Elections

Some thoughts on last night

First, I think what happened (so far) is the most optimistic election result that anybody could have hoped for. Electoral college? Popular vote? Senate majority and growing? Probably keep the House with expanded majority? Yes, please. Trump’s margins may shrink and the growth in seats in the Senate and House may stall to something less than spectacular but this was an amazing result.

Second, I bet the Democrats will develop a strange new respect for the filibuster and federalism. Always remember in our system where ambition is to be checked with ambition, the reason you keep the filibuster around is not out of some sentimentality but rather because you will find yourself needing it one day.

Third, on the Powerline podcast last night Steve Heyward speculated if this was the election that finally marked the shift from the traditional media model to podcasts. Maybe though we’ve been waiting for that death for a while. There was a lot of chatter in the past about how social media was going to be the one to torpedo the “SS Traditional Media” (keep in mind the Russian influence hysteria of 2016 centered on their purchase of ads on Facebook).

Fourth, I would imagine this is finally going to mark the fall of the House of Obama and maybe even get him to move out of Kalorama. That’s okay, I’ve heard he was renting anyway.

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Our old friends in Maricopa County are back in the limelight again, having to deal with 90,000 last-minute voter registrations, 40,000 of which are too damaged to be processed. Wait until some of those 40,000 show up at the polls and find out they aren’t eligible to vote: can you say allegations of voter suppression?

I had outlined the Democrats’ obsession with “voter suppression” in a previous post; a term which seems to encompass any imposition of a requirement or restriction on voting. If you survey their various writings and pronouncements, you notice the topic has become part of their version of a Nicene Creed of belief regarding an unholy trinity also incorporating “fascism” and “Christian nationalism.”

I wrote in the same post about their hysterical response to the 2021 Election Integrity Act in Georgia which Joe Biden called “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.” The voter ID provisions that Biden and others pointed out as evidence of the return of Jim Crow? Overwhelming support among blacks in Georgia. The voting experience of blacks during the 2022 Georgia election? 72.6% said their experience was excellent with 0.0% citing a poor experience.

The two lessons from the Georgia experience are 1) blacks support common-sense voting requirements and 2) modern-day racial voting suppression for Democrats is a symbol with as much empirical evidence for its existence as the bogey-man. The best evidence that the Georgia laws didn’t suppress black turnout is that the Democrats no longer talk about it.

Put that aside for a moment. Let’s talk about the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 (ECA) and what lawfare might look over the next few months.

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Another part of the Democrats’ post-Election Day strategy taking shape?

Two predicates.

First, the power of the legacy media this election cycle lies not in who believes what they say, but in the ability to bring “themes” into the limelight. The media look for allies that can provide them with the proper hook, witness John Kelly’s Hitler comment that was reported in The Atlantic last week. The purpose of the article wasn’t to inject any new, credible information. Rather, it was to give an excuse for everyone to talk about Trump-as-Hitler (again).

The second is the Democrats’ upcoming reliance on the claim of “voter suppression” and other irregularities, to contest the presidential election result after Nov. 5th. This was part of John Podesta’s ploy to throw the table and deny Trump’s victory in the electoral college in “Game 3” of the Transition Integrity Project war game.

The Democrats have been playing the voter suppression card whenever and wherever possible, essentially claiming that any attempt to clean up voter rolls, have standards regarding ballot access, or have certain requirements for mail-in ballots (like, actually, the ballots actually have to arrive by Election Day) is akin to the return of the KKK. Think I’m exaggerating? In 2021 Georgia passed its Election Integrity Law which required the use of voter ID and tightened regulations on things like mail-in ballot requests and ballot drop boxes. All Hell broke loose. Joe Biden traveled to Georgia and called it “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” in part because it banned outside groups from offering water to voters waiting in line. Georgia was also sued by the Department of Justice, the ACLU, and the NAACP despite the fact that the new law made in-person voting more accessible, through longer early-voting periods and increased funding for more staff and locations.

Just as Hitler would have been confused by the Democrats’ calling Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally (that was festooned with Israeli flags) Nazi, Herman Talmadge would have been confused by his old friend Joe Biden’s characterizing a law that made it easier for blacks in Georgia to vote as “Jim Crow.”

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Tens of thousands of citizens wait in line for upwards of an hour to perform a sacred rite of citizenship, to vote for the people who will run the government. Yet when they get to the actual voting booth they are unable to cast their votes because the “tabulators won’t read the ballots.” Many are sent to other polling places, where if they don’t find the same problem with the equipment, they are unable to vote because they are recorded as having already voted. As a stop-gap the election authority decides to place the unreadable ballots into a special box at each polling place so that they can be later scanned, but many of those ballots are mixed-up with discarded ballots and presumably lost.

The race for chief executive was decided by a margin of little more than 17,000 votes out of more than 2.5 million votes cast with the political establishment’s preferred candidate winning.

So where is this place of strange elections and funny results? Putin’s Russia? Early 20th-Century Mississippi or Chicago? The country of some South American tin-pot despot of yore? Nope 2022 Maricopa County, the 3rd largest voting district in the country, and key to what many are calling the most important presidential election in more than 160 years.

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A couple of things.

First, a common perception of elections is entangled with the misty notions of a vindication of democracy. Alternatively there is also the view of an annoying process of choosing the lesser of two evils. However, it is also an operational process similar to many others; composed of discrete elements (voter registration, polling station management, vote counting) that must work correctly within a series of dependencies and certain time periods. If that operational process is riddled with problems, then you are going to have a hard time having people accept the final product (an election outcome).

Second, a guiding principle of organizational analysis is a form of “revealed preference”: if you want to know what an organization values, look at what it actually does as opposed to what it says.

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