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I appeared on Silvio Canto Jr's talk show from Dallas.  It's here.

NOVEMBER 8-9,  2022

Good evening, fellow fanatics.

It's 9:16 p.m. here in New York, home of elegant criminality.  It is very, very early in the vote count around the country, and little has emerged thus far to make definitive predictions about major trends...except in Florida.  Both Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio have been re-elected with enormous majorities, sealing Florida's position as a critical red state.

The DeSantis victory is especially significant.  It is expected that Donald Trump will announce a new presidential run next week, and already there are voices from his camp literally warning Governor DeSantis to stay out of the presidential race.  The warnings are unseemly, and suggest that Mr. Trump is less confident of an easy path to the nomination than he had been.  But, with the DeSantis landslide win tonight, it will be pretty difficult for even Donald Trump to order him around.  Should DeSantis jump into the race, he will jump in to win.

Just heard the DeSantis acceptance speech.  If that wasn't a presidential speech, I don't know what is.

More later.

3:55 a.m. Wednesday. 

What a disappointment.  Oh yes, in a technical sense we can say that many of the pundits got it essentially right – that the Republicans would take the House, but that the Senate was a toss-up.  But what we all dreamed of, when this night began, was a decisive victory.  We saw Lee Zeldin in the governor's chair in New York, and conservative women, many of them Hispanic, capturing one House seat after the other.

Well, we'll have to settle for less.  The GOP will take the House, but with a modest majority.  Control of the Senate is still in doubt, and may come down to two races too close to call – in Nevada and Georgia. 

How should we react to having our wings unceremoniously clipped?  Not by anger or accusation, although we'll have a heaping serving of both.  But by planning, studying the results and asking ourselves how we can do better.  Our limited victory does not diminish the anxiety and frustration of the American people.  But clearly, those very people didn't find our offerings all that attractive. 

In listening to the acceptance speech of Governor Kathy Hochul of New York, I thought I was back in the 1960s.  She has learned well from the various grievance committees who inform her party.   She might consider getting a calendar.  Like her party, she is hopelessly out of date. 

We will probably enter a national recession, or worse.  We must have a superb candidate ready to enter the White House and lead.  Think of our blessings.  No party in American history has had as deep a bench as the current Republican Party. 

One thing to come out of tonight's disappointment is a sense that the polling industry needs spiritual and technical help.  Its methods are inadequate. 

NOVEMBER 7,  2022

LAST DAY OF THE CAMPAIGNS:  The 2022 election campaigns have ended, with no great bombshells, scandals, or accusations.  There was heated speculation that Donald Trump would announce a new run for the presidency on the last night of the campaigns, but he did not.  He simply said he'd make an important statement on November 15th, at  I doubt if he'll be announcing a new golf tournament.  I think we can safely say that he'll launch his presidential run.  Some will be happy.  Some will not.  But he'll put the spotlight back on himself.

The campaigns just concluded had three identifiable phases.  Phase one, earlier this year, predicted a Republican wave, led by voters angry with the economy and the culture.  Phase two began when the Supreme Court sent Roe v. Wade back to the states, and the Dems thought they finally possessed an issue to exploit.  They had a good run for a while, but, ultimately, the campaigns came back to the things Americans actually care about most – the economy, inflation, crime, and a rotting school system. Democratic gains were largely erased and phase three began about a month ago, with GOP poll numbers returning to "possible red wave" status.

And that is where we are.  Election Day is upon us.  Millions will vote.  The votes will quickly be tabulated, and the TV reporters will give us bulletins starting, maybe, at eight o'clock or so, Eastern time.  But that may only be the beginning.  There are tens of millions of absentee and mail-in ballots out there.  States have different policies on how and when they're counted.  Common lore tells us that Democrats favor the mail-in ballot, whereas Republicans like to show up at the polls.  The Republican nightmare is that the party might have many apparent victories on election night, only see a number of them reversed by the counting of the mail-ins and absentees. 

Or the miscounting.

Joe Stalin once said, approximate quote, "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes."

Will we have, in the coming days, a sequel to the year 2000 presidential mess, where it took weeks for Florida to gets it vote count straight, allowing George W. Bush to defeat Al Gore and become president?

Or will we have a sequel to the 2020 presidential election, where Trump, correctly or incorrectly, wouldn't let go and insisted that the election had been stolen?  

True, this isn't a presidential year, but the same drama can be played out on the state level, possibly affecting control of Congress.  In 2018, lifelong candidate Stacey Abrams lost the governorship election in Georgia by 50,000 votes, and still maintains that she lost only because of voter suppression.  She's back this year, by unpopular demand, running again for governor.  Far behind in the polls, she's insisting, even before the vote count, that there's voter suppression out there.  We await, with no enthusiasm, her third try.

If we're plunged into a number of recounts, or slowdowns due to the counting of absentee and mail ballots, cries of "fraud" will surely be heard in the land, and some of them may be accurate.  Despite ridiculous claims that questioning an election result is an "assault on our democracy," it is in fact a perfectly proper act, demanding that the count be correct.

President Lyndon Johnson's nickname in politics was "Landslide Lyndon."  He got it when competing in 1948 for the Texas Democratic nomination for U.S.  senator.  He won by 87 votes, and no one could figure out exactly where those votes came from. 

It is said – I wasn't there – that Johnson and his aides scoured Mexican-American cemeteries for names to put on ballots, to make them look legitimate.  An aide came to one tombstone, where he couldn't make out the name.  Johnson ordered the aide to give the man a fake name.  After all, he was reported as saying, he had as much right to vote as any of the others.

We'll be blogging throughout the vote count.

November 7, 2022     Permalink