No doubt you have heard the joke: what did socialists use for lighting before candles? Electricity. But it is literal fact if you live in the socialist paradise of Cuba:
The communist Castro regime in Cuba aired a new set of propaganda pieces through its media apparatus this week claiming Cuban citizens are “content” with daily power blackouts and offering tips to make the most out of the three hours of electricity that they receive per day.
Can you live on three hours of electricity a day? Sure, if you are poor enough. And of course, no one in Cuba is driving a Tesla.
As reported by the Spain-based website Diario De Cuba on Friday and the outlet Cibercuba on Thursday, the regime aired interviews of Cuban women on Tuesday through its television channel, Canal Caribe. In the interviews, Cuban women offered tips to make the most out of the roughly three hours of power that Cuban citizens are receiving per day as part of the regime’s electrical authority to share the power blackouts in an “equitable way.”
Under socialism you don’t have any electricity, but you have all the “equity” you can stand. Excuses, too. The Castro regime will give you all kinds of reasons why it isn’t their fault.
Still, we shouldn’t mock the Cubans. If we continue down the reckless path of “green” energy that works both intermittently and inadequately, we too will get to the point where we can’t keep the lights on. And we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
It is not news that the Republicans’ share of black and Hispanic votes is rising, but the latest Wall Street Journal poll has some recent numbers:
About 17% of Black voters said they would pick a Republican candidate for Congress over a Democrat in Journal polls both in late October and in August. That is a substantially larger share than the 8% of Black voters who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 and the 8% who backed GOP candidates in 2018 House races, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large survey of voters who participated in those elections.
As more blacks come out as Republican voters, that percentage is sure to increase, as Democratic policies offer nothing to voters of any race whose major concerns are the cost of living and crime.
Among Latino voters, Democrats held a lead of 5 percentage points over Republicans in the choice of a congressional candidate in the Journal’s October survey, a narrower advantage than the Democrats’ 11-point lead in August.
That is a sharp drop in Democratic support in a short time, but what is really remarkable is the shift since 2018 and 2020:
Latino voters in 2020 favored President Biden over Mr. Trump by 28 percentage points and Democratic candidates in 2018 House races by 31 points, VoteCast found.
So, from 28-point and 31-point leads, down to 5. And falling. If those numbers are even remotely close, there are major areas of the country where the Democrats will struggle to win anything.
DOUGLAS SCHOEN & ROBERT GREEN , DEMOCRAT POLLSTER AND PIERREPONT CONSULTING & ANALYTICS PRINCIPAL ON 11/7/22 AT 8:00 AM EST
What is driving the defection of working, middle-class voters—who make up the majority of the electorate—from the Democratic Party? The answer: Democrats‘ priorities are substantially out-of-touch with this group specifically, and with those of the largely populist American electorate generally.
These are the findings of a new national survey. The poll, which measured the core values and beliefs of 900 likely midterm election voters, found that nearly 70 percent of the electorate embraces a populist outlook, either fully or partially, which is grounded in a desire for politicians to focus on the most immediate barriers to individual advancement.
These voters are most concerned with skyrocketing prices, the looming recession, and rising crime. They also view uncontrolled immigration as a major concern, and see it as intertwined with crime rates.
You’ll notice that this is the precise agenda that Republicans are running on this year.
There are two segments within this larger populist group. The first, which comprises roughly one-third (34 percent) of the 2022 electorate, can be classified as true “populists.” These voters embrace American exceptionalism and the notion of God-given—not government granted—rights. Roughly six in 10 identify as Republican, and only one-in-four voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
This segment of the American body politic believes in the power of individual initiative and shares the belief that Americans can get ahead if they work hard. A multi-racial category that includes Black and Hispanic voters, populists are averse to identity and class-based politics and view “wokeness” as a backward step and a distraction.
Three key everyday issues crowd out all the others with these voters, because they threaten individual advancement today: the deteriorating economy, increasing crime rates, and the migrant crisis at the Southern border.
People pledge allegiance to the US flag at a campaign event for Republican Monica De La Cruz, running for Congress, and US Representative Mayra Flores (R-TX), who is running for reelectionALLISON DINNER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
The second segment, which makes up 35 percent of the electorate, is essentially part-populist or “mixed voters.” In 2020, 45 percent of them voted for Biden. They are not as wedded to American exceptionalism and the notion of God-given liberty and freedom as true populists, but they still view the big 2022 issues the same: inflation, recession, crime, and uncontrolled immigration.
Even though two-thirds of these voters support abortion rights under similar parameters as Roe, they don’t view abortion as a top three issue.
Both “populists” and “mixed voters” view immigration in part through the prism of rising crime rates; they want tougher border controls in large part because uncontrolled immigration is a major source of the fentanyl ravaging many of our communities.
