No…is not a strategy
Anger…is not a strategy
Trump…pro or con…is not a strategy
Republicans Win the House: Barely, but they will be the majority party. With few votes to spare, that leaves lots of room for mischief and insider politics to be played by virtually any small group of members. A tough governing majority.
The liberal Democrats still control the White House and the Senate. At best, the House Republicans serve as a check and balance on a federal government that has run amuck.
The progressive left has set so much in motion, I’m not sure what conservatives and Republicans will be able to do on inflation, crime and WOKE policies that the Democrats have already put in place.
We will probably have to wait until 2024 to finish the job to help turn America around.
WOKE at Its Worst: Anti-Trump establishment in the media and politics are trying to back door their ‘anti’ campaign instead of running a race for or against someone on the issues. Trump, DeSantis, Youngkin, etc. should all run, or chose not to run, on their record and merits.
The leftist Twitter elite are suddenly doing their best to destroy Twitter and Musk because he has argued for real free speech. The irony of ironies.
Across the political and business spectrum, the progressive liberal left continues to attempt to shame, blackmail, manipulate, and distort the truth and the record in order to accomplish their crazy agenda.
Pay attention…don’t fall for it…engage and explore the consequences. The end results will not be a free society with the ideals of that shining city on a hill.
Read more below and follow me on Twitter & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
The GOP takes the House, McConnell stays as leader of the Senate, and Texas Governor Abbott declares an invasion at the southern border!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/09/midterm-election-results-2022-senate-control
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Republicans must fight Biden’s trillion-dollar spending by refusing to give in on debt limit
Debt limit is designed to protect taxpayers from out-of-control spending and Republicans must use it.
The federal statutory debt ceiling makes for good policy. Congressional Democrats who want to repeal it to give themselves a permanent blank check to spend American taxpayer dollars are equal parts smug elites and constitutional vandals.
Congressional Republicans should absolutely fight to defend the statutory debt limit this year and leverage it next year to extract badly needed spending reforms from President Joe Biden and his party.
That the sentences above are considered uncouth inside the Beltway is not evidence of Washington elites’ supple political sophistication, but of their chronic political disconnect from the nation they serve.
Contrary to the phony narrative coming soon to an editorial page near you, the debt ceiling is not a formality. It is not an anachronism or a symbol. It is an indispensable tool, specifically designed to protect taxpayers and check the ambitions of entitled politicians. The contempt elites in both parties have for the debt ceiling is compelling evidence for its value.
By the same logic, lawmakers who demand spending fixes in exchange for raising the debt limit are not threatening the full faith and credit of the United States — they are protecting it, by using the tool exactly as it was designed.
To listen to media and liberal elites, federal spending growth is a kind of sacrament, and anything that checks it sullies its holy purity.
Hogwash.
The Constitution and federal law are thick with restrictions on government’s ability to spend your money. The Origination Clause. The Spending Clause. Appropriations time limits. Since our founding, Americans have always known that politicians cannot be trusted with a blank check with your name on it.
Avoiding the 1964 Republican presidential defeat in 2024
A bitterly split party will devour itself
Republicans must learn the lessons of the 2022 elections and think through a path to victory in 2024.
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy’s recruitment of women, minority and veteran candidates — and prolific fundraising ($485 million) — enabled House Republicans to gain seats for a second straight election despite losses in other parts of the GOP.
Similarly, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s focus on opening offices in minority districts paid off. Latino and Asian voters moved significantly more to the GOP.
Nonetheless, 2022 involved a lot of shocking defeats and disappointments. And 2024 promises to be potentially even more dangerous to Republican hopes.
I am worried about the potential for 2024 to become 1964, when Republican Barry Goldwater was annihilated by President Lyndon B. Johnson. I lived through 1964, and I saw how badly a bitterly split party can devour itself.
‘The Gipper’ strategy: Six bold ideas for Trump, Republicans to rebound from 2022 midterms
Party faithful want Trump and other Republicans to act like Reagan did after ’76, and not like Oscar the Grouch.
After an underwhelming midterm election, the Republican Party and its enigmatic leader Donald Trump find themselves in a political wilderness, much like Ronald Reagan did after losing the 1976 nomination.
