Election Frustration: If, if we only made that extra phone call, knocked on that one more door or convinced a few more of our friends and neighbors to come out and vote…what could have been. 2020 was a near-miss election in the Electoral College. As of this weekend’s numbers, a switch by 5,495 voters in Arizona, 7,087 in Georgia, and 10,274 in Wisconsin would have defeated Joe Biden in last week’s presidential election!
Your vote matters, your effort matters and that little extra really can matter.
Election Fraud: Amazing how the Russians couldn’t pull off another election victory, even when Trump was in charge and helping them out😊
There is NO WAY on God’s green earth that 77 million people voted for higher taxes, open borders & nationwide mask mandates!!! That’s why we want to make sure every legal vote is counted.
We now know there was some fraud and some Election Day irregularities that caused many pauses. The process is working itself out, states and the feds are investigating multiple claims and, in the end, we’ll have a duly elected president and a better and more transparent election process.
Election Workers – Jail Time?: There are few things more important than running honest and fair elections that determine who represents us in our great republic.
When “officials” responsible for administering, counting and supervising elections participate in voter fraud, they should be prosecuted to the greatest extent of the law and see some prison time. This is inexcusable behavior.
Whistle blowers emerge, either out of a sense of civic duty or to cover their hind end…but they are stepping forward to expose fraud in city after city and county after county.
This is NOT acceptable behavior and in addition to structural reforms to limit the possibility of cheating, those who do should be prosecuted to the greatest extent of the law.
Post-Election Analysis: Here is a link to an excellent analysis of the elections and what to expect moving forward.
https://mehlmancastagnetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2020-Election-Mehlman.pdf
-Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
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60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://townhall.com/columnists/jimmartin/2020/11/11/an-evil-covid-policy-for-seniors-n2579869
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgia-election-hand-recount-audit-presidential-race/
PHOTOS: Donald Trump Thrills D.C. Supporter Rally with Motorcade Drive-By
President Donald Trump thrilled a supporter rally Saturday in Washington, DC, as he drove by the group on the way to the golf course.
The “Million MAGA March” and “Stop the Steal” groups rallied in Washington, DC, to protest the election results after former Vice President Joe Biden gained late big margins in states critical to the president’s reelection:
The president’s motorcade drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, where crowds of his supporters were gathered on both sides of the street.
Why Republicans Must Win the Georgia Senate Runoffs
The two US Senate runoffs in Georgia are the most significant in American history.
I know of no other occasion in which the levers of power over the entire country have so hung in the balance than in these races.
The re-election of Sen. David Perdue and the election of Sen. Kelly Loeffler are absolutely essential for the preservation of America and the repudiation of radical efforts to change the fabric of our country.
A victory for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock would be a victory for a much more radical America. If the Democrats win, San Francisco radical Vice President Kamala Harris could preside over the Senate as Senate President and would work cooperatively with new Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer to help decisively change America.
As Senator Schumer said in New York, “Now we take Georgia then we change the world.”
Ground Zero: Georgia, Georgia, Georgia
Now that former Vice President Joe Biden has been projected as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, the eyes of the political world are shifting to the state of Georgia — where Biden holds an extremely thin lead, with a recount pending, and where two Senate runoffs will determine whether or not Democrats wield full control of the federal government starting in 2021. It’s true that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s majority will be battered and bruised in the new Congress, thanks to a major Republican over-performance that led to substantial and unexpected GOP gains in the lower chamber:
Given the internecine fights already brewing among House Democratic factions, Pelosi and company are likely in for a bumpy ride, and their advantage will be very much in peril come 2022. Though diminished, however, it’s a majority nonetheless. So the only check on total Democratic power in DC would be a Republican-controlled Senate. That outcome is plausible-to-probable.
As of this writing, each political party has won 48 Senate seats. Neither Alaska nor North Carolina has been called, but each of those seats is extremely likely to be carried by GOP incumbents. Up north, Sen. Dan Sullivan’s Democratic challenger claimed in a fundraising appeal that he’s well-positioned to overcome a huge deficit and win, but this is delusional. Alaska takes forever and a day to count votes, but once more ballots come in, it’s virtually a lock that Republicans will carry all three uncalled federal races (POTUS, Senate and House). In North Carolina, a November 12 deadline involving the return of requested absentee ballots is delaying what’s likely the inevitable final result. Given what’s still outstanding, President Trump’s margin is strongly favored to hold up. Sen. Thom Tillis’ margin is even larger. In other words, the overwhelming likelihood is that Sullivan and Tillis have been re-elected, putting Republicans at 50 seats. They need at least one more to secure an outright Senate majority, erasing Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ power to break the tie for Senate control in her party’s favor. The stakes are extremely high.
