Fascistic Dems Still Control MOST OF PRINTED AMERICA?

How Zeldin’s Loss Is Making New York’s Republican Party Ambitious Again

by David Freedlander – at Intelligencer:

In his lone television debate with Kathy Hochul, Lee Zeldin was asked, given that he voted to overturn the 2020 election, if he would accept the results of the one he was in.

Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images© Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images

“Well, first off,” he responded, glaring at moderator Susan Arbetter, “losing is not an option.”

But Zeldin did lose, conceding Wednesday afternoon with a pointed message to Hochul. “Those controlling Albany should take note,” Zeldin said of his 5.6-point loss. “New Yorkers of all walks of life are sick of the attacks on their wallets, their safety, their freedoms, and the quality of their kids’ education and are hitting their breaking point, as proven by these results. As they take office in January, Governor Kathy Hochul and those controlling Albany must address the grave concerns voiced by the voters.”

Months ago, New York Republicans were down on Zeldin’s chances of winning. He was pro-life in a state that is overwhelmingly pro-choice, a fierce defender of Donald Trump in a place where voters loathe him, and most importantly, a Republican in a state that has shut the GOP out of statewide office since 2002, the longest Democratic win streak in the country. The fact that Republicans in the Empire State are now outnumbered not only by Democrats — two-to-one — but even by unaffiliated voters makes the simple math of winning a statewide election daunting.

But after focusing relentlessly on crime, Zeldin took advantage of a Hochul campaign that didn’t realize exactly how tight of a race it had on its hands until an internal poll showed her under 50 percent and the Republican within four points with just three weeks to go.

And now New York Republicans say they see a path forward to end their long years in the wilderness.

“The lesson we are all taking from this is, Wow, we could really pull this off,” said William F.B. O’Reilly, a longtime GOP consultant who last year wrote an op-ed cautioning the party against rallying around Zeldin, figuring that he would not be able to overcome the albatross of the January 6 attack.

“This is going to encourage a lot of other Republicans to run statewide. For the first time in a while I am genuinely enthusiastic about our future chances.”

As results come in, New York appears to be an outlier, one of the few places where Republicans performed better than they did in 2020. The GOP looks set to make major gains in the State Legislature, ending the Democratic supermajorities in both houses in Albany, and may flip enough congressional seats in New York alone to retake the majority, especially since a special master, and not the state Democrats, drew the redistricting lines.

The reasons, strategists on both sides of the aisle say, are manifold. For one thing, New York has a large population of Orthodox Jewish voters. Those voters swung hard against Democrats over issues like Israel and religious education, which may have contributed to the surprising loss of Sean Patrick Maloney, the head of the Democratic Campaign Congressional Committee, in a seat just north of New York City, and to the defeat of Democratic state legislators in the same area.

In order to win, Republicans need to get around 35 percent of the vote in New York City. Zeldin, at last count, was at just above 30 percent. Over the last half-decade, noncollege voters, and in particular noncollege voters of color, have been moving into the GOP column. Many Republican strategists feared that this was simply a Trump phenomenon that would dissipate once he was no longer on the ballot. Zeldin, however, nearly doubled the GOP vote of the 2018 gubernatorial candidate Marc Molinaro by making inroads with outer-borough white and Asian voters. A few more points in that direction, and a Republican statewide candidate is suddenly looking at a very different map.

“You can play all the turnout games you want, but for a Republican to have a glimmer of hope they would need to make serious inroads with registered Democrats,” said Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic pollster. “You can do everything right in the swing districts and suburbs, and even if you do well in all of these places and clean up in Republican strongholds, you still need to win 10 percent of registered Democrats, and if you don’t it’s just not enough. It looks like Zeldin did well with Asian voters, and it looks like he did relatively well with Latino voters, but the domino that never fell was that you didn’t have wealthy white Democrats who were scared about crime and decided to vote Republican.”

Both Republicans and Democrats are wondering if a different kind of Republican could have actually won the election outright in 2022. Liberal northeastern states have made it a habit of electing and reelecting moderate Republican governors who have gone on to be overwhelmingly popular. In Vermont this week, Republican Phil Scott won reelection by a 47-point margin, while Vermonters elected a Democratic supermajority to the legislature.

“Lee Zeldin had a tremendous amount of money propping him up, but money isn’t the reason why a Republican hasn’t won statewide in 20 years,” said Democratic consultant Evan Stavisky. “It’s because Republicans keep nominating people like him, who are anti-abortion, Donald Trump–supporting election deniers who are in the pocket of the NRA.”