They also support U.S. oil, natural gas, and nuclear production now to cut rising car and home energy costs as soon as possible. Similarly, as a recession beckons, they want to end our dependence on China to spur U.S. job creation, among other benefits.
On the other hand, just 31 percent of likely voters—the smallest of the three voter segments—are “anti-populists.” This group resembles the Democratic base in many ways: They are also multi-racial, but they over-index as college-educated whites. They’re slightly younger and more likely to be women, and almost none are Republicans. They are also the least likely to vote in 2022.
Anti-populists firmly reject the idea that America is exceptional among nations. They fervently believe COVID lockdown policies worked. They view environmental regulations as sacrosanct and want a complete focus on wind and solar energy to the exclusion of American oil, natural gas, and nuclear, even if these environmental policies cost them money.
This group does not believe there is a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, and emphatically rejects the notion that illegal immigration should be stopped. They rank crime as only the 10th most important issue facing the nation.
Put succinctly, the Democratic Party’s priorities line up with less than one-third of the electorate—our “anti-populist” group. But most voters, 69 percent, are either fully or partially populist, and hold views that align with the 2022 Republican agenda.
This is not to say that Republicans should expect to win the popular vote this year by nearly 20-points, nor that all voters in the fully or partially populist groups are members of the GOP; they are not. However, this data makes it clear and apparent that the Democratic agenda is detrimentally out-of-touch with the American electorate. It also underscores how challenging it will be for Democrats to win with a majority coalition absent a major shift in the party’s message and issue priorities.
Democrats used to be the party of the working middle-class. But in 2016 and 2020, Donald Trumpcarried voters without a college degree by roughly four-points, and Republicans have won this group in three of the last four congressional elections.
This movement of working middle-class voters toward the Republican Party explains why Hillary Clinton lost the presidency in 2016 and why Joe Biden barely defeated Donald Trump, a deeply unpopular incumbent, in Midwestern states in 2020.
It is also one of the main reasons why Democrats’ midterm election prospects are so bleak this year, despite the extremist views of many individual GOP candidates and the Republican Party’s lack of a positive message or concrete policy proposals.
To remain politically viable in 2024 and future elections, the Democratic Party needs to rededicate itself to core American populist values: addressing immediate concerns vis-à-vis the economy and crime, promoting individual advancement, and helping working middle-class voters get ahead.
Douglas Schoen is a Democratic pollster. Robert Green is a Pierrepont Consulting & Analytics principal.
This is it, the “most important election of our lifetime,” which is how most national elections are described. But this year’s Congressional midterm elections may be just that important. Much rides on which party controls Congress, state legislatures, and many state governorships in terms of the country’s direction and what everyday life looks like for Americans over the remainder of the decade and beyond.
President Barack Obama described the original plan as “the fundamental transformation of America.” It was supposed to be eight years of Obama followed by eight more years of a President Hillary Clinton, to complete the “great reset” from freedom, liberty, and prosperity for much of the Western world, to a top-down command and control society, more in line with a George Orwell novel than the vision of America’s founding fathers.
Will it be a red wave, a blue wave, or a purple trickle? I already made my case predicting a red wave, but given the propensity for Democrat electoral shenanigans, Republicans and conservatives (not necessarily the same group) need to vote like their lives and well-being depend on it because they certainly do. Libertarians too.
Hugh Hewitt summed it up in the title of his 2012 book, “If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing The Democrats In Every Election And Why Your Life Depends On It.” President Biden hinted at such cheating in recent remarks at the Columbus Club in Washington, DC.
We know that many states don’t start counting those ballots until after the polls close on November 8. That means in some cases we won’t know the winner of the election until a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner. Huh?
Days to count ballots? Since when? Since any close election where the Republican candidate is ahead, beginning with Bush v Gore in Florida in 2000 to Trump v Biden in 2020. The Mega Millions lottery can identify the winner almost immediately and know where in America he purchased the winning ticket. Most countries, including a previously more honest America, know the election winner hours after the polls close.
Biden’s comment about “a few days” suggests that once the votes are counted the first time, if the Republican candidate is the winner, counting stops until additional votes can be found or manufactured, enough to put the Democrat over the top. This is why voting is so important and that every vote counts to so overwhelm the tally that cheating is impossible, as Hugh Hewitt described.
What’s in store for the country if Democrats control Congress and, in essence, all three branches of government? Yes, the US Supreme Court is supposed to be independent, but even the high court can be pressured and politicized. Court decisions are often ignored, as in New York City Mayor Eric Adams having no interest in following the ruling of a NY Supreme Court justice requiring reinstatement of municipal employees fired for not taking the COVID vaccine.
So how do your country and life depend on the November 8 election outcome? What would Democrat majorities in Congress mean for America? All tricks and no treats.
