Interesting Items 11/14

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

In this issue –

1.  Persuasion
2.  Alaska
3.  Election
4.  Predictions

1.  Persuasion.  Initial thoughts on what was a very rough election for Our Side later in today’s edition.  Wanted to lead off this morning with a view of the election through a number of persuasion filters.  Persuasion does not necessarily tell us what worked.  Rather. It tells us why it worked.  Persuasion is not a field that many Republicans play.  Democrats, OTOH, live, eat and breathe it.  And persuasion worked very well for them last Tuesday.  In no particular order, the following persuasion filters are presented for your consideration:

• Fear, taking away your stuff works.  In this election, democrats promised things that they blamed Republicans for taking away.  And Republicans had no counter.  For instance, Biden’s school loan forgiveness was a promise of free stuff.  Many young democrat voters (the only demographic group that increased their support for democrats this time around) had already spent the anticipated free money.  Republicans promised to take that free money away.  It was a promise that democrats knew was unconstitutional but no matter, as it worked long enough to make it through the election.  The promise worked on GenZ voters.  Taking away the right to abortion also worked, especially on single women.  It helped democrats on every state ballot it was on.  Lindsay Graham’s proposal of a national abortion law may have been the worst mistake by Republicans during the campaign.  Expect abortion on the ballot in any state targeted by democrats in two years.  Finally, losing our democracy worked, once again with GenZ voters.  The claim was so ludicrous that nobody on Our Side believed it, which meant that we completely missed the persuasive value of the charge.  The under 30 set did not miss it and it was sufficient to turn some of them, given the assistance of leftist college administrations and educators poisoning their young minds.
• Follow the money mostly worked.  Blake Masters was outspent in Arizona roughly $12 million to $80 million, and he lost a tight race.  $9 million of Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund money spent in anti-Tshibaka ads, more than both campaigns combined, may have reelected Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.
• Results of complicated systems are difficult to predict.  Elections are complicated, especially with 50+ different systems in place.  Most predictions were for some sort of a Red Wave election.  These sorts of failed predictions coupled with polling that supports those predictions tend to undermine trust in the system and its results.
• Most events will tend toward maximum entertainment value.  While I wasn’t entertained by the results this week (not unlike Aggie football this year), a lot of people were, and apparently The Simulation was also.
• Final persuasion filter is that ballot harvesting works, though the reason is not what you might expect.  It works for democrats because they have the urban areas where it easier to do.  States like MI, PA, AZ which have installed some form of universal mail-in / absentee ballots will be difficult for Republicans to win until Republicans figure out the new game is that ballots are counted rather than votes. Sundance in Conservative Treehouse is adamant about this, and after rejecting that observation out of hand, I’m afraid I have to agree.  One of the things that universal absentee / mail-in ballots make it difficult to almost impossible to do is not to vote, not to participate.  Democrats are aggressive collecting the ballots and turning them in and they have a running list of who has participated and who has not.

2.  Alaska.  Here in Alaska, we have preliminary results from the Division of Elections.  Date on the downloadable pdf is Thurs, 0933 L.  Final results including ranked choice rounds will be announced Nov 23.  Reason for the delay is to wait until all the absentee and overseas votes are received.  The second / third vote sort will take place fairly quickly once they input all ballots into the system.  This year’s election was a heavyweight fight with a US Senate race, US House, Governor, and 58 (or so) of 60 legislators up for election due to redistricting.  We also rejected a constitutional convention by our standard 2:1 vote, though this one did have an enormous amount of Outside money spent in opposition.  None of the 20 or so judges up for retention were rejected, though several of them polled in the 50 – 60% range.  More detailed analysis follows:

• We will likely have a split legislature in both Houses of the Legislature.  Depends on what sort of skullduggery democrats and unions manage in early December when the House caucuses organize.  There are at least 5 elected Republicans who have in the past shown the willingness to caucus with democrats, handing control of that House to them.
• The good news is that some real nasties on the democrat side in the House lost.  The bad news is that democrats installed one of the nastiest, most venal members of the Anchorage Assembly in the State Senate.  Expect for him to run for governor in 2026.
• Kelly Tshibaka may still win.  She is currently about 3,000 votes ahead of Lisa Murkowski, and in a normal year would be on her way to the US Senate from Alaska.  It all depends on how many of the 20,000 voters democrat Pat Chesboro second votes split for Lisa.  By the time the sort comes to Chesboro dropping out, we expect Kelly to have around a 10,000-vote lead.  Note that Chesboro voters are hard core democrat voters.  How many of them bothered to vote for Lisa Murkowski, an elected Republican in Alaska for the last 25 years will determine who goes to DC. 
• Mary Peltola likely returns to the US House.  She currently has over 101,000 votes.  Sarah Palin has 57,000 and Nick Begich has 52,000.  If all Begic’s second votes go to Sarah, she goes to the House.  It didn’t work that way in the special election in August.  Where a bunch of Begich Republicans chose not to vote for the crazy woman and either did not list a second vote or voted for Peltola.  No reason at this writing to believe it will work any differently this time around.  For her part, Sarah went to DC for training for the House majority and appointed a local supporter as her Chief of Staff.  Many of us think she is delusional.  We will see.

3.  Election.  While we still don’t have the final results of this election, there is enough to discuss today.  There will be more.

