Last night, a Republican no one ever heard of a year ago won the right to occupy the Governor’s Mansion in Virginia, which Joe Biden had won by 10 percentage points less than a year ago. A Democratic incumbent governor generally assumed to be a shoo-in for re-election in New Jersey until recently was trailing his Republican challenger in a race too close to call. Back to “Ol’ Virginy,” Republicans also took the Lt. Governor and Attorney General slots. Minneapolis’s referendum seeking to replace the police department with an Orwellian “Department of Public Safety” was soundly defeated.
Good. The Democrats were begging for a rebuke like this, and they got it. A better example of what George Will, back when I respected him, called “condign justice” could hardly be imagined. More ominous still for Joe Biden’s party, it is difficult to see how the carnage of last night doesn’t make an epic wipe-out in the 2022 mid-terms in 2022 a near certainty, except that Republicans are fully capable of lousing up a sure thing.
While all this was going on, those objective, professional, unbiased analysts on MSNBC, CNN and just about everywhere else but the jubilant Fox News were freaking out; presumably the pundits and reporters in the Post and the Times will be emulating them. They were all complicit in the Democratic wipe-out, refusing to report just how bad the Biden Presidency has been for the first ten months (with the occasional exception, like the Afghanistan debacle), continuing to bash Donald Trump as if he was still tweeting, and generally insulting any American who wasn’t ready to do their his or her impression of Winston Smith.
Watch: this will be characterized across the board as proving how racist the United States still is, and how democracy is in dire straits, when the real significance is exactly the opposite. (Well, let me clarify that: the Democrats are still promoting anti-white racism, but they just got slapped for it, and democracy is still under attack, but last night represented a stout and spirited defense.) What last night also proved, again, is that Lincoln was right: you can’t fool all the people all the time, with this key addendum: you especially can’t do it while calling the people evil and racist, blatantly lying, and behaving as if you are certain they are morons, all while looking awfully dumb yourself.
That last part fairly describes how Terry McAuliffe and his allies campaigned. As a Virginian (well, a Bostonian in exile in Virginia), I was certain that McAuliffe would lose when he inadvertently spoke the truth during his debate with now Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin: he (and his party) don’t want parents interfering with the ideological indoctrination of their children. It wasn’t a “gaffe,” as the news media decribed it; the statement was an accurate description of how public schools and school boards have been behaving in Virginia (and elsewhere). McAuliffe doubled down on his statement, tripled down, quadrupled down, and then, when his polling showed that it wasn’t working, did a triple-somersault mid-air and said he was taken out of context, which was ridiculous since the context was on live TV for everyone to see. More lies followed; after all, this guy was trained by the Clintons. He talked about how much he admired Virginia’s public schools, though all but one of his children never attended them. He and his surrogates followed the Left’s “It isn’t what it is” script by denying that critical race theory or its equivalent was being taught. McAuliffe kept describing Youngkin as a Donald Trump disciple, even claiming that Trump was campaigning with the Republican, though he never entered the state. At the same time, the Biden administration showed its complicity by quickly responding to a call from those indoctrination-minded school boards to keep angry parents at bay with a speech-chilling memo from Merrick Garland threatening them as aspiring domestic terrorists if they crossed vague and ill-defined lines in their passion. Brilliant.
And all of this was going on while a weak and declining President, chosen only because he could be disguised as a “moderate” while decidedly non-moderates were pulling his strings, was failing on every front, and real moderates in his party, unwilling to ram a socialist, nanny-state agenda through Congress that would add more nitro-glycerine to the debt and inflation, were being harassed in bathrooms by the party’s “base” and being excoriated by the party’s captive news media. At the same time, statues of the Founders were being torn down, professors who dared to express non-woke opinions were being punished, “anti-racism” measures that were obviously racist were being extolled, and dissent was being censored by Big Tech and social
And they really thought they could get away with it!
That’s the most amazing part of all. They really have that much contempt for Americans. In the end, last night’s reckoning was born of hubris, arrogance, incompetence and hate.
More to come in Part 2.
But I need some sleep.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack, I think you pretty much nailed it.
I talked to our son late last night as we celebrated the Braves’ World Series win (he’s a big Braves fan as well) and told him it was a good night. His response…? “Yep, and not just for baseball, either.”