For weeks, Democrats have been grumbling about Hochul’s miscues, accusing her largely new–to–New York campaign staff of spending too much time on TV ads and not enough on a get-out-the-vote operation in New York City. And while there is some truth to that, Hochul also ran only three points behind Chuck Schumer and ended with more votes than any Democrat in history save for Andrew Cuomo in the historic Democratic wave year of 2018. Hochul also had to be on TV in order to answer the TV ads of Zeldin’s patron, Ron Lauder, who poured more than $11 million into a super-PAC devoted to hammering Hochul on the air.

Bigger issues for Hochul were fears over crime and her inability to convince the Legislature to change the state’s bail laws. As much as Republicans tarred big cities around the country as being little more than dens of rape and robbery, only in New York was the issue salient as the Legislature continues to wrestle with the fallout of a bail-reform law first passed in 2019.

Democrats were wiped out on Long Island in 2021 thanks to the law, and were wiped out further in 2022. In Staten Island, which shares many similarities in demographics and concerns about crime as Long Island, Donald Trump won by 15 points in 2020; in 2022, Lee Zeldin won by 34 points.

And if New York proved more right-leaning than much of the country on Tuesday, and may again in four years, Democrats say a lot of it is for one simple reason: New York has the New York Post, which acts as a house organ for the GOP, drives coverage to other news outlets, and is widely read outside of New York City.

“The Post just kills us, day after day,” said one Hochul adviser. “There is no other place in the country where a Democrat has to deal with something like the New York Post.”

It all adds up to enough to give Republicans some reason for hope at last. Presuming that the crime issue remains relevant, and that longtime Democratic strongholds in the city shift ever so slightly to the GOP, they could at last break the streak and regain the governor’s mansion that once belonged to Republicans like George Pataki and Nelson Rockefeller.

“New York is so stacked against us, but the Democrats made this race a referendum on abortion, Donald Trump, the so-called threat to democracy,” said Rob Astorino, the former Westchester County executive who got 41 percent of the vote against Andrew Cuomo in 2014. Citing the gains in Congress and the down ballot, he added, “We didn’t win the big enchilada this time, but we won a bunch of side dishes. We made significant gains. We can build on this.”

THE LOONY HATE-TRUMPers IN ACTION!

November 12, 2022

What Really Happened in the Midterms and Why

By Richard Moss at American Thinker:

By every account, this was a strange election.  Having had some time to think about it, I have determined the best explanation for November 8 is that this midterm election was intended to turn out pretty much the way it did.

Who intended it?  The Republican establishment.  Why?  To get rid of Trump.  

How did they do this, and where is the proof?  It wasn’t too hard, and the proof is all around us.

This was a midterm election, so there are no real consequences beyond the control of Congress.  This means that if you can control one house, even by a slim margin, you can stall the agenda of the other side.  How large a majority you have is secondary and, in the long view, not that meaningful.

The establishment Republicans were willing to settle for less than expected numbers in the House to eradicate what they see as by far their biggest problem.  This was their chance to bury Trump and avoid a great deal of damaging unpleasantness at very low to no real cost.

It makes sense.  The Democrats funded the Trump senatorial candidates in the primaries because they thought they could make them lose.  The Republicans seemed to think that might be a good idea.  If necessary, they could help those candidates lose, which could seriously weaken Trump but still leave them with sufficient winners.

The Dem-supported Trump candidates lost, as per their plan.  I have heard some pundits say that this was a clever move on the part of the Democrats.  Maybe so, but they had a lot of help.  Those candidates lost because if they had won, Trump would be almost assured of the presidency in 2024.  Look at the contortions Mitch McConnell went through to keep Murkowski and deny the Trump candidate in Alaska.  Check out where the Republican House money went when the chips were down.  New Hampshire was denied funding just as Bolduc was surging.  See here, here, here.

Immediately upon the polls closing, the Republican Establishment gushed over Ron DeSantis.  He was all over TV.  The very next day, Fox News (with dedicated anti-Trumper Paul Ryan on its Board) ran the headline “Ron DeSantis is the future of Trumpism.”

The Republicans, admittedly dreadfully incompetent at messaging, outdid their own previous failures in this election — on purpose.  National ads acknowledging the accomplishments of Trump on the economy, immigration, inflation, crime, or any of the other major issues on the table for this election were nonexistent.

Ronald Reagan made one of the most impressive marks on an election in the last 50 years when he asked a simple question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”  The Republicans needed only one chart with two columns — one for Trump, one for Biden — listing gas prices, food prices, general inflation rates, murders, education proficiency rates, and half a dozen more items with the comparable figures.  Displaying that chart on 30-second ads in every market every day would have left the Democrats begging for mercy with minimal voter turnout.  Did Republicans, do it?  No.  Why not?  The Trump name would have been mentioned.  And this year, there were more than enough of those issues to slay an entire herd of dragons. 