Abortion on demand, up to and perhaps even beyond birth, would be codified into national law. Democrats had 50 years post-Roe v Wade to legalize abortion legislatively, many of those years when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, but they didn’t. After the recent SCOTUS decision repealing Roe, turning the decision over to the states as prescribed by the Tenth Amendment, expect a donkey Congress to legalize killing babies.
Censorship is the new norm, with unelected and unaccountable social media behemoths determining “truth” and acceptable conversation. Asking questions of or disagreeing with those in charge leads to censorship or worse. Noted cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Sherri Tenpenny may lose their medical licenses and board certifications over having the temerity to challenge Dr. Fauci, and the three-letter medical agencies, just as Galileo was imprisoned for questioning the leading scientists of the day over the earth-revolving around the sun rather than vice versa.
Taxes will rise under a Democrat Congress. The government is spending money it does not have, now financing a $31 trillion national debt at an interest rate of 4 percent and rising. This translates to $1.4 trillion in annual interest payments on the debt, consuming 29 percent of federal tax receipts according to Zero Hedge. Given that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell suggested additional interest rate hikes to combat inflation, expect debt service to grow, leaving little money for other government spending priorities, with tax hikes as the only solution for Democrats to make ends meet.
Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for US adults. Democrat open borders and sanctuary city policies are supporting the Fentanyl supply chain, while other Democrat policies are choking the supply chain for the essential and non-lethal goods and services that Americans depend on.
Speaking of the border, expect Democrats to leave the border wide open, flooding America with low-skilled migrants, unable to assimilate into American culture, bringing criminal activity and economic dependence, all of which will be supported by already overtaxed American citizens.
From Trump era energy independence, when America was a net energy exporter, to the Democrat President begging the Saudis for more oil and depleting our strategic petroleum reserves, expect this trend to continue spiraling downward. Remember gasoline under $2 a gallon during a Republican administration to a doubling of gasoline prices under the current Democrat cabal? With a deliberate effort to reduce energy supplies, expect energy prices to continue rising while Biden licks his ice cream cones “like a boss” according to ABC News.
What’s the Democrat solution to unaffordable gasoline? Electric vehicles, as if electricity and EV batteries magically grow on trees. California can’t keep its lights on, but the state has mandated 100 percent new EV sales by 2035. But don’t worry if the lights go out. President Biden claims that EVs can light your homes. Aside from such a practice voiding a Tesla warranty, how will you recharge your batteries during a brownout? How will you drive to work with a dead EV battery? This is what passes for Democrat leadership these days.
Democrats have no solution for inflation, other than calling it “transitory.” Or there’s Biden’s recent proposal of windfall profit taxes on oil companies, a tactic that has been tried and was an abject failure. Democrats in charge going forward means higher prices for virtually everything.
But rest assured, government tax revenues, when not supporting interest payments on the national debt, will be sent to Ukraine to finance a proxy war against Russia, an endeavor for which America has no compelling national interest, and that could possibly escalate into a nuclear holocaust that, by comparison, would make the COVID pandemic look like a day at the beach.
Don’t forget the children. Democrats want unnecessary COVID vaccines for your children. Drag queen story hour and encouraging gender confusion, followed by surgical castration, are Democrat priorities and likely to be codified into law if Democrats control Congress.
Lastly, Democrats want to defund the police, leading to increased crime and violence. How ironic that the husband of the US Speaker of the House, herself calling for police defunding, was “allegedly” violently attacked (the emerging details are becoming dodgier by the day) in his own home. With an election ahead, Democrats deny their calls for defunding the police, but here is a 7-minute video of them advocating for that from which they now run.
Democrats will turn America into, at best, a socialist state and, at worst, a communist dictatorship with a handful of them in charge, much like the capital city in the Hunger Games.
Electoral reform is happening, but will it be enough to ensure a fair and honest election? Election reform advocate and attorney Lin Wood cries, “Fix 2020 or bust.” Does this mean we shouldn’t vote as elections are still sketchy but likely better than in 2020? Or because every GOP candidate is not the perfect solution to our current problems? How can we fix anything without electing leaders who acknowledge the problem and have the cojones to actually fix the broken and fraudulent electoral system?
Perfect is the enemy of good, and that applies to candidates as well. An imperfect Republican official will do far less damage than any Democrat and may even do some good. Leave principles and convictions in the chatrooms and think tanks.
Voting libertarian out of conviction will only split the Republican vote and likely elect the Democrat candidate. This election is a call for action, or else there may be nothing of America left to salvage after two more years of Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer in charge. Vote Republican or get the government and country you deserve.
On election day, vote like your country and life depend on it because they do! America needs and deserves better than the modern Democrat party.
It is not news that the Republicans’ share of black and Hispanic votes is rising, but the latest Wall Street Journal poll has some recent numbers:
About 17% of Black voters said they would pick a Republican candidate for Congress over a Democrat in Journal polls both in late October and in August. That is a substantially larger share than the 8% of Black voters who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 and the 8% who backed GOP candidates in 2018 House races, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large survey of voters who participated in those elections.
