Wow. Big surprise.
At the Sacramento Bee, "California Democrats poised to keep lock on statewide offices including attorney general":
California Democrats appear poised to maintain their nearly two-decade lock on statewide offices, leading in races for lieutenant governor, attorney general, controller and other posts in early results...
More at the Los Angeles Times, "Newsom cruises to reelection as governor, Democrats leading races for other statewide posts."
From the redoubtable Amy Walter, at the Cook Political Report, "Just as Democrats did in 2020, Republicans came into the 2022 midterms expecting a landslide. Sky-high inflation, an unpopular President, and pessimism about the direction of the country all pointed to a 'typical' midterm romp for the party out of power:"
First, as I wrote earlier this fall (citing the amazing work of political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck), events and the responses to them from politicians no longer have the ability to deeply and fundamentally reshape our politics or political coalitions. With fewer people willing to 'defect', even when they are unhappy with the status quo, you get more close elections and fewer 'wave' elections. Also, when every election is an existential election, the drop-off among 'in-party' voters, which was once common in midterm elections, is no longer the case. Mike Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director and progressive strategist, has long argued that the 2018 and 2020 elections proved that there is an anti-MAGA voting majority in this country. As long as these voters turn out, he’s argued, Democrats will remain competitive in battleground states and districts. Moreover, Podhorzer told me on Wednesday morning, that the January 6th hearings were critical in “reminding people that Trump existed and that he was dangerous.” Combine that with the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision and the ‘costs’ of a MAGA majority, he said, became even clearer to these voters.
From Ira Stoll, at Future of Capitalism, "Some votes are still being counted and the final results are not clear, but I've seen enough to draw some conclusions from yesterday's election":
Republicans can delude themselves in a bubble, too. At the top of the Wall Street Journal editorial page on November 4 was an article touting Bolduc's chances under the headline "An Upset May Be Brewing in New Hampshire." Henry Olsen of the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center, generally a shrewd analyst, had a November 7 Washington Post column predicting the Republicans would emerge with 54 Senate seats. "Inflation, crime, progressive attempts at overreach and a general sense that President Biden is not up to the job will likely deliver a surprisingly large victory to Republicans," Olsen wrote. Michael Barone, one of the most brilliant election analysts on the center-right, had a column about "poll numbers trending toward a wave victory for Republicans." I myself was holding forth in private conversation this past weekend about Tesla-driving, college-educated coastal elites underestimating the fury felt by middle-American, non-college-educated voters at high gasoline prices and at Biden's unilateral forgiveness of student loan debt. It turns out that some voters care more about abortion rights than they do about cheap gas prices.
Still more at that top link.
A telling bright spot from last night, at Fox News, "Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Maloney concedes in historic House loss: Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney competed against Republican nominee Mike Lawler to represent New York's 17th Congressional District "
And from Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "MICHAEL LAWLER CONTRIBUTES TO FLIPPING THE HOUSE, KNOCKS OUT DCCC CHAIR SEAN PATRICK MALONEY IN NY-17."
Jedediah Bila, on Twitter:
You will not understand what’s happening until you accept that there is a growing segment of the population that welcomes leftist authoritarianism & is happy to relinquish their freedoms. They would rather have a ballooning government than a free society.
— Jedediah Bila (@JedediahBila) November 9, 2022
A day-after autopsy, at AoSHQ, "As the GOP prepares for post-mortems and mutual recriminations -- and some of that will be necessary -- it's also important to keep in mind that in any contest, the other team has strengths as well, and they get their time with the ball too. And that they're going to score."
From Scott McKay, at the American Spectator, "The red wave washed ashore as a ripple, though Republicans did make progress":
It’s late as I write this, though not late enough to know how things will turn out. But there are things we can safely say just after midnight Eastern time on Tuesday as the vote counts roll in and the races get called. One of them is that for all the anger we’ve seen evidence of from Republican and independent voters, it seems pretty clear that channeling it into positive action is something beyond the reach of the GOP’s leadership and political class. Is that a failure of that leadership? Well, yes. It is. And we’ll spend weeks and months analyzing the fact that what was supposed to be a red wave election was more like a sea spray that might be just enough to take majorities in the House and Senate by the tiniest margins … or perhaps not even that. And we’ll be analyzing it within the context of the opportunity the GOP had in 2022 — and the party simply blew it. This should have been a massive wave election. Given the low job approval ratings of the sitting president in his first midterm election, and given the favorable generic congressional ballot numbers, this should have been a plus-five wave in the Senate and a plus-30 wave, or bigger, in the House. It also should have resounded down to statehouses, and yet the GOP turns out, apparently, not to have been able to beat abysmal Democrat gubernatorial candidates like Katie Hobbs, Kathy Hochul, and Gretchen Whitmer. There are so many utterly horrid Democrats who will remain in office after this election that it should be offensive to average Americans. It’s tempting to fall into the trap of believing there must be wholesale corruption in American elections, but the problem with going there is that there must be proof before it’s actionable. Until some is presented, we’ll have to deal with something very unpleasant. Namely, here’s the truth that we on the Right are going to have to accept: the American electorate in 2022 is awful. And the axiom about the cycle that involves weak men and tough times is a real thing, and we are in the worst quadrant of that cycle. We are still in the time in which weak men make tough times. We have not gotten to the point where tough times make tough men...
