid of a lot of Republican deadwood.
Vote fraud will be of as much use to the Democrats this year as it was in Virginia last year.
Vote fraud in Virginia last year turned a 10-point landslide into a 2-point nailbiter.
The Republicans are up, but they’re not up 8 points. There is very good reason to be worried about what the Democrats will pull next month.
Vote fraud in Virginia last year turned a 10-point landslide into a 2-point nailbiter.
Any proof to sustain that assertion?
Also, how do you explain the GOP gaining House seats in 2020?
Re: speaking of voter fraud being “tiresome”. We’ll see what happens in November.
Prayful, indeed.
Do worry about being cocky. Encourages fraud aka dirty tricks.
I’m not cocky. I’m mad as Hell.
N.B. none of those people quashing 2020 election audits and investigations and destroying evidence talk like people that actually believe they themselves did not steal the 2020 elections.
The margin of fraud only matters in very close elections. It isn’t going to be close this go round.
I’ve literally heard this line from the right my whole life. The only effect this line of thinking has had is to never fix voter fraud based on the idea that the left’s always going to do it anyway and if the election was close, we deserved to lose.
I used to be dismissive of fraud. I cut my teeth in local politics in New York. Elections administration in New York was imperfect but head and shoulders above what I read about other states. (I believe it has deteriorated noticeably in the last 30 years). One thing that’s dismaying is the promiscuous resort to postal balloting. This is absolutely bad business, particularly in circumstances where the electoral roll is not purged of relict entries. I’m no longer persuaded that fraud is only consequential in the closest election.
Another problem is enrollment of the ineligible. One thing Terry McAuliffe tried to do in Virginia was to annul state law against the enrollment of felons by decreeing a mass amnesty. There is a constitutional provision which allows the discretionary restoration of a person’s suffrage, but it was envisioned that it would be used retail. I think the governor’s action may have been enjoined because he did not sign a specific document for each ex con he intended to enfranchise, with the name of the subject on it, but I’ve not followed up on that.
2018 got rid of a lot of Republican deadwood.
I hear you. Please note, however, that McConnell has been the Republican floor leader since 2007 and that Kevin McCarthy was the 3d ranking Republican in the House in 2011 ad the 2d ranking in 2014. The deadwood may be gone from the caucus at large, but the caucus leadership is the same sort of deadwood.
Vote fraud in Virginia last year turned a 10-point landslide into a 2-point nailbiter.
They’d have to have put 240,000 fraudulent ballots into the stream to accomplish that. Seems like a tall order, but I don’t know.
2020 wasn’t just voter fraud, it was states making up voting law on the fly. That was a once in a lifetime event.
Thinking that dems successfully using a crisis to bend the law to their benefit is a “once in a lifetime event” is one of the most naive statements I’ve ever read.
“I’ve literally heard this line from the right my whole life.”
Yeah. In 2010 and 2014 for starts. Republicans have held the House for 20 of the past 30 years. The Senate for 16 of the past 30 years. Invincible cheating by the Democrats is a fable, with the exception of 2020 on the Presidential level.
I never said that the cheating was invincible, but it doesn’t need to be invincible to be a serious problem. Imagine you played baseball in a league where your opponents got one free run at the start of every game. You could still win, but you would have a serious handicap. And you’d be stupid to just shrug it off by saying “that rule only causes us to lose games that we’d only have a one run margin on anyway.”
It’s also foolish to think that having the power transfer between the parties is natural or inevitable. The Democrats held control of the house from 1948-1995, after all. When it comes to the senate they were “merely” able to keep control of it for 26 years straight (at a time when they also controlled the house.)
Again, I’m not saying that doom is certain, but it is possible, and it’s a lot more possible if we shrug off vote fraud.
Rudolph, it’s never happened before. Breaking election law, sure. Creating election law that can be abused, yup. But not writing election law on the spot like freeform poetry. That was new, and there’s no reason to think the conditions exist for it to happen again, certainly not a month from now.
The trouble is that massive use of postal ballots has greased the skids for fraud. I think the watershed may have been the theft of a U.S. Senate seat in Washington State in 2002. Washington state later did away with in-person voting.
One thing that gets you about elections administration in this country is how everything is done with the left hand and the response to problems is to make technological introductions which then add more problems.
Media Democrats make hay over long lines at precincts in Georgia without ever mentioning why they’re long. Georgia only sets up one precinct per 6,000 residents. The national mean is one per 3,000 residents. New York set up one per 1,000 when I was involved in local politics. You can add more precincts. You can move elections to Friday evening, Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon. You can simplify your electoral calendar by having all offices serve terms which are a whole-number multiple of four. All of these things would reduce the length of your queues. Instead, they instituted masses of vote-by-mail. The introduction of digital technology has if anything been associated with delays in reporting results; what computer science faculty who addressed the issue 15 years ago has come to pass: the use of digital technology has reduced public confidence in the probity of the ballot.
The Democrats held control of the house from 1948-1995, after all.
Largely due to the historical accidents of the Great Depression and the Solid South. Once both these factors became one with Nineveh and Tyre a more traditional back and forth between the parties became the norm.
use of digital technology has reduced public confidence in the probity of the ballot.
Amen.
Largely due to the historical accidents of the Great Depression and the Solid South.
For a dozen years after the war (1946-58) it appeared as if some degree of parity had reasserted itself between the parties. They you had an abrupt and severe portside turn (1958-64) and it required serial disasters for the Democratic advantage to dissipate. I assume there is some academic literature on 1958-64 and developing a model to attempt to explain it. Never seen any.
That was new, and there’s no reason to think the conditions exist for it to happen again
They don’t have to happen again, just happen still. As Art mentioned. Mail-in ballots are ubiquitous today as they were in 2020, and many voter rolls remail unpurged. They “accidentally” printed and sent out tens of thousands of extra unrequested ballots then, why wouldn’t they now? They mailed them to people living out of state then, why should this November be any different?
For a dozen years after the war (1946-58) it appeared as if some degree of parity had reasserted itself between the parties.
Running Adlai Stevenson twice by the Dems against Ike helped the Republicans a lot. In 1946 the Republicans benefited from the same time for a change after a long period in power by the opposing party as did Labor in Britain in 1945. Absent these conditions the Democrats were still overwhelmingly strong at the Congressional level. Reagan began the process of chipping away at this and the first two years of Clinton established a return to strong competitiveness between the parties at the Congressional level.
Disagree. You had six Congresses after the war. The Republican position in five of them was better than it was at any time during the 11 succeeding Congresses (1959-81). The 81st Congress was the only one in which there were fewer than 85 Republicans for every 100 Democrats. The curio was that their performance in Congressional elections was consistently disappointing while they performed satisfactorily in presidential elections (bar 1964).
Disagree. You had six Congresses after the war. The Republican position in five of them was better than it was at any time during the 11 succeeding Congresses (1959-81).
Agreed Art and I explained why.
On the Presidential level after FDR the Democrats tended to be weak sauce as opposed to their latent Congressional strength. Truman barely won in 1948, Stevenson blew two elections, Kennedy barely won, Humphrey lost to Nixon, McGovern was slaughtered, Carter barely won and then was slaughtered, Mondale was slaughtered and Dukakis was soundly whipped. The one exception was the Goldwater Johnson contest where Goldwater suffered from a virtual schism in the party and the South was still largely a Democrat domain. It is interesting that the Democrats recover from the slump once the Republicans become competitive again at the Congressional level.