I live in Texas where we got some big wins but the rest of the country I’m confused. You have people who are upset about inflation and Biden policies but still voted for dems. He will keep pushing the climate cult agenda and I feel bad for those who live where winters get very cold. I truly hope heat isn’t an issue.
I really hope more states address mail in ballots. I guarantee if a democrat lost due to days of ballot drops after the election the media would be screeching. It just seems suspicious. Only people who have mobility issues or the elderly/military should use it. Otherwise I don’t get why votes can’t be counted by the end of Election Day. I love the convenience of early voting but if they made it one day I could take time to vote.
But anyway, life goes on but I’m honestly surprised. I thought red wave wasn’t going to happen but I didn’t expect this. Trans nonsense, climate cult, economic illiteracy, and politicians who care more about criminals than victims. I think abortion made some difference as well and the media but that’s always there. Should people on the right just move to red states? Or maybe we can ban lefties from moving to red states.
I remember a guy here in the Dallas Ft Worth area got mad because after he complained about conservative nut jobs in Texas (he moved from Illinois) I asked him why he moved here. He said he has a right to move where he wants and I said I’m not moving to Chicago and whining about the far left policies there so I don’t like people moving here and trying to change things
I saw two thoughtful comments that I'll repost here. I don't necessarily agree with everything they say but I think they add to the conversation.
1:
I don’t think abortion played as big of a role in this disappointment as people are letting on. Did it play a small part? Sure. But I don’t believe it played a significant role.
Why do I think this? Look at the candidates who did well last night:
• Desantis / Rubio. They far exceeded the polls and absolutely dominated what many consider to be a swing state. The polls had them winning by 11 pts and 9 pts, and they won by 20 and 17 respectively.
• Abbott, Dewine, Kemp. Performed about on par with the polls. Abbott and Dewine govern over two States that have been much maligned in the media (Texas and Ohio) for their abortion policy. If abortion was the driving factor for this poor outcome, I would’ve expected Abbott and Dewine to perform much poorer than they did. These are three swing States these republicans just won handily. I know Texas and Ohio lean R pretty heavily, but they’re still swing States to some degree. Abbott outperformed Trump’s margin by 6 pts and Dewine outperformed Trump by 18 pts. Kemp outperformed Trump in Georgia by 8.
• Kari Lake, Lombardo, and Laxalt. Not sure if they will win, but they seem to have a good shot as of right now. Even if they lose, they seem to be performing on par with the polling.
What’s the common theme here? Good candidates who ran good campaigns. All of these candidates (primarily the 5 in the first two sections) have been thrashed routinely by the media and still did quite well because truth be told they are good candidates.
Now who did poorly last night?
• Oz / Mastriano. Shit candidates that no one liked. Even polling that showed Oz ahead showed that the favorables for these two candidates were in the gutter.
Walker. Another shitty candidate. Currently he is underperforming Kemp in Georgia by 4 pts. A candidate with terrible unfavorables, ran a terrible campaign, and had a bunch of scandals.
JD Vance didn’t do too well. Another shitty candidate. He underperformed Dewine by 20. He was also a shitty candidate who was of the extremely pro-trump / stop the steal mold.
• Blake Masters. Another shitty candidate, with similar issues to JD Vance. He is underperforming Kari Lake by about 3.
What’s the common theme I see here? It’s candidate quality. The candidates who are good candidates and ran effective campaigns performed better than or as well as expected, and the shitty candidates who ran chaotic campaigns performed extremely poorly. I really think it’s as simple as that. You had polling in States such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia that showed voters wanted a Republican senate, but they preferred the Democrat Senator on their ballot over the Republican one.
The last thing I’ll add is that the Republican candidates who did well were all pretty much in State-level races. Abortion policy is largely dictated at the State level, not the federal level. If abortion was really the deciding factor, the Democrats would have dominated the State-level elections, but the Republicans actually did quite well in the local elections. It was the federal elections where the republicans struggled, elections where we coincidently ran shitty candidates.
Thanks for this breakdown
2:
Can we just be real here? There are some obvious things to learn here.
Abortion just killed many Republicans. Tons of conservatives buried their head in the sand because they were giddy over Dobbs and ignored the reality that this is a gigantic loser for Republicans. It created a ton of single issue voters that could have easily been had in this environment had it not been for Dobbs and then Republicans taking wildly unpopular positions on it in the aftermath. Conservatives need to do what the libs do on guns. Bite their lip, and run away screaming towards being very moderate at worst on it.
Until we can get Election Day back instead of election month, conservatives need to do a 180 on early voting and encourage it just as hard as Dems do. I’m sure we lose tons of would be voters on Election Day when something happens and they don’t make it to the polls. Votes that could be had if they planed on voting early or even by mail and had the flexibility to overcome an issue keeping them from voting day of. Dems get to keep those would be lost votes because they have correctly identified this.
Trump has to go man. I know there’s lots of big Trump fans here but he’s just a huge drag on the entire party. He’s a huge net loser in general elections and yesterday reiterated what we failed to learn 2 years ago. It’s time to jettison him today. We don’t need him anywhere near the future of the GOP and we certainly don’t need him losing a primary, doing his fraud thing and keeping people from supporting them in a general.
GOP strategy and messaging leadership all needs to go. Fact of the matter is this was the best possible climate to make huge waves and they lost a lot of messaging battles when all the Dems had is “democracy at risk and abortion.” The GOP utterly failed to make any coherent case on why they are the obvious better choice.
Candidate quality matters and we need to keep that in mind going forward. Oz and Walker are jokes. Mastreino was so bad it probably costed Oz the win. Kinda ties into the Trump point but running these losers was always a doomed practice.
Time to drop the stolen election routine. People don’t like it. They don’t like it when Mastreino does it, they don’t like it when Abrams does it. If the GOP can’t message correctly and define the line between loose voting practices (good) and Trump trying to get as many people to say “it was stolen” (bad) then they just need to stay away from it all together.
We will get the house, and can stonewall most of Bidens agenda for the next 2 years while hopefully the GOP figure this stuff out.