I hope this is the kind of whirlwind – the whirlwind of the ballot box – the Left reaps over the next couple of years, rather than the one I have feared. It confirms that there are still “avenues of dialogue and debate” open for American citizens on all sides of the issues and the peaceful election-and-transfer-of-power process can still be the final arbiter in the matter. It feels like one side, in its grabs for power, has tried to narrow, or even shut down, the ability to debate, but so far, they’ve been less successful than they hoped and less successful than I feared.
After last night, the Left may fight harder. The other side must use those “rebellious” Virginia parents as something of a spiritual springboard to fight harder as well.
MLB To Braves: Hold Victory Parade In Denver
The incomparable Mr. Schlecht.
He never was the man he used to be……
I feel the need to apologize to Mr Schlecht–I reused your comment the other day on a local comment board without attribution. In my defense, the comment I copied was your list of all the doomsday quotes about the climate summits, so it was mostly just a comment quoting other people. Still, thank you for that.
Shoot JMF, that’s public information, all I did was assemble it.
And if memory serves, I may have had a bit of help……
The blog Reidout says that Youngkin won by “exploiting the ignorance of white people.” Go figure.
That’s just a blunt expression of what the Left’s talking point will be going forward. We saw its origins last night.
Yep, you’re a racist if you’re not in favor of giving massive amounts of free stuff to black people, er, people of color.*
Was that really Cornel West appearing on MSNBC’s election coverage? I think it was!
____________
*A little help here? I need some clarification on “people of color.” The Taiwanese American Harvard grad woman who’s been elected mayor of Beantown is evidently “a person of color.” I thought Chinese were the devil incarnate when it comes to college admissions. They are in fact “people of color?” Then why the fuss about too many of them getting into Harvard? I’m confused.
It’s really very simple. Apartheid era South Africa classified mainland Chinese as coloured (which, for them, was an intermediate stage ranked above outright black), but classified Chinese from Taiwan (then usually called Formosa) as “honorary white”.
I see no ideological mandates as a result of the elections, I see division.
Even though the Minneapolis public safety referendum question to eliminate the Police Department and replace it with a Public Safety agency was soundly defeated by 12 points, the results are also significant in another way. This was a referendum on public safety and it should have been defeated by well over 20 points and probably over 30 points but it wasn’t, there’s still 62,813 (44%) voters in Minneapolis that actually wanted to get rid of the Police Department and that is very significant, this kind of public division regarding public safety is very disturbing.
What will happen in the political scene now is anyone’s guess going forward; however, I don’t think the Democrats are going to let up, they can’t allow the public to see perceive Republicans as have any momentum heading into the 2022 elections. I think the Democrats will double down on all the things that have helped push their totalitarian ideological agent forward. I expect to see lots of gaslighting from the left in general and a rhetorical call to arms from progressives trying to fire up their army of social justice warrior activists to take to the streets and neighborhoods across the USA and not allow any Republican any peace. Attack, attack, attack until there is complete submission to their ideology and then figuratively kick the opposition while they’re down so they can’t get back up.
I think the closeness of this election shows progressives that It’s all or nothing for them now.
“Even though the Minneapolis public safety referendum question to eliminate the Police Department and replace it with a Public Safety agency was soundly defeated by 12 points, the results are also significant in another way. […]there’s still 62,813 (44%) voters in Minneapolis that actually wanted to get rid of the Police Department”
This was going to be one of my first points on last night. People can be forgiven for voting for their party on issues they care deeply about, particularly if they find the other side of the binary unappealing, heck, to a certain extent it’s expected and necessary. But ballot measures for drug legalization, gay marriage, and prison reform still succeed in deeply red areas…. Ballot measures are a real litmus on what people actually think on any given issue. The fact that 44% of the Minneapolis electorate voted to replace their entire police department is stunning.
It’s funny. In Arizona, what most states would call their Highway Patrol is called the Department of Public Safety, or DPS.
I think the ballot measure was the equivalent of re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The department would be renamed and a bunch of other administrative union jobs would be added and police would be made miserable, but I don’t think cops in squad cars would have been eliminated.
Frankly, I was hoping the measure would pass so Minneapolis would devolve into a complete goat rodeo. Condign justice, you know.
