Interesting Items 11/12

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue:

1. Alaska
2. National
3. Analysis
4. Job
5. FakeBook

1. Alaska. Unlike many of the rest of the states where democrats won Tuesday night, Republicans here in Alaska did pretty well.  We tossed out a so-called independent governor, Bill Walker, who broke Frank Murkowski’s old record for losing a reelection bid, getting around 2% of the total vote.  In the same election, voters statewide administered formed US Senator from Alaska, Mark Begich, the worst defeat of his political career.  We defeated an anti-development ballot initiative with around a 60-40% vote.  We tossed out a turncoat Republican, defeated another so-called independent, and flipped the house majority back to Republican.  All in all, a decent night for the Home Team up here.

• An Army Vet named Josh Rivak won a contested Republican primary against a very respected incumbent Republican, Charisse Millett.  Charisse for years won close elections, but not any longer.  Rivak ran against a perennial democrat candidate named Pat Higgins, famous for living out of state for a year on the Marshall Islands where he worked.  At the time he was also a member of the Anchorage School Board and a reliable vote for the union.  Higgins and the state democrat party dropped a filth bomb on Rivak the last weekend of the campaign, accusing him of two DUIs and fishing violations.  Rivak enlisted after 9-11 and lost most of a leg to mortar fire in Iraq.  Like a lot of vets, he suffered with PTSD and is a recovering alcoholic, something he owned up to the very first day of both campaigns.  This concern for AA membership only extends to Republicans, as one of the rising stars on the democrat side is Ivy Sponholz, also a recovering alcoholic.  But this was all the democrats had, and they were behind.  Rivak won by a comfortable margin.  http://mustreadalaska.com/josh-revak-gets-dirty-bombed-democrats/
• Stand for Salmon, the ballot initiative that would have loosed national lawyers on every single development project in the state went down nearly 2:1. The initiative was funded mainly by outside environmental groups, laundering donations and grants through three local environmental groups, the Cook Inlet Keeper, Trustees for Alaska, and Alaska Center for the Environment.  Industry spent around $12 million, vastly outspending the greens, at least on the officially reported campaign spending reports.  We truly will not know what was spent for a year or two until we see the local nonprofit 990s filed for last year, this year, and next year.  https://www.adn.com/politics/2018/11/11/why-did-ballot-measure-1-get-crushed-opponents-outspent-backers-by-a-lot-but-other-factors-were-also-at-play/
• Republican candidate Mike Dunleavy won a comfortable victory over Mark Begich, Bill Walker and a libertarian candidate.  It was a resounding victory.  Biggest losers in this were the unions, who were whipsawed first in strong support for incumbent Bill Walker.  Walker was strongly pro-union and populated his administration with democrats and executed a pogrom against anyone in state government including boards and commissions who ever donated to or registered as a Republican.  The independent groups supporting Dunleavy were remarkably agile, responsive, and used no small amount of humor in their response to what the unions and Begich were doing.  The last Hail Mary thrown by the unions supporting Begich were a series of large signs accusing Dunleavy of voting against the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), one of the hot issues in the election, the one that mostly killed Walker’s reelection chances.  When Walker dropped out of the race a few weeks before the vote, union money was mostly spent, so they trotted out the labor with wood, nails, and signs making the fraudulent claim.  The Dunleavy supporting groups responded within a day or two with a series of smaller signs posted in front of the union signs accusing them of being fake news.  Hilarious.  And something that triggered a meltdown by Alaska AFL/CIO head Vince Beltrami.  http://mustreadalaska.com/big-losers-edition-begich-beltrami-ivan-moore-galvin/

 

2. National. There was good news and bad news from the election.  At the top level, Republicans lost their House majority and will end up with a majority in the 11 – 20 seat range.  Republicans picked up at least two seats in the US Senate, bringing their majority up to 53 – 54.  Republicans lost at least seven Governors.  I have seen at least one location reporting that we also lost up to 300 down-ballot seats.  And as several of the elections were well within the margin of fraud, democrats are busily in the process of stealing the Florida Governor, US Senate from Florida, US Senate from Arizona, and perhaps even the Georgia Governor.  All in all, a standard off-year election.  https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2018

 

3. Analysis. So how did we get here and what does it mean?  This picture is not yet complete and will still be analyzed in the weeks to months to come.  But the following thoughts occur to me early on.