As more blacks come out as Republican voters, that percentage is sure to increase, as Democratic policies offer nothing to voters of any race whose major concerns are the cost of living and crime.
Among Latino voters, Democrats held a lead of 5 percentage points over Republicans in the choice of a congressional candidate in the Journal’s October survey, a narrower advantage than the Democrats’ 11-point lead in August.
That is a sharp drop in Democratic support in a short time, but what is really remarkable is the shift since 2018 and 2020:
Latino voters in 2020 favored President Biden over Mr. Trump by 28 percentage points and Democratic candidates in 2018 House races by 31 points, VoteCast found.
So, from 28-point and 31-point leads, down to 5. And falling. If those numbers are even remotely close, there are major areas of the country where the Democrats will struggle to win anything.
Biden and Obama make last-ditch effort as Democrats’ mood darkens
Barack Obama and Joe Biden at a rally in Philadelphia on Saturday. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
The president has remained outwardly optimistic about Democrats’ prospects in Tuesday’s midterm elections, but the party is struggling as polls tighten
The lights dimmed, the music throbbed and cellphone lights danced across the arena. Then a DJ welcomed to the stage the president of the United States, Joe Biden, flanked by the former president Barack Obama and Pennsylvania’s nominees for Senate and governor. An ecstatic crowd of thousands roared to their feet.
With days left until the midterm elections, the presidents were in Philadelphia to mobilize Democrats in a pivotal swing state that could determine Congress’s balance of power. But the event also had the feel of a political homecoming for Biden, joined at the end of a volatile campaign season by his former running mate in the state where he was born.
“It’s good to be home,” Biden thundered above the cheering. “It’s good to be with family.”
The president has remained outwardly optimistic about his party’s prospects in Tuesday’s elections, and the Democrats’ electric reception at Temple University’s Liacouras Center on Saturday no doubt gave him even more reason for hope. But nationally, Democrats’ mood had darkened.
After a summertime peak, the party in power is now struggling to overcome historical headwinds and widespread economic discontent. Public polls have tightened in recent weeks. Democrats are now on the defensive in places they thought were safe, like New York and Washington. And Biden’s low approval ratings continue to burden his party’s most vulnerable candidates, many of whom have sought to avoid the president.
On Saturday, Biden clasped hands with John Fetterman – the Democratic nominee for Senate locked in a narrow race that could decide control of the chamber – and Josh Shapiro, the party’s nominee for governor.
Pennsylvania lies at the heart of Democrats’ efforts of staving off major losses in the House, as the president’s party traditionally does in midterm elections, and keeping their narrowest of majorities in the Senate.
Biden declared the midterms “one of the most important elections in our lifetime”.
Hanging in the balance, Biden charged, was the very American experiment that began in Philadelphia nearly two and a half centuries ago, now at risk of falling victim to the cynical forces seeking to undermine the nation’s system of government with lies and conspiracies. In impassioned bursts, he warned of the dangers of electing candidates who have denied the results of the 2020 election and who he says threaten the security of future ones.
“This isn’t a referendum this year,” he said. “It’s a choice – a choice between two vastly different visions of America.”
There he reprised familiar warnings of worsening crime, open borders and war on “your coal” – a jab at Biden’s comments from a day earlier pledging to shut down coal plants “all across America” that set off an unwelcome political firestorm within his own party. He also teased a long-anticipated third presidential run: “I promise you, in the very next – very, very, very short period of time, you’re going to be so happy.”
Donald Trump and Mehmet Oz at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
Biden has said publicly he intends to run again in 2024 but has not made a formal announcement. His team have begun preparations for a possible re-election bid though his age and low approval ratings remain a concern for many Democrats.
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The convergence of three presidents in Pennsylvania on Saturday underscored the state’s importance as a battleground. In a potential 2024 rematch between Trump and Biden, Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes are once again likely to play a decisive role in determining the victor.
Biden on Saturday reminded Pennsylvanians of that power. In 2008, the state helped elect the nation’s first Black president in 2008. In 2020, he said, Pennsylvania elected “a son from Scranton president” and helped make Trump not only a former president but a “defeated president”.
Despite some fretting that Biden’s appearance in Philadelphia might do more harm than good for Democrats in tight races, Biden arrived as the native son.
Though he built his political career in Delaware, Biden’s political identity is rooted in Pennsylvania. And on Saturday he proudly recalled that as a senator from Delaware he was often referred to as “Pennsylvania’s third senator”.
He anchored his 2020 campaign in Philadelphia. As president, he has returned to Pennsylvania on as many as 20 occasions, including a trip to Scranton to tout his infrastructure plan at an electric trolley museum and, more recently, to deliver a primetime address in Philadelphia warning that Trump and his Republican followers “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”.
