In the wake of a very disappointing mid-term election for the Republican Party there’s already a lot of dissection of the results and their meaning going on in the US Right Wing.

But before reading about that, I was amused by this story of a guy in Florida who went undercover working for the Fetterman campaign in Pennsylvania doing call-ups by phone. He also joined a smaller Florida GOP campaign later on to do the same thing.

The talking points delivered to him to repeat to registered Democrats to vote are great:

The Democrats use software called Scale to Win. It sometimes took a minute or two to find a live person for me to talk to, but eventually the names of voters popped up on my screen. All my calls were to registered Democrats in Pennsylvania.
…
In case anyone challenged us, we were to say that Fetterman was “on a path to a well-paying career in the insurance industry” before he essentially decided to be a do-gooder following the death of a friend.
…
I asked him what his concern was and he said, “basically denying election results.” I asked him if he was referring to Trump and Republicans questioning the 2020 election and he confirmed that he was. Then I asked him if he had also been concerned with Hillary Clinton’s continued efforts to dispute the results of the 2016 election and his voice grew confused then angry. “Oh wow…Hillary…wait, where are you calling from?” I stumbled trying to decide what to say, and amid my hesitation, he hung up.

Heh, heh. The propaganda was already laid and set: “tell me what the MSM already got me to believe and make me feel good so I’ll vote Democrat”. The contrast in professionalism was not good either:

I made dozens of calls, using my own phone, and got nothing but voicemail. “The Dems have better technology than us because the tech companies help them,” Henson said when I told her how many Pennsylvania Democrats I’d spoken to.

Trump

Suffice to say that there’s already blood-letting going on over the vast, looming presence of Donald Trump in this election – and over what that says about the 2024 election. Ever since Trump lost in 2020 I’ve held that at 78 years of age in 2024 I don’t want him to be President again, as I’ve grown very tired of the octogenarians running the US government across the Presidency, Senate and House. I also know that Trump is too toxic to win in 2024, when he won’t be facing someone even more toxic than himself as he did with Hillary Clinton in 2016. The 2022 results, arising from the Democrats making Trump and abortion the centerpiece of their campaigns, will likely mark the beginning of Trump’s decline inside the GOP, as even former supporters declare that it’s time to move on (read the Powerline comments from their post Unquiet Flows The Don).

The latest example is from Washington state, where a Trump-backed candidate beat the GOP incumbent in the primary (she’d voted for Trump’s impeachment) and then lost an R+13 district in the General! And before I bitch about McConnell not spending money to help the GOP Senate candidate in Alaska – because that would have hurt his ally, Murkowski – you should also note that Trump gave more money to David Perdue in the Georgia Governor’s GOP primary in losing to Brian Kemp than he gave to Blake Masters for the Arizona Senate race (Kemp went on to win the Georgia general election in a thumping victory).

Never-Trump and the GOPe

But the Never-Trumper wing of the party – in particular the Bush/Cheney/Romney/McCain section – should stop kidding themselves that the end of Trump means a comeback for them and their policies. They’re more dead than Trump will be in a couple of years time, less because of their opposition to Trump than because of the fanaticism they’ve brought to the fight, which has sometimes exceeded even that of the Democrats, and which has recently seen many actively stumping against all Republicans around the country.

Also included in holding the bag for this crap is the current leadership of the GOP – McConnell in the Senate, McCarthy in the House, and their lower-level enablers. Blaming Trump is not enough to deflect blame here; they’re in charge, Trump was not. Read what this losing Republican candidate in the Ohio-9 House district describes as the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) “helping” him in an R+3 district that went for Trump strong in 2020: more like not helping. Moreover, like the Never-Trumpers it’s obvious that many of the GOP Establishment (the GOPe) remain opposed to Trump policies that GOP voters like, such as de-coupling from China, staying out of foreign wars and preserving jobs at home.

If the consultant class really wants to “move on” from Trump, they are going to have to earn the trust of voters (at least those that are persuadable). The first step in doing that would be supporting a fresh slate of leaders at the top of the party. That includes Congressional leadership, but it also includes Ronna McDaniel at the RNC, whose mid-term strategy was so disastrous that she should have immediately resigned in shame.

There are also problems with State-level GOP machines, as the losing Michigan Governor candidate, Tudor Dixon pointed out. I was surprised to learn that both the Michigan House and Senate were held by the GOP (the latter for forty years!) So how did they let Wretched Whitmar get away with so much crap in the last two years? And then they pissed and moaned about their own person, Dixon. Is it any wonder people gave up on them and gave it to the Democrats. A lot of other stuff in the article reads as incompetence as they constantly fought with Dixon: it’s one of the oldest political rules that if voters are presented with crap politicians and policies versus split parties with infighting politicians, they’ll will go with crap. And just look at what those voters are about to get in just that state:

With the election over, Democratic lawmakers are finally making clear that voters shouldn’t expect centrism. Look no further than State Sen. Dayna Polehanki, D-Livonia, who on election night told Michigan exactly what the future holds: “We got ALL the gavels. Get ready for some cha-cha-cha-changes here in Michigan.” She followed it up with a list of leftist policies that are now on the docket — including blocking school choice, investigating charter schools, and repealing Michigan’s historic right-to-work law

More regulations. Higher energy costs. More skin-colour “diversity”. More welfare. More spending.

