By DEXTER DUGGAN
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Melissa Bowers was easy to spot in the hotel ballroom here packed with Republicans watching midterm election-night returns on the big Fox News screen, and by reporters watching the Republicans.
Platforms for the media ran along two walls of the room in this Phoenix suburb, with at least 22 news cameras on them.
Although some other people wore name tags or ID badges, Bowers carried a poster proclaiming herself a member of the growing WalkAway movement (walkawaycampaign.com) who’d departed the Democratic Party because of its increasing extremism.
After being a Democrat for 26 years, Bowers told The Wanderer on November 6 that she left the party in 2008 because “I saw the handwriting on the wall about what would happen if we had a socialist in office. Then I saw identity politics take root. I found more inclusion in the GOP than I ever did on the left.”
She said a Democratic hierarchy of oppression developed, in which a person was more highly valued based on how many identity groups she qualified for.
“It was all about who was oppressed more than anyone else…which is exactly the opposite” of what Martin Luther King Jr. wanted when the civil-rights leader stressed the content of one’s character rather than skin color, she said.
In hotel halls and ballrooms across the country, as well as at other gatherings, people watched the election results being displayed in flashing, colorful graphics that at least were reporting actual votes cast, not speculation and ephemeral hopes. However, the preceding months of media jabber were part of the reason for the results of November 6.
Although major media had pushed their theme for nearly a year that the day’s elections would bring a “blue wave” washing Republicans down the drain, the theme was no more reality-based than many of the other propaganda campaigns they pound away with. But it had affected people’s attitudes — as sly media intended to occur.
The Democratic Party did win the U.S. House majority away from the Republicans, but by a smaller number of seats (around 28) than the historical average in midterms for the party out of power, and by far fewer seats than Democrat Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had lost to Republicans — 54 seats lost for Clinton in 1994, and 63 seats for Obama in 2010.
Moreover, the Republicans in 2018 actually took away a few U.S. Senate seats from Democrat incumbents, enlarging that GOP majority, as well as defeating other liberal Democrats who supposedly wouldn’t be beaten.
Politico reported on November 6, “The outcome deflated progressive activists who had desperately hoped for more. ‘This is heartbreaking,’ the liberal activist Van Jones said on CNN.”
National radio host Rush Limbaugh lamented on the following day, November 7, that House control being lost by the GOP needn’t even have happened, but dozens of incumbent Republicans had retired out of fear of the “blue wave” tales.
“Once again Washington Republicans get psyched out by the media” and abandoned their seats, costing the GOP the advantage of their incumbency, Limbaugh said.
Again President Trump had to come to the rescue of a party that sometimes seems barely worthy of him. While establishment Republicans moaned and cowered, the bold 72-year-old Trump left contrails crisscrossing the nation as Air Force One flew him to rally after rally where he exhorted tens of thousands of admirers in arenas and hangars to vote Republican.
The morning after the election, national radio talk host Laura Ingraham said that without Trump’s campaigning, the GOP would have lost 50 to 60 House seats. Pundit Pat Buchanan, guesting on her program, said he’d never seen a president fight so hard for his party as Trump.
Ingraham also recalled conservatives’ advice to GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan when he announced last April that he wouldn’t run for his seat again. They said he should have resigned as speaker right then so a fresh, optimistic face could have led the campaign charge into November. But Ryan hung on like a lame duck, keeping his loser’s imprint on the office.
Rather than resting from his exertions, Trump held a full-fledged post-election news conference right away on November 7 with his characteristic frankness and take-no-guff bluntness with hostile reporters.
The president also pointedly and specifically named Republican candidates who hadn’t asked for his embrace. He noted that they lost their elections, while those he campaigned for won.
Trump was a multibillionaire businessman who was elected to be president of the United States in the first political office he ever ran for, but he still faces opposition from an encrusted establishment that doesn’t think he knows how to deliver.
This successful developer wants to build a new, more confident future for the GOP, so it will lose holding onto its loser ways. Radio talker Limbaugh said on November 7, “The Republican Party now knows that Trump can get them re-elected.”
