Elections

Open Thread

Mark Noonan58 Comments

As of this moment in time, still thinking that Biden remains – he’s really digging in his heels (or Hunter and Jill are) and he is garnering some public support among Democrat electeds. There are still a few Democrats calling for him to step aside but the numbers are small and it can often be seen a tactical: they’re in areas where Democrats are weak and Democrats are always forgiving of Democrats who do what it takes to survive.

I think, bottom line, that its really too late to swap out. Not based on law. Laws don’t matter to Democrats. If they were really determined to push Pudding Brain out, they’d do so and rely on friendly Democrat judges and squishy cooperative GOPers to ensure the new guy is on the ballot in all 50 states. Its too late because getting someone new in and trying to ramp up a national campaign with a new candidate is just entirely too forlorn. Democrats know they are headed for defeat – they could have pushed Biden out 9 months ago, but now it is just too late. On to the end – maybe a miracle shows up, but keeping Biden is now at the very least no worse than hitting the eject button. It is now all about down-ballot. At the moment, most State-by-State polling shows Democrats doing ok – it looks like they’ll lose the House and Senate but only by a few seats in each…but that is the polling. This polling screens for Presidential-year voters…who only show up every four years.

And that is the problem Democrats really have – the Presidential-year Dem-leaners aren’t going to show up in sufficient numbers if it gets into the public mind that Biden is done for. This could be catastrophic for Democrats. If even five million such people become stay-at-homes then what is now a narrow Congressional loss could become a landslide loss…all sorts of Dem House and Senate candidates who are up by even 5 to 7 right now could end up losing. And so I just saw a Rosen (D-NV) Senate ad lauding her for fighting to secure the border; an egregious lie, of course, but it indicates that even with polling showing her substantially up over Sam Brown, the GOP Candidate, she’s concerned about losing the race on the right.

Team Biden is still going with “he’s vigorous as heck!”. In fact, they even have surrogates out there going, “hey, where’s Trump?”. Basically implying that since Trump isn’t on the stump right now, it is Trump who is feeble while the vigorous and manly Biden is out on the trail. Of course, Trump is wisely holding back – while your opponent is self-immolating, just shut up and let him do it. Remember, we’re only here right now because Team Pudding Brain issued a debate challenge they clearly thought Trump would decline. Had they not done that, this would be going a lot differently right now (and a heck of a lot more funny if June’s debate happened in September and it was only at that moment Democrats realized they’re screwed). Trump is naturally delighted with how it went and as he preps for the RNC and the Veep selection, there’s no need for him to do anything.

Especially as the latest RCP average has Trump up something like 3.3. I might be slightly wrong on that – it might be more. But, no matter: as I’ve said – and everyone says – for Biden to have a shot as scraping by with 270 Electoral Votes, he’s got to be up by 3 nationally. Trump up by 3+ puts this entirely out of reach. Trump was narrowly winning pre-debate. He’s comfortably ahead now (many forecasters have taken GA, AZ and NV out of the “tossup” realm and put them “Lean-R”…and an argument can be made that PA is “Lean-R” – and, if so, that is game over). Trump is in the driver’s seat here. Lots of things can happen, of course, but it is also a well-known fact of political life that usually in June the thing is pretty baked in. Takes something really major to shake it up. Unfortunately for Biden, most of the major things that can happen are bad for him (another mental breakdown live, Ukraine being defeated, inflation spiking, that sort of thing).

The French election went as I expected – the Left convinced that squish “Right” to vote Left to keep the “far Right” out. Do keep in mind that when they say “far Right” they mean “middle class French patriots”. It is the same as when they call you and I “MAGA extremists”. Looks like Le Pen’s party actually got the most votes – and by a substantial margin. But by the quirks of French election process, her party came in third, seat-wise. This has caused a lot of heartache on the French Right (as it should) but I tell them to buck up – a decade ago there were like 4 French patriots in Parliament. Now there’s 150. And while the Left is trying to forge a governing coalition (no party obtained an absolute majority) it already looks unstable…with plenty of the squish Right being dismayed that the Left now wants 100% of their program enacted. I expect a good portion of the squish Right to defect to Le Pen’s party…and they might have to call another snap election if a stable government can’t be formed.