Learn from Success

Having said that, all of this needs to show up in learning from the GOP successes that happened in this election since it’s always better to learn from success than fight over laying blame for the failures and every Republican should be aware that the Democrats and their MSM/Social Media allies will do everything they can to throw gas on this fire while also keeping the focus on always-Trump (though the “GOP” Never-Trumpers wont’ care about that either).

First off is this fascinating article in City Journal relating what it calls Ron’s Rules – eight rules that every Republican should take from Ron DeSantis’s overwhelming success in Florida:

  1. Stay on offense. 
  2. You can create your own majority with the right approach.
  3. Competence matters.
  4. You don’t necessarily have to move to the center to win over independents. 
  5. You can redraw the political map without pandering.
  6. Create a culture where wokeness cannot thrive.
  7. Deliver a policy-driven approach that works.
  8. Court the moms (with education ideas)

You can read the details about the others at the link but two in particular jumped out at me:

4. You don’t necessarily have to move to the center to win over independents. 
Republicans may have a nearly 300,000 voter advantage in the state, but DeSantis won by more than 1.5 million votes. The ordinary school of thought is that politicians must tack to the center to win independents. DeSantis never did. Instead, he crafted a bold, unapologetically conservative agenda and traveled around the state tirelessly promoting it. As Ronald Reagan proved, you can build a broad coalition with a conservative platform, but you have to be an effective communicator and a great salesman. DeSantis has been both.

5. You can redraw the political map without pandering.
DeSantis scored a double-digit win in Miami-Dade County, which is 70 percent Hispanic—“rewriting the political map,” as he put it, without the kind of ethnic pandering that strategists have claimed is necessary to win the Hispanic vote. Hispanics generally have the same priorities as other Americans, and most reject woke ideology. For years, these same strategists have insisted that Republicans need to embrace amnesty for illegal immigrants and soft immigration enforcement to win the Latino vote. But the polls refute this advice. In fact, according to a recent Telemundo poll, Latino immigrants backed DeSantis’s migrant transfer to Martha’s Vineyard even more strongly than U.S.-born Hispanics.

Also this, which admittedly goes against the grain of a non-collectivist political party:

I’ve worked productively with politicians of all stripes. Democrat politicians are as individualistic as their Republican counterparts. But their party discipline is to spout the party line first and then add their individualism as a modifier in their presentation. Republicans present their individualism first and, quite honestly, don’t have a coordinated party line to offer to the public. You’re not going to get large numbers of uncommitted votes to come your way with that kind of packaging.

The following is perhaps not a lesson that the GOP can learn from, which is the overwhelming Democrat lean of AWFL’s, Affluent White Female Liberals, who went for the Democrats by 68% to 31%. The reason there may be no lesson for the GOP or the Democrats here (despite the latter’s glee at this result) is that it portends that A sex war is coming:

The AWFL demographic, relatively underrepresented in the Senate, is overrepresented across media, journalism, nonprofits, HR departments, academia, and school teachers…. And those progressive graduate women who aren’t busy shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments are busy doing so for the next generation in schools: 76% of American teachers are women. Inevitably, given that all US states require teachers to hold at least a bachelor’s degree, these are also uniformly drawn from the female demographic most likely to be very liberal.

Amazingly, despite this, Gen-Z did not go heavily for the Democrats as was reported; it turns out that’s yet another standard crap argument that the MSM trotted out because the eternal cry of the Left is that “The Youf Are With Us”:

[T]here was no youthquake. The media has had this narrative coming out that there was this giant army of young Gen Z people voting Democrat — didn’t happen at all. They did vote Democrat, but they came out at a smaller level than they did in 2018, and they actually voted more Republican. The data shows it. 

Back to the chicks!

For knowledge-class progressive women, though, a still more central issue where tech and their interests converge is in the core material obstacle to workplace equality: the female reproductive role, including gestation, childbirth and breastfeeding. For the so-called “gender pay gap” is, in truth, a motherhood pay gap. Thus, for a chance to compete in the knowledge workplace on the same terms as men, women’s bodies also need tech support. So such women are structurally dependent on medical interventions to keep their bodies free from the rigours and long-term obligations of pregnancy, childbirth and dependent children. In other words: for AWFLs overall, abortion really is an existential issue.

So the abortion ploy of the Democrats worked – this time.

For now, the coalition between Clinton feminism, Virtual class interests, and the American electorate seems to be holding up, albeit with some creaking. But for how long? For “progress”, understood as the march of technology, has losers as well as winners. And when “progress” is routinely conflated with “feminism”, you can expect groups who aren’t doing so well under its auspices to take this at face value too – and blame feminists for their suffering.

I can see no possible direction for this to take save a backlash that will likely spill far beyond the class at whom it’s really directed.

Nobody can be a winner forever – and the class war she worries will hurt her feminism is already well underway, judging by the increasingly nasty fate of boys and men in our education systems and workforce, which is already hurting none other than AWFL’s themselves.

Finally there is the machinery of voting where the GOP’s continued focus on Election Day is enabling losses in close races. But that’s for a separate post.