Wednesday's Wonderful Absurdities: The Red Wave Breaks a Mile From Shore

Get ready for two more years of the same old stuff. If Old Joe Biden is still breathing in 2024, maybe 6 more. He will be the Democrat nominee, and Democrats will continue to push the same set of radical leftwing issues until they are forced to do otherwise.

Assuming Republicans do manage to eke out a thin majority in the House - which remains up in the air as of this writing - we will see some congressional gridlock to some extent and maybe even some fun oversight hearings. Otherwise, nothing much is going to change from the last two years, and, given that Joe Manchin ensured that Democrats already have their inflation-creating big spending agenda in place, they don’t really need much to happen in congress, anyway. Well, other than raising the debt ceiling twice a year, which a thin GOP majority will no doubt happily oblige.

It’s hard to believe that this is what a majority of American voters really want, but unless you have some really hard proof, don’t bother to talk to me about some sort of “stolen” election. This outcome is undesirable, obviously, but it is what it is.

On an overall disappointing night, the best news for the GOP in these mid-term elections is told in the tale of the array of execrable Democrats whose political careers will now be relegated to the ash heap of history.

Let’s review some of them…

Bye bye, Beto: Texans won’t have Irish Bob O’Rourke to kick around anymore. Not only did the El Paso dilettante miserably failed to move the electoral needle in Texas to the Democrat party’s favor, the statewide wipeout suffered by his party indicates that Texas is every bit as Red as it was a decade ago. Republicans won every statewide office for the 7th straight election cycle, carrying all of them by double-digits.

No one should cry for poor Beto, though. The man is fabulously wealthy, first of all; and, if he so desires, he can no doubt remain involved in non-electoral politics by being appointed to some cushy job by either the Texas Democrat party - which will need a new chairman after this latest shellacking - or by Old Joe the Sock Puppet, who needs a good “Gun Czar,” after all.

That’s enough, Stacey: Stacey Abrams, the Beto O’Rourke of Georgia, actually conceded an election last night, although no one was sure if it was this latest loss or the one she suffered in 2018, which she has denied for four years. In any event, the long, ridiculous Abrams booster effort will now run out of money and steam.

But again, we should expect the portly politico to painfully land on her feet with some plum appointed role in the Democrat party. Her instinctual ability to parrot talking points for hours on end without uttering a single true word would make her the perfect pick to become the next leader of the Democrat National Committee, for example.

Crist Crashes: Political huckster Charlie Crist just reached eligibility for Medicare, so it was time for retirement in any event. Future GOP presidential nominee Ron DeSantis sent the old snake oil salesman packing with just 40% of the vote in their race for governor of Florida.

Oof. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

Conservatives Flee Blue States: Republicans can now celebrate the fact that the big electoral-vote states of Ohio and Florida have joined Texas as firmly-Red states. Republicans will now hold every statewide office in Florida for the first time since Reconstruction, folks. That’s as Red as Red can get.

In Ohio, incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine won his re-election by over 25% of the vote, and JD Vance beat Democrat Tim Ryan soundly in the senate race. Those two states were tossup swing states as recently as 2016, so their transitions to Red have been rapid and stunning.

But here’s the thing about that: The massive transition of those and other states signals a further Balkanization of America along state lines. One of the contributing factors to that shift has been the massive flight of millions of moderate-to-conservative adults out of crime-ridden, Democrat-run big Blue state cities to safer grounds.

That flight is making it increasingly hard for the GOP to win statewide races in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and as Lee Zeldin found out so painfully last night, New York. Zeldin probably ran the best campaign of any prominent Republican in this cycle, maintaining a laser-like focus on New York City’s violent crime problem and the refusal by Gov. Kathy Hochul to address it, but the brainwashed victims of all that crime in NYC still awarded Hochul with about 70% of their votes.

This phenomenon could make the task of wresting the White House away from whomever the Democrats run in 2024 even more difficult than it was in 2020. We have to remember that Trump needed wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to cobble together enough electoral votes to get there in 2016.

Did the pro-GOP Hispanic shift materialize? - We don’t have reliable demographic breakdowns available yet (I do not trust exit polls in any way), so we won’t know for sure until late this week or early next week. But the strong GOP results in Texas and Florida would certainly tend to imply that happening to some extent. Certainly, the Cubano vote came in big for DeSantis in Miami-Dade County, enabling him to become the first GOP governor candidate to win that county in modern times.

Myra Flores’ loss in Texas CD 34 was a disappointment, but GOP candidate Monica De La Cruz offset that by winning in neighboring CD 15 in a big way, becoming the first Republican to represent that part of deep South Texas in modern times. Interestingly, Flores lost to Vincente Gonzales, a standard-issue Democrat machine politician, while De La Cruz whipped a far-left woke Democrat. At the same time, moderate long-time Democrat congressman Henry Cuellar, who dispatched a woke opponent in his primary race, easily won re-election in CD 28, which neighbors CD 15 to the West.

That’s a lesson Democrats in the Rio Grande Valley should, and probably will take to heart. Woke doesn’t sell in the Valley.

Another lesson from last night, one Republicans should learn and take to heart, is that the quality of the candidates matters. Dr. Oz was a very weak candidate in PA. He simply was never able to overcome his clear, unarguable status as a carpetbagger candidate, something Pennsylvanians felt so strongly about that they elected a Hobo to represent their state in the U.S. senate.

As much as I like Herschel Walker and hoped he could win, it is just silly to argue that he is not a weak nominee. He might get lucky and end up in a runoff (the results are unclear as I write this), but only because his opponent is an equally weak nominee.

Blake Masters almost made a race out of the Arizona senate election, but he was a political rookie who did not run a strong campaign.

This brings me to my final and perhaps most important point: we all need to recognize and accept the fact that Donald Trump’s endorsement does not a winner make. When it really mattered, Trump had a very painfully mixed night on Tuesday.

The simple fact of the matter is that the whole “election denier/Jan. 6 supporter/ultra-MAGA” mantra repeated endlessly by the Democrat/media Axis of Propaganda worked in this election, stunningly so. That dedicated focus on that line of propaganda enabled the Democrats to avoid unmitigated electoral disaster in the face of some of the strongest issue headwinds any incumbent president has ever faced.

Maybe that’s not fair, but don’t whine to me about it because I’m not listening. It is what it is, a simple fact of life, and Republican voters had better think long and hard about asking for a replay of all of that with Trump at the head of the GOP ticket in 2024. Especially with such an obvious, very strong alternative down in Florida, one who doesn’t bring all that baggage and all those attendant personality disorders along with him.

Feel free to lash out if you want, but you might want to give all that a little thought before you do.

That is all.