The Brit’s, on the other hand, are screwed. Labour obtained an unassailable absolute majority. Moving swiftly they have already announced they will let a bunch of criminals out of jail. Not kidding. This is apparently a high priority for Labour. No, they didn’t campaign on that. The Left never campaigns on what they’re going to actually do. They learned that lesson in the 1980’s when in both the US and UK the Left did campaign on what they wanted and they got electorally wiped out. Since then, it has always been like this:

“We’ve passed the free ice cream for everyone law!”

“Cool! When do I get my ice cream?”

“Ice cream? We’re here to shoot your dog.”

I don’t see how the UK comes back from this – the Labour government is going to import a couple million Muslims and give them citizenship to make sure Labour never loses again. Think I’m kidding? I’ve seen videos of new-minted Labour officials dressed entirely in Muslim garb and with only Muslim flags being waved by the crowds. One does have to remember that Leftists – all Leftists, everywhere – hate their own country and their own people. Its why Labour is rushing through the release of criminals…they want these criminals to prey upon the British people. To the Left, the British people are evil and now they’re going to get what’s coming to them.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan48 Comments

In the Virginia election last week the GOP got more votes, State-wide, for House and Senate than the Democrats did. The Democrats narrowly won both chambers – ultimately in the crucial districts by just 3,000 or so votes – because of the Democrat gerrymander of the districts. But this shows that Virginia isn’t quite as Blue as we’ve been led to believe. Can’t do much about the district lines until after 2030 and then only if we have at least one of the legislative houses, but I think the votes show that Virginia may yet be in play for 2024.

Of note, the Democrats went nuclear on abortion in Virginia and the national GOP did nothing about it. The national GOP seems determined to let the Democrats win on the abortion issue and then blame pro-Lifers for the losses. This is probably a means of undermining the Populist impulse in the GOP. Make no mistake about it, most of the GOP leadership wants to return to a Romney-like GOP. They don’t like Trump, but they also don’t like DeSantis. Their candidate for 2024 now that Scott has thrown in the towel is Haley. And if they don’t get the candidate they want, they’ll do everything they can to undercut the overall GOP effort in 2024 as much as they did in 2022 and 2020. I do believe that this is because a lot of our leadership is compromised – either directly or indirectly. The Democrats own them. It will be a grind over the next ten years or so to get rid of these people and replace them with people who are on our side.

In Pennsylvania the switch to the GOP continues. The Democrat voter registration advantage stands at about 445k; it was 916k back in 2016. This is an earthquake that just hasn’t quite happened yet. The State is trending Red but is still controlled by Blue. Democrats had thought their new auto-registration system would right the ship but all its done is produce even more GOP voters. The Democrats are now committing massive funds to register voters for 2024 because they do see the writing on the wall. One of these days, regardless of how “fortified” they make the elections, you’re going to see a Red Wave in Pennsylvania.

October 7th has been memory-holed by the Left. They don’t even mention it any longer. No surprise as any mention of it now just brings up that it is abundantly proven that Hamas committed savagery that would have made Attila the Hun blush. But it isn’t just expedience that has done this on the Left – they are very proud of Hamas, after all – it is just that right now their only goal is to make what Israel is doing look bad and make it appear, the longer time goes on, as if it happened in a vacuum. They will keep putting (fake) pictures of Gazan dead up on social media to get Pudding Brain’s people to increase the pressure on Israel to quit. Survival of Hamas is at stake here – and the Left wants Hamas to survive. They don’t just want a repeat of 10/7, they want 10/7 on steroids (apparently Hamas had a much more ambitious plan to also paraglide in from the West Bank but didn’t have the resources to pull that off. This time). But they have a problem – more and more Israelis are seeing the evidence of what Hamas did and they seem to be getting determined to see an end to Hamas, at least in Gaza. There aren’t a lot of voices in Israel right now calling on the IDF to quit. That might come some day, but not any time soon.