Biden touted his home state ties to make the case for electing Fetterman to the Senate, saying: “I know Pennsylvania well and John Fetterman is Pennsylvania.”
Then he turned on Fetterman’s Republican opponent, the Trump-backed celebrity doctor, Mehmet Oz, casting him as a carpetbagger from neighboring New Jersey. “Look,” he said, “I lived in Pennsylvania longer than Oz has lived in Pennsylvania – and I moved away when I was 10 years old.”
Tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots, though polls officially close on Tuesday and it could take days – or weeks in some cases – to know the final result of an election Biden said will “shape our country for decades to come”.
In the final months of the midterm cycle, Biden has largely avoided states with the most competitive contests, like Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, even though all of them helped elevate him to the White House. Instead, it has been Obama rallying Democrats in those battlegrounds – a role reversal from 2010 when Obama was the unpopular president and Biden, then his vice-president, was the party’s in-demand surrogate.
Yet Biden has kept a frenetic pace on the campaign trail in the final days. On Tuesday, he traveled to Florida, a battleground where Democrats have seen their hopes fade in recent elections cycle, before heading to New Mexico, California and Illinois, Democratic strongholds with competitive midterm contests.
On Sunday, Biden returned to New York, where the race for governor has narrowed in a worrying sign for Democrats’ fortunes elsewhere, and he will headline a rally the night before the election in Maryland.
In his appearances, Biden has tried to rally supporters around his administration’s policy achievements, highlighting initiatives to lower the cost of prescription drugs, boost domestic manufacturing, combat climate change and forgive student loan debt while warning that Republican control of Congress would threaten social security and Medicare.
People hold signs at the rally in Philadelphia as Biden speaks. Photograph: Hannah Beier/Reuters
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The economy and inflation consistently rank as voters’ top concern this election, along with crime, abortion and threats to democracy. Democrats have sought to blunt Republicans’ advantage on the economy and crime by arguing that their opponents would pursue an extreme agenda on issues like abortion, guns and voting rights. They have pointed to the threats posed by election deniers loyal to Trump.
“You see these guys standing there with rifles, outside polling places?” Biden said on Saturday. “Come on. Where the hell do you think you are?”
For Democrats to remain competitive on Tuesday, their task will be to rebuild the coalition responsible for Democratic victories during the Trump era. They must recapture support from a mix of college-educated suburban voters and Republican-leaning moderates while motivating Black voters and young people to turn out in strong numbers.
Should they fall short, Biden has been blunt about the challenges of governing with Republican majorities. “If we lose the House and Senate,” he said in Chicago, “it’s going to be a horrible two years.”
Taking the stage last on Saturday, in a slot typically reserved for the current president, Obama said he knew all too well what Democrats stood to lose if Biden no longer had majorities in Congress.
“When I was president, I got my butt whooped in midterm elections,” Obama recalled of the 2010 elections. “Midterms are no joke.”
He asked the audience to imagine what it might have been like if Democrats had kept control of Congress. They might have acted on immigration reform, gun safety and the climate crisis. Had they kept the Senate in 2014, he continued, the makeup of the supreme court might look very different. The audience groaned at the thought.
History didn’t have to repeat itself, Obama said. Democrats didn’t have to imagine what Biden could accomplish with another majority in Congress.
“The good news is, you have an outstanding president right now in the White House,” Obama said, ticking through Biden’s legislative accomplishments.
“You’ve seen what he’s accomplished with the barest of margins,” he said. “If you vote, he can do even more. But it depends on you.”
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In recent polls, American voters ranked “threats to democracy” among the most important issues facing the country. At a time of climate collapse, inflation and a pandemic, this speaks powerfully to the fragility of America’s fundamental rights and freedoms.
The country is seeing a dizzying number of assaults on democracy, from draconian abortion bans to a record number of book bans. Politicians who spread lies and sought to delegitimize the 2020 election are pursuing offices that will put them in control of the country’s election machinery. Meanwhile, the supreme court is enforcing its own agenda on abortion, guns and environmental protections – often in opposition to public opinion.
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Roll the tape back to early March of 2020, when the Democratic establishment closed ranks around Joe Biden after he had performed miserably in all of the early primaries. They managed to put Biden over the top in the South Carolina primary, and conveniently persuaded several competitors in the field to drop out and endorse him. The motive for this was transparent: it appeared that Bernie Sanders might run away with the Democratic nomination, and Bernie was a sure loser to Trump, COVID or no COVID.
And good ol’ Joe, he was as familiar as an old shoe, and above all a moderate, who promised to be less divisive than the Bad Orange Man.
But what we got was the Bernie Sanders Administration after all. Biden handed over policy wholly to the progressives who are hollowing out the Democratic Party. If Biden was merely the senile doddering fool so evident every time he opens his mouth it would be one thing, but he insists on rank demagoguery as often as possible.