• We saw a massive sex-based difference in support between democrats and Republicans, with 68% of unmarried women favoring democrats.  Only 31% favored Republicans, a 37% difference.  Essentially, democrats have created a party of Karens.  Everyone you see still with a mask on is a democrat voter because they have been terrified.  Married men supported Republicans by a 20% majority.  Married women supported Republicans by a 14% majority.  Unmarried voters supported democrats by 20%.  Married men and women made up 60% of all voters, unmarried women 23%, and unmarried men 16%.  33% of women said abortion was the most important issue, with 77% of them supporting democrats.  In contrast, only 22% of men said abortion was the most important issue.  Every time abortion shows up on a ballot over the next few years at a state level, assume that it is a statewide democrat election strategy aimed at single women.
• There is one obvious explanation for the hard swing of single women, particularly single women under the age of 30, to democrats this election, and the answer to this leads directly to foreign meddling in the election.  Where do young women get most of their news today?  Social media, specifically TikTok.  Who owns TikTok?  China, with direct corporate ties to the CCP.  And their power lies in what news is not posted, so young women saw a lot about abortion and threatened loss of Our Democracy due to evil Republicans. From here, it appears that the outcome of Tuesday’s elections are precisely what the CCP wanted – a closely divided government with nothing resolved.  TikTok is a problem that must be solved.  Sooner would be better than later. 
• The democrat project to fund the most extreme Republican candidates appeared to work every single time it was tried, with Blake Masters in AZ and Dr Oz in PA the two most obvious examples.  Expect democrats to keep doing this as long as it still works.
• None of the polls agreed with the results, much to the delight of democrats.  Problem with this is that when polling and results are completely different, the results are by definition questionable and not trusted. 
• The slow count (signature verification) in Maricopa County can best be seen as an example of malicious compliance.  Maricopa County elections were justifiably thrashed following the 2020 results.  They are following new signature verification rules just as carefully as they can, maliciously so.  Remember how the Air Traffic Controllers Union brought aviation almost to a halt in 1981 by following the rules to the letter?  Same action.  Same result.
• There appears to be some serious f$%kery going on in Maricopa County and probably Nevada with the late counts.  Don’t believe any democrat win at the state level in either state until the counts and recounts are done.
• Late results generally favor democrats, in the 80 – 90% range.  When you see late results from a swing state, assume the worst.
• It appears that for the time being Colorado, New Mexico, Michigan, Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania are all blue.  Reasons are varied.  The roadmap to rolling that back has been given us in FL, TX, SD, and NC.  Jay Valentine’s voter roll cleanup groups were effective.  They need to be expanded to all states rather than the current 20. 
• There is some weirdness due to vote splitting in NV and GA.  Both elected Republican governors by comfortable margins.  Both had democrats win or go to runoffs for US Senate.  Why did vote splitting take place in those states?
• With the election in PA of a dead guy to the House and a stroke / aphasia survivor to the Senate, we have smartly moved back to the good old days down south of the yellow dog democrat, who would vote for a yellow dog as long as it was running as a democrat.  Some things never change for democrats. 

4.  Predictions.  Finally, we will end with some predictions and random uninformed thoughts for your consideration.

• Right now, it appears that the Beltway Republicans have targeted Trump for destruction over failure on Election Day.  The maximum entertainment filter would tend to support a second Trump term.  There is another filter that describes the story arc as similar to a three-part play.  Today, our protagonist, Trump, is at the bottom, just the position he needs to be to rise from the ashes and win at the end of the movie.  Given both of those, I wouldn’t count him out as yet.  Stranger things have happened.
• Attempts by corporate Republicans and gaslighting democrats / media to start a fistfight between Trump and DeSantis have started in earnest.  Some conservatives started blasting away at DeSantis as a Uniparty shill.  The only thing I don’t like about DeSantis so far is apparent withdrawal from the climate wars, though I don’t have much more actual information to do anything other than keep an eye out on this.  For now, I am in trust but verify mode.
• What happens if fraud is discovered in Maricopa County or NV?  That would tend to completely destroy the election denier house of cards so carefully constructed by democrats and media since 2020.
• While I don’t suggest pandering to the democrat Karens, there are a few things that Republicans can do to prepare for 2024. First would be to declare a war on fentanyl with the cartels and CCP in the cross hairs.  Fentanyl is killing around 100,000 Americans a year, mass murder with the functional equivalent of a chemical munition supplied by the CCP and the cartels.  We ought to respond accordingly.  On the climate front, don’t agree with wind and solar.  Rather, fast track GenIV nukes as a more environmentally friendly solution while pointing out the massive difference in environmental footprints.
• Mitch McConnell apparently thinks that his $9 million in campaign ads to reelect Lisa Murkowski will buy her loyalty.  My guess is that Lisa is too stubborn and too stupid to stay bought and will end up voting with democrats more times that McConnell would like over her next term, assuming she has a next term.
• Finally, a close Republican control of the US House and a split or 51-49 US Senate poses some real problems for Joe Biden and his Weekend at Bernie’s administration.  This means that they absolutely must drag Biden all the way until Jan 2025.  If for whatever reason Biden is no longer in office (health reasons), Harris becomes president and proposes a VP candidate.  A Republican House can refuse to confirm, leaving the Republican Speaker next in line.  In the Senate, there is no VP to break ties, so everything dies.  And in the end, Joe Manchin becomes the most powerful man in Washington. 

More later –

– AG