From Stephen Kruiser, at Pajamas, "The Morning Briefing: We're Done–American Voters Are Idiots":
So much for the Red Wave, freedom, and hopes that the United States of America would continue to exist past next Arbor Day. We’re done here, kids. You know actual human beings who voted for Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and Kathy Hochul in New York. These are not people who are conducive to the continued existence of this once-glorious Republic. What happened last night should have been an emphatic correction to the hell this country has been subjected to since Joe Biden was artificially installed in the White House. Instead, we got a bunch of bleating socialist sheep...
RTWT.
Sabato's Crystal Ball ate crow in 2020.
These guys are good, but obviously not that good. My sense is they're a little gun shy on the Senate side. Sabato's team can only muster a prediction of 51 seats for Republicans in the upper chamber. Sure, they've got the data, but who can you trust nowadays? What pollsters? I will be surprised if Fetterman wins in Pennsylvania, and perhaps the enthusiasm for Kari Lake in Arizona will have spillover effects for the Senate race there, where Republican Blake Masters is said to be less competitive than his cohort next door in the Silver State. Native son Adam Laxalt will likely beat Democrat incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto in the Nevada Senate match-up.
As for the House, it's not a question of if but how big. I have no idea, but Republicans need a pickup of just fives seats to take back the chamber. Folks have thrown out all kinds of numbers, with former House Speaker even predicting Republicans picking up at least 40 seats!
God knows who will win, literally.
See, "Final Ratings for the 2022 Election" (via Memeorandum).
At the New York Times, "DeSantis Campaign Video Hints at National Aims and Draws Trump’s Ire":
It has not been aired on television and there are no plans to use it as a paid advertisement for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, but that may not be the point, so long as it spreads on social media. Back in April, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, released “Sweet Florida,” a catchy campaign anthem by two current members of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. That song, with lyrics including “You can take it to the bank he don’t care what Brandon thinks at the White House,” served as the walk-on song for Mr. DeSantis’s campaign events but never went viral outside of conservative circles. As of Monday, it has about 328,000 views on YouTube and another 1.1 million on the conservative video platform Rumble. But while the campaign jingle touted Mr. DeSantis’s record and popularity in Florida, a new video released by his campaign on Friday hints at the governor’s broader national ambitions. Posted to Twitter by his wife, Casey DeSantis, the 96-second video invokes God 10 times and suggests that Mr. DeSantis was sent by a divine power. “God made a fighter,” the narrator says. “God said I need someone to be strong, advocate truth in the midst of hysteria, challenge conventional wisdom and isn’t afraid to defend what he knows to be right and just.” Former President Donald J. Trump, who views Mr. DeSantis as a potential 2024 rival, wasn’t amused. He called the governor “Ron DeSanctimonious” during a rally Saturday in Pennsylvania. Even some of Mr. DeSantis’s Florida allies said privately that the video was a bit much. The new video, which already has at least 2.5 million views on Twitter, was produced in-house by the DeSantis campaign. It has not been aired on television and there are no plans to use it as a paid advertisement for Mr. DeSantis, but that may not be the point, so long as it spreads on social media. It is, by far, the biggest viral candidate video of this year’s midterm cycle, but there is not much competition out there...
And she's so young. What a waste of a great potential.
