Early voting in Nevada ends Friday. The news leading up to the election is certainly stressful and intense. It shouldn’t be. Simply because Democrats could lose an election when Conventional Wisdom dictates the President’s party is going to lose in the midterms doesn’t mean it’s the figurative end of the world or the end of the republic.
Except, it probably could be.
Remember, the Party of Trump is engaged in an organized effort to install state officials who parrot the dogma that the election was stolen and Trump is the real president, and this effort is strongest in states like Arizona and Nevada where Trump barely (but clearly) lost. Lest one think this is not an organized campaign and that the good little Trumpniks all came to the same conclusion independently, Arizona US Senate candidate Blake Masters actually released a video of him campaigning door-to-door, and while he was out he took a call from Trump who told him, “Look at Kari. [Kari Lake, the Trump candidate for Governor] Kari’s winning with very little money, and if they say, ‘how’s your family?’ she says, ‘the election was rigged and stolen.'” All the proof we need that this really is the catechism of the Church of Trump. Just what you’d expect from a movement that is half fundamentalist cult and half snake-oil racket. Always Be Closing. At least Trump knows that much.
As addled as the Trumpniks may be in, for example, running a country, they have a capacity for long-term strategy and a capacity to change the terms of debate in a way that Democrats have so far been lacking. If they win it will make it that much easier for them to game the system and get their dominus et deus back in the White House, and then it won’t matter if Democrats bounce back in the presidential race after they didn’t feel like voting in the midterms because they weren’t enthused about the party in power. If enough Republicans get enough power in enough states next week, Democrats might never get back in power again.
These are my impressions on how this election is shaping up and how we got here.
The press is engaging in malpractice.
This week Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight made a hypothetical case for how Republicans could actually have a red wave this year, titled “The Case For A Republican Sweep On Election Night.” And I thought to myself, ‘that’s got to be the best news Democrats have had all year.‘
Silver, you might recall, was pretty optimistic about Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the White House in 2016, even if he also gave Trump a bigger chance than anyone else. And FiveThirtyEight, like most pollsters, was a lot more optimistic about the Democrats’ downballot chances in 2020 than the actual results warranted. After the fact, Politico came up with at least one analysis. “The most likely — if far from certain — culprit for off-kilter polling results is that key groups of people don’t answer polls in the first place. …Decreasing response rates have been a major source of concern for pollsters for more than a decade. But the politicization of polling during the Trump era — including the feedback loop from the former president, who has falsely decried poll results he doesn’t like as “fake” or deliberately aimed at suppressing enthusiasm for answering polls among GOP voters — appears to be skewing the results, with some segment of Republicans refusing to participate in surveys. …The most plausible — yet still unproven — theory is that the voters the polls are reaching are fundamentally different from those they are not. And Trump’s rantings about the polls being “fake” or rigged only exacerbate that problem.”
Politico also noted this year : “For the past week or so, polling averages like RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight have seen a steady stream of surveys from Republican (or Republican-leaning firms). That’s led to a social-media debate over whether the GOP’s uptick in the polls is real — or whether it’s an artifact of which polls are comprising these averages.
“How much of an influence are the Republican polls having? In New Hampshire, four of the last seven polls in the FiveThirtyEight average are from Republican firms. In Pennsylvania, it’s the three most recent polls, and six of the last nine. In Georgia, five of the last seven.” The article also noted that polls achieve substantively different results based on methodology: “(Nevada) Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Adam Laxalt were tied in the New York Times/Siena College poll, 47 percent to 47 percent. Another new poll out Monday, an OH Predictive Insights poll conducted for the nonprofit Nevada Independent, showed Cortez Masto barely ahead of Laxalt, 43 percent to 41 percent.
“Again, though both polls point to a close race, the differences in vote share can be explained by different methodological choices. The Independent’s poll included all three third-party candidates, plus Nevada’s unique “none of these candidates” ballot option.
“But the Times poll required respondents to volunteer the names of the third-party candidates, and “none of these candidates,” likely leading to higher vote shares for both major-party hopefuls.”
It recalls the physics problem of how the act of observing a phenomenon changes the nature of what is being observed.
There’s also the fact that, as with the Clinton-Trump race in 2016, you have may one candidate who is unpopular but qualified, or in some races a candidate who is qualified AND popular, against another candidate who is objectively inferior, and the press basically stages things to make the race a lot more suspenseful than it arguably ought to be.
Katie Hobbs is the Democratic candidate for the open Governor seat in Arizona against Kari Lake. Some have compared the race to an NPR public-affairs host going up against a Fox News anchor. Hobbs clearly has no charisma, and apparently no faith in herself. Because she went through all kinds of maneuvers to avoid getting into a debate with Lake, and in such a way that it ended up causing more problems. Supposedly this was because Lake “only wants a scenario where she can control the dialogue ” and is “only interested in creating a spectacle”. Which is true enough. Of course the spectacle was where Hobbs torpedoed the debate and made herself look like a chicken. On the other side of the country, Democrat John Fetterman is running as the Democrat for Pennsylvania’s open US Senate seat against Mehmet “Dr.” Oz. Fetterman had a stroke just as he was getting confirmed as his party’s nominee, and had been doing pretty well in the polls even though he refused to do direct interviews or public appearances, citing his need to recover. But then he had to do the late-campaign debate with Oz, and predictably did very badly. (It was noted at the event that Fetterman had to watch closed captioning panels because he still has problems processing what he hears, which made it that much harder to respond in conversational real time.) Now, it may be true that Fetterman will end up recovering fully while Oz will always be an entitled jerk, but his performance still might have had a negative impact on people who hadn’t already made up their minds. Why did Fetterman keep to his schedule when he would have had an excuse not to? Because if he’d refused to debate, he would’ve looked like a chicken. As it is, he looks unfit. And thus two races that had been going pretty good for Democrats are in real danger of going the other way, because the candidates could not or would not perform to the dictates of the press.
