A View From the "Red Sea"
Reflections on the 2022 General Election and the apparent forthcoming "Red Wave" from the most Republican district in America.
Although early voting was underway in Tennessee until this past Thursday, and some people are still allowed to vote in certain locations in other parts of the United States even today, Tuesday is the day which, by law and custom, the State and national General Election take place across the United States- the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
During this election cycle the mainstream press has been obsessed with the notion that the Republicans would not do as well as would normally be projected because of the overturning Roe v. Wade by the newly established precedent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, but the Democratic obsession over abortion has proven to be a non-starter for most people. As it turns out, far more women are concerned about where their next meal is coming from than whether or not there is a fictitious legal right to kill their unborn children. Furthermore, no small number of people on all sides of the issue of abortion have figured out that the matter has truly been returned to the States, where the vast majority of our daily life and law is determined in America. The vast majority of our laws which determine what constitutes a crime, what does not, and what the penalties for the violation of criminal and civil law will be are made at the State level. That reality pleases many pro-lifers who can legitimately push for abortion restrictions within their States, up to and including outright bans, such as we have here in Tennessee. Pro-abortion advocates cannot legitimately say that abortion is against the law everywhere in America, because that's false.
Since people on both sides of the abortion issue understand these realities, what has happened is exactly what many of us who were opposed to Roe from the beginning believed would happen, and that is that for the vast majority of American voters, abortion is largely off the table in national elections but becomes a huge issue at the State level. Democrats have always publicly said that if abortion were taken off the table they would do much better, they believed, saying that abortion was a "wedge issue." Now here we are a day before the first General Election since Roe was overturned, and it has largely been the Democrats who have been obsessed with the abortion issue. Republicans have talked about the issue of rising crime in the major cities of the nation, massive inflation that has taken hold of the national economy since Mr. Biden has taken office, and - as a corollary to the inflation issue - the much higher price of fuel and energy, due in large part to the Biden administration's insistence on closing down the Keystone XL oil pipeline and restricting the use of other domestic energy pipelines.
The policies which are causing the Democrats' political and electoral problems in this cycle are policies of their own making, they are not policies for which the current Administration can rightly blame their predecessor, since the results of many of these policies can directly be traced to their implementation. In addition to energy policy, Democratic Mayors largely run the major cities of the nation, and the three largest cities in the country are in States run by Democratic Governors. All three have a major crime and violence problem, owing in no small part to the soft policies of restricting or eliminating cash bail or even refusing to charge petty crime at all in many Democratic jurisdictions.
Adding to all of this is the national Democratic Party's continuing obsession with what we can only call "woke politics." This is the kind of politics where everything from rulings of the Supreme Court (a court which has African-American, women, and Jewish justices) to crime policy is seen through a racial or sexual dimension, and where what our eyes can clearly see to be true is somehow not the case, and we shouldn't believe it. If a man says he is a woman, we should believe him, even if he is obviously a man, and we should celebrate when such a man beats a field of hard-working, competitive women in a woman's sport.
Ordinary Americans see just how far from the mainstream the Democratic Party has decided to go and they are reacting late in the electoral process, and we are seeing it in the polling numbers. RealClearPolitics now projects that based on their "poll of polls" and the situation on the ground in the country that Republicans could win as many as 54 Senate seats, with a projected gain of around 34 seats in the House of Representatives at the time of writing. Some projections say that the Republicans could win 50 or more seats in the House.
The latest Democratic scare tactic is to tell the country that "election deniers" are about to gain control of the nation, that is to say a group of people who did not trust that the results of the 2020 presidential election accurately tabulated or reported to the people, with some of them refusing to accept the validity of those results. We must accept the outcome of the election, we are told, from people who routinely question whether or not Republicans have actually beaten them, with the present Democratic nominee for Governor of Georgia repeatedly telling people for the last 4 years that she was "the real Governor." While it is true that voters and sometimes people in politics tend to have short memories, most people do remember Mrs. Clinton repeatedly saying that she had beaten Donald Trump, calling the 45th President “illegitimate”, and even publicly questioning the outcome of the election in speeches and public statements long after it was over, though to her credit she did concede (although as with Mr. Trump, if Mrs. Clinton had refused to concede, it would have made no difference in the outcome). At one point Mrs. Clinton even threatened to run against Mr. Trump in 2020, saying that she would "beat him again." The evil of "election denial" only seems to apply if the person doing the denying is a Republican or a supporter of Mr. Trump, something which most casual observers can easily pick up on.
