Random Politics Stuff Thread...

[boozeman]

I wonder if less than expected turnout was the problem for Republicans or whether independents didn’t break their way as expected, or what.

I thought the vote was all rigged anyways. Looks like they did it again!

 

[boozeman]

 

[Smitty]

Ted Budd is going to win comfortably it looks. Anyone else of significance up for election there?

The House candidates.

 

[Smitty]

MSNBC was digging Walker’s grave about a half hour ago. There’s still so much out in the rural areas that he can easily make up the deficit. It’s probably going to be a runoff.

Yeah well the last time there was a Georgia run off it didn't exactly inspire confidence.

Rs need to figure out a way to win that run off. Walker is so terrible though.

If Republicans had 52 seats in hand I'd be actively saying I want Walker to lose probably. He's not really a good look for Republicans.

 

[Smitty]

Lake had a big lead in almost every poll, and the polls usually oversample Dems. Even MSNBC was griping about how weak Hobbs was. This doesn't make sense at all.

Republicans underperformed compared to polls in a lot of key races, but not all.

A common theme seems to be Trump endorsements. Pretty telling.

The party needs to say thanks but no thanks to Trump. Go start your news network.

 

[Smitty]

I thought the vote was all rigged anyways. Looks like they did it again!

Is this specifically addressed to me?

I wouldn't say I'm an "election denier," but I absolutely think there are shenanigans that existed. Without proof that it affected the final outcome there is no point in pushing that narrative though.

 

[Smitty]

Yeah I don't see how you can possibly run him in 2024 after last night. He's clearly an albatross.

DeSantis has to be the guy now.

 

[Smitty]

Republicans should have won the Senate easily, but they nominated really bad candidates

by Timothy P. Carney, Senior Columnist |

November 09, 2022 06:56 AM

There’s a lot of noise as these midterm results flow in, and a few unsettled races at the moment, but this much is clear: Republicans would control the Senate next year had they stuck to nominating good candidates. Instead, typical of the Tea Party-to-Trump Era, Republicans in many key states nominated people who were patently unfit for office.


It goes back to the Massie Theorem. Rep. Thomas Massie explained the Tea Party after the 2016 election.



"All this time," Massie said, "I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul-searching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas. They were voting for the craziest son of a b**** in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class.”


Nominating the craziest son of a b**** in the race is not a formula for winning governing majorities.


Here’s the raw math:

Republicans, as of 5 a.m. Wednesday, control 48 seats in the Senate, with four states outstanding. (Technically, Alaska is still outstanding, but it is undecided between two Republican candidates.) Republican Ron Johnson will probably win reelection in Wisconsin. That means the GOP would need to win two of the final three races — outstanding contests in Nevada and Arizona, and a likely runoff in Georgia — to control the Senate. So, the odds are decent that Republicans end up with 49 or 50 seats, which is 1 or 2 seats short of Senate control.


Republicans should have won the Georgia Senate race easily this year. They also should have won Pennsylvania.


In Georgia, former NFL running back Herschel Walker will get about 48% or 49% as Gov. Brian Kemp gets about 54%. At least half of that difference is due to Walker’s personal unfitness. He hasn’t convinced anyone of the falsity of the charges that he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion. His personal immorality and lack of political skill cost him an easy opportunity to knock off Warnock.


In Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz lost a Senate seat Republicans have held for the past 12 years. This is remarkable in a midterm election of a Democratic president. What’s more, Oz lost to a man whose stroke left him unable to understand spoken language or speak clearly. A good GOP nominee would have won Pennsylvania this year.


New Hampshire’s Sen. Maggie Hassan should have been vulnerable in this midterm election. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu won reelection by 15 points last night. But Republican Senate nominee Don Bolduc was a political novice and conspiracy theorist. He lost to Hassan.


Were Pennsylvania and Georgia in the red column, Republicans would control the Senate with either Wisconsin or Nevada victories. Had Sununu run for the Senate, he probably would have won, and with good nominees in Pennsylvania and Georgia, Republicans could already have the Senate clinched tonight.

And now a reminder: Democrats control the U.S. Senate currently only because Donald Trump refused to concede his 2020 loss, and his antics tipped two Georgia runoffs to the Democrats.


Republicans are where they are because of the low quality of leaders the party keeps nominating.

 

[boozeman]

Yeah I don't see how you can possibly run him in 2024 after last night. He's clearly an albatross.

DeSantis has to be the guy now.

He is starting out like a bull in a china shop though.

Mentioning he is the woke culture slayer a billion gazillion times right away may not be the best strategy.

I think these election results should be a wake up call and he mashed snooze.

 

[Smitty]

Here's a big issue that needs fixing:

Voting integrity systems have been put in place in Florida after the state became a national laughingstock in the wake of the 2000 presidential election, and “hanging chad” became a symbol of questionable vote totals. Florida permits any registered voter to request an absentee ballot, but the request has to be received by the office of the local Supervisor of Elections by the close of business 10 days before the election. Only the voter or an immediate family member can make the request. There are no mass mailings of vote-by-mail ballots.

