Red Wave or Pre-Menstrual Trickle?

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

As usual, the pollsters and the MSM talking heads that count so heavily upon them were wrong, as I'd said for months they'd be.

     They'd been predicting a red tsunami since Biden took his hand off that Bible on January 20th last year. A new president always loses a chamber of Congress (not always) in the first two years, which is lazy thinking masquerading as punditry and prophecy. They seem to have especially deluded themselves into thinking the Republicans were going to take the House under the Trojan Horse of electoral fraud conspiracies.

     Except, the people weren't as stupid as they made them out to be. Yes, for a few weeks, there was pearl-clutching in the MSM that their long-cherished punditry and spotty record of infallibility was going to be spoiled by the Supreme Court's coat-hangering of Roe v Wade then it was back to the same old lazy thinking. Just a month ago, Ryan Lizza, the chief centrist in chief for Politico that Charlie Pierce calls "Tiger Beat on the Potomac", actually titled his article last month, "Is the Dobbs effect fading?" as if abortion rights was one of those sugar rush issues or scandals that briefly skew polls for a week or two before the "real" numbers level themselves out.

     That typical male dismissive behavior was part and parcel to that of both sides of the ideological divide. Both sides were chary to campaign on it but none moreso than Republicans. With the exception of Gym Jordan, who implored Republicans to "lean into" the Roe decision, most Republicans were just barely smart enough to read the tea leaves and realize that abortion rights was the third rail this year.

     As with just about any other election, especially those that defy what the pundits predict, which is to say virtually all of them, we'll never know why we got the confusing results that we had after last night's midterms. Obviously, people vote for or against many issues and abortion was just one of them. But if any one thing would get out the female vote, that would be it and not inflation or gas prices or cuts to Social Security or the border.

     As Amanda Marcotte recently wrote on her byline, 

    First and foremost, everywhere abortion was put directly on the ballot, abortion won. Not just in California, where voters, as expected, backed a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion as a right by a healthy margin. In Michigan, voters approved a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights. In Kentucky, an amendment to explicitly deny abortion rights in the constitution was voted down. Voters in Vermont, as expected, amended their constitution to protect abortion rights. Even in Montana, an anti-abortion law appears to be voted down. The law was misleadingly packaged as protection for infants "born alive," based on a particularly nasty anti-choice lie. In reality, the law was about prosecuting doctors, potentially criminalizing palliative care for newborns with fatal conditions.

     This is, of course, very true. As we'd predicted, Kansas proved to be the bellwether and harbinger of things to come. For those of you who don't have goldfish-class memories, that was the ballot measure intended to be a trial balloon as to how popular, or unpopular, reproductive rights were. It turned out to be very popular and the people of Kansas, no doubt spearheaded by female Kansas voters, enshrined reproductive rights into their constitution, having seen through all the deliberately misleading language of the measure in which they'd actually called their proposed abortion ban, even brazenly packaging it as a "pro-choice" measure when all it was intended to do was ban abortion by baking it into the state constitution.

     But if Republicans didn't get the red wave and claw back so many seats, that was one of the reasons. But there were others.

The Orange Jinx

 

Trump had been working his tiny little thumb on the throbbing little head of the MAGA base. He desperately wanted a piece of the political action last night and rob the midterms of its thunder and act like the stereotypical pigeon that shits on the chess board, knocks over all the pieces and pretends that he won.

     Until his people began losing in droves, especially the high profile endorsees.

    Oz lost. Tudor Dixon lost. Blake Masters lost. Bolduc lost. Majewski lost. Mark Finchem lost. It looks as if Kari Lake's losing. Kristina Karamo lost. And Herschel Walker will have to shine up his fake badge again and run in a runoff against Raphael Warnock, which will give opposition researchers another month to turn up another five or six of Walker's illegitimate kids. The one bright, shining difference, one-hit wonder JD Vance, sleepwalked his way into the Senate.

     And, almost without exception, these right wing psychopaths and professional grifters had one thing in common- They were election deniers, which was why Trump had endorsed them, to begin with. They were "endorsed" not because of their qualifications but their ability to add to the chorus of diminishing noise about the 2020 election being "stolen". And the voters decided enough was enough. They don't want to hear it any more.

     So, in a way, last night's midterms were a referendum on Trump. Which explains why he didn't pull the trigger and end his cock teasing of the MAGA base once and for all. The timing would have been all wrong. The ratings would have sucked. Of course, MAGAworld is sniping about that. MTG said on Steve Bannon's mud room podcast that we should cut Trump a break, that he's the most mistreated and maligned POTUS of all time. Of course, Greene won re-election last night in a district in which the votes actually outnumber the teeth of those who cast them.

    And, typical of his up-is-down, black-is-white delusional world view, Trump went on Fox digital and actually said his 285 endorsees all won.

     Obviously, this is not good news if your last name is Trump. Nearly all of his major endorsees lost last night and many of them were election deniers, proving that the American people and not just Democrats are tired of the stolen election spiel, that they are not only ready to move on but already have. And in 2024, Trump will be 78 and, if there's a God, he'll be a convicted felon long before the general election.

     We won't know for at least a week who will control the House or the Senate. The political zeitgeist that has so infallibly guided us through these last few election cycles are still saying the Republicans will take both chambers. But however it shakes out, the American people sent a message to the GOP that they've had it with the bullshit. And the 2022 midterms was their final warning.