More on the Midterm Results

Now that it’s the day after the picture is a bit clearer:

• A common theory is that Ron DeSantis’ dominance was entirely due to a bunch of Republicans moving to Florida and turning the state completely red. But while this is partially true, if you think about it a little more, it’s not entirely true. Where did most of those people move to Florida from? New York.
• But Republican governor candidate Lee Zeldin in New York did remarkably well, despite losing. Right now, he’s down 52-47 with about 94% of the vote in:

• That’s remarkably strong performance for a Republican in a deep blue state. So I don’t think “every Republican in New York moved to Florida and that’s why DeSantis won” is a claim that holds up to scrutiny.
  • In 2018, Andrew Cuomo beat Republican Marc Molinaro by a margin of 59-36. WAY bigger margin than last night.
  • In 2014, Cuomo beat Republican Rob Astorino 54-40.
  • In 2010, Cuomo beat Republican Carl Paladino 63-33.
  • In 2006, Eliot Spitzer beat Republican John Faso 65-27.
  • 2002 was the last time a Republican won the governorship of New York. George Pataki won in a three-candidate race with 49% of the vote. The Democrat got 33%, and an independent candidate got 14%. Pataki only won because the Dem vote was split up between two candidates. He still only got 49%, not even a majority.
  • In 1998, Pataki won in a similar situation: 54% of the vote, while the Democrat got 33%, and the same independent candidate that ran in 2002 got 7% in 1998.
• So Lee Zeldin was the most successful Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York State in 20 years. And not only that, but Republicans are going to pick up 5 House seats in New York State that NYT has listed as “most competitive” races. The Republicans even managed to unseat Sean Patrick Maloney, a longtime Dem Rep who was the chairman of the DCCC. He’s a high-ranking Democrat who comes from a powerful political family, and he’s already conceded his race. Republicans were remarkably strong in NY despite losing the governor race.
• Republican incumbent governor Brian Kemp won easily in Georgia, while Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker is likely to lose, running considerably behind Kemp. This points to a simple reality: people liked Kemp more than Walker. And so candidate quality matters. These are not just generic D and R candidates that all perform the same based on “the national mood.” The mood is in theory favorable to Republicans, but if you run a poor candidate, you’re probably going to lose.
• The governor race in Oregon is really close. Democrat Tina Kotek is winning 45.71% to 44.72% for Republican Christine Drazan. NY Times says Democrats have had a hold on the Oregon governorship for 36 years. Only 67% of the votes are in so it’s still very much possible the Republican wins. No one is talking about this election but I think it’s fairly significant. The difference between the two candidates is only about 14,000 votes right now.
• Kari Lake in Arizona is only down about 12,000 votes right now. 66% of the vote is in. I think there’s a great chance she pulls ahead and wins that race.
• It looks like Republican Adam Laxalt could win the Senate race in Nevada. He’s up 50-47 right now with 75% of the vote in. However, NY Times says a lot of the outstanding vote is going to break Democrat, and Laxalt is only ahead by about 23,000 votes right now. It looks like there’s about 40,000 outstanding net Dem votes, and only about 10,000 outstanding net GOP votes. So it appears Laxalt will probably lose by about 7,000 votes if thinks break as expected. However, Clark County (where Las Vegas and the vast majority of the state is) is currently 51-46 in favor of Masto, the Democrat. Which is pretty close. NYT expects the outstanding vote in Clark county to break 52-34 in favor of the Democrat, which may or may not be accurate.
• Blake Masters, the GOP Senate candidate in Arizona, only has about a net of 22k additional votes expected to come in, and he’s down by about 90k votes. I think Masters loses his race. Masters is described as a “Trump-backed venture capitalist.” I only know him from Twitter. Not sure he’s a great candidate for a general election–he’s popular with the GOP Twitter set, but that’s not real life. Masters is doing worse than Kari Lake, who is only down by about 12k votes.
• Republicans are ahead or expected to win in 22 House races right now, and they only need 14 more to retake control of the House. NYT has increased their odds of Republicans winning the House to 83%.
• The emerging story today seems to be just how in the world did John Fetterman win?

• I can only offer theories, but my first theory would be that nobody was excited to vote for Dr. Oz–a carpetbagging TV doctor who nobody even knew was a Republican prior to last year. Candidates matter. Voters usually don’t just blindly check the box for D or R regardless of the candidate.
• And I think John Fetterman was able to convince enough people that he’s a blue collar everyman outsider. It’s a complete fabrication. According to his own Wikipedia page, he was raised in an affluent suburb of New York, obtained a master’s degree from the University of Connecticut, and a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard. Even though he’s not anywhere close to the flawed, relatable blue collar everyman he portrays himself as, I think Fetterman probably came off as more likable to people than Dr. Oz. That would be my guess.

A few more thoughts on things:

