Wow, that was anticlimactic. I woke yesterday with a sense of dread and I couldn’t put my finger on it until I turned on the TV last night to watch the “Red Tsunami”. Before the first results came in, I felt it. I don’t know if I had ESP or a perfectly timed case of indigestion but I felt something slipping away before it even began.
There was no Great Awakening.
As of this writing, there are still outstanding races to be called but if the Republicans take the House, it will be by the slimmest of margins. Same with the Senate. Certainly it was not the massive rebuke of failed Democratic management that most—including many Democratic pundits—believed was going to happen. Just like after 2020, there is a lot of handwringing at the outcome versus the predictions made by the pollsters.
If there is to be blame, it falls solely on the weak management of the national GOP leadership. As I pointed out in April I believed then and definitely now that namby-pamby proclamations don’t do a damned thing. Trying to play Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, the House and Senate leadership threw out meaningless lists of what Republicans would do once they won power. Do any of you remember a single item from their list? Do any of you know they put out a list?
Rick Scott’s and Kevin McCarthy’s little lists don’t cut it. “Hey, citizens, we got a few kind of cool ideas we think you’ll like. Vote Republican! Hell Yeah!”…
A long time ago, I was a market intelligence consultant. I studied my client’s market share and how to increase it, especially if a new product was coming online. Many times, my client would have a great product that solved a lot of their customers’ issues and yet sales were low and stagnant. It was usually not the sales department’s fault but a marketing issue and the solution was usually one of market education. The customers had problems which sometimes were nebulous in understanding but once exposed they realized that the problems were major issues and my client offered them the solution. Sales would increase and the money they spent on me was a bargain (I hope!).
It seemed that the Republican leadership believed that the problems we face were self-evident and we just had to show up.
In 2010, Zeljka Buturovic and Daniel B. Klein conducted a study to measure economic awareness among different political factions. It found that conservatives understood economics much better than any other political faction, topping libertarians, liberals, and progressives in that order. So, the solution to creating new GOP voters would then be to launch a basic Econ 101 for the nation. As far as I can tell that study sits on some dusty shelf in some backroom of a college library, never discovered, never used.
Maybe in your area this was done, but I did not see one ad nor receive one mailing from the GOP listing the multitude of issues in which the current administration is failing, much less what the GOP would do to fix it. In fact, is there one issue in which the Democrats are successful? Maybe lying and manipulating the message that the average voter receives, but little else. If you have no list, you can’t offer solutions.
If you are to have a political party, wouldn’t educating the voter be the primary service that party should preform? Instead, we got soft-pedaled platitudes and wishful thinking; it’s just as bad as the Democrats’ magic wand and pixy dust.
The things that disturbed me more than the election were the results of exit polling concerning different issues. Number one on my list is that 75-80%—depending upon the poll—of voters answered that the country was heading in the wrong direction and yet the red wave never materialized. I can’t answer the question as to why voters didn’t make the connection between the current rulers of this clusterfuck nation and the problems we face, but they didn’t.
There was one that suggested 65% of Americans favored a government solution to healthcare. That scares the crap out of me!
There were other issues, as well, that jumped out but the primary one for me was Climate Change! Sixty-five percent of voters ranked the false flag of a warming earth as one of the major issues they considered. I’m not going to go back and find the actual numbers but at least ten years ago, that number was closer to 30% (which would suggest that primarily only Democrats believed that false narrative). Sixty-five percent now means that Republicans and independents are buying into the propaganda as well.
I’ll attack the Climate Change! crap sometime in the future but I bet my life, my children’s lives, their children’s lives, and their children’s lives that Climate Change! is hocus pocus. The claim is that the Democratic Party is the party of science; just like Lord Fauci is science.
But the fact voters buy into this crap means rising gas prices and lowered standards of living are voter’s acceptance of the penitence that the Church of Climate Change! demand you pay.
It’s one thing to say you’re against the Climate Change! agenda but you have to educate the public as to why you’re against it. The answer is simple, there is absolutely no science that proves it; there are no scientific observations that support it; and it certainly isn’t settled among climatologists.
And I don’t remember anyone bringing up the Covid tyrany that blue state governments made people endure.
People of all persuasions have short term memory issues. That’s why you educate.
But now we have to live with the ignorance of the majority of our fellow Americans—the fault of which Republican leadership should accept and resign. In more honorable times, this would be done.
So, the two-year nightmare continues for at least another two years. They say time flies when you’re having fun. Are you having fun yet?