Watch Out Democrats - The Worst Is Yet To Come.

Now that the Fake News media has run out of steam warning America about the threat of Trump-led Fascism, they can ramp up their next narrative about impending disaster by talking about how many Senate and House seats the Democrats will lose in 2022. And the proof that Biden’s leadership is going to collapse, and Trump and his minions will come roaring back next year, can be found in the results of the elections last week.

After all, Virginia has a Republican Governor who won the election, according to jailbird Steve Bannon because Republican poll-watchers kept the Democrats from stealing votes. The vote-stealers also barely held onto the Governor’s seat in New Jersey, a state which has never held an election without the Democrats committing voter fraud.

These results indicate that the Democrats are headed for a catastrophe next year which will make them the minority party for at least the next decade! So says Ezra Klein, a (failing) New York Times columnist, who bases this Armageddon-like prediction using the data analysis of a kid named David Shor, who has discovered a remarkable truth about the Democratic Party, namely, that its DC-based leadership is much more liberal, entitled and educated than the voters it needs to attract in midwestern and rural states which have no people but still get two Senate seats each.

This disparity, according to Klein and Shor, is accentuated by the ongoing battle over cultural values, including such issues as school curricula, the ‘woke’ movement and defunding the police, On all these issues, according to Shor, the leadership of the Democratic Party is not only far to the left of its voting blocs, but cannot hope to attract the swing voters who ultimately decide how most electoral contests play out.

What does the blue team need to do to maintain or expand the tiny majority it enjoys right now? They need to find some way to re-ignite the energy and commitment out in the boondocks that erupted and led to Obama’s victory in 2008. The 2008 election has taken on something of a legendary image these days, because until the last-second 2021 vote in Georgia, it was the last time that the Democrats controlled both the White House and the Hill.

The argument being made by Shor and his followers is that the electorate continues to shift slightly to the Right, in particular those voters who live in the less-populated and less-educated states. This is the population whose voting behavior will determine the winners and losers over the next decade, if not longer, and this is the population which increasingly finds itself at odds with the highly-educated and highly-urbanized professional class which determines what Democratic candidates are going to say.

This is all well and good, but I am leery of any attempt to predict voting behavior or election outcomes based on messaging, or ideological attitudes, or anything else which neglects to factor in the mechanics of how campaigns are actually run. Klein goes on for paragraph after paragraph discussing how Clinton’s messaging did not overcome the ability of Trump to create a racial and cultural divide which gave him the necessary voting edge in certain, key states. But the whole question of how you actually move from messaging to voting is left entirely undiscussed.

I have friends who did GOTV work for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and also did GOTV for Clinton in 2016. They were sent to swing states both in the East and the West. They could not get over the difference between the organization and management of Obama’s ground-game efforts and the lack of any organized effort in the Hillary campaign. In 2016, if you wanted to volunteer to do GOTV for Hillary in Dade County, FL, the office for this effort was located in Orlando! How do you manage a GOTV effort in Dade County from Orlando? You don’t.

Republicans have never been comfortable with people exercising their franchise. They don’t do GOTV efforts, it’s not their thing. In 2020 the GOP claimed that it had recruited a 50,000-person ‘army’ to do poll watching and get out the vote. This claim, which was repeated without any checking by the Fake News media, was a total and complete lie.

On the other hand, know where ‘stop the steal’ came from? It didn’t come from Roger Stone. It was invented by Hillary, who blamed her loss entirely on Russian interference in her campaign. Why didn’t she show up once in Michigan where she lost a key state by a whole, whopping 11,000 votes? Because – ready? – she was afraid that if she went into Michigan it would result in more Trump voters coming out.

When it comes to politics, the real problem with the Fake News is that it’s no longer news. It’s become a launch-pad for every journalist who wants to sit behind a desk, make a few telephone calls and then write a nice, thousand-word op-ed that will get enough online responses from readers to justify the appearance of his/her prose.

I remember when op-eds were only on the editorial page, the rest of the paper contained stories and interviews about events, in other words, what we used to call ‘news.’

And if you want people to get interested in what you have to say, whether it’s about any issue at all, make sure to always present it in the most threatening and frightening terms. After all, what could be worse than the GOP coming back to take command?