From Michael Shellenberger, on Substack, "Free markets have lifted millions out of poverty, liberated women, and protected the environment. Why, then, are so many progressives against them?":
For the last three years, Greta Thunberg has said that her life’s purpose was to save the world from climate change. But last Sunday, she told an audience in London that climate activists must overthrow "the whole capitalist system," which she says is responsible for "imperialism, oppression, genocide... racist, oppressive extractionism." Her talk echoed the World Economic Forum's calls for a “Great Reset” away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. There is no “back to normal,” she said. But her claims are absurd. The "whole capitalist system" has, over the last 200 years, allowed for the average life expectancy of humans to rise from 30 to 70 years of age. The "whole capitalist system" produces larger food surpluses than any other system in human history. And the "whole capitalist system" has resulted in declining greenhouse gas emissions in developed nations over the last 50 years. Capitalism is far from perfect. It worsens inequality by making some people so rich that they can rocket into space on liquified hydrogen while leaving others too poor to afford natural gas. It is characterized by cycles of boom and bust that create frenzies of wealth followed by high unemployment. And it is constantly turning non-market relationships, including intimate ones, such as between parents and caregivers, into exchanges between buyers and sellers. But capitalism is plainly better than any other system of economic organization yet devised. High levels of inequality are the result of more rich people, not more poor people, who are much better off under capitalism than feudalism or communism. The business cycle of booms and busts provokes manias and depressions, but it is much more efficient, and less oppressive than governments deciding what should be produced, by whom, and at what price. And while it’s true that capitalism undermines non-market relationships, that’s often a good thing, even in the case of childcare, since it allows women and others to be compensated for their labor. Some of the people who have benefitted the most from industrial capitalism are people like Thunberg and her family. The remarkable wealth of their home nation of Sweden is due to the industrial revolution, which allows for a tiny number of people to produce food, energy, and other necessities for life so that the majority of Swedes can do other, less arduous, and more pleasurable things. The same is true across the West. In the U.S., just 2% of the population works on farms and just 8% in factories. And industrial capitalism allowed Sweden to create a generous social welfare state consisting of free health care, free education, and 480 days of paid leave for parents when a child is born or adopted. The Thunbergs are, by any global or historical standard, rich: the annual per capita income globally, according to the World Bank, is $11,000, which is less than the cost of the two chairs in Thunberg’s living room. Capitalism is far better for the natural environment than feudalism or communism. Under feudalism, subsistence farmers rely on wood and dung for cooking fuels and must farm large tracts of land to produce a small amount of food. The industrial revolution not only liberated most people from back-breaking farming but also reduced the amount of land required, thanks to fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors. The same process allowed humans to switch from using wood to coal to natural gas and uranium as primary fuels. The result has been the return, and “re-wilding,” of grasslands and forests around the world, including in Sweden. The reason is that market capitalism rewards economic efficiency and thus reduced natural resource use. Consider the whales. What saved them, in capitalist nations, was cheaper substitute oils, first petroleum and then vegetable oils. The Soviet Union, by contrast, kept whaling long after it was economically efficient to do so because whalers were protected from market competition. All of this and yet, around the world, it is affluent and educated progressives like Thunberg who are anti-capitalist...
On Twitter, folks are suggesting Ms. Lake is a much better public communicator than even Barack Obama. As Melissa Mackenzie writes, "She should be teaching classes to other Republicans. She's that good."
And on Fox News yesterday:
I saw this sucker last night, and remember the Wall Street Journal story about it What a kick, lol.
See, "In Search of a 12-Foot Home Depot Skeleton: A Halloween Shopping Spree Gone Wrong":
Our columnist was determined to join the ‘more is more’ crowd when it came to Halloween yard decor. Only problem: She didn’t start planning six months in advance.
WHILE CYCLING in the suburbs in mid-September, I stopped at a house that demonstrated the most sincere, all-encompassing commitment to Halloween I’d ever seen. Its yard was an entire Halloween cemetery, with a coven of 10-foot-tall animatronic witches gathered around a huge cauldron, casting spells and creating utter, supernatural mayhem. Life-size skeletons—some human, some animal—emerged from their graves in various states of decomposition. Planning and executing this display had to be the focus of these homeowners’ lives for a good six months. While taking in every undead detail, I thought how fun it might be to embrace a holiday with such creative fulsomeness. As someone with an actual job, I couldn’t. But neither did I want to continue my lousy track record as a party pooper who can’t even be bothered to carve a pumpkin badly for the porch. When it comes to honoring Oct. 31, The Husband and I have traditionally hunkered down inside with a stiff drink and the front lights off, nary a Twix bar in sight. Inspired and shamed by CemeteryPalooza, I vowed to step up our game this year. But when we finally got around to stepping up our game, it was mid-October, and we were two months too late. The Halloween section at our local Home Depot had already been taken over entirely by Christmas