Meet the Diverse Field of GOP House Flippers
Republicans made big gains in 2020 House races, and there are many reasons for their improvement. In 2018, House Republicans lost 40 seats and their majority as Democrats won the House national popular vote by 8.4 percentage points. In 2020, Trump will lose the national popular vote by perhaps four to five percentage points — not as bad as polling suggested — and House GOP candidates will perform a few points better than the GOP presidential candidate (as they did in 2012 and 2016).
One thing that’s striking about the field of Republicans who have flipped House seats so far: They are all women, minorities, or veterans (in many cases two of three).
In Southern California, Young Kim and Michelle Steel, two Republican Korean-American women, flipped Democratic districts. In American history, a Korean-American woman had never been elected to the U.S. Congress before this year.
If there’s fraud in the 2020 election, then we must find it
There’s more evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election than there ever was of Russia collusion, so America is owed a legal examination of the election irregularities alleged by the Trump campaign.
It’s not crazy to say this, despite the gaslighting from much of the media.
Basically, the election is down to roughly 120,000 votes of almost 150 million votes cast.
That’s 0.08 percent, a tiny margin by anyone’s reckoning.
Recounts have been ordered. President Trump’s campaign is challenging hundreds of thousands of votes in the courts.
Five swing states are within 1 percent, all with Joe Biden in the lead.
There was vote fraud
Jonathan Turley, a confirmed liberal who believes in a “living Constitution” that reflect contemporary society, is a scholar at George Washington University.
He has advised whistleblowers, military personnel, judges, members of Congress and others. He fought for the courts to strike down the federal law banning cohabitation. He challenged the Libyan war on behalf of members of Congress and was lead counsel to the House of Representatives in its challenge to Barack Obama’s off-the-cuff changes to the Affordable Care Act, resulting in a federal court decision that Obama violated the separation of powers by paying billions of dollars to insurance companies without congressional authorization.
And he says of the 2020 presidential election, “I think it’s clear at this point that voting fraud occurred.”
That’s the contention of President Trump’s campaign, which has filed challenges in several states alleging fraud that benefitted Joe Biden.
Voters stood up to the culture and declared their center-right values
Had you spent any space of time in this northern suburb of Pittsburgh listening to voters, finding out what things mattered to them when it came to schools, community growth, economic prosperity, and the emotional impact of COVID-19 lockdowns, you would have at least been skeptical of the media narrative and the polls that claimed suburban voters here are no longer center-right.
Not Republican per se, just center-right.
Most reporters certainly didn’t take the time to do so. Instead, they relied on the scolding of our cultural curators in sports, media, and Hollywood as an indicator of how these college-educated, affluent voters would vote. Surely, they thought, these suburbs would cave under the cultural pressure, push left, and their votes would send a blue shock wave across the country.
These reporters put their faith in what they saw in polls or on Twitter, and they predicted the vilification of center-rightism would drag the country leftward — except the people who voted here, and in down-ballot races across the country, vigorously rejected that pressure.
The year of the Republican woman
Two congresswomen from New York are celebrating the election, but only one victory is getting national attention from traditional women’s outlets. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her Democratic “Squad” all won reelection. They even added a member with the election of Cori Bush from Missouri.
That’s not what should be dominating the headlines when it comes to women and the 2020 election.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress before Ocasio-Cortez took that title, won her fourth term. But the big news is that Stefanik’s sisterhood of conservative women in the House grew by double digits. Stefanik led the way in recruiting and advocating for more Republican women in Congress. She put her reputation, time and energy into supporting these candidates.
Is This the Year of the Republican Woman?
On January 3, 2019, a record-shattering 102 women were sworn in as members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Democratic side of the aisle—with 35 brand-new female members—sparkled with vibrant skirts and blouses; one member wore a hijab, another a traditional Pueblo dress. On the Republican side, a sea of navy, gray, and black reigned—mostly suits, and mostly men. The disparity, like the fashion, was stark: Just 13 GOP women were sworn in, only one of them newly elected. (By comparison, there are 16 male GOP House members named “Michael” or “Mike” alone.)
The abysmal numbers were impossible to ignore. “It was a significant wake-up call,” says Representative Susan Brooks of Indiana, the recruitment chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the party’s campaign arm in the House. New York representative Elise Stefanik, the youngest GOP woman in Congress, called it a “crisis.” Republican women, in short, realized they needed a serious reset. And for many, the gains women on the left had made were inspirational: If Democratic women could run and win, why couldn’t they?
They were also galvanized to prove that those women—Democratic socialists and staunch pro-choice advocates among them—didn’t represent all women. “I give the Democrat women a lot of credit for stepping up and owning their voices,” says Genevieve Collins, a first-time candidate running for Congress in Texas’s 32nd District. “I want to be counted, too.”