At this point what social scientists call “pattern recognition”—an updated version of Occam’s Razor—is kicking in. We’ve now had three Democratic presidents in a row— stretching back to Clinton in 1992, then Obama in 2008, and Biden in 2020—who all campaigned as moderates, but lurched sharply left once in office. In other words, Democratic presidential candidates lie to us, over and over again, and then voters issue a restraining order at the first opportunity. It’s as though voters need reminding every other decade how bad Democrats in power can be. “Swing voters,” wise up.
Here’s how the Democrat-leaning Andrew Sullivan describes the scene in his latest Substack entry:
I hoped in 2020 that after a clear but modest win, with simultaneous gains for the GOP in the House and a fluke tie in the Senate, Biden would grasp a chance to capture the sane middle, isolating the far right. After the horror of January 6, the opportunity beckoned ever more directly.
And yet Biden instantly threw it away. In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went. Even the policy most popular with the center — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state. What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the center?
Over the past few years, the Democrats have made heroic efforts to win back working-class voters and white as well as Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted rightward.
What planet is he living on?
One other stray tidbit. Colin Cowherd is a very popular sports analyst on YouTube, but on politics he says he leans to the left. Nonetheless he tweets this out, congruent with my “desperate housewives election” theme:
Against a hostile propaganda press, many Americans have poured themselves into restoring election integrity — and it’s working.
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY
If Republican candidates do as well as expected on Tuesday, they can credit the new, widespread, and coordinated effort to begin securing U.S. elections, helping give candidates the best opportunity possible to win a fair fight in the new voting environment of mail-in balloting.
The Republican National Committee, other party entities, and dozens of public interest election nonprofit groups built over the last two years a multimillion-dollar election integrity infrastructure that passed laws improving voter ID and other election security measures, defended those laws from legal attacks by Democrats, and sued states and localities that failed to follow the law. They also recruited, educated, trained, and placed tens of thousands of new election observers and other workers throughout the long midterm voting season.
And they did it all in one of the most hostile propaganda environments on record.
2020’s Wake-Up Call
The 2020 election was a massive wake-up call for many Americans on the right. In the months leading up to it, Democrats forced through changes to hundreds of laws and processes governing how elections are conducted.
The rule-change scheme was run by Marc Elias, a Democrat election attorney who also ran his party’s Russia collusion hoax, which falsely claimed Donald Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia. Sometimes Democrats’ 2020 changes were instituted legally. Frequently, though, they were effected by other means, such as getting a friendly state or local official to change the rules unilaterally.
The 2020 election plan, some of which was admitted to in a flattering Time magazine story, sought to flood the zone with tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots, historically understood to be riper for fraud and other election irregularities than supervised, in-person voting. The plan also involved the private takeover of government election offices to run Democrat-focused get-out-the-vote operations. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, financed the project, doling out $419 million to two left-wing groups that focused grants and assistance to government offices in the Democrat areas of swing states.
This radical change — “practically a revolution in how people vote,” as Time put it — included the widespread practice of placing ballot drop boxes predominantly in Democrat areas of the country, mailing out unsolicited mail-in ballots or applications for mail-in ballots, using well-funded teams of ballot harvesters both inside and outside of government, lowering and changing the standards for mail-in ballot acceptance, and fixing or “curing” ballots that were improperly filled out.
Corporate media and other Democrats claimed the election was the best-run in history. In reality, it was a mess. Big Tech and the media ran coordinated disinformation campaigns to benefit Democrats by suppressing news that hurt the party. Big Tech also deplatformed effective conservative voices and media outlets, suppressed fundraising emails from Republicans, and elevated certain information to help Democrats.
There were other problems. Candidate debates occurred long after mail-in and early balloting began. Poll observers were sidelined under the guise of a Covid “emergency.” The counting of ballots cast via unsupervised, mail-in voting resulted in curious and confusing results. It took days and sometimes weeks to find out how many ballots were cast, much less for whom. In the end, Americans learned that Joseph Biden, who had spent most of his campaign at home, had become the most popular American president in history, collecting an astounding 81 million votes.
Many Republican voters wondered how things were allowed to get so bad with elections.
Republicans Spent 40 Years on the Sidelines
Part of the reason Republicans hadn’t more effectively fought the election integrity battle before now is somewhat shocking. The 2020 contest was the first presidential election since Ronald Reagan’s first successful run in 1980 in which the Republican National Committee could play any role whatsoever in Election Day operations. For nearly 40 years, the Democratic National Committee had a massive systematic advantage over its Republican counterpart: The RNC had been prohibited by law from helping with poll watcher efforts or nearly any voting-related litigation.
