Did I watch CNN all night last night until the race was called for Warnock around 11 P.M? Is New York a city? Does a bear sh*t in the woods?
I sat there all night until Herschel Walker stood in front of his supporters and must have thanked God at least 20 times in a speech which maybe lasted three minutes, maybe less.
I thought that Warnock was going to kick ass. I didn’t believe the pre-election polls, which turned out to be absolutely correct. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would vote for a guy who in a runoff for the U.S. Senate thought he was running for a seat in the U.S. House.
And yet all the Fake News commentators could talk about yesterday was how this election was yet another repudiation of Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, if the election showed us anything, it’s the fact that the Democrats better start figuring what to do if they don’t have Trump to run against in 2024.
Because for all the talk about the MAGA ‘base,’ and the Trump this and the Trump that, the fact (note the use of the word ‘fact’) is that he won the 2016 Presidential election because what’s-her-name ran the worst Presidential campaign of all time, and he got clobbered in 2020 when he ran for President a second time.
Yea, yea, I know a politician’s base is what matters in the primaries much more than in the November vote count. If that’s the case, how come nobody ever mentions the fact (note the use of that word again) that Joe got more than 19 million votes in the 2020 Democratic primaries whereas Trump pulled out 14 million primary voters in 2016?
The truth is that Republicans don’t like to vote. And for all the GOP hot air about how they believe in democracy and blah, blah, blah, and blah, when was the last time you ever saw the Republicans do a voter registration drive or a Get Out the Vote campaign?
Remember how Trump said he had raised an ‘army’ of 50,000 who were going to show up at all the polling places in 2020 to make sure that everything on election day went off fair and square? My sister was a Democratic poll-watcher in one of the contested districts in Philadelphia in 2020, you know, one of those polling places where we stole all the votes. The GOP poll-watcher never showed up.
On the other hand, just about every national election still turns on how that middle five percent moves back and forth between red to blue in the so-called ‘swing’ states. And the fact that Trump’s presence either on the ticket or on the campaign trail provoked so many voters to come out for the blue side, doesn’t necessarily mean that all those voters will continue to show up if Trump’s not around.
I would love it if Trump was on the ballot again in 2024, but that situation is looking increasingly dim. Not only was his campaign announcement greeted with a big yawn both within and without media land, but he will be facing both another investigation for business fraud in New York plus a connection to criminal referrals about to be made by the Select Committee in D.C.
And the worst news of all for Trump is that his return to Twitter wasn’t such big news. And not only is Trump just one among everyone who now uses social media to be heard but what happens to Truth Social, which was struggling to turn a buck even before Trump could switch back to his Twitter account?
I think a comment in WaPo yesterday said it best. There won’t be a big explosion that will take Trump down, there will just be a collapse as one mishap after another – dinner with a Nazi, swiping classified documents, backing an unqualified jerk like Herschel Walker - continues to occur.
Which is all fine and well, but it still raises the possibility that Trump’s demise will create a narrative vacuum for the blue team, which has had Trump to kick around endlessly for the last several years.
If anything came out of the Georgia result last night, it was the affirmation again that you don’t win elections just by telling the voters that your opponent is no goddamn good. Either you have some positive ideas about what to do or you don’t. And if you don’t, you wind up like Herschel Walker, standing in front of the crowd and thanking God again and again even though you lost.
Comments