We are told that those who deny the election results are a "threat to democracy" because a group of unruly people in what was otherwise a constitutionally protected protest made it into the Capitol building and caused mayhem on the 6th of January 2021. These "threats to democracy" included an unarmed female veteran, the only casualty of the day, and a hooligan in a viking hat who looked like he was at an English soccer match as opposed to a protest at the United States Capitol. This “threat to democracy” occurred the same week that the Democratic controlled House of Representatives opened their session with one of their members praying an absurd pseudo-polytheistic prayer ending with the phrase "Amen and Awoman." Nevermind, though, because we are to believe what the mainstream press tells us and not what our eyes can clearly see. Democrats don’t believe in political violence, they assure us.
For my own part, I concur that President Biden was legally elected President in 2020 according to the rules established at the time. However, I absolutely believe that Democratic operatives in critical States, as well as others sympathetic to the Democratic ticket, were very quick to manipulate the rules and use the Covid-19 pandemic to change the voting procedures in such a way so that a Biden victory would be much easier to bring about. I believe that some of the methods that they used were likely unethical, even if they were legal at the time. In some of the places where I believe that these things likely occurred, the laws have since been changed to make that kind of legalized mischief much more difficult to occur. As to whether denying election results is a supposed "threat to democracy," I will leave aside the misuse of the term "democracy" in American Constitutional government, which the Left seems to do with impunity in this country, and simply point out that if this is indeed the free country that we all claim to believe that it is, everyone has a right to question the results of an election if they so choose, people have a right to keep questioning it if they believe it was unfair, just as anyone has a right to protest and petition the government. If those who do such questioning are wrong, the people will react accordingly. If the voters are willing to give such people a hearing, perhaps the legislative instruments of the federal government ought to do the same for the sake of clarity.
My own predictions for how the General Election will turn out will be optimistic from a Republican perspective, but not quite as generous as some pundits suggest. Republicans will, I believe, control both Houses of Congress, and we will know that fact by Wednesday. I believe that the GOP will likely win 52 Senate seats, with Herschel Walker ultimately prevailing in Georgia after a December 6th runoff. Where we will likely see any real "Red Wave" will be in the U.S. House of Representatives, where I believe that Republican gains may exceed some predictions, with a swing of between 30 and 50 seats. The size of the incoming Republican House majority just might be large enough that the Republicans would control the House of Representatives for many years to come. Republicans will have the overwhelming majority of Governors in the States across the country at the end of the night, and that total might include a couple of upsets of Democratic incumbents
.As it happens, my own vote will make little difference in the national outcome, since I live in one of the safest Republican constituencies in the country. The First Congressional District of Tennessee has not elected a Democrat since 1878, the closest a Democrat has come in our district in recent years is just over 22% of the vote. Congresswoman Diana Harshbarger will easily defeat the token Democratic candidate, Cameron Parsons. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee will easily win reelection over Democrat Dr. Jason Martin, who is virtually unknown outside of Middle Tennessee. Better-known Democrats, such as Knoxville State Representative Gloria Johnson and Tennessee Senate Minority Leader Jeff Yarbro of Nashville, wouldn't run, likely owing to the fact of their near-certain defeat and little help from the national Democratic Party. Republicans may pick up a seat in the Tennessee House of Representatives, but they already have 73 out of 99, including my own Representative, House Republican Caucus Chairman Jeremy Faison. The Tennessee Senate currently only has six Democrats out of 33 seats. Republicans are very close to reaching the maximum number of seats they could possibly reach in either body, since a significant number of the remaining Democratic constituencies are drawn to ensure minority representation. My State Senator, Frank Niceley, isn't up for election in this cycle.
It is up to the voters of our country to determine if my prognostications may prove to be correct.