Open Thread

The assertion about the mid-terms is that the Dobbs decision is motivating female voters to turn out for Democrats. Is there any truth to this claim? Only in polling. But, as I’ve pointed out before, polling is the political metric most open to manipulation.

This also leaves out the fact that not all women back abortion. I know the the MSM will never cover such a thing, but the bottom line is that women have been leading the charge against Roe ever since the decision was handed down. Would not their victory against overwhelming odds and after so many years of struggle motivate them to cement their achievement into a pro-life Congress?

For me, I just don’t see abortion as being that great a motivator for the Democrats outside of the urban and suburban upper class white women who were going to vote for them anyway. Might get a few more of them to actually show up in November, but not in any numbers necessary to save Democrat bacon.

I stand by my prediction – made months ago – that the GOP is heading for a blowout win on November 8th. Could I be wrong? Of course I could. I’m human! But we’re in a recession. Food prices are high. Crime is rising. Foreign affairs are a mess. Its the first midterm for the Democrats since their victory. The GOP gained House seats in 2020. They only need a few to claim a majority. Voter registration and primary participation numbers (even after Dobbs) clearly favor the GOP all around the country (it won’t matter because the State is so Democrat, but in Hawaii the GOP primary turnout was up like 125% or some such).

And lets think about something – if you’re a Democrat you sure in heck don’t want to talk about the economy or crime or foreign affairs. But you have to talk about something. Sure, you’re talking Trump…but you can’t just talk about him, right? So, what? How about abortion? That’s the ticket – talk abortion. Maybe frame it to scare our halfwit female voters (something like 36% of college educated white women agree with the sentence “some men can get pregnant”; rely on it, the number of GOP women included in that 36% is next to zero)? Goose that turnout and maybe turn a few narrow, suburban losses into holds? And then, hey preseto, here comes a bunch of polls saying that women are talking 24/7 about abortion and, buddy let me tell you, they’re gonna make the GOP pay for it! Convenient how everything in the Establishment comes together just the way the Democrats would want, right?

Now, maybe women are fired up to save Roe? Could be. I guess. If so, then we on the right have a far larger problem than we suspected. We’ll find out for sure on November 8th…but I’m sticking with my prediction.

Over in Pennsylvania Dr Oz is doing all he can to win – he’s barnstorming the State while Fetterman apparently still has a long way to go on recovery from his recent stroke. As I’ve been saying for a while, Pennsylvania is the next Florida. Voter registration trends have been massive for the GOP year after year. It might seem like the State is still favorable to Democrats, but that is an illusion mostly brought about by habit and really, really bad polling. Remember, in 2018 4 of the last 5 polls in Florida showed a substantial lead in the governors race for Gillum…only to have DeSantis win. And it wasn’t like the polls were close – the day before the election Quinninpiac had Gillum up by 7. So, I take those polls showing Fetterman (who can barely speak) up by 10 over Oz with a truckload of salt. Same, too, with the governors race in PA. Some people got mad the other day when Oz said he would have voted to certify the 2020 results…but I didn’t. I pointed out early on that Oz will have to go off-MAGA on at least some issues to be electorally viable in a State trending Red but not quite there yet. Taking a contrary position on the 2020 election result is the most meaningless off-MAGA gesture he could make.

Latinos are trending GOP. Hard. And Democrats are starting to notice and it is really pissing them off. So, what do you think they’re doing about it? Reassessing how they approach the community? Reconsidering things like Latinx and telling school kids they can change gender? Maybe concentrate on policies which will provide the sort of well-paid, blue collar jobs which sustain most Latino families these days? Oh, heck no! What made you think they’d do anything like that?

What they’re doing in response to the GOP gains in the Latino community is figuring that the GOP is lying to them and that Latinos are too stupid to figure this out:

There is nobody quite so racist as a white liberal – they simply cannot believe that any POC would disagree with them and if they do, it is because they’re stupid…and so need white liberals to speak for them.

I do believe – and it is one of the reasons for my prediction of a GOP blowout win – that Latinos will show that they want something different in November. This vote will not necessarily be an endorsement of the GOP: it will be far more, in my view, a rejection of the Left than anything else. To secure the long term loyalty of Latino voters, the GOP will have to do the concrete things necessary to show them we’re serious – a strong economy; low crime; good schools. That sort of thing. As for the Democrats, their party strength is in upper class white women and black women in general. This is not enough to sustain them in power. If they lose Latinos (and they are) and if support among black males starts to crumble (there is some indication of this) then Democrats will be reduced to an urban rump incapable of winning national power.