Why the red tsunami seems to have hit only Florida

As vote counts continue to be posted, it is clear that Republican hopes and dreams of a huge wave election have been dashed. Instead of a large House majority and solid control of the Senate, Republicans will be lucky to have small majorit...

www.americanthinker.com

 

[Smitty]

Maybe America Hasn’t Suffered Enough – The American Spectator | USA News and Politics

It's late as I write this, though not late enough to know how things will turn out. But there are things we can safely say just after midnight Eastern time on Tuesday as the vote counts roll in and the races get called. One of them is that for all…

spectator.org

Maybe America Hasn’t Suffered Enough

The red wave washed ashore as a ripple, though Republicans did make progress.


It’s late as I write this, though not late enough to know how things will turn out. But there are things we can safely say just after midnight Eastern time on Tuesday as the vote counts roll in and the races get called.


One of them is that for all the anger we’ve seen evidence of from Republican and independent voters, it seems pretty clear that channeling it into positive action is something beyond the reach of the GOP’s leadership and political class.


Is that a failure of that leadership? Well, yes. It is. And we’ll spend weeks and months analyzing the fact that what was supposed to be a red wave election was more like a sea spray that might be just enough to take majorities in the House and Senate by the tiniest margins … or perhaps not even that. And we’ll be analyzing it within the context of the opportunity the GOP had in 2022 — and the party simply blew it.

​

This should have been a massive wave election. Given the low job approval ratings of the sitting president in his first midterm election, and given the favorable generic congressional ballot numbers, this should have been a plus-five wave in the Senate and a plus-30 wave, or bigger, in the House. It also should have resounded down to statehouses, and yet the GOP turns out, apparently, not to have been able to beat abysmal Democrat gubernatorial candidates like Katie Hobbs, Kathy Hochul, and Gretchen Whitmer.


There are so many utterly horrid Democrats who will remain in office after this election that it should be offensive to average Americans. It’s tempting to fall into the trap of believing there must be wholesale corruption in American elections, but the problem with going there is that there must be proof before it’s actionable.


Until some is presented, we’ll have to deal with something very unpleasant. Namely, here’s the truth that we on the Right are going to have to accept: the American electorate in 2022 is awful.


And the axiom about the cycle that involves weak men and tough times is a real thing, and we are in the worst quadrant of that cycle.


We are still in the time in which weak men make tough times. We have not gotten to the point where tough times make tough men.



But get ready because those tough times will do their work. Perhaps for quite a long while.


Somehow, the Democrats and their pals in the legacy media managed to convince a large swath of Americans that we’re not in a recession. Four in five Americans are unsatisfied with the economy, a large majority seem to be furious about gas prices, people say crime is out of control, and yet barely half of the country — if that — are motivated to unload the horrid leadership that caused those issues.

Look at the state New York is in, and yet the voters there overwhelmingly chose to retain Hochul?


But gas prices will skyrocket thanks to the Biden administration’s running out of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The true shortage of both crude oil and refined petroleum products will soon become unmistakable.


And it’s going to be a cold winter in America, and a rough time coming.


You only think it’s rough now. You have no idea how bad things can get. When the diesel fuel runs out and the trucks don’t move, and the shelves go empty, and the layoffs come, perhaps you’ll think of 2022 as the good times.


The responsibility of the American public was to deliver an utter rebuke to the Left and the Democrat Party that the Left runs, and the 2022 election was not a rebuke.


How you can perform so manifestly awfully in running a country like the United States of America over the past two years and not suffer a rebuke from the American public is mystifying. But the Democrats will perform even more manifestly awfully over the next two years.


The trouble is that the Republicans are also performing manifestly awfully, and if the voters were only willing to deliver a mild rebuke, at best, of the Democrats, they do appear willing to deliver one to the Republicans as well.


The voters took a look at the Republican Party and they don’t prefer Mitch McConnell to Chuck Schumer — or, if they do, not by a lot. They don’t prefer Kevin McCarthy to Nancy Pelosi — or, if they do, not by a lot.


And they didn’t see much of anything out of the GOP that they thought was worth voting for, even if they thought the Democrats were no better.


This isn’t a new problem. It’s the reason Donald Trump rose as the party’s surprise nominee in 2016 and why he’s the leading figure within the party still. Republican voters don’t even like the Republican Party, and Trump was seen as somebody who could reinvigorate it.


To some extent, he did. As underwhelming as things are right now, it would be infinitely worse if the Bush Republican brand was still dominant within the party.


The problem is that too many people who would be GOP voters think of it as a Bush Republican Party.


And if the numbers on Kari Lake and Blake Masters persist in Arizona, those people might be right. It may be that shaking things up in the GOP upsets too many of the complacent, “compassionate conservative” crowd who prefer a slow descent into irrelevance for the party to a vigorous fight to the end — not just for the Republican brand but for the country as founded.