The Biden Democrats with hiding Kathy Hochul and hobbled John Fetterman seemed as beatable as bumbling Gerald Ford, and yet somehow the Reagan and 2022 GOP teams lost the process even though polling data showed they had won the hearts of the faithful. And the despair of knowing a far left regime (Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden) might rule for another election cycle led many to throw hands up and point fingers.
Not Reagan, who many openly said could not possibly run for president in 1980 at the age of 69 (then the oldest candidate in history.)
“The Gipper” knew differently. While painfully aware he had lost the process at the convention, he also could see the groundswell forming around his conservative agenda. He recognized it needed tweaks and adjustments and a post-election commitment to better own the narrative to appeal to independents. He also knew internal fighting and blame would only distract from the opportunity.
What Republicans Should Do With Their Slim House Majority
As ballots continue to be tallied, two things seem fairly certain about the midterm election: Republicans had a disappointing showing relative to expectations. Nevertheless, in January, they will find themselves in control of the House of Representatives after four years in the minority. While the exact size of the House GOP majority will not be known until a number of outstanding contests are resolved, in the 118th Congress the party is likely to control somewhere around 220 seats in the 435 seat chamber. That working majority will be, at best, a tad less narrow than the one Democrats have had previously. So what should this new GOP majority be working for?
The temptation for ascendant Republican leaders in the House will be to shrug off all of the criticism coming their way, emphasize that they gained ground for the second cycle in a row, and insist that the American people have given them a clear mandate to implement an agenda diametrically opposed to the one Democrats have pursued for the last two years. That impulse is understandable, given that Democrats passed major spending bills without a single vote from the minority and urged on the most expensive unilateral executive branch action in the nation’s history.
But for a party that does not hold the White House and may not hold the Senate, mandate-thinking can be quite dangerous—especially with such a tenuous hold on the chamber.
Historically, midterm elections are invitations for course corrections rather than mandates to override the sitting administration. If soon-to-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his conference act like they have been charged with stopping the Biden administration cold, or even entirely overriding the White House, they can easily alienate the voters who brought them to victory in 2022.
Why Independent Voters Broke for Democrats in the Midterms
GOP candidates closely aligned with Trump turned off some centrists and in-play Republicans
Republicans succeeded in one of their top goals this year: They brought more of their party’s voters to the polls than did Democrats. But in the course of energizing their core voters, Republicans in many states lost voters in the political center—both independents and many Republicans who are uneasy with elements of the party’s focus under Mr. Trump.
Control of the House and Senate, which had seemed poised to land with the Republican Party, is coming down to a handful of races that so far are too close to call, though the GOP remains on track to winning a narrow majority in the House. Republicans have won nearly 5.5 million more votes in House races than have Democrats, a tally by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report finds, as many voters were motivated by anxiety over high inflation and a low opinion of President Biden’s response.
At the same time, Republican analysts said their unexpectedly weak showing in the election indicated that they had failed to press hard enough on those issues. In Michigan, the Republican Party’s state committee said a failure to talk to voters in the political center was a central reason that Tudor Dixon, the party’s Trump-endorsed nominee for governor, was crushed in a 10 percentage point defeat by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Toward a Conservative Popularism
If they want to win majorities, Republicans should emphasize issues on which the public supports their positions.
Three days before the midterm elections, Donald Trump headlined a rally in Pennsylvania for his handpicked gubernatorial and Senate candidates, Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz. At the rally, the former president’s remarks focused not only on the midterms but also on preliminary polling for the 2024 presidential primary. As he ran down the list of his potential future competitors for the Republican nomination, Trump tagged Florida governor Ron DeSantis, the GOP candidate running closest to him in the polls, with a derogatory nickname: “Ron DeSanctimonious.”
Mastriano, who attended the January 6 protests, and Oz, best known as a celebrity doctor, had won their primaries following Trump’s endorsement. But they came up short Tuesday night, with Mastriano losing in a blowout to a self-described moderate and Oz falling to a progressive who has struggled to speak coherently after suffering a stroke. Meantime, in Florida, Trump’s home state and once the quintessential political battleground, Senator Marco Rubio and Governor DeSantis won reelection by huge margins. For context, Trump won Florida by less than two points in 2016 and less than four points in 2020. DeSantis defeated his opponent by nearly 20 points—even winning longtime Democratic stronghold Miami-Dade County by double digits.
