On the Midterms, and Foundational Thoughts

 My freshman year we moved to a small town in Indiana (and moved again to South Bend a year later). I remember having one of the strangest teachers I'd ever had there. He put some basic axioms on the board... not saying they were real, but asking us to take them as true. Things like 'black is solid' iirc. Then, using those rules, he argued that when you put a glass jar over a candle it was the black soot that put the flame out.

Obviously, we all know that's false. But no matter how much we argued about oxygen and whatnot (and why should you believe in oxygen, you can't see it?) we couldn't get him to admit he was wrong.

I later came to believe that the point was you had to address the underlying thinking. The axioms who put on the board that we had to take as the starting point. (He also later argued that the earth was flat, you can go around a quarter and wind up back at the starting point and it's still flat, right? I assumed at the time this was part of the same point, getting us to really think about the underlying assumptions. Now I'm not so sure, and am wondering if that science teacher really was a flat earther... I hope not).

Anyways. With the fallout of the midterms still being determined, I decided to check in on some of the more conservative sites I occasionally look at. I do try to make sure I get a diverse feed of inputs, but tbh I felt conservatives had gotten so crazy under Trump that most of the time it wasn't worth it. I'd rather see the highlights someone else did the digging for, than subject myself to that level of madness. But I digress.

I came across an article on the topic, and wanted to share it here so I could discuss my own responses. Since I'm going to copy/paste pretty much the whole thing and you can use that to find it, I'll go ahead and link to it here. The difference in our underlying understanding is just breathtaking, really. How are we supposed to run a country when we have such a divide?

Anyways here's the article:

It Could Have Been Worse

Just kidding. Out of the range of possible outcomes, what we saw last night was about as bad as it could be. The GOP’s failure to make progress stunned everyone, not least the Democrats.

What happened?

* Fantasy vs. Reality. It turns out that there are a great many voters who don’t care much about what traditionally have been considered decisive issues: inflation, crime, illegal immigration, lousy schools, etc. (I personally disagree here, I think voters care very deeply about these issues. It's just that the Republican willingness to overlook Jan 6 and Trump's attack on democracy was more important. That and the abortion issue.) Many millions of Democrats, confronted with these facts, didn’t conclude that they should consider voting for someone else. Rather, they seem to have thought, My team is in trouble! (Again, not what happened. Some Democrats may have thought so, but Republicans lost independents, and even some conservatives also offended by Jan 6 and Trump. But if you explain it away like this you don't have to address that, do you? Democrats will probably go too far if they believe this, because they'll lose those same independents and conservatives... but we'll deal with that after we deal with the Republicans willing to support a lying oathbreaker like Trump.) All the more reason why I need to support my team. This was an election in which, to an extraordinary degree, issues were subordinated to party loyalty. (Not my take, like I already said. Blaming it on 'too much party loyalty' let's them avoid addressing the real problems.)

* Abortion. While Dobbs was plainly right as a matter of constitutional law (said as though it was a fact and not up for debate, nor the way this was rammed through, but sure. Whatever), Justice Alito and his colleagues probably cost Republicans control of Congress. I thought the Democrats were wasting their money when they spent countless millions over the summer, pounding Republicans on abortion. The conventional wisdom, which I shared, was that the issue would likely help to drive turnout, but wouldn’t win over any undecided or middle of the road voters. But driving turnout was decisive: liberals trooped to the polls, while in many areas Republican turnout was not what it should have been. (Not just liberals, but again... whatever let's you feel better I guess.)

* Donald Trump. I thought the Democrats’ endless yammering about “our democracy” and “fascism” was incredibly stupid, born of desperation, and would be ignored by voters. (Considering what I've already said about Trump and Jan 6, I think it's obvious I highly disagree with his analysis here, and am pretty annoyed that he and his refuse to see the harm Trump has done. I do think throwing the term 'fascism' around is... perhaps a little extreme? Or rather, it's trying to frame the issues in World War II terms rather than seeing what we have in the present, so I tend not to use it. Also because it's inflammatory and tends to alienate the people who don't already agree. But I don't necessarily disagree, so much as don't feel using the term helps. I think we'd be truly screwed if we ever gave Trump power again, and the same goes for the party that refused to impeach him and continued to support him after Jan 6.) I was partly right: those themes were stupid, and they were born of desperation. But it turned out that they were not ineffective. To cite just one example, a young woman I know posted a photo of herself at the polls on Instagram, with the text, “I’m voting against fascism.”