There were several House races with obvious “Biden bumps” in the vote tracking.  A Biden bump is a sudden, straight-line, vertical rise in the normal arcing pattern of vote count over a number of hours.  The Biden bump was clearly demonstrated on Election Night 2016 in several states, and it was clear last Tuesday.  Check that out here.

Republicans are making no noise about this at all.  They are contesting nothing vocally on the national level.  They are taking no action whatsoever in the obvious stalling of the counts in Arizona and Nevada.  The Republicans are quiet because the establishment accomplished what it set out to do.  There should be no question about this.  Yes, Harmeet Dhillon and the troops are plugging a lot of holes at the local level, and that’s needed, but the overall national outcome was predetermined.

The Republican Party used their huge polling advantage and the favorable winds granted by the unspeakably incompetent Biden administration to target their own losses in a manner that will ensure the embarrassment of Trump and ascendancy of DeSantis, all in one fell swoop.  This week, the Republican establishment will likely be dangling a few vivid alternatives in front of Trump as he retires to Mar-a-Largo before his scheduled announcement.  His choices will be presented in the starkest of terms.

Deals are made all the time in this game, and this election has no other explanation that makes sense.  “Interesting times” is the understatement of the year, and we likely could be in for a pretty interesting couple of months.

This is all opinion, of course, but it seems to me to be logical.  That assumption is based on two things that I have come to believe over the years.  In politics, things are not ever as they appear to be, and politicians will never fail to act in their own self-interest, whatever the stakes.  (For all of you mystery fans, there are also motive, means, and opportunity.)

And regardless of how we may feel about this personally, we have to hope the Republicans achieve at least their minimum goal: a House majority.  The fear is that whenever one is dealing with the devil, or playing with fire, or even failing to do one’s level best, the risk of serious loss is much higher than the players are willing to believe going in.

Concerned About “THE DRAG”

Biden was a drag on the Democrats in the midterms: He’d be a disaster in 2024

Momentary good feelings are understandable, but Biden was the biggest negative for Democrats. It’s time to move on

By NORMAN SOLOMON at SALON:

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 12, 2022 6:00AM (EST)

U.S. President Joe Biden takes questions from reporters, after he delivered remarks in the State Dining Room, at the White House on November 09, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

No amount of post-election puffery about Joe Biden can change a key political reality: His approval ratings are far below the public’s general positivity toward the Democratic Party. Overall, Democrats who won in the midterm elections did so despite Biden, not because of him. He’s a drag on the party, a boon to Republicans, and — if he runs again — he’d be a weak candidate against the GOP nominee in the 2024 presidential campaign.

While the electorate is evenly split between the two parties, there’s no such close division about Biden. NBC News reported that its exit poll on Tuesday “found that two-thirds of voters (68 percent) do not want Biden to run for president again in 2024.”

This is nothing new. Biden’s low public-approval ratings have been longstanding. A chart showing chronic disapproval now has him a dozen points underwater, with 53 percent disapproving and only 41 percent approving. The gap between Biden’s approval ratings and those of his party underscores what a massive drag he is on Democratic electoral prospects.

As for how he’s apt to govern next year, Biden has offered a willingness to compromise with the right-wing Republican leadership that’s likely to gain control of the House. (That won’t be clear for at least several more days as vote counting continues.) A New York Times headline after the president’s Wednesday afternoon news conference summed up: “Biden Promises Bipartisanship After a Red Wave ‘Didn’t Happen.'”

But “bipartisanship” is exactly what we don’t need, in the face of extremist Republican demagogues who are determined to keep dragging the goalposts — and the country — further rightward.

In contrast to the current fad of adulation for Biden in much of corporate media, Politico offered this sober assessment of his impacts on the midterms: “It’s hard to argue that Democrats overperformed on Tuesday because of Biden rather than in spite of him. His approval rating, hovering around 41 percent, is dismal — and has been all year. He’ll turn 80 this month, and earlier this year, a majority of Democrats polled said they’d prefer someone else to be the party’s nominee.”

The article added: “But one thing Biden did have going for him was the calendar, and the reluctance of Democrats to do anything that might hurt him — and, by extension, the party — ahead of the midterms. That imperative is gone now. And though no prominent Democrat is likely to run a serious campaign against Biden, there will be increasing pressure on him, especially from the left, to step aside.”

It will be crucial to boost that pressure in the months ahead, which is why I’m glad to be part of the Don’t Run Joe organizing team. On Wednesday, the campaign launched digital ads reaching Democratic voters in New Hampshire with the message: “We need strong leadership to defeat Republicans in 2024.” While beating the fascistic GOP will be absolutely necessary, moving ahead with vital progressive policies will also be of paramount importance.

