Tucker: "The people whose job it was to win but did not win should go do something else. We're speaking specifically to the Republican leadership of the House, Senate, and RNC. They took hundreds of millions of dollars to paint the map red and they didn't." pic.twitter.com/eTOwXlDWAl
— American Firebrand (@AmFirebrand) November 10, 2022
News that I missed, courtesy of The Babylon Bee:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Amid record discontent around the economy, inflation, and education, the Republican Party has narrowly managed to stave off what many thought would be a record-breaking red wave.
“This was a close call,” said one Republican leader in Washington. “We were worried that we would achieve massive victories tonight, but we thankfully snatched defeat from the jaws of victory to achieve a much more proper and sensible red trickle, like the proper gentlemen we are.”
Some Republicans achieved major victories, which were largely ignored by party leadership due to the fact that those Republicans were loud and icky “MEGA-MAGA” culture warriors. “Ron DeSantis won by double digits, and frankly, we find that quite uncouth,” said a D.C. consultant while holding up a glass of red trickle victory champagne. “Everyone knows the key to being a good Republican is to muddle your message and make it really squishy so no one knows what you stand for and everyone will like you. Duh!”
Everyone in the room then golf-clapped politely.
Go here to read the rest. Now Republicans will enter a period of navel gazing to find out what went wrong. I think it is obvious: the Republican party establishment earned this defeat.
- The Democrats in most states have developed a highly effective process of getting out their votes with constant e-mails, phone calls and door knockers. The only thing most Republicans receive is constant e-mails and letters begging for money. This isn’t rocket science. The GOP GOTV operation in most states is last century or worse.
- Embrace mail in voting. In order to excuse his own defeat in 2020, and I do believe that an immense amount of fraud at drop boxes probably stole that election, Trump convinced too many Republicans that voting in person on election day is the way to go. Now that is how I vote, but you lose a lot of marginal party voters by voting like that, and you expose them to shenanigans like the mysterious failure of 20 percent of the polling places in Maricopa County in Arizona on election day this year.
- Fire and replace a good many of the campaign gurus. These people eat funds like Elvis used to eat banana and peanut butter sandwiches, often for little to show for it. Almost always the worst of them are well connected and the whole operations often smell of grift first, effective campaigning second.
- Stop playing inside beltway games with funding. Our candidates for the Senate in Arizona and New Hampshire both were deprived initially of funding, because Minority Leader Mitch McConnell got his snout out of joint after the candidates had attacked him in the primaries. Leave such feuds for after the elections and count on beating the Democrats.
- Fund raising needs to become more centralized and rationalized. Too often good candidates are starved for funds, while candidates rolling in cash will not part with a penny of it. Every candidate for Congress with a winnable race needs to be assured of minimum funding.
- The Party needs to develop better training for would be candidates. Well meaning amateurs are too often nominated and lose winnable races through completely avoidable rookie mistakes.
- The Party needs an organized social media presence, rather than letting paid agents of the Democrat party completely dominate.
- Learn from successful campaigns and pass those lessons on. During World War II our military ran very effective training schools imparting the battle experience of combat veterans to new troops. Politics is a trade like any other. Stop having candidates trying to learn that trade with no prior training.
- Coordinate messaging. The Left does this masterfully while conservatives are all over the lot. This isn’t individualist, it is stupid. Every week in a campaign should have a theme to be hammered away by most of the candidates running for Congress, with the messages reinforcing each other.
- In the early years of this century the Republican party developed a deep bench by taking control of state legislatures. This focus has been lost and needs to be regained. In what should have been a Red Wave year the Democrats took several legislative chambers, including both chambers in Michigan and the Pennsylvania House.
None of this is rocket science and there is no excuse for not learning from the shellacking the GOP took yesterday.
What often passes for incompetence is just as often merely excellent planning. (Status quo anyone?) A famous general once said that we fight the war with the army we have, but too often that means we lose the war with the army we failed to properly select and train.