Contrary to what you might assume, she isn’t an idiot. “Our democracy” and “fascism” were code for Donald Trump. (Not really. He's the tip of the iceberg, but whatever.) At this point, Trump is a giant anvil around the neck of the Republican Party. (Absolutely agree, and I'm glad he sees it.) In many areas, likely most, he is absolute poison. (Yes). To be associated with Trump is to lose. Pretty much everything he has done in the last two years has been not just ill-advised but massively destructive to the Republican Party and to the United States. He has teased a “big announcement” in the next few days. I hope he announces that he is moving to Bulgaria. (One can hope).

An off-year election is normally a referendum on the president, which is why the out-party nearly always gains. (Yep. Which is why all the Republicans trying to convince themselves this wasn't a terrible midterm just because they may still gain control of the House is... silly. Or shows ignorance. But that seems more of a face-saving thing than anything else.) When the Democrats tried to make this year’s election a referendum on Donald Trump, I thought they were crazy. (Probably because you don't see the harm Trump did to America with all his lies about the 2020 election, but sure.) Trump is not an office-holder, nor was he on the ballot. (True. My little parable before talking about how some people were trying to reinstate Trump, and I thought about adding some more on how he wasn't truly on the ballot, but I'm just not posting as much these days and never got around to it. The thing is, since Republicans went all in on Trump and refused to impeach him for what he did, and continued to deny the election themselves, they're now as much a problem as Trump is himself. Hence why he's an anvil around their neck, as this guy so astutely pointed out.) How could that possibly work? Well, it did work, and Trump, with his inimitable bad judgment, collaborated fully with the Democrats in putting himself front and center, with disastrous results. (That's how Trump has always been, surprised it took this long to notice).

The major exception to last night’s gloom was Florida, where Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio both won crushing victories. Why was that? At least part of the explanation is that Florida was one state where the Democrats couldn’t pretend Trump was on the ballot. Ron DeSantis was on the ballot. (Well, we can also talk about Florida gerrymandering and the way they lost ground with Hispanic voters, but sure.)

* Polls. We Republicans have gotten used to the idea that polls generally underpredict Republican performance. When liberal pollsters started reporting more favorable numbers for Republicans in the days leading up the election, it looked like the usual script was being followed. But this year, if anything the polls may have understated Democratic support, not Republican. What–to cite just one instance–happened to the 26-point swing among suburban women toward the GOP, which led Steve to dub this the “Desperate Housewives Election?” They were desperate, all right–desperate to vote in favor of abortion and against Donald Trump. But how could so many polls be so wrong? (Lots of people asking this question. I personally think polls have a hard time polling young voters... well, most of us don't answer the phone when unknown numbers are calling. Of course, with a decent sample size pollsters can adjust their results to reflect that, but it's pretty hard for them to do it when they're using patterns that worked in previous years and this particular year doesn't fit the pattern. The youth turnout was much larger than normal, how could they have polled and adjusted for that?)

I have no idea why this happened, but I know that it wasn’t just the major public polls that were off-target. I was privy to private poll data here in Minnesota, and it showed far greater support for Republican legislative candidates than actually turned out at the polls. Why? I don’t know. I speculate that a number of Trump voters who are not consistent voters and are lightly attached to the Republican Party didn’t show up. On the other hand, liberals who thought they were voting in favor of abortion and against Donald Trump turned out massively. (Close enough. Probably. I'm sure there'll be more post-mortems looking into this.)

Trafalgar was one pollster that had a relatively good record in recent cycles, and Robert Cahaly, who runs Trafalgar, was convinced that his poll, which tried to sample hard-to-reach conservatives, understated Republican support. That turned out to be wrong. On Saturday, I am moderating a panel on the election at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in Phoenix. Cahaly is a member of my panel, and I will ask him what he thinks happened. The answer should be interesting.

There is much more that could be said, but I will leave it there for now.

*******

The biggest issue, to me, is that this guy badly misunderstands the harm Trump did with his 2020 election lies, and just how many Americans - like me - were willing to vote against Trump and all the crazy people who continue to support him after what he did on Jan 6.

I've gotten into enough discussions on Twitter (more on that debacle to come) to know that they don't want to understand, though. They always minimize it... laugh at calling it an insurrection, or bring up the BLM protests. They just absolutely refuse to believe that a sitting president lying about election results for months, and directly encouraging people to come protest (and pressure Pence into overturning the results) was in any way, shape, or form an attack on our Constitution. 

But sure, whatever. This analysis may make them feel better. At least they see that Trump is dragging them down, even if they don't really understand why.