Across the country, Trump’s preferred candidates—usually political novices who skated through primaries thanks to his backing—underperformed expectations in red, blue, and purple states. In Arizona, Kari Lake and Blake Masters made Trump’s theories about the 2020 election a central part of their campaign, but both trail in the vote tallies for governor and senator, respectively. In Michigan and Wisconsin, Tudor Dixon and Tim Michels failed to capitalize on Trump’s alleged midwestern appeal. In Georgia, Herschel Walker, the football star and Trump ally accused of fathering secret children and paying for past girlfriends’ abortions, ran well behind fellow Republican and incumbent governor Brian Kemp and faces a runoff for the Senate. In Maryland and Massachusetts, two of the most popular governors in the country—moderate Republicans Larry Hogan and Charlie Baker—saw Trump-endorsed candidates beat their chosen successors and go on to lose the governor’s mansion to Democrats. In New Hampshire, Governor Chris Sununu, who has called the former president “f***ing crazy,” won reelection by north of 15 points, while his counterpart, Trump-backed Don Bolduc, lost his Senate race. Perhaps the most prominent Trump endorsee to win a general election—J. D. Vance, who won convincingly but ran behind Ohio’s centrist Republican governor Mike DeWine—did not mention or thank Trump in his victory address.
Democrats have mastered mail balloting. Republicans will pay if they fail to step up
PITTSBURGH — The first thing Allegheny County Republican Chairman Sam DeMarco saw on election night after the polls closed was the more than 100,000 votes from his home county that dropped for Democrat John Fetterman through mail-in ballots. Although he wasn’t sure just yet that that meant the race was lost, he also knew Republicans needed to fix something in the party’s way of doing things going forward.
“Those initial large dump of voters were mail-in ballots from Democrats,” he said of the advance voting that began in 2020 during the pandemic. Democrats embraced it with gusto, but Republicans shied away.
“The biggest takeaway from Tuesday night is that Republican attitudes in regard to mail-in voting needs to change,” he continued. “Right now, it’s like we’re running a 100-yard race against the Democrats and giving them a 45-yard head start. Both parties have limited resources, but while they work during the 50 days of early voting collecting and banking early votes … we’re just collecting promises to show up on Election Day; it’s not sustainable, and Democrats get better at it every cycle.”
When all the dust is settled, it will be interesting to see what the percentage of mail-in votes for Democrats was in the final count; anything over 40% is a real problem for Republicans going forward if they don’t right their mail-in ballot ship.
The Latest Election Myth Pushed by the Left
For years, liberal activists—with the assistance of their corporate media allies—have been pushing the myth that there is a wave of “voter suppression” going on across the country. As the record registration and turnout numbers in recent elections prove, as well as their numerous losses in litigation show, this is a false claim created by opponents of commonsense election reforms like voter ID.
Now, the latest myth they are pushing is that there is a rising tide of violent threats against election workers across the country that is “pervasive” and “unrelenting.”
President Joe Biden repeated that theme in his recent inflammatory speech at Union Station in Washington, D.C., as have federal agencies like the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, which circulated a memo claiming there is a “heightened threat” of violence against “election workers.”
No one sanctions threats or violence against election officials, voters, poll watchers, or anyone else in the election process, and I say that as a former county election official in two different states. Such misbehavior is strictly prohibited by numerous state and federal criminal laws.
But is this claim really true, or is it an overblown assessment similar to the fraudulent claims made in 2016 that the Russian government had conspired with the Trump campaign to fix the election?
Why can’t we let children be children?
Back when I was growing up, girls who enjoyed playing sports and roughhousing and disliked feminine activities, including dolls and dress-up, were allowed to go through their tomboy phase without being pressured to fit in. They were girls who might not have gotten along well with other girls, but they were girls — that much was certain.
Nowadays, those girls are lucky to make it to puberty without having their breasts cut off.
Gender ideologues have convinced an alarming number of young children and teenagers that if they feel out of place with their sex or feel uncomfortable in their bodies, it’s because they were born into the wrong gender. Changing one’s gender, both socially and physically, is the only solution, according to transgender activists.
Unfortunately, the medical field has adopted this narrative unquestioningly, even though it violates every single norm and ethical standard on the books. Doctors are prescribing puberty blockers and other hormonal treatments to children as young as 8 if they think they are confused about their gender, knowing full well that the long-term consequences of these drugs are unknown and very likely irreversible.
An in-depth report from the New York Times, for example, found that puberty blockers can damage the development of children’s bones and brains permanently.