decor, and the store had banished whatever spooky detritus remained to a department that was also being used to store hydraulic lifts and large restocking carts. Accessing the dwindling Halloween stock involved climbing through what was essentially a jungle gym. All that was left for Halloween were some fall-colored wreaths about to crumble under the weight of accumulated store dust, and some tiny cat, pig and dog skeletons. Trick-or-treaters would be more likely to crush them underfoot than be terrified by them. This year’s coolest stuff, like the must-have 12-foot skeleton with LCD “Life Eyes” ($299), had been out of stock for weeks. (As we had nowhere to store such a thing after Halloween, except by giving it a permanent spot on the couch, this was perhaps for the best.) Given Home Depot’s abundance of Christmas stuff, we considered refocusing our energies on a new holiday-decor mashup: Hallowmas. Skeleton Santa and eight tiny skeleton reindeer? Zombie elves? A creche filled with severed body parts? We could coast right through Halloween and into Christmas without changing anything. We liked this direction, but worried our neighbors might look askance at such cutting-edge decor thinking. This left us with a challenge: What could we do with a dusty orange wreath? Halloween has become a decorative arms race, and as The Husband and I had discovered, those who procrastinate are bound to lose. In the not-too-distant past, it was only the hardcore “holiday” people—whose yards serve as a rotating homage to whatever holiday was next, including Arbor Day—who really pushed the Halloween boat out. They crowded their lawns with witch-based frippery, wrapped their porches in more spiderwebs than the Earth’s entire spider population could manufacture, and always had full-size candy bars. Everybody whose decor was limited to inept pumpkins, lit by real candles, rolled their eyes while secretly envying the holiday people’s creativity and candy budget. Today, it seems, every second neighbor is a hardcore Halloween person with the same “more is more” aesthetic embraced by throwers of extravagant first birthday parties featuring the Rockettes and gender-reveal parties with a flyover by the Blue (or will they be Pink?) Angels. In this new Halloween landscape, bigger is not just better, it is required. And based on that display I cycled past, so are spreadsheets and an entire off-site storage unit devoted to containing the undead. We weren’t interested in recreating CemeteryPalooza, or, frankly, owning any Halloween decor that requires an outlet. But I also wasn’t prepared to give up the (hopefully discounted) ghost. So last weekend, undeterred by our Home Depot fail, we went to our local Party City, determined to find a few items to show that we were no longer Lame Halloween Ignorers—decorations that could telegraph “We are fun and creative!” We were shocked to find the place packed with Halloween swag, especially since Home Depot had been picked so clean. Party City had 7.5-foot, light-up spiders ($75), dozens of varieties of tombstones (some that cost as little as $9), animatronic haunted toy boxes ($115 and also, super yikes). Every sort of ghastly decorative string lights you can imagine, and an entire butcher shop worth of severed body parts. It was an embarrassment of both riches and witches, which promptly paralyzed us with indecision. Would we go ‘cute scary’ or full-on ‘Hostel scary’? Then I backed into the Animatronic 7.5-foot Tall Light-Up Talking Ice Scream Clown ($99)...
From Sasha Stone, on Subtack, "And the Realignment of a New America":
“I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.” ― George Carlin Joe Biden and the Democrats have a big problem. It isn’t just that they stand to lose in the midterm elections and maybe the Presidency in 2024. They stand to lose much more than that. They stand to lose everything. The American people, by now, have had enough. They’re sick of cowards who cannot stand up to the activists who control them. They’re not just sick of them in Washington. They’re sick of them everywhere. They’re sick of being told what they can and can’t say, what they can and can’t think. In 2020, a New Woke Order exploded on the streets. It looked a lot like the rehearsal at Evergreen and across many college campuses all over the country. It wasn’t all of the Zoomers leading the charge, but the activists have been loud and powerful. They have captured corporate America and nearly every cultural institution in the country. And they’ve captured Joe Biden and the Democrats. Their activism, however well-intentioned, has all but wrecked Hollywood movies; almost every network or streaming series is infused with their doctrine. It is inescapable. It’s in public schools, museums, fast food advertising, library reading lists, and sports. Most of us are developing an immunity to anything we think might be “woke,” and we will avoid it as much as possible. Most of us know that if there is some message buried in a book or a movie, we’re going to resent being drawn in for yet another lecture on how to be better, how to do better, and how to reorder our thinking to satisfy their unending critiques. It’s so bad that someone should start a website called “Is it Woke”? That would save consumers a lot of time and trouble. The only reason we don’t hear about it more is that any dissent is viciously attacked until an apology is squeezed out like the last bit of toothpaste in an empty tube. It is too much trouble to endure all of that panic and hysteria. So most people keep their heads down and hope it will pass. Joe Biden doesn’t yet understand this. Most Democrats don’t. Not even the new stars in the party like Gavin Newsome or Pete Buttigieg. Not even Beto. They falsely believe that is what they must do to win Twitter and win points on the Left. The exact opposite is true. Although one must develop “rhino skin,” like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, the future will be with those who push back loudly against this ongoing madness. In the past, we might have had some reality checks with people like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, or