Among the dead from 10/7 was a Canadian peace activist lady. From what I read, she’s been in Israel for decades “working for peace”. Naturally, Hamas murdered her. You do wonder if at the last moment she realized her error? We’ll never know – but I will say the hard pill to swallow: of the people of the West, nobody is more responsible for the existence of Hamas and other groups of savages than “peace activists”. They are not good people. They are not wise people. They are not merciful people. They are narcissistic cowards who preen themselves on their moral superiority over the people who fight barbarians to keep them at bay. They are almost invariably white and rich. And for 60 to 70 years these people have stopped the West from squashing the barbarians…so now we’ve got more barbarians in the West than any time since the fall of Rome.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan44 Comments

Yesterday everyone got into a blue funk over losing the abortion fight in Ohio…except all it did was enshrine into the Ohio constitution what was already Ohio law. It was a clever tactic by the Democrats, though, and it will be used everywhere in 2024…get abortion initiatives on the ballot in order to drive turnout because, apparently, nothing is more important to suburban white women than making sure black women can get abortions (39% of all abortions in 2020 were done on black women – who make up about 12% of the female population). But, don’t get yourself in too much of a fret about it.

We scored some big local victories in New York City – in areas carried by Pudding Brain by 30 points. Seems like New Yorkers (outside Manhattan) are finally having enough of this woke garbage. No, NYC will not vote GOP in 2024…but if we’re seeing deep blue areas shift right even a little bit, then it spells disaster for Democrats at the national level in 2024. Just a few percentage points of deep blue areas moving GOP means Democrats will have an increasingly hard time winning PA, MI, WI…and even MN. We also did a bit of this on the local level in New Jersey and while (as expected) we came up short in the PA Supreme Court race, we once again pressed forward with victories at the county and school board level which are vastly more important right now.

Some people are now calling the Life issue toxic – I don’t agree. I agree that we’re losing on the issue, but I disagree that it is a losing issue for us. Our primary problem is that we’re not responding. The GOP is simply hoping the issue goes away. Can’t do that; can’t leave the field to the Democrats. In 2022 here in Nevada we were bombarded 24/7 by pro-abortion advertising on all media platforms and it almost certainly cost us a Senate and two House seats. I’m not saying the GOP response was weak – I was here; it was non-existent. Nobody even mentioned the matter on the GOP side. We lost the Nevada Senate race by 8,000 votes after Democrats spent months and tens of millions advertising on abortion. Just a bit of pushback on our side and we could easily have flipped 4,000+ of those votes. We do need to carefully think about how we want to go forward. It is clear that at the moment we do not have an electoral majority in favor of banning abortion. That is sad but entirely to be expected given overall social conditions. We have to tune our message to reasonable restrictions which are backed by large majorities and they must be coupled with massive help for pregnant women.

As the Gaza war grinds on it has become increasingly clear to me that we have to be very forthright about our views on the matter. No more trying to be nice about it. No more tip toeing around Leftist hate. Call it what it is. As I pointed out on X, you don’t get to crawl off the Israeli girl you just raped and set on fire and claim Geneva Convention protections. Such people are to be shot out of hand and only granted mercy if they abjectly surrender. And any deaths resulting from getting at Hamas are entirely on Hamas. They did deeds which have removed them from any protection of the law. Until they are on their knees they are simply to be killed. And everyone around them should shun them and flee their presence. Better to risk Hamas shooting you in the back then remain in place as their human shields. If you don’t run, it is assumed you want to be a shield.

But more than that, we also need to clearly call out the pro-Hamas people. They are trying to hide it. They have to. But anyone refusing to outright condemn Hamas – personnel and ideology – is an accessory to Hamas’ savagery. No decent person can have anything to do with Hamas, and those who are still carrying their water – by whatever verbal gymnastics – have to called out as the evil people they are. We’re not trying to silence dissent; we are out to completely condemn the evil. It must become that no person, anywhere, will raise their voice in support of Hamas. They must be made as toxic as their actions make them.