In a lot of Western states (Texas, NM, AZ), they have a Department of Public Safety, which handles statewide policing. The famous Texas Rangers, for example, fall under the Texas Department of Public Safety, but they are not the same as the Texas Highway Patrol, who are more like a conventional state police force, and also fall under Texas DPS. In NJ we have the Department of Law and Public Safety, a very large agency which handles all legal matters, both civil and criminal, at the state level. The Division of State Police is just one division of that department among many (the Division of Law, which handles civil law matters, is where I would be if I were a state employee). In the City of Newark we have the Department of Public Safety, which is just combining the police, the fire department, and the Office of Emergency Management under one agency.
The proposed Minneapolis Department of Public Safety appears to have been envisioned as a whole different animal, taking a “holistic” approach to public safety, with the OPTION of employing armed peace officers, but no OBLIGATION to do so. The vision also appeared not to rely primarily on enforcing the law, but instead solving problems some other way, with force only as a last resort, if at all. Sounds good, but I wouldn’t want to be an unarmed social worker trying to deal with a raging abusive husband or a drugged up homeless guy.
Would have been fun seeing how it worked out, Steve. Utter chaos. Think of all the criminals, petty and otherwise, that would relocate to Minneapolis.
The Committee of Public Safety (free translation) was the institution in Revolutionary France that did all the official repressing, up to and including getting people guillotined.
I wrote, “I think the Democrats will double down on all the things that have helped push their totalitarian ideological agent forward.”, “Attack, attack, attack until there is complete submission to their ideology and then figuratively kick the opposition while they’re down so they can’t get back up.”
…and so it begins…
Glenn Youngkin’s victory proves white ignorance is a powerful weapon
Yup, that right MSNBC, attack the people that voted for Youngkin and call them ignorant, that’ll get you more support for the Democratic Party.
Notice in that MSNBC article how the author talks out of both sides of his mouth about critical race theory, “Ultimately, his campaign settled on a game plan that seemed to resonate deeply with white voters in Virginia: targeting school lesson plans that address inequality and social justice.” but then he goes on the the same paragraph to say that “Critical race theory is a college-level field of study that’s not taught in Virginia K-12 schools”. The author directly contradicted himself, about CRT in K-12 schools. The author clearly states that there are lesson plans that address inequality and social justice and then he says that CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools when part of CRT lesson plans actually do address inequality and social justice, that’s what CRT is built upon, it’s pure indoctrination and the author is trying to gaslight the public.
Read the whole article. The author Ja’han Jones sounds like an anti-white bigot throughout the article, it’s truly “enlightening”.
He is a complete anti-white bigot. Unfortunately, we white folks are fed up with being insulted and bullied.
Hmmmmm……..
When I read between the lines in that segment of the article I got the impression that they might actually want Trump’s presence on Facebook and Twitter to be restored so they have their favorite political target back in the news to keep the anti-Republican hate alive at the polls. Was this a dog whistle aimed directly at Facebook and Twitter?
Oh, there has never been any question in my mind that banning Trump from social media was a big benefit for him and Republicans. So would sewing his lips together with steel wire. But neither action is ethical.
Did you consider that this shows the level of vote fraud that is going on? With ballot harvesting alleged in this area, new allegations of nursing home vote harvesting, all the other evidence of voter fraud across the country, could it be that 20%, 30% or more of the votes could be fraudulent?
The answer is that I don’t know and neither do you. Our election laws are violated with such impunity with no accountability to the point that we don’t know. “After the election observers were dismissed and vote counting resumed without them, why did the consistent 51% Republican, 49% Democrat vote ratio suddenly change to 20,000 votes Democrat, while the Republican vote total DELINED by 1000?” You don’t know, I don’t know, and no one knows for sure because the voting procedures were violated. No recount could be done because the ballots were left unsecured.
Michael R.,
Okay; but, I don’t understand how any of that is related to my comment which is what you replied to.
Virginia is still a blue state. The Left could back off some of its more crazy ideas in order to win and still be a package of crazy ideas that aren’t good for the country.
(and that’s what they’ll do in 2022 – back off, or reconfigure the excess crazy)
I mean. Maybe…. But that’s good too, right? We don’t need to beat the Democrats if we can make them realign to a less extreme place.
Right now the electorate is in a good place because they don’t have any appetite for excess wokeness, so the alternatives are: Stay the course, and get blown out, or realign to something less crazy, actually moderate, and maybe start winning again.
I feel like I win either way.
The only way we really lose is if Republicans generally take this opportunity to pretend they have a transformative mandate and blast off to the right.