In New Hampshire, which has long hosted the nation’s first presidential primary, Democratic state Rep. Sherry Frost said this on Wednesday:

I am eager to support a candidate who understands the fatal dysfunction in our economy and is willing to hold the ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations to their obligations to the rest of us, who is going to actively champion meaningful civil rights and voting protections, and who will spearhead a shift away from the military-industrial complex and oligarchy and toward a culture that works for the most vulnerable of us first. I am not confident that Biden is that candidate, and while I appreciate his rescuing us from another Trump term, I believe we need someone else to champion the big and systemic changes we need to continue to strive toward our more perfect union.

What does all this mean for people who want to defeat Republicans in 2024 and to advance truly progressive agendas? Joe Biden should not be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. If he runs for re-election, representing the status quo, the outcome will likely be disastrous. Grassroots activism will be essential to create better alternatives.

The Spectator

CAMPAIGN 2022

Republicans need to figure out mail-in voting

It’s being used by Democrats to influence the course of elections

November 10, 2022 | 10:08 pm

Workers count mail-in and in-person absentee ballots at the Wisconsin Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Getty)

Written by:

Roger Kimball

Ihave been thinking about the phrase “the fix was in.” What it means is that a certain result was predetermined. It carries with it a suggestion — but only, I think, a suggestion — of something, if not quite illicit, then at least not quite above board.

Why have I been thinking about that pregnant phrase? If you said “the midterm elections,” go to the head of the class.

I have no idea whether there was anything corrupt or underhanded about the election, notwithstanding the Caligula’s horse moment of John Fetterman’s election to the United States Senate. It was odd, no doubt, that the people of the great state of Pennsylvania elected a mentally incompetent trust-fund leftie who never saw a dead baby he didn’t like. But perhaps, like Caligula, who is said to have made his horse a consul, the people of Pennsylvania did it out of spite, just to show that they could. Or maybe Fetterman’s elevation to the 100 club is just an illustration of the old observation that anybody — and I mean anybody — can rise to the top in America.

Of course, by “anybody,” I do not mean “anybody.” I mean anybody with the approved left-wing attitudes.

But I digress. Let’s return to that “fix” I mentioned above. What was the determinative fix in the 2022 midterm elections? Early, mostly mail-in, voting. It is perfectly legal. But it undermines a fair and open electoral process. Were I a Democrat, I might even say that it “threatens our democracy.” Why? Because it allows for the wholesale manipulation of the vote. It also dilutes the integrity of an election by transforming it from an event into a process.

I should add that “mail-in ballots” is an equivocal term. It can mean different things in different contexts and in different states. The practice is obviously open to more interference and manipulation than same-day voting is. So extra safeguards must be put in place and scrupulously followed if such interference and manipulation is to be avoided. Some states do this. Florida is a good example. Other states do not. Apparently, about 1.4 million people asked for mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. Around the same number voted early by mail in Arizona, compared to just shy of half a million on Election Day. Were all such ballots carefully checked to ascertain the identity and eligibility of the person casting the vote?

I doubt it, but let’s leave that question to one side. The real issue is that the wholesale practice of early or mail-in voting makes a mockery of elections. If you say that an election is to be held on November 8, but millions of ballots are already docketed, if not actually counted, by the time November 8 rolls around, why bother to have Election Day at all? Why not have Election Week, or Election Month, or Election Quarter?

Elections are meant to represent a particular decision made at particular time at which voters can assess the state of things at that moment and make their choice. Early and mail-in voting undermines the definitiveness of that practice. I suspect that in many cases the result of an election is essentially predetermined by early and mail-in voting, something that makes the very idea of Election Day superfluous.

There is also the elephant, or rather the donkey, in the room: mail-in voting is largely a Democratic concession, encouraged and abetted by Democrats in order to help influence the course of elections. My own feeling is that the practice should be sharply curtailed, if not outlawed. If that is impossible, it should at least be made “safe, legal and rare,” as Bill Clinton said in another context.

I raised the idea of outlawing mail-in voting with a canny friend. “The Dems would never allow it,” he said, comparing the practice to nuclear weapons. Once they exist, it is impossible to get rid of them. Maybe so, in which case it behooves Republicans to become experts in organizing and deploying mail-in voting for their own candidates.

If nothing else, a little competition in the mail-in ballot sweepstakes would counter the invitation to corruption that follows on the feeling that the fix is in. In the election just past, it seemed, despite media forecasts of a red wave, that a certain complacency was abroad in and about the headquarters of certain contentious races. Gretchen Whitmer never seemed particularly worried about Tudor Dixon, nor did John Fetterman seem worried about Dr. Oz. Of course, Fetterman is a special case. But the point is, I believe, they knew that the fix was in and therefore — to employ another common idiom — that the race was in the bag.

By Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of the New Criterion, publisher of Encounter Books and a Spectator columnist and contributing editor.