Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. What Happened
2. Lessons Learned
3. Next
4. Markey
5. Residency
6. Artemis
7. Informants
1. What Happened? We are well into the finger pointing and chair throwing phase of what happened, and most importantly why it happened in the election. We have a relatively good handle on what happened. Why it happened is something else entirely.
- Will start with Alaska, though we won’t have results until the Ranked Choice Vote sort tomorrow. The most important thing that happened is total turnout of 44% vote was down by about 4% from 2018, the last statewide, nonpresidential year vote. We don’t know who stayed home as yet. I suspect it was hard core conservatives who stayed home and should be able to prove it later this week when the Division of Elections posts its results. Reason they stayed home? We have at least one talk show host in the morning who has been banging the “rigged elections” gong for all he’s worth for years, unintentionally (or intentionally) suppressing turnout on Our Side. Note to self: If you don’t show up, you won’t win. By not showing up, conservatives turned likely majorities in both houses of the legislature into tossups that will likely organize with democrat majorities. They also managed to elect a democrat to the US House and allowed Lisa Murkowski to turn to the US Senate with a whopping 43% of the total vote. Congratulations, guys. You’ve outdone yourselves.
- A lot has been written about GenZ voters swinging hard to democrats this year, saving them from annihilation. While they broke hard for democrats, voting D +28%, their overall numbers were nearly equal with turnout since 2018 (12 – 13%). But it is clear that buying their votes with the college loan holiday and anti-abortion hysteria coupled with indoctrination in school and universities worked nicely for the democrats. Expect them to do this again and again and again, as long as it works. Couple the lack of experience of the GenZ’s with the promise of free money, and you have the perfect democrat constituency.
- Voting against Biden didn’t work out as well for Republicans as it should have, with voters voting against Biden (33%) being almost completely offset by voters voting against Trump (29%). This demonstrates very nicely that demonization of Trump has worked well for democrats, almost a reprise of what FDR and democrats managed to do to defeated Herbert Hoover in subsequent elections for the next decade.
- The two issues that were rejected primarily by indy voters were abortion bans and 2020 being stolen. Every single Republican who ran on either/both of these lost, with Doug Mastriano running for PA governor being the most egregious example. Want to run on issues? Run on something in the future rather than something in the past.
- Republicans overperformed in areas that didn’t matter, eventually gaining over 5 million more votes than democrats, mostly in FL (DeSantis, again). This is pretty good news, as DeSantis has managed to flip a formerly purple state to hard red, not unlike what democrats managed to do flipping purple CO hard blue. It is also pretty good news as it demonstrates Republicans can compete even up with democrats should they choose to play the current game.
2. Lessons Learned. What are the (very preliminary) lessons learned based on the elections?
- First and foremost, Republicans MUST get into the early / absentee voting game. All ballots are unique and individually tracked. Democrats have a system to track their ballots and ensure their voters vote those ballots before Election Day, banking wins well before Election Day. Republicans need to play this game on two levels. First, by the Jay Valentine technique of cleaning up voting rolls discussed last week. Second, by following up on ballots floating around and collecting them, they jack up Republican turnout and do not allow an excess number of unvoted ballots to float around available for democrat mischief.
- Note that both AZ and NV have massive numbers of mail-in and absentee ballots. A full 84% of AZ vote took place before Election Day. That number was 75% in NV. Note that this included early voting in both states. With these numbers, how did a Republican win governor in NV?
- One blogger bemoaned the lack of the functional equivalent to Act Blue on the Republican side. He was uninformed. Win Red is the functional equivalent and was raising about two-thirds the money for Republican candidates that Act Blue did for democrats in 2021.
- The shift from voters to ballots has diminished both the candidate and campaign as vital vehicles to get someone elected. Things that work in democrat favor are large numbers of free ballots (mail-in and absentee) floating around, increasing numbers of people participating in early voting, and extended voting periods. When Republicans choose to not play on this new battlefield, democrat candidates know they simply can ignore dealing with their opponents. PA elected a dead guy and a guy with brain damage, both with ballots collected well before Election Day. Democrats for the most part either minimized debates or pushed them as close to Election Day as humanly possible where they had no impact. The bluer the state, the freer they were to ignore their opponents. While not completely meaningless, issues, candidates and traditional campaigns are receding quickly in the rear-view mirror.
- Sundance at Conservative Treehouse is in nuclear winter mode, calling a 270 electoral vote lock for democrats based on current election rules. If we conservatives choose to do nothing, rather than adopting techniques we did in FL and TX, we will lose future elections. And will deserve to lose. I choose another path. You should also. And we already know what that path is (FL’s embrace of early voting and ballot tracking by Republican campaigns).
