Ideologues think that there’s a right side of history. Conservatives know that there isn’t one.
Elections are a battleground, they’re not inevitable. Like any conflict, they come down to strategy, determination and random chance.
What’s the takeaway now long after the sun has set on a troubled midterm election?
Candidates matter, so do issues. Picking the right candidates is a matter of intangibles. But a good candidate has to connect with enough of the public to win. Republicans ran a whole bunch of high-profile celebrity candidates who couldn’t do that. The assumption that because someone is used to being in the limelight, that they have media experience, that they do well on camera, means that they can connect to voters is a fallacy. Sometimes it gives them an edge. But such assumptions go sideways during a crisis election. And this was a crisis election.
Having the right issues is important. Republicans had a lot of those on their side. The polling backed that up. But they didn’t always have the right candidates to deliver those messages on a national level.
And yet, locally, a lot of Republicans did well. It was the national races where there was more of a struggle because Democrats had poured so many resources into them and because bad choices stymied the electorate.
The polling wasn’t wrong about public outrage, but one thing that both sides tend to miss is the sheer amount of anger, fear and frustration by voters. And how much of it is apolitical.
A whole lot of the voters don’t like politicians right now. Any politicians. And many are casting votes to send a message against whatever attracts their anger right now. Considering the state of the country, that’s understandable. A whole chunk of the electorate doesn’t trust anyone at all.
It’s a challenging landscape with some significant Republican victories. Most notably in Florida. Those wins show what’s possible when candidates and issues come together and mind meld with the public. And when the public believes that you’re getting results.
“Ideologues think that there’s a right side of history.”
Yeah, the Marxist-Leninists always talk about being on the right side of history, as if history was some living, breathing, conscious God that looks down on them with favor. They are against religion, but they make the inanimate entity “history” into their God.
I think vote fraud and corrupt systems are mostly to blame. I mean allowing a candidate to oversee her own election ?!?! How can that be allowed? Then making no allowance for her own vote machine failures A leftist judge decides?
Add to that the enormous amount of money for ads that do influence those people still glued to TV’ watching (and that’s a lot of people) plus brainwashed college & young adults who do want communism.
. This may mean we can never win. Not in my lifetime anyway.
The Dems don’t need voter fraud. They have endless amounts of money from billionaire donors and labor unions and other sources of “dark money.” The Left controls nearly all of our major institutions and has achieved information dominance and emotional manipulation dominance. They have dumbed-down our educational institutions and, in line with the theories of the communist Paulo Freiere that are taught in all of our education colleges, are turning out class after class of students who have extremely poor math and reading skills, and no critical thinking skills, but are all ready to be leftist political activists and who can vote. Add to that an uninformed, incurious, gullible cohort of voters. As Hillary Clinton said to Dick Morris, ““Look, the average Democrat voter is just plain stupid. They’re easy to manipulate. That’s the easy part.” And this is not to mention that the Left has so trashed the Republican brand, nobody wants to identify with the Republicans so they get more of these stupid people to vote for them. After the last two years of disastrous Democratic governance, someone is going to have to explain to me just what the Dems would have to do to wake these people from their slumber. So they don’t have to cheat.
One would have thought that Biden’s inflationary economy would have made the majority of voters vote Republican.
Not to mention the continuing disaster of the last two years. Now we’re on the cusp of a recession, a shortage of heating oil and natural gas, and a lack of diesel fuel that fuels all of the trucks that bring everything we use and eat to market. And still the voters voted for the people who have brought this all to the American people. You just can’t fix stupid.
We are in our own little bubble too. We hear what we want to hear. The democrat media complex NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, most magazines and newspapers – that is a huge hill republicans have to climb. “WE” keep forgetting just how outgunned we really are – and it is a huge advantage for the crappiest of candidates.
They set the narrative and culture for tens of million more Americans than we do. They put the doubts and assumptions, and “common” knowledge out there and most of the time we can not overcome it with the best of candidates.
Oz is just not a very warm and connectable guy.
People follow logic basic on their knowledge – not ours.- not our things.
I agree completely – for what its worth.
Yeah, she’s the overseer of elections or whatever? What a load of bullshit. AZ is like that.
Leadership is the elicitation of desired behavior. This behavior is the precipitate of
the sincerity of the leader. As historical factoid, I refer to Horatio Nelson, the one eyed, one armed giant of British history.
Unfortunately, we seem to have discontinued these models, and replaced with mendacious sleeze balls, like Biden, or girly men, or flaming dykes.
Excuse me, while I vomit.
“And when the public believes that you’re getting results.”
The results the public wants depends on the philosophy, ideology, or religion the public wants. Muslims vote for Sharia. Nazis vote for Nazism. Socialists vote for Socialism.
Conservatives vote to conserve Social Security and Medicare, they vote to conserve the welfare state. notknowing or not caring that the welfare state by its nature and logic will grow and expand eventually becoming full-blown Socialism.
The Founding Fathers WERE ideologues, they had a political ideology based predominantly on REASON. To be on the right side of reason (not history) is to be on the side of an American future of freedom, liberty, and Capitalism. But only if that’s what you desire and believe in.
“A majority without an ideology is a helpless mob, to be taken over by anyone . . . . Political freedom requires much more than the people’s wish. It requires an enormously complex knowledge of political theory and of how to implement it in practice.” – Ayn Rand
Daniel, the caliber of candidates and issues don’t really matter, as the results in Pennsylvania and New York clearly demonstrate. I cannot conceive a reasonable justification for voting for Kochul and even less so for Fetterman, each having zero achievement to recommend them.
Who controls collecting and counting the ballots is really all that matters Mr. Greenfield. No thoughtty analysis needed. They did it in 2020 and they unsurprisingly did it again.
People tend to stay loyal to their church, college or other institutions. It takes a real catastrophe to shake their faith and drive them to switch. I was surprised recently to learn that a friend had become disillusioned with his church and had withdrawn from it. Dan Bongino said that in the eighties New York had two thousand murders a year, but people defeated Guiliano the first time he ran for mayor. They finally elected him later, and he put an end to the high crime rates. But later the city relapsed into the arms of the far left, and crime rates have soared. I guess there is a tendency to revert to type.
There was no major fraud this time around. The states we need to win have election laws and rules that make counting the votes in an efficient way impossible.
If Lake (for example), wins, and changes those laws, then runs a smooth election she will be on her way to being a Desantis. I am curious to see how she does. Border, Dope. Homeless. She has challenges.
Over at TGP the black helicopters, and corrupted voting machines are every where.They are going whack-a-doodle Qanon over there.
Sometimes you win (Vance), and sometimes you lose! Oz is not a very warm man – he did not connect enough.
Electoral procedures also matter. Early and mail-in voting means votes are cast based on less than complete data – argument and information from and about the candidates (not to mention more opportunity for questionable ballots). In 2020 millions of votes had already been cast before the sordid details from the Hunter laptop came out. In Pennsylvania, a couple million (mostly Democrat) ballots had already been submitted before the first debate exposed Fetterman’s mental disabilities. These experiences alone should be enough to move us back to an in-person Election DAY.