If the voting results from last Tuesday left you anxious and thinking that up-is-down and down-is-up, the state of Oregon proved that “we’re not in Kansas anymore”. Voters there overwhelmingly passed ballot measure “110” which decriminalizes the use of hard drugs (methamphetamines, cocaine, heroin). Anyone caught using these drugs must go into a “free” treatment program or pay a small fine but will not get any jail time. The free drug treatment program is to be funded by taxes on the sale of marijuana in the state. That’s right – Oregon now has to sell drugs in order to fund their drug treatment program!
As discouraging as it may be at this moment for conservatives who voted for Trump, there is a bright silver lining to these election results. The presumed march toward socialism, if there really was one of any substance to begin with, hit a big roadblock last Tuesday. Not only did anti-socialist conservatives prevail in both House and Senate races, they also won big in local elections. The mere fact that conservative candidates retained, much less gained, legislative seats at the local, state, and federal levels defied all projections. It was a flat-out repudiation of the socialist/progressive platform championed by “Green New Deal” and “Defund the Police” Democrats. Since the Biden/Harris platform includes most of this same defeated socialist agenda, it seems counterintuitive that Biden could have received enough support in the election to prevail over Trump.
It is certainly possible that a large number of conservatives decided to vote for every Republican on their ballot except for Trump. However, that voting pattern would seem to fly in the face of the massive turnout1 of Republican voters driven by enthusiasm for Trump as seen at all his rallies. The only other explanation for the observed voting pattern would be that a large number of voters came out to vote only for Biden and not anyone one else on the ballot. That would explain why Biden was victorious in states where down ballot Democrats ended up losing. Of course, it would also be easy to conclude that fraud must have occurred to create the observed voting pattern. Maybe – there is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence2, but so far there is no hard evidence on a large enough scale to make a difference.
In any event, the Republican party faces a big challenge ahead. They need to maintain all the enthusiasm and increased ethnic and racial voter diversity Trump has brought to the party. But they must not alienate an apparently sizable portion of conservatives who require in their leader a subdued personal style even at the expense of substance. This won’t be easy. The Democrats have had a very similar problem in the last two elections with Bernie Sanders generating most of their voter enthusiasm but having an unpalatable platform of pure socialism.
By far the biggest loser in this election was the news media and pollsters. Just about every pre-election poll was wrong at every level of government. Senate seats that were predicted to flip did not. Republican state legislatures that were predicted to switch to Democrat did not. No Republican governor lost a race, and one gubernatorial race even flipped from Democrat to Republican (Montana). Republicans gained seats in the House of Representatives when every poll predicted they would lose seats. And not only was Trump not blown out in a “blue wave”, he managed to enlarge his party’s base with a record increase in the number of Latino and African Americans voting Republican (both male and female). None of this comports with the news media’s portrayal of a racist, misogynistic, bigoted Republican party and President savaging the country. The media tried, and failed, to falsely influence voters with totally contrived poll results. We include Fox News in this group as their pre-election polls were every bit as wrong as those from CNN, Washington Post, Quinnipiac, NY Times, and others. Fox further embarrassed themselves on election night with on air squabbling over when/how to call states and weak attempts to legitimize their own faulty pre-election polls. The unmistakable conclusion from all this is how completely and utterly untrustworthy the news media and polling organizations have become.
Exit polls are more believable because the people answering the questions are those who actually just voted, not random registered voters or “likely” voters. Tuesday’s exit polls revealed a reality that is truly a different universe from that painted by the news media. The COVID-19 pandemic, proclaimed by the news media as the most significant concern on everyone’s mind, turned out to be the deciding factor for only 15% of those who voted. Racism and social injustice concerns were the deciding factor for only 20% of voters. Concern about the economy ranked first, as it typically always does in Presidential elections. These results don’t match at all what the media has been saying should be our primary concerns. These exit poll numbers do tell a positive story. They prove that the media’s non-stop panic generating narratives about the viciousness of COVID-19 and widespread racial injustice in America were way overdone and, after a time, mostly ignored. More than 80% of voters saw right through the gross exaggeration in those stories and did not base their vote on these supposedly “critical” issues. Rather, people were more concerned about the state of the economy. On that topic, the news media was manifestly negligent by way of omission.
This past January (before COVID-19 took hold), the US economy was in the best shape it had ever been. Unemployment was historically low (especially among minority groups), the stock market was at an all-time high, average wages were up, interest rates and inflation were at historic lows, and consumer confidence was high. All of this was a result of Trump’s economic and tax policy and went largely unreported in the major news media. There was literally nothing about the economy any of the Democrat candidates for President could legitimately criticize. A few, including Joe Biden, made laughable attempts to credit policies of the Obama administration as having had a “delayed effect” for the stellar economy as opposed to anything President Trump had done (a 3+ year delay!). In reality, there was little the Democrats or media could do to blunt this Trump success story other than not report on it. Then came COVID-19 and the lockdowns. The economy tanked and unemployment skyrocketed, which the news media then gleefully reported on ad nauseum 24-7. As the economy staged a record-breaking comeback in mid-summer, made possible because of its solid foundation prior to the lockdowns, the media went silent again on the topic. The willful lack of media reporting on the true state of the US economy before and after the COVID lockdowns no doubt exacerbated the “concern for the economy” as the number one voter issue in the exit polls. The only economic news most people heard from the media all year was how terrible the economy was in March, April, and May.
No matter how you look at it, this year has been an epic fail by the news media in almost every conceivable way. We stand by our belief that the US news media is a bigger threat to our democracy than any other entity, foreign or domestic. Thankfully, a majority of voters in this election didn’t base their decision on embellished and/or false news narratives. The down ballot losses of socialist/progressive candidates prove that. At the same time, the absence of media reporting on topics like the strength of the pre-COVID economy, as well as the recent post-lockdown economic recovery, left many voters starved of truthful information on the one issue they considered most critical to them.
Of course, this election process and the media’s role in it isn’t over yet. There is a lot more to happen between now and inauguration day on January 20th. Think of this as the halftime report.
1 Compared to 2016.
2 In Michigan, Trump received 7,131 more votes than the Republican candidate for the US Senate in that state – given the total number of votes cast, this difference is within historical norms. However, Joe Biden received 69,093 more votes than the Democrat candidate for Senate in Michigan – well outside any historical norm. With control of the US Senate arguably at least as important as the winning the Presidency, why would so many Democrat voters vote for Biden and not their Senate candidate? While this strongly hints at fraud, it’s not enough by itself to prove fraud or to determine what the remedy would be.
2 Responses
Exactly the shot in the arm I desperately needed. Thank you again for lining it all up and providing necessary clarity to what has happened, what is likely to happen, and why. I needed to read something of SUBSTANCE, laced with pure sensibility.
Thanks K. Here are a couple more things not to forget right now – 1) Trump is President until noon on January 20th, 2021. Biden can do nothing until then. 2) If Biden does get inaugurated on January 20th, any executive orders he signs better be able to pass constitutional muster. That pesky 6-3 conservative majority now on the Supreme Court won’t let him run wild.