Right now, McCarthy has to be seen as a liability atop the GOP House leadership. Steve Scalise was always a better choice and Scalise is going to have to make a decision he’d like not to, which is to step over his friend and lead. Because, if he won’t, somebody else who can make a compelling case for conservatism will necessarily step over both of them.


The worst result of the 2022 midterms, however, is that we will be stuck with Mitch McConnell as the leader of the GOP in the Senate for two more years. Without Masters and Don Bolduc and Herschel Walker (who might yet win) and Mehmet Oz, it’s going to be hard to find enough Republicans in the Senate who’ll vote against him.


Though Trump is demanding he go, to be replaced by Rick Scott of Florida.


I doubt that would be the case, though it should happen that way. Scott isn’t going to have the votes within the caucus to unseat McConnell, barring something unforeseen.


But Trump didn’t play the net positive role he should have, and that might be the real takeaway.


Mehmet Oz should not have been the GOP nominee in Pennsylvania. It should have been David McCormick. Everybody knows that now. McCormick would have beaten the ridiculous John Fetterman easily. Oz lost while performing similarly to Trump in 2020.


I’m not going to fault him for backing Masters. Masters was objectively the most interesting of the candidates in Arizona, and I wouldn’t give up on him as someone with a future in politics if he wants it. And I can’t understand Kari Lake’s underperformance, except she must have come on entirely too strong, particularly late in the race — but even then, in a competitive state, it’s impossible to fathom her losing to Katie Hobbs.


But when Trump rejoiced in Joe O’Dea’s loss in Colorado on Election Night, it was a rotten look.


It’s also a rotten look for Trump to have thrown jabs at Ron DeSantis, who is the single brightest light in the Republican Party. DeSantis held Charlie Crist under 40 percent, or he was doing so last I checked, and won reelection by 20 points.


Objectively, it’s clear that DeSantis is the future of the GOP. The talk about Lake as potentially overshadowing him can now be put to bed.


What we’ll have to discover is whether, rather than the future of the party, DeSantis must become its present. Because what he’s done in Florida in turning it definitively from purple to red in just four years is the single most impressive thing in Republican politics.


Frankly, it might be just about the only impressive thing in Republican politics now.


Republicans should study DeSantis and emulate him. He’s the standard. And as America turns bleak over the next two years, he might be the only inspiration the party has left.

 

[Smitty]

I think between Trump endorsements, bad candidates, Roe fallout, and the fact that as the above-article mentions, we haven't really hit the bottom yet, those are probably the factors that most explain why Republicans couldn't capitalize on the standard midterm swing.

As most of you know I do bankruptcy, and our filings are still kinda limping along. I'm not sure things have gotten bad yet.

 

[boozeman]

Here's a big issue that needs fixing:

Why the red tsunami seems to have hit only Florida

As vote counts continue to be posted, it is clear that Republican hopes and dreams of a huge wave election have been dashed. Instead of a large House majority and solid control of the Senate, Republicans will be lucky to have small majorit...

www.americanthinker.com

I don't understand why people would have an issue with the voter integrity measures. It is completely reasonable.

 

[Chocolate Lab]

Also, after further review, it's way too early to say Lake lost. Only like 70% of the vote is in.

 

[boozeman]

I think between Trump endorsements, bad candidates, Roe fallout, and the fact that as the above-article mentions, we haven't really hit the bottom yet, those are probably the factors that most explain why Republicans couldn't capitalize on the standard midterm swing.

The anti-Trump sentiment was enough to eliminate the lunatic fringe that campaigned on Trump-like promises, but it seems that those who actually have done Trump-like things got the payback.

As most of you know I do bankruptcy, and our filings are still kinda limping along. I'm not sure things have gotten bad yet.

Don't worry, give it a couple more years of this economy and it will break some folks.

As I am certain you understand, some people raked in free cash during the pandemic and I think some are still living off of that wave.

It won't be long before the average person runs up their credit back up.

 

[Chocolate Lab]

Won't take even close to a couple more years. Give it six more months.

 

[Rev]

Go Team!!

 

[Cowboysrock55]

Missouri passed recreational marijuana so there is that.

 

[Texas Ace]

Republicans underperformed compared to polls in a lot of key races, but not all.

A common theme seems to be Trump endorsements. Pretty telling.

The party needs to say thanks but no thanks to Trump. Go start your news network.

Yup, that is exactly what's happening -- Trump is actually motivating more blue voters than red ones.

We can't have 4 more years of a Democratic president so the GOP needs to cut ties with Trump already.

Move the fuck on.

 

[Chocolate Lab]

Yup, that is exactly what's happening -- Trump is actually motivating more blue voters than red ones.

We can't have 4 more years of a Democratic president so the GOP needs to cut ties with Trump already.

Move the fuck on.

Agree with moving on. I wish he'd go away, and have thought that for a while now.

But I will say that this election had nothing to do with Trump for me and plenty of other voters. Nothing. Trump wasn't on the ballot.

The left wants to make it about Trump, because tying candidates to the evil Hitler-like Trump is about all they have. That and abortion.

But that argument is about as valid as saying this was a vote to save Democracy. Total BS.