I mean, not communicating something isn’t the same as realigning.
Watching and reading election coverage last night, I was flashing back to 2016 when TV people were morose because Hillary wasn’t winning. Then I flashed back to 2020 as leads began to shrink as boxes full of mail in ballots and ballots from Democratically controlled precincts started to arrive with all Democratic votes in them. I went to bed fully expecting the Democrats to have stolen the Virginia election.
Question for Steve Kornacki: “Steve, why is it that mail in ballots in New Jersey are equivalent to Democrat votes?” You said it in so many words. Por qua?
Man, that Larry Sabato guy is despicable.
Something that I think Republicans far and wide, including and especially President Trump, should take note of is how Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin won the election without any perceived assistance from President Trump. I think this is a real sign that Trump’s overall appeal is dwindling and those that distance themselves from Trump are on the rise. This is very significant and shows how vulnerable Trump would be if he chooses to put his name in the ring for the 2024 election. The Trump era might be coming to an end and in my opinion that’s a good thing. Trump should start taking a back seat in politics.
The only question I have right now is who will be politically effective to get the GOP nomination in 2024. I’m looking for that pebble…
The Dems and media seem to think “Trump voters” only vote for Donald Trump and if Trump is not on the ballot, they’ll just evaporate into the ether (or vote for Democrats?). It’s column A or column B and “Trump voters” are not the walking dead. They’ll vote for candidates who espouse certain policies.
The network broadcast and print media were and are the prime ethics corrupters of the Democratic Party, covering for their bullshit instead of at least presenting counter-arguments (if even only to explain the counter-arguments’ flaws).
In the summer of 2020, several of these outlets called the protests a racial recnkoning.
Yesterday’s elections looks much more like a racial reckoning.
Democrats are flat out lying when they CRT is not taught in schools. People don’t mean that it is “literally” taught in the nuts and bolts way of an academic lecture, but the general cultural sentiment behind it is being taught, and children are coming home to their parents asking them questions about whether they are evil for being white. I don’t know how widespread the practice is, but it is happening. Public schools are also pushing kindergarteners into gender ideology when they are too young to understand any of it.
And, calling everyone who disagrees with you a white supremacist is getting old fast. The left in this country has defanged the meaning of racism now. I don’t believe anyone on the left when they tell me someone did/said something racist because their definition is basically, “Anything I disagree with.”
Exactly.
jvb
One more thing this win demonstrates is the “we can’t win against the cheating” disenfranchisement of the right has passed. I’m pretty convinced that the two senate losses in Georgia we tied to that self defeating pessimism. I was pretty worried that it could take hold, and it would spell defeat for republicans all over the country.
This win shows that this fear can subside and it is indeed possible to swing states the other way.
First comment since March! Welcome back!
Thanks!
I’ve been reading all along, I really do enjoy your content.
I think if Trump had kept his mouth shut and stopped going on about the election being stolen, the GOP might have won both of the Senate races.
I think you’re right…. But I’m also kind of glad we lost those two seats. If we’d won them, the last year, all we would have heard about was “Republican obstructionism”. Now, they have their majority, thin as it is, they still can’t get shit done, and there isn’t a Republican on Earth they can blame. Losing those two seats paved the way for the Democrats to get obliterated in ’22…. Which will harken in two years of “Republican Obstructionism” talking points before ’24.
If the Republicans regain control of both houses of Congress in 2022 (which seems almost a certainty at this point), wouldn’t that put Democrats in the role of obstructionists?
You don’t understand how media narratives work.
I think it’s morphed into “We *can* win against the cheating” now though, as opposed to “these elections are actually clean”, and I don’t blame the people who feel that way. Election officials need to get their shit together.
As an example, in the New Jersey Governors race: Midnight last night, the auto-updated map at NPR showed that Ciattarelli was marginally ahead in Bergen, Jersey’s most populous county, and that 100% of the ballots were in. This was a huge upset, and I thought signaled the race for Ciattarelli. We go to sleep and find that overnight, about 40,000 ballots had been added to the totals and Murphy blew Ciattarelli out in Bergen.
What happened there? Did they find a load of ballots in a corner? Was the 100% not inclusive of mail in ballots? Did the Democrat’s fraud machine go brrrrrrr? I don’t know. I’d love for them to explain it. And I’d really like it if we could figure out a way to run election reporting that actually inspired confidence.