Two days earlier, radio talker Ingraham said that never in her life has she seen a political figure so able to draw massive, enthusiastic crowds as Trump can — not Ronald Reagan, not Barack Obama. And this is with most of the media opposing Trump.
At the Scottsdale rally, The Wanderer ran into John Jakubczyk, an attorney and longtime Arizona pro-life activist. Asked how he thought the GOP’s loss of House control would affect Trump, Jakubczyk recalled that Democrat Obama eventually had to operate without either congressional chamber under his party’s control.
“Look what Obama did without any help,” Jakubczyk said, referring to Obama’s comment in 2014 that “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone.”
The Scottsdale rally awaited word of the results of the nationally watched U.S. Senate race to fill retiring Sen. Jeff Flake’s seat that had been hotly contested between two Arizona congresswomen, Republican Martha McSally and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema.
However, the following day it was announced that more than a half-million votes remained to be counted in that close race, and the outcome wasn’t expected for at least another day, when this hardcopy issue of The Wanderer would have gone to press.
It might have seemed surprising that a candidate with such a hard-left background as Sinema would have been competitive around Arizona, but dominant media here downplayed that unrepented past.
In addition, some conservative voters may have been reluctant to give eager support to Republican McSally because they recalled some of the repeated lies in commercials against her GOP primary-election foe, Kelli Ward. The barrage of these commercials falsely said Ward wanted to use restraint when opposing terrorists and had a weak position on protecting the border.
Experts’ Observations
The Wanderer asked conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard for some observations about the midterm outcome. Here’s that Q-and-A.
Q. Trump campaigned energetically but still lost the House.
A. Trump’s effort was largely focused on the Senate and he was largely successful there.
Q. Will House Democrats make sure the huge foreign invasion from the south won’t be stopped? Will economic reform be stopped dead? What becomes of pro-life?
A. The House of Representatives alone doesn’t have authority over who crosses the border. That power is in the hands of the Executive to a much greater degree. I’d expect some short-term cooperation on items like infrastructure spending before D.C. decays into its usual self. Obviously pro-life legislation will not make it through a Democrat-controlled House.
Q. This clearly wasn’t a blue wave, but Trump now has a divided Congress.
A. Historically, it was an average off-year on the House side, while the Republican gains on the Senate side are better than average, so the net is better than the normal midterm election.
Also, The Wanderer asked Rob Haney, a retired chairman of the Phoenix-based Maricopa County Republican Party, for his observations.
“Republicans are touting the results of the midterms as a great victory of thwarting the blue wave. But they are playing the short game,” Haney said. “Democrats, learning from the Islamists, play the long game and take power through incremental bites.
“Islamists, Democrats, Republicans in Name Only (RINOs), and the mainstream media (MSM) have no ethical standards based upon our Founders’ Judeo-Christian moral code to guide their methods of obtaining power,” he said.
“Results, not methods, is all that matters to them. I say ‘Founders’ Judeo-Christian’ because the current corrupt Democrat Party controls the Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim religions of today as well as most of the Protestant sects,” Haney said.
“Slowly, the illegal-alien invasion is changing the political alignment of the country. As illegals and their offspring vote for Democrats, our immigration and voting laws will not be enforced. California and Virginia allow felons to vote and were the Democrats’ first bites at realignment. Florida (just voted to allow one million felons to vote in future elections), Texas, and Arizona will be their next bites,” he said.
“The Democrats, by taking control of the House, have ensured that nothing will be done in Congress to enforce our immigration and voting laws. It also makes more likely that the next bites of power will be accomplished more rapidly and that voting fraud will be rampant,” Haney said.
“Senators John McCain, Jon Kyl, and Jeff Flake were the architects of this takeover by the Democrats. The RINOs have even raised McCain to sainthood status.
“The Lord has given us the most pro-life president in history. Pray to the Lord for the conversion of the wicked and that He continues to bless us in spite of these challenges,” he said.
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