More often because we use methods that worked in the past and we expect to work in the future. Politics is human conflict and being wedded to a victorious strategy from a prior conflict is a good way to lose the present one. At Leipzig Napoleon said of the Coalition generals: “I see these dogs have learned something!”.
Dr. Taylor Marshall on Twitter pointed this out:
“Most 18-29 year olds voted overwhelmingly (D+28) for weed, LGBT+, abortion, blue cities, and student loan forgiveness.”
https://twitter.com/TaylorRMarshall/status/1590328906980392961?t=EOosAeJ3GvBGM9Y-kstFkw&s=19
Half my company is filled with these fruit cakes. They can do math and science when it comes to their jobs, but all critical thinking skills are lost when it comes to politics. The believe in global warming, in abortion, in gay marriage. And they regard Judeo-Christian principles as right wing fascism. This is what America is becoming. You cannot undo a generation so totally damaged ideologically.
Call me a cynic, but I think the Republican establishment is pretty OK with these results. The will likely gain the House and keep the filibuster alive in the Senate to stymie the President and set the stage for 24. Most importantly, they successfully isolated Trump and his candidates to preclude future assault on the Establishment. This was effectively executed, not a mistake.
No, they wanted to win a big victory but they were too inept to accomplish it. As for Trump, he was at best unhelpful, especially letting his hand picked candidates be starved of funds, while he was sitting on a huge mountain of campaign money, until near the end when he begrudgingly gave some of these candidates some campaign funds, too little and too late. For Trump, it is always about Trump.
We didn’t unseat Bennie but he did admit that had he not been given an extra 2 counties he’s not sure he would have pulled it off.
Nice going w redistricting. (/sarcasm)
I’d like to believe that the Republican establishment wanted to gain enough seats in both houses to make effective impeachments and DOJ/Garland/Fauci hearings a possibility, but I’m afraid Bill R’s scenario is plausible. Profiting from a position of weakness is right in McConnell’s wheelhouse.
Newt Gingrich showed that a specific program. Contract with America, gets results. A list of platitudes just does not have much effect.
All excellent observations: but I gravitate towards LCQ’s observation and the apparent data showing 18-29-year-olds voted +28 for their hysterical global-warming/save-the-earth, kill-inopportune-babies, pay-my-loan-debt, politically-disparate-thinkers-are-fascists woke-screech agenda.
Ruck up, son.
Three or four generations of public school brainwashing and Catholic/Christian school/church sermons on social justice BS are hard to overcome.
Add to that, bogus mail ballots and vote harvesting.
Tuesday was a national IQ test and the median score was 70. As per plan.
Even PhD’s [credentialed morons] voted for two or six more years or horrid policies and policy-induced crises.
Work harder.
LQC…I have seen this at work, too. In the mid 1990s, it was dress shirt, dress pants, dress shoes and a tie. Women got off easier, they wore pretty much what they wanted.
Before Covid, I saw pink/green/blue hair, earlobes stretched enough to pass a golf ball through, neck tattoos and septum rings.
The GOP establishment has a loser mentality. McConnell is the poster child for it.
Elevator speeches from the nosebleed section:
1) Socialism cannot work because of the inherent flaw that comes with limiting economic activity to the point where managing the metrics becomes possible.
2) “Your truth” stops at the inside of your skull. Objective reality begins there, goes to the ends of the universe and is completely beyond your ability to control it. It is what would still be here if you were not, and does not care either way.
3) Sex is a biological fact. “Gender” is a construct which does not exist outside of the imaginations of those who choose to hold it and has no bearing at all on those who do not. See speech #2.
4) The Earth’s climate is a chaotic system. There are far too many interacting variables for accurate predictions to be made with any confidence, and it is not known whether the known list of those variables is even complete. This is why, going back a half-century, every prediction that the world was going to end in 10 years unless we went hard Socialist has failed.