Why? Because getting a bunch of career politicians and functionaries to keep running the government the establishment way is boring and bad for ratings. Stuffing a bunch of baboons into business suits and telling them to rewrite the Constitution is funny and great for ratings.
But that would be if the Democrats lose, as if they need any help. The real punch line would be if the Republicans aren’t as popular as they appear and don’t perform as well as the press expects (see below) and the Trumpniks, as they did in 2020, play on this to say everybody expected them to win and therefore an inconvenient result means the whole thing was “rigged” and “stolen.” And who else do you think they’re going to blame?
You would think that these guys learned their lesson by foisting a “reality” TV celebrity who then turned around and sued the press for telling the truth about him, but apparently not.
Nobody likes either of these parties.
But this election, based on all the information I can trust, really is close.
I went to a Walmart the other day and the friggin’ mens’ underwear was locked in a glass cabinet so you had to flag down an employee to get it. I went to their cereal aisle and the prices were almost a dollar higher than they were the last time I was there. Republicans’ anti-Democrat commercials keep hammering inflation and crime, and what am I dealing with when I want to shop in my neighborhood? Inflation and crime.
None of which means that Republicans have any better idea how to deal with these things, but all they have to do is keep hammering on the side that’s in charge and hope voters don’t have a memory span longer than two years.
And it goes to display our civic illiteracy and lack of long-term analysis that nobody considers that when you lose representative government, the economy gets worse in the long run because there is no way to correct a bad government’s bad decisions. Just look at Vladimir “Let’s Have A War” Putin. Or China under Xi Jinping, whose economy is becoming more brittle even as The Leader consolidates more power.
But the apparent weakness of the Democrats in the stretch belies the point that again, in midterm elections with an unpopular president, that president’s party usually does that much worse. And if Republicans are that popular and Democrats are that bad, you would think that their lead in “tight” states would be that much more clear. If Republicans really are a party of brain-dead theocrats, why aren’t Democrats running away with this? And if Democrats are a bunch of woke Commies and everybody hates the economy, why aren’t Republicans running away with this?
Because the Republicans actually ARE a brain-dead theocracy. And while the Democrats aren’t really a Communist regime, they haven’t been doing such a great job.
MAYBE, it could be, Americans don’t like either one of these gangs. But one has to win.
And if Democrats are that unpopular and that incompetent, and Democrat early voting turnout is as lackadaisical as it often is (remember, blowing a big lead on paper is what Democrats DO), the main thing that gives me hope is that in the Kansas abortion referendum this summer – where a “Yes” vote technically would have only meant that the state had the option to write greater restrictions on abortion in the future – the main poll prior to the vote had “Yes” leading by 4 points with a 2.8 percent margin of error and the “No” vote ended up winning by almost 60-40.
Because as much cause as voters might have to hate Democrats, I think some of them realize that they can’t take a chance with the Republicans. “What the hell have ya got to lose?” Well, over a million COVID deaths between January 2020 and November 2022, over a third of which were under Trump in one year.
The Future
So given all that, I’ve got no right to make a prediction for what happens in these various elections other than what we already know: If Republicans win their contests they will do all they can to skew state governments to make sure they can throw out any 2024 election results they don’t like. And if they don’t get the results they want they will scream and cry and throw things, try to pull what legal skullduggery they can and ultimately resort to violence, because that’s just what they did after 2020.
Democrats keep wailing that this approach is a threat to “democracy”, but I’m not sure they understand that in an environment where everything is branding, association of democracy with the Democratic Party might not be such a great idea. Think of our system more as “representative government.” Or even “republicanism.” And right now the ostensible Republicans are against that. A republic means you elect the political class, and if your approach is “either we win or there will be blood”, then there’s really not an election now, is there? I know the Right is, or used to be, the side that said, “it’s a republic, not a democracy,” but as I’ve said, these are functionally the same thing. And if there are no independent elections, it’s not even a republic anymore. It’s more like what you have in Communist countries where you have an “election” to give undeserved legitimacy to the regime, but the outcome is never in doubt. I mean back in the days of Reagan or even McCain, Republicans used to be critical of old Communist politicians but apparently not anymore.
Regardless of who ends up winning in your state, this is my advice to any liberals after the election:
Buy guns. Train with guns. And buy lots of ammo.
Because it is very clear now that the Republican state governments and the Alito Supreme Court don’t think we have any human rights other than the right to have guns, and don’t acknowledge any part of the Bill of Rights besides the Second Amendment. And you need to take advantage of that before they get rid of that too. I mean, if they see enough black, female and gay customers come into the gun shops all at once, they might get wise. Although if you have pastel colored hair and a cannabis T-Shirt, you might be able to pass as a Libertarian.
You might think, “oh no, we shouldn’t escalate”, but kids, the Party of Trump has been escalating for the past six years whether you acknowledge it or not, and this is where we are. These people only acknowledge power and force, and you need to get some of your own. Or, you can just keep playing Eloi to their Morlocks until they’ve gobbled the last one of you.
And if you really think the solution to this country’s political violence is more gun control – meaning, more control of the individual by a government that you are rapidly losing control over – first acknowledge that you’re not going to get more federal gun control as long as the entire Republican Party and several senior Democrats are against it. But you know what will change their minds?
All you need to do is have one hundred big Black men in BLM T-Shirts, flanked by an honor guard of twenty drag queens, marching down the streets of Washington DC all strapped with AK-47s and AR-15s. When they see that on Fox News, the Republicans will all change their minds on gun control right quick. They will change their minds like Saul on the road to Damascus, PRAISE Jesus.