• One of the things that made democrat takeover of the House possible was retirement of 38 House Republicans.  Generally, these members are reelected at a 90 – 95% rate.  It was these seats that were at the heart of democrat majority takeover efforts.  Why did they retire?  Many reasons.  They listened to a couple years of media claims of a blue wave, so they got out while the getting was good.  There was no small number of them that neither liked Trump or his methods and didn’t want to play anymore.  https://admin.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/the_trump_effect_and_the_wave_that_never_was.html
• So now that the democrats have the House majority, what to do with it?  Given that they just reprised what they did in 2006, run a bunch of bright photogenic, former military as democrats.  How do these people play with socialist whack jobs like Occasional – Cortex who is already whining about the inability to pay for a place to live between now and when she is sworn in?  Pure comedy gold, that.  And how are all these young members going to play with the septuagenarians in Pelosi’s leadership cadre?
• A lot of issues simply didn’t matter, as democrat after democrat simply lied about what they believed and where they wanted to go after being elected.  The Project Veritas guys documented this nationwide.  At the House and lower level, this was about personality and tribal membership rather than anything associated with issues.  Now that I say that, I saw at least one piece blaming the loss of the House majority on McCain, who cast the vote in opposition to repeal of O’BamaCare out of personal pique against Trump.  The problem with all of this is that the House majority did a pretty good job over the last few years passing decent legislation.  https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/defeated-goper-blames-mccain-house-loss-veterans-day
• Democrat John Tester was sadly reelected in Montana.  Why?  Montana for years has a small libertarian party that siphons off perhaps 5% of the total vote.  6% Libertarian vote gave the election to Tester in 2012.  This time around the Libertarian vote was only 3% which was below the margin of victory for Tester.  The libertarian candidate dropped out a couple weeks ago following a democrat dirty trick mailer.  Problem is that around 50% of the vote was already in the can.  https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/07/matt-rosendale-vs-jon-tester-montana-senate-race-results-2018-972571

 

4. Job. So, what is the job ahead of us as conservatives over the next couple years?  First will be to take a hard look in the mirror and figure out how we got here and what to do about it.  The bad news and good news are that we are now Trump’s party, that is for the next little while nationally, and we will only get as far as he will take us.  The other good news is that we are busily flushing the never Trumpers out of the political gene pool.  Sharply defined differences will always work to our advantage.  The bad news is that we cannot become too dependent on Trump as a party and as a movement.  One day, he will be gone from the political scene.  Who carries on after that?  Rick Scott may be one such name, as he is most certainly a fighter, and not a half bad governor.  Second piece of good news / bad news is that the continuing influx of illegals continues to do its damage, with creeping Californication moving out of Cali to Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Virginia and North Carolina.  Texas and Florida are not immune from this either, as refugees from the blue states leave the blue states take their lives and most importantly voting habits to their new homes.  Our job in the face of this?  Think like democrats.  Think tribally, at least at some level.  Start turning blacks and Latinos to Republican habits, or at least considering them.  Prison reform will be a big part of this, especially if done correctly (note that for the record, we tried this in Alaska and screwed it up royally).  Removing marijuana from the list of banned substances at the federal level will be another way to get this done.  It is even federalism, as it will limit federal involvement to policing the borders.  Going after suburban women, the heart of the democrat machine these days will be more difficult, as they drank the Kool-aide at college and are well inculcated in the ways of victimhood.  Sooner or later, simple freedom, and great economy works for everyone.  But it is going to be a closely fought thing.  The best thing we have going for us is that democrats always, but always overplay their hand.

5. FakeBook. Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit documented how FakeBook has been systematically eliminating links to conservative articles, conservative pages, and other sorts of “undesirable” content since 2017, eliminating 1.5 – 2 billion page views over the last couple years.  He makes the case that the wealthy suburban voters and women who are being credited for democrat wins last week no longer see a conservative message at any level because they are no longer present on their news feeds.  80% of women 18 – 49 have FB accounts.  These women get their news from FB.  Now that FB has eliminated conservative content from their platform, they no longer see that sort of content.  It is part of the gift that Big Tech is giving the democrats.  Conservative sites are losing 70 – 80% of their traffic due to this shutdown.  When Gateway Pundit was targeted, they lost 93% of their traffic.  When suburban voters and women could check their FB pages and get conservative news, they made other decisions about whom to vote for.  They no longer do, and this year they voted for democrats.  FB pretends this was not a political decision, yet they work with Media Matters, Share Blue, CREW and America’s Bridge to undermine Trump, gain control of congress, and win the presidency in 2020.  They are halfway there.  Time for some anti-trust action.  https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/11/facebook-delivers-for-democrats-erased-2-billion-gop-page-views-in-purge-eliminated-conservative-content-to-suburban-females/

More later –

– AG