• Trump is starting to turn on Ron DeSantis. He said he voted for him of course, but there’s clearly a rift between the two. I think DeSantis deliberately kept Trump at arms length and didn’t kiss the ring, Trump resents him for that. But it worked. And so Trump resents him even more.
• Republicans need to stop looking at Trump as this political genius with a Midas touch who is their only hope of demystifying the forbidden knowledge of How To Win Elections. 
• I think we need to stop viewing Trump’s 2016 victory as this historic landslide that proves he’s an electoral genius and instead look at it from the perspective of, “He just BARELY beat Hillary Clinton, the worst and most detestable political candidate to run for President maybe ever.”
• I do think Trump really benefitted the Republican Party in a major way by orienting the party more to be in alignment with the interests of the base. The GOP prior to Trump was all about cutting taxes for corporations, and that’s it. Now it’s more populist and more pro-America as opposed to pro-corporation. He brought about a much-needed paradigm shift in GOP political ideology.
• Although if you really look at the legislation passed by the Trump era when they had unified control over the government from 2017-2019, the main thing they passed was… corporate tax cuts. No wall, of course. Just corporate tax cuts.
• But the big thing is the voters now won’t accept the old Republican Party that only cared about corporate tax cuts. He was a much needed refresh of the party’s values and positions.
• But if you just start looking at 2016 from the perspective of, “How bad of a candidate was he that he almost lost to Hillary Freaking Clinton!?” then things start to make a lot more sense. 
• Yes, he beat Hillary. Congrats, it was a massive own and hilarious. But any remotely decent candidate would’ve destroyed her. She may have been the worst presidential candidate in US history. And he barely beat her. That’s an indictment of him, not proof of his political brilliance.
• He won one election. One. 
• In the 2018 midterms, Republicans got killed.
• In 2020, Republicans lost once again. You can blame all the mail in ballots and democrat tricks and fraud and all that, but then you also have no answer for this question: Trump was President, why did he let it happen? So the two explanations for 2020 are either that Trump was so unpopular he lost to a man with dementia, or that he was so feckless and incompetent he allowed the election to be stolen from under his nose. Take your pick.
• The truth is that Trump is too much of a known commodity. Most of the country has long since made up their mind on him. You either like him or you don’t by this point. There is not going to be some moment where suddenly millions of people who despise him just see the light and become die-hard Trump supporters. He has a hard ceiling in terms of his national support, and I don’t think it’s over the 50% threshold.
• Trump is a dead end, politically speaking. I just think too many people have a visceral personal hatred of him and he is thus too toxic to ever win an election again. You may disagree, you may love him, you may think he’s the greatest, but not everyone shares that view of him. We have to acknowledge the fact that a lot of people simply hate his guts and will never change their minds. It’s time to move on. Trump is now a millstone around the GOP’s neck.
• And he is still seen as calling the shots in the GOP even though he’s not in the White House anymore. I am sure many GOP candidates suffered simply because of their perceived association and/or allegiance to Trump. Many candidates were seen as Trump acolytes, and they suffered for it.
• The Republicans need to position themselves as “the normal people party,” but they cannot do this with Trump as the face of the party, in my opinion. Too many people out there view Trump and all his supporters as crazy people, rightly or wrongly.
• The funny thing is, it was mainly due to Trump that the GOP’s political ideology and platform has become more in-tune with the average normal, everyday American. But Trump’s persona and character strikes a lot of people as bizarre, abnormal, weird, and they see the whole Trump movement as culty. So even though on substance the GOP is the party of the normal American, stylistically, the GOP is seen as crazy and extreme.

If your state doesn’t have mandatory voter ID Laws in place, your election results are called into question. 

• in Florida, voting works very simply. You present your ID at the polling place, you sign to make sure your signature matches your ID, and then you get your ballot, you fill it out, you submit it into a counting machine, and they give you a sticker. 
• When the polling place closes and the last ballots have been filled out, the vote counting machines I presume have a final count, which is then somehow transmitted up the chain to a central location for tabulation in conjunction with all other precincts.
• It’s not very difficult to understand why Florida has its election results figured out so quickly. Nor should it be all that impressive that in the year 2022, Florida has figured out how to count millions of votes in just a few short hours.
• The states that take a long time to count their votes want it to be that way, and probably for nefarious purposes.
• If your state doesn’t have mandatory voter ID, as far as I’m concerned your election results are invalid.
• I don’t understand how we’ve not figured out electronic voting. There has to be some way to use Face ID to securely cast your ballot from your phone, no?
• People might say Face ID is not foolproof. Well, is the way we vote now foolproof? Of course not.
• Regardless of how you feel about elections, whether you think there’s zero fraud or rampant fraud, you have to admit the way we handle voting is outdated and horribly inefficient. Anyone can see it. 

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One other way of looking at the election is in this light:

If you’re married, you are voting Republican. If you’re a single guy, you are still probably going to vote Republican.

But unmarried women are the bluest of blue groups.

Unmarried women are the Democratic Party base.

It’s official.

I’ve been saying for a while now that late 20s/early 30s sexually and emotionally frustrated cat ladies are the backbone of the Democratic Party. I’ve written recently about how they are the Karen Party.

But it is now staring us all right in the face.

The Democrats are the abortion party. That’s what it means to have unmarried women as your core demographic.

The Dem party revolves around abortion.

I think a lot of people underestimate just how important abortion is to the Democratic Party, because I think people underestimate just how much the Democratic Party is controlled by sexually frustrated and emotionally empty single women.

Every Democratic Politician you see today–Fetterman, Biden, Pelosi, Kamala Harris–they are in power because of unmarried women and their religious devotion to abortion.

I’m sure most of them have never even had an abortion personally. Statistically, this is true, because I think there’s something like 800,000 abortions a year on average.

But they view it as a matter of bodily autonomy and human rights–“A woman’s right to choose.”

I personally think this is silly; just be more responsible and don’t sleep around. But telling them that will just make them even angrier than they already are.

And they are very angry to begin with. Unmarried women are angry and frustrated by nature.

Roe v. Wade gets overturned, they think it’s the end of the world, and they come out to vote straight-ticket Democrat in droves.

Most of us probably forgot about Roe being overturned earlier this year, but unmarried women did not.

I would even go as far as to say the anger in the Democratic base over the Roe overturn was the single biggest reason there was no significant “Red Tsunami” last night.

Add in the fact that the GOP ran some less-than-optimal candidates (like Oz) and you have the results we’re seeing.