Democrats had accused Republicans of voter intimidation in a 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race. The case was settled, and the two parties entered into a court-ordered consent decree limiting Republican involvement in any poll-watching operation. But Dickinson Debevoise, the Jimmy Carter-appointed judge who oversaw the agreement, never let them out of it, repeatedly modifying and strengthening it at Democrats’ request.
Debevoise was a judge for only 15 years, but he stayed 21 years in senior status, a form of semi-retirement that enables judges to keep serving in a limited capacity. It literally took Debevoise’s dying in 2015 for Republicans to get out of the consent decree. Upon his passing, a new judge, appointed by President Obama, was assigned the case and let the agreement expire at the end of 2018.
The effect of this four-decade hindrance on GOP poll-watching cannot be overstated. Poll watchers serve many functions. They deter voter fraud, but they also help with getting out the vote. Poll watchers can see who has voted, meaning campaigns and political parties can figure out which areas and voters to call and encourage to vote. They also can observe who was forced to vote provisionally or who was turned away at the polls.
“Without poll watchers, the RNC would have no good way to follow up with its voters to help ensure a provisional ballot is later counted, direct confused voters to their correct polling place and document irregularities, such as voting equipment malfunctions and other incidents that are important flash points in a close election or recount,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has explained.
For decades, Democrats built up expansive coordination efforts that the Republicans were prohibited from developing. Republican candidates and state parties could do things on their own, but not with help from the national party. In 2012, the Obama-Biden campaign bragged about recruiting 18,000 lawyers to be poll watchers, providing more than 300 trainings to ensure the observers understood election law. The volunteers would collect more than 19,000 problematic incidents at polling locations that were resolved with or without legal intervention.
The consent decree also meant the RNC was kept out of almost any litigation related to Election Day. In fact, one main part of the RNC’s legal efforts was training staff to stay away from Election Day operations, including recounts, and fending off litigation that arose from the consent decree.
It paralyzed the RNC’s political operations, as the slightest misstep would result in getting sued by Democrats. For example, when former Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer said in an interview with GQ magazine that he’d watched 2016 returns in an oversized utility room on the fifth floor of Trump Tower, Democrats deposed him to show he’d violated the order by being on the wrong floor, one tied to Election Day outreach.
The Democrats used that trivial fact to try, unsuccessfully, to get the new judge to extend the limitation on their political rivals for another decade. Even though the decree was finally lifted after nearly 40 years, it didn’t mean Republicans were on even footing with Democrats in 2020. Democrats had spent decades perfecting their Election Day operations and litigation strategy while everyone at the RNC walked on eggshells, knowing that if they so much as looked in the direction of a polling site, there could be another crackdown.
Thus there was no muscle memory about how to watch polls or communicate with a campaign. They had spent decades not being able to organize or talk to presidential campaigns, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or the National Republican Congressional Committee about any of these efforts.
What a change, then, when McDaniel announced in early 2020 her “intention to be the most litigious chair in history.”
But First, Election Reforms
Before mounting successful lawsuits, however, better laws had to be passed — a difficult task in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, when Democrats claimed any criticism of how that election had been run was unacceptable and possibly criminal. That campaign, designed to suppress efforts to bolster election security, continues to this day. Nevertheless, Republican lawmakers in dozens of states began pushing for election reforms.
For example, bans on so-called Zuckbucks, the private takeover of government election offices, were passed and signed into law in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Six Democrat governors vetoed attempted bans, understanding how key Zuckerberg’s funding was to Democrat success in 2020. The governors of Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all vetoed the bans. Wisconsin’s governor, currently in a tight election, vetoed twice. The Kansas legislature overrode the veto.
The resulting contrast between election integrity in some of these battleground states could not be clearer. Take Pennsylvania, for instance, a pivotal swing state where the Democrat governor vetoed the legislature’s attempted reforms. Its partisan Supreme Court meanwhile issues conflicting guidance, resulting in disparate treatment of ballots depending on the county they’re cast in. Elections here are high in irregularities and low in voter trust.
Not so in Georgia. Recall that despite tremendous pressure from Democrats who alleged massive GOP-led voter suppression, including Biden who smeared election integrity efforts as “Jim Crow 2.0,” Georgia passed much-needed reforms related to voter ID, mail-in voting, and drop boxes, in addition to the Zuckbucks ban. The result has been record-breaking early, in-person voter turnout, across demographics, surpassing 2 million voters this week.
Meanwhile, the Foundation for Government Accountability worked with states to make policy changes to clean voter rolls, ban ballot trafficking, secure ballot custody, roll back Covid waivers, enact penalties for election lawbreakers, require chains of custody, secure drop boxes, pre-process absentee ballots, improve absentee voter ID, and dozens of other types of reforms.
Florida has been working steadily to improve its election system since the disastrous 2000 election. Last year, that meant banning Zuckbucks. This year, those changes included “requiring voter rolls to be annually reviewed and updated, strengthening ID requirements, establishing the Office of Election Crimes and Security to investigate election law violations, and increasing penalties for violations of election laws.”