SNL. But no. They’ve been sucked into the Body Snatchers, too, and their comedy isn’t comedy at all. They work for the Democrats, just like much of the media. It feels like being stuck inside a Twilight Zone episode where everyone is pretending like what is happening isn’t happening. There are many reasons the Democrats might lose in a massive red wave on Tuesday. One of those is the pendulum shift we see throughout American history that bobs back and forth between liberalism and conservatism. But I would bet that many of these voters might not even want Republicans in power and disagree with their policies. Still, they see in the MAGA candidates something they don’t see anywhere else: unapologetic resistance to the “woke” utopia that has been foisted upon us all. This is why Kari Lake is burning up the polls. This is why Glenn Youngkin won and why Ron DeSantis is so popular. And it’s why Trump will likely breeze through to a win in 2024. Sure, they are also offering ways to rescue America from a collapsing economy, but what people fear the most is what they aren’t allowed to talk about. The Democrats and their robot army on Twitter or in the mainstream media seem to think that continuing to demonize the other side will work to scare voters away from them. But to many people, that’s like trying to tell them not to get in the lifeboats as the Titanic sank, explaining that the people driving the boats protested the last election. But let’s get specific about what we mean by “woke.” It doesn’t mean inclusion. It doesn’t even mean equity. It means that the answers to humanity’s problems have finally been solved. All you have to do is measure a person’s worth by status as a marginalized person. Meet the new utopia. Same as the old utopia. They believe that America, and other Western nations, have been built as colonizing systems of oppression specifically to keep Black and Brown people down. They have an adjunct category now for whites. They can have protective status if they’re part of the LGBTQIA community. If they are disabled, if they have some mental disorder, or even if they are old. These things elevate those deemed oppressed, left out and shut out of the American way of life, which theoretically rewards high achievement. Joe Biden and John Fetterman are cis-gendered heterosexual white men who would usually be on the list of oppressors. Still, both have miraculously transcended their identity to become part of a marginalized group. Fetterman is considered disabled, and Biden is incapacitated due to age. There is nothing more the Left loves than incapacitated white men. If they can wrap their fingers around a pen, they can tell them where to sign. Disability is only a protected class if you are also ideologically compliant. Elon Musk has Asperger’s but do you think that wins him any points with the Woketopians? If you don’t have protective status, you are on the other side, the “bad” side. You are someone with privilege. White privilege, pretty privilege, thin privilege, youth privilege, straight privilege, and able-bodied privilege. Here is a sampling of different kinds of privilege from North Shore Community College...
RTWT.
Shot: At the New York Times, "With sheriffs vouching for them and a flood of ads proclaiming their support for the police, Democrats are shoring up their public safety bona fides. Still, some worry it’s too late":
In the final stretch of the midterm campaigns, Democrats are straining to defend themselves against a barrage of crime-focused attacks from Republicans, forcefully highlighting their public safety credentials amid signs that G.O.P. messaging on the issue may be more potent than usual in some critical races this year. Democrats have enlisted sheriffs to vouch for them, have outspent Republicans on ads that use the word “police” in the month of October, and have been using the kind of tough-on-crime language that many on the left seemed to reject not long ago — even as some Democrats worry that efforts to inoculate the party on a complex and emotional issue are falling short. Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who is being criticized over a 2018 video in which he called ending cash bail a “top priority,” aired an ad in which an officer declared him a “tough-on-crime” lawmaker who confronted those “who wanted to defund the police.” Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada has long highlighted her pro-law enforcement credentials, including with an ad featuring a police chief praising her record of being “tough on crime.” And Lt. Gov. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, whose history on criminal justice issues is being denounced by Republicans, sounded pro-law enforcement notes at a senior center on Friday as he discussed his tenure as the mayor of Braddock, Pa., saying he “was proud to work with our police departments, and funding the police.” Nationwide, Democrats spent more money last month on ads that used the word “police” than Republicans did, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. But heavy Republican spending on crime ads earlier this year has helped define the final weeks of the campaign in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. National crime trends are mixed and complex, and Republicans have often reached for arguments about crime or border security, with varying results. Some party strategists doubt the issue will be decisive this year, with many Americans far more focused on economic matters. But a Gallup survey released late last month found that “Americans are more likely now than at any time over the past five decades to say there is more crime in their local area than there was a year ago.” The issue, fanned and sometimes distorted by conservative news outlets, has been especially pronounced in liberal-leaning states, including New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Wisconsin, where big cities have struggled with concerns about violence and quality of life over the last few years. But the topic is at play in many tight Senate, House and governors’ races...
Tuesday's going to be blast!
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