5) Embryology and reproductive biology, on the other hand, are sciences so well known that they can be replicated in a test tube. There is no scientific doubt that a living being is created at conception. The only argument is with the calendar, as in when it was that you exercised your right to choose, and what the person who might be killed looks like at death.
6) Decreasing waste, looking for more efficient energy systems and innovating better stewardship are all good ideas in their own right. There is no need for heavy-handed government scare tactics, unless those are not the actual intented goals.
7) In my version of America, you are free to speak your mind and I am obligated to defend that freedom even if we disagree. What does your version look like?
I have had success with these. They may be simplistic to us, but to the mushy-headed zombie class they’re real jaw-closers, and on occasion have led to further discussion. On the other hand, when I get called an “-ist” or “-phobe” is when I know I’ve won, and my reply is always “Calling me a doodie-head proves only that you do not know what you’re talking about. Remaining ignorant is your choice until it impacts me, and then it is my right to do something about it. Today my option is to try and teach. Tomorrow it may be something else. Objective reality and all that, you know.”
The social data I saw (and who knows what the methodology was) showed a large plurality in favor of the Democrats among those under 30. It also showed a 50-50 split among those between age 30 and age 45, i.e. among those born during the years running from 1979 to 1992. Barack Obama won with a plurality in excess of 30% of the vote among those cohorts in 2008. If the survey is correct, their disposition now is entirely different. Now, its distressing that young people ‘think’ this way, but the phenomenon appeared between 2000 and 2008, not this year.
Another piece of data pointed out by Steve Sailer: Republicans won among married men, married women, and unmarried men. They got shellacked among unmarried women.
WK, I prefer planting seeds of doubt rather than taking on an entire ideology. The modern fascination with irony allows little undermining ideas to be received without the warning bells going off. Like, but you know they’re not really women. Or, let’s you and him pay for your college, that sounds fair.
Young people are stupid, and they’ll change their perspectives over time. The one thing that scares me is the pro-choice stuff. That’s an immorality. The generation that came up under Roe could understand the threat of not being born. The new generation sees a threat of not having a right to abortion. That’ll require a big, societal effort to get them to think right.
The new generation sees a threat of not having a right to abortion. That’ll require a big, societal effort to get them to think right.
Joseph Epstein in an interview for the editor’s chair at The American Scholar was asked what he would do for young people. His reply, “I will let them grow older”.
They should know better, but they do not. They did not 40-odd years ago. The society ladies who manned the board of Planned Parenthood should have known better, but didn’t. The clergymen in charge of the Episcopal parishes they attended should have known better, but didn’t.
I have often thought that the Republican party is not very effective at responding to the issues as posed by the democratic party. They respond weakly, and in ways that no one pays attention to. Why don’t they come up with catchy slogans and actually get people excited about the issues? They just keep giving in on the moral issues (gay so called “marriage”), and they don’t even seem to believe what they are saying. I think that is why they wouldn’t win even if the other side didn’t cheat.
The Republicans are often compared to the Washington Generals. So often that it’s hard to remember that it’s anything other than a meme. But the establishment wing of the party is so good at losing that it’s difficult to believe that their job isn’t to lose.
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Also do not underestimate how Rick Scott’s “11 Point Plan” “appeared” to suggest cutting Medicare and Social Security. One thing McCarthy should have done— and he did not do—is list in his vague and platitudinous “Commitment to America” a specific commitment NOT to cut SS & Medicare.
After all the Democrats have run this one-trick pony now for over 20 years. How could the Hapless Party not have expected “Medi-Scare” not to be used at the last minute now?
Trump endorsed 174 candidates that won, and only 9 of those he endorsed lost. The goal with this election wasn’t so much to defeat Democrats as it was to get the RINOs out of office. If you look at it this way, it wasn’t a total defeat, but setting up the board (as in a chess game).
The real defeat was in the states that adopted abortion laws, including state constitutional amendments, and in the states that rejected pro-life legislation.
Thank you, David! Good perspective.