Short version: The Republicans won a few races, but there was no ‘red’ landslide as some, not just Republicans, had predicted. Though of course a few key races are going down to the wire, so control of the House and Senate are still up in the air.
My prediction about *this* situation is that, the more Republicans fail to win races they claimed (despite polls) to be certain to win, the more accusations of voter fraud will fly. Only if they won every race would they be happy with “election integrity”.
Again, no attempt here to be comprehensive, just some links that caught my attention today.
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Summary of reactions from NYT columnists: Times Columnists on Winners and Losers From the Election, subtitled “How did Democrats escape a rout? Where will the results leave America? Times Opinion columnists and writers were making sense of the midterm elections all night.”
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Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 9 Nov 2022: The Dobbs effect is real: Voters, still angry about the Roe overturn, turned out to protect abortion, subtitled “Pundits said people forgot about Dobbs. The success of abortion rights and pro-choice politicians says different”
File under: Be careful what you wish for.
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Salon, Samaa Khullar, 9 Nov 2022: “I should not be blamed at all”: Trump throws his MAGA candidates under the bus after midterm losses, subtitled “Trump distanced himself from New Hampshire loser Don Bolduc and reportedly trashed Pennsylvania loser Mehmet Oz”
“Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all,” Trump said in an interview with NewsNation.
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Salon, Areeba Shah, 9 Nov 2022: “How is this not a red wave?”: Fox News struggles to cope with “how to explain” GOP midterm failure, subtitled “‘That is a searing indictment of the Republican Party,’ said Fox pundit Marc Thiessen”
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Jamelle Bouie, NY Times, 8 Nov 2022: No One Forced Republicans to Do Any of These Things
He begins by writing of historical necessity.
Many — too many — political observers speak as if Republican leaders and officials had no choice but to accept Donald Trump into the fold, no choice but to apologize for his every transgression, no choice but to humor his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election and now no choice but to embrace election-denying candidates around the country.
But that’s nonsense. For all the pressures of the base, for all the fear of Trump and his gift for ridicule, for all the demands of the donor class, it is also true that at every turn, Republicans in Washington and elsewhere have made an active and affirmative choice to embrace the worst elements of their party — and jettison the norms and values that make democracy work — for the sake of their narrow political and ideological objectives.
Those objectives, for what it’s worth, are nothing new. To the extent that the Trump-era Republican Party has an agenda, it is what it has always been: to be a handmaiden to the total domination of capital, to facilitate the upward redistribution of wealth and to strengthen hierarchies of class and status. To those ends, Republicans in Washington have already announced plans to reduce social insurance, cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and restrict abortion rights.
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AlterNet, Thom Hartmann, 8 Nov 2022: Republicans are attacking the heart of our democracy the same way they did in 1964 — and for the very same reason
Republicans have been attacking the heart of our democracy right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about “voter fraud.”
No other developed country in the world worries about “voter fraud” because it’s been nonexistent in most modern democracies. It’s not a thing anywhere except in the United States, and now Brazil. And it’s only a thing here because of this strategy that was developed in 1964.
Most countries don’t even have what we call voter registration, because they don’t want a system to try to cut back on the number of people who can vote.
If you’re a citizen, you vote. You show up with your ID and vote at any polling location you choose; in many countries because you’re a citizen they simply mail you the ballot and you vote by mail. Everybody gets one.
After all, what kind of idiot is stupid enough to risk going to prison to cast one vote out of millions? What possible payoff is there to that? And the one time somebody tries to do it at scale — like the Republican scheme a few years ago in North Carolina to buy a few dozen mail-in ballots from low-income people in a trailer park — it gets exposed because it’s almost impossible to cover things like that up for any period of time. After all, it would take thousands of votes in most places, sometimes tens of thousands, to alter election outcomes.
This passage is telling because it explains why “voter fraud” is simply implausible as an explanation for election results. Why would individuals bother? And if there’s some massive conspiracy, via voting machines or 5G signals from China (I’m making this up), why haven’t Republicans been able to find evidence *for even one*? (Aside from the general implausibility of conspiracies, where so many people would have to be involved, none of them giving the game away.)
This is an example of the benefits of knowing something about other societies than one’s own, and other time periods than one’s present. The other example I’ve heard about is that, a century ago (until World War I roughly), there were no such things as closed borders, no such things as passports. For most of human history, “borders” were not fixed and people moved around as they pleased, mostly following economic opportunities. As “refugees” from Central and South America do now, or trying to do now, heading north.
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This headline summarizes what may be going on.
NY Times Roundtable, 9 Nov 2022: ‘We May Have Reached the Limit of Crazy That Will Be Tolerated’
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AlterNet, Brandon Gage, 8 Nov 2022: ‘Gaslighting’: Mehdi Hasan blasts Republicans for ‘moaning’ about election rules that they adopted
MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan tore into Republicans on Tuesday afternoon for simultaneously passing laws to overcomplicate elections and then complaining about the consequences of having added unnecessary extra steps to ballot counting processes.
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AlterNet, Alex Henderson, 9 Nov 2022: ‘He’s never been weaker’: Conservatives ‘rage at Trump’ over red tsunami that never materialized
Trump, true to form, is giving himself credit for the victories that some MAGA candidates enjoyed on Election Night. When his candidates lose, he typically attributes their loss to either voter fraud or claims that they lost because they weren’t MAGA enough. But in an article published by Fox News’ website on November 9, journalist Anders Hagstrom reports that some conservatives are blaming Trump for the lack of a red tsunami.
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Frank Bruni, NY Times, 9 Nov 2022: Ron DeSantis’s God Complex (subscriber only).
After decades of closely observing and writing about American politics, I’m accustomed to the runaway religiosity of many political campaigns and to a whiff of theocracy in our democracy. But an ad that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida released in the final days of his successful re-election bid nonetheless took my breath away.
It’s possible you didn’t see it or read about it in the whirl of news and nervousness as the midterm finish line neared. But you must. And you must take in — and be prepared to take on — the staggering hubris and flamboyant piousness in it. In him.
[… ending with:]
He brings to his political ambitions not just the customary cockiness but a more sinister zeal and grandiosity. No wonder he gets under Trump’s skin. They’re megalomaniacs of a feather.
I’m looking forward to seeing T**** and DeSantis splitting the MAGA vote.
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Finally, it’s been widely reported that Elon Musk advised the masses to vote Republican, ostensibly to maintain a “balance” in government between Congress and the Presidency.
NYT: Elon Musk Puts His Own Politics on Display on Election Day, subtitled “The new owner of Twitter has urged his followers to vote Republican.”
But he’s merely confirming the widespread observation that the wealthy support the Republican party because Republicans vote tax cuts, and bend over backwards to benefit business. See Jamelle Bouie item above. Nothing new here.
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NYT: Paul Krugman comments about this (subscriber only): Is Divided Government Good? Don’t Take Elon’s Word for It.
I have to admit: It has been fascinating to see Elon Musk tweeting his way ever deeper into a hole. It’s like watching a car crash — an electric, self-driving-car crash.
Nor is this just about Twitter. I’m not a marketing expert, but it seems obvious that Tesla’s brand rests in part on the perception that Musk himself is a cool guy. Tweeting out homophobic conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi and suspending the accounts of comedians who mock him doesn’t seem good for that perception.
But I’m not here to give Musk business advice. What struck me instead was the justification he gave in urging Americans to vote Republican — an assertion that divided government is good because “shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties.”
Leave aside the rather obvious question of whether extremists are equally prevalent on the two sides of the aisle. Is divided government actually good?
Answer, after displaying several charts and graphs: No.