Who are the real Shy Trumpers?
With the final ballots yet to be counted, and with the next President still unknown, the polling post-mortem is well under way.
“So much of the experience of watching returns,” remarked frustrated MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes to two leading pollsters, “was anchored by the polling going into it. And it was a bad night for polling—an enormous polling miss.”
Far from learning from the mistakes of 2016, the polling industry seemed to have got things worse. Whether conducted by private or public firms, at the national or local, presidential or senatorial, levels, polls were off by wide margins. The Five Thirty-Eight final poll of polls put Biden ahead by 8.4 points, but the actual difference in popular vote is likely to be closer to 3-4 points. In some close state races, the error was even greater.
Why did they get it so wrong? Pollsters typically receive low response rates to calls, which leads them to undercount key demographics. To get around this, they typically weight for key categories like race, education or gender. If they get too few Latinos or whites without degrees, they adjust their numbers to match the actual electorate.
But most attitudes vary far more within a group like university graduates, than between graduates and non-graduates. So even if you have the correct share of graduates and non-graduates, you might be selecting the more liberal-minded among them. For example, in the 2019 American National Election Study pilot survey, education level predicts less than 1% of the variation in whether a white person voted for Trump in 2016. By contrast, their feelings towards illegal immigrants on a 0-100 thermometer predicts over 30% of the variation. Moreover, immigration views pick out Trump from Clinton voters better within the university-educated white population than among high school-educated whites. Unless pollsters weight for attitudes and psychology – which is tricky because these positions can be caused by candidate support – they miss much of the action.
Looking at this election’s errors — which seems to have been concentrated among white college graduates — I wonder if political correctness lies at the heart of the problem.
Political correctness refers to the policing of speech so that it conforms to cultural taboos, especially the ones concerning race, gender and sexuality. Those who wield taboos gain rhetorical power, encouraging them to stretch the meaning of concepts such as racism to encompass non-racist actions such as voting for Donald Trump.
Is Michigan’s collapse in union membership a sign of things to come?
In Michigan, the so-called “birthplace of organized labor,” unions long have been influential politically. Even with the steady decline of automobile industry jobs over the past few decades, the state remained one of the most unionized in the country.
But in 2010, Republicans scored a trifecta, winning the governorship and near-historic margins in the state House and Senate. On the heels of some education reforms, organized labor recalled a Republican lawmaker and pushed a ballot proposal in 2012 that would have constitutionally prohibited a right-to-work law and any other collective bargaining reform. After it went down by a large margin, Republicans responded by passing a right-to-work law, granting workers the right to opt out of paying union dues or fees.
In the eight years since, this law has had an enormous effect on union membership, finances and political power. Michigan union membership is at a historic low, and the changes may be a sign of things to come across the country.
Trump won record minority support — yet the left is calling it ‘racism’
In an ideal world, political parties would be about different approaches to governing. Yet too often in our nation’s history they’ve been about tribalism along regional, economic and, most divisively, racial lines.
Then came 2020: This Election Day, President Trump garnered the highest percentage of non-white votes for a Republican presidential candidate in 60 years. This movement toward balance should be celebrated by all, but not surprisingly, that is not what is happening.
Take MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, who claims that the election showed a “great amount of racism, anti-blackness and anti-wokeness.” Or The New York Times’ Charles Blow, who somehow sees this election as confirming the power of the “White Patriarchy.”
Writer Bree Newsome Bass conceded that some white voters had chosen Joe Biden but voted Republican down ballot to preserve “white rule.”
These people view everything through a racial lens. They’re convinced Trump is a racist and regard his broad support — half the country voted for him — as proof that the nation, as a whole, is likewise hopelessly racist.
In 2021 and Beyond, Will the GOP be a Reagan Party or a Trump Party?
Even though my 2020 prediction for the presidential race was much more accurate than my 2016 prediction, I’m definitely a policy wonk rather than a political pundit.
That being said, I’m very interested in elections because voting patterns eventually can translate into policy changes.
And some of the voting patterns from Tuesday were rather surprising. For instance, I was shocked at the data that compared 2016 exit poll data with 2020 exit poll data and found that Trump got more votes in 2020 from every group other than white men.
And I was also shocked to learn that Trump did a much better job of attracting non-white votes than any other Republican candidate in recent history.
My pro-Trump friends tell me that this is evidence that a Trumpian approach is capable of attracting new voters, particularly minorities. Indeed, they tell me that Trumpism should be the model for all the politicians who may think about going for the Republican nomination in 2024.
So, as part of my post-election analysis (see here, here, here, and here), let’s explore whether the GOP will be (or should) a Trump party.