Incidentally, the Center for Renewing America filed a complaint with the IRS over the tax break that Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan received for their 2020 election meddling.
Litigate, Litigate, Litigate
While the RNC and the Trump campaign did achieve some legal successes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, it was nowhere near sufficient against the well-funded and coordinated Democrat effort. Republican donors and grassroots demanded more.
The RNC got involved in 73 election integrity cases in 20 states for the midterms, with plans to expand. They won a lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for restricting the rights of poll challengers; got Maricopa County, Arizona, to share key data about its partisan breakdown of poll workers; won an open records lawsuit against Mercer County, New Jersey, for refusing to share election administration data; won a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections for restricting the rights of poll watchers; and reached a favorable settlement against Clark County, Nevada, in which the county agreed to share information about its partisan breakdown of poll workers on a rolling basis.
“I’m so grateful the RNC is back in the system after 40 years. They’re so needed,” said Minnesota State Senator and former Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer.
Ken Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general and acting deputy DHS secretary who now runs the Election Transparency Initiative, agreed. “They’ve been a game changer in the litigation arena to keep elections clean.”
The RNC wasn’t the only big change in the litigation battle. Hotelier Steve Wynn, strategist Karl Rove, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and top Republican election lawyers launched an election litigation group, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), in July 2022, and within three months chalked up several major victories.
For instance, RITE sued over controversial Wisconsin Elections Commission guidance that conflicted with state law, telling election clerks to accept ballots that had been spoiled, and won the case. It was also part of the group that successfully sued Pennsylvania over whether ballots that failed to be dated, as required by state law, could be counted.
“It goes to show what responsible and tireless lawyering can do for election integrity,” said Derek Lyons, the president and CEO of RITE.
Groups with lengthier histories of battling for election integrity, such as the Public Interest Legal Foundation, also had successes. A Delaware court ruled that the state’s newly passed mail-in balloting scheme violated its constitution.
Monitoring Polls
U.S. elections used to occur on one day, requiring just one day of poll observations. Now that elections can spread out over days, weeks, or even months, many more workers are needed to monitor the casting of ballots.
The RNC hired 17 in-state election integrity directors and 37 state-based election integrity counsels in key states. They conducted more than 5,000 election integrity trainings, recruited more than 70,000 poll watchers and workers, and worked with more than 110,000 unique volunteers nationwide. They set up an issue reporting system and distributed copies of Poll Watcher Principles for states. If voters encounter election issues, they can file a report, and attorneys will be dispatched to resolve the issues. Sites were set up in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
The move occurred after Democrats nearly seized a seat won by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa in 2020. She won her election by just six votes, leading Democrats to attempt to unseat her using parliamentary shenanigans. The Republicans of the House Administration Committee just released a mini-doc about Democrats’ attempt at literal election denialism.
With tens of millions of voters newly concerned about election integrity, other groups also took part in massive training operations. The Election Integrity Network, which started with a podcast on election integrity issues hosted by longtime election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, grew into state summits, which then built out into coalitions in states, attracting people to weekly meetings. The network has trained 76,000 poll workers.
The network’s North Carolina Election Integrity Team covers 95 percent of that state’s priority areas with poll observers. It has more than 30 local task forces, with representatives in 75 of 100 counties. More than 2,000 North Carolinians were individually trained. The group has established a strong working relationship with the state General Assembly to overhaul legislation and built relationships with local election officials. Similar groups are operating in Georgia, Virginia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and other states.
The Vulnerable Voters Working Group meets to develop and implement ideas to protect nursing homes from left-wing ballot harvesting. The American Constitutional Rights Union is one coalition partner working to protect seniors from illicit activities.
Part of the benefit of an aggressive legal strategy is that it incentivizes election bureaucrats and officials to follow the law, which helps restore trust in elections, Election Integrity Network Director Marshall Yates says. “What these people do is provide transparency and accountability to the system that was previously just run by unaccountable bureaucrats. They may or may not see something but just their presence is a check on making sure there is some accountability to the system, and it should restore confidence in seeing how elections were administered.”
What Remains
While reforms were passed in more than two dozen states, key lawsuits were filed and won, and poll workers are being deployed nationwide, many problems remain. Even with the recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court victory, that state remains essentially lawless when it comes to election integrity. North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, and other battleground states retain problematic election processes and guidance. And inflated voter rolls, combined with unsolicited mail-in ballots, are a recipe for disaster.
The new election integrity groups have much work to do in the years ahead. But many Americans, from establishment Republicans to grassroots conservatives, have poured themselves into restoring integrity to elections nationwide. They have begun to achieve major successes in lobbying for election security, litigating against a well-funded activist opposition, and training poll watchers. And they did it all in the face of a hostile propaganda press that maliciously disparaged them as election deniers.
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