3. Next. Given that the new rules of elections are all about ballots and the ability to collect them, with actual campaigns becoming little more than pro-forma exercises in publicity, what do we conservatives need to do?
- First, and most importantly, Play. The. Game. If your state is one like AZ or NV where 84% or 75% of voters have already voted before Election Day, Election Day becomes almost meaningless. Republican intransigence, refusal to play in PA, NV, AZ lost US Senate races in all three states, as the results were baked in, with democrat wins locked before election day. In PA, Fetterman had over 70% of his vote before election day. DeSantis did the same thing in FL, which was one of the reasons he and Republicans statewide rolled.
- The only good news in all of this is that democrats may be locked into retaining Biden for 2024, as he won the midterms. While there is no small amount of arm waving about forcing out Kamala Harris and replacing her with Gavin Newsome, I find that difficult to believe, as in replacing a black woman with a white man will be a multi-megaton nuke aimed at the black little heart of the democrat coalition. If women and blacks walk, what do democrats do next? From here, the only way she leaves is by being bought out or jailed, either of which is possible.
- Note that none of this mentions money from McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund that was used to support insiders and pointedly not support insurgent candidates. That will be a whole other discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that the uniparty in the Swamp will do everything humanly possible to protect itself, winning elections being a secondary concern, which makes them predictable.
4. Markey. It didn’t take long after the Twitter purchase for democrats to drop the mask, bare their fangs and start threatening businesses owned by Elon Musk. A week ago, Ed Markey (D, MA), got himself into a tweet exchange with Elon Musk and came out looking pretty bad. Something about wading into a battle of wits unarmed. A reporter from the Wash Post created a fake Twitter account under Markey’s name. This was done with full knowledge of Markey’s office who had a letter by Markey to Twitter ready for signature. Twitter verified the account after the reported paid the $8 verification fee. It took Markey a full day to send a letter to Musk demanding Twitter be more diligent handling fake accounts. Musk responded it was because he couldn’t tell the difference as Markey’s account looked like a parody. He went on to note that Markey’s profile picture has him with a mask. The exchange ended with Markey, outraged at Musk not assuming the bended knee position or a courtier or supplicant, threatening all businesses Musk owns with congressional action. Musk made Markey look like a fool. Markey responded with a naked threat. This isn’t over. Rather, it is just beginning.
5. Residency. MedPage Today ran a piece last week calling for an increase or elimination of the cap on federally funded residency spots as a way to address a shortage of doctors. Today the only way to become fully licensed physicians is going through residency, which ends up being a bottleneck, probably in intentional one. There have been multiple attempts in congress to increase the federal cap, which was installed in the late 1990s, via the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. At the time, there was some concern about oversupply of doctors, so the cap was the (however poor) solution. Since then, US population grew by 22%, number of med school graduations increased by 38%. So, we once again have a government-caused problem that the government is refusing to solve. I do not support an increase in federally funded residencies, as that would increase federal control over doctors, something we all experienced with varying degrees of negativity during the COVID zombie apocalypse over the last two years. Rather, I would simply eliminate the cap and let the marketplace do its magic.
6. Artemis. NASA finally got the Senate Launch System (Artemis) off the pad last Saturday. The stack is a reworked shuttle stack with a pair of solid strap-ons, an external tank for the core with engine on the bottom, and a long-duration Orion capsule on top. Its development has been very slow and very expensive. Launch costs today are in the vicinity of $4.1 billion / flight. None of it is reusable. Artemis is intended to be the launch vehicle for a return to the moon, exploration of the asteroids, and an eventual manned trip to Mars. So far, so good, as the Orion just entered a high lunar orbit. It should land somewhere around Dec 21 following a month in space.
7. Informants. A story in American Greatness and Wash Free Beacon detailed whistleblower disclosure that the FBI had informants (and likely agents provocateur) infiltrating both the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers during the Jan 6 festivities. Given that the FBI and their leash holders at Do(In)J have gone out of their way to promote the phony narrative that these groups are domestic terrorists, violent domestic extremists, and pose security threats to the country, one wonders precisely how many informants were involved? What did they do? What were they told to do? What were their orders? And who did they report to afterwards? The FBI has refused to tell congress who was working as informants or even how many of them there were, our only conclusion is that not only was the FBI fully involved, but they were leading the festivities. All you have to do is see who the leaders were in the mob and compare them to people currently in the DC Gulag awaiting trial. That number probably approaches zero, which explains the 14,000 hours of video not yet released to the public. One of the more important things the new House majority needs to do is to release all communications between Speaker Pelosi’s office, Do(In)J, FBI, and the Capital Police leading up to, during, and following the riot. My guess is that it was an inside job, planned beforehand, and executed to smear Trump and his supporters.
More later –
– AG