By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president for the first time, in 1992, with only a 43 percent plurality of the vote. Republican incumbent George H.W. Bush came in second with more than 37 percent, while third-party gadfly Ross Perot drained off a vital nearly 19 percent.
Clinton portrayed Bush as out of touch with ordinary concerns, while Perot railed against wasteful spending.
When Clinton’s Democratic Party faced his first midterm election two years later, in 1994, it lost a thumping 54 seats of the majority it held in the U.S. House, giving the GOP its first control of the lower chamber since 1952. Republicans ran against Clinton’s failed government health-care proposal.
While the party in the White House often loses congressional seats in the midterm, this number was a strong repudiation of Clinton’s performance.
Democrat Barack Obama was elected to an open seat for the presidency in 2008 with nearly 53 percent of the vote while Republican opponent John McCain scored more than 45 percent. Obama attacked a major economic downturn and the Iraq war of term-limited incumbent Republican George W. Bush.
Two years later, facing his first midterm in 2010, Obama and his Democrats lost their House majority by a remarkable 63 seats, in what Obama described as his “shellacking.” The Republicans campaigned against his having shoved through unpopular Obamacare and also a weak economy.
In 2020, challenger Democrat Joe Biden was said to have won more than 51 percent of the presidential vote while incumbent Republican Donald Trump scored nearly 47 percent. Critics said Biden campaigned from his basement at a time of Democrat-inspired riots around the U.S. and additional social turmoil over the surprise COVID-19 pandemic, which altered many voting procedures.
The frail, often invisible Biden supposedly won more than 81 million votes, which far exceeded the more than 69 million votes that the charismatic, energetic Obama won 12 years earlier.
In 2022, Biden’s midterm election season closed out on November 8 after he insisted on pushing a far-left agenda that throttled the U.S. and made him clearly the worst president in living memory if not the entire history of the U.S.
Inflation soared. Prices for essentials like food, energy, and gasoline shot up for everyday people who lacked the wealth of callous Biden. He illegally threw the border wide open and millions of illegal immigrants poured in whom Biden furtively spread around this nation.
This meant drug smugglers celebrated while tens of thousands of Americans died from the smuggling that Biden heartlessly enabled, and sex-trafficking was condemning victims to shame and servitude in the U.S. whose suffering meant nothing to incomprehensibly bad Catholic Biden and his media and political enablers.
Biden’s government pushed left-wing racism, severe sexual confusion, attacks on parents, children, and pro-lifers, and traditional religious people. It fixated on massive tax-paid permissive abortion, and it promoted scarcity. He called opponents “semi-fascists” who would end democracy. His new normal was to mash people’s faces into mud and garbage.
The Real Clear Politics average approval for Biden was a fatally low 42.1 percent for election time, while 54.6 percent disapproved of him.
And what were the Democratic Party’s losses in the House over this nightmare? The numbers weren’t finalized as this was written overnight on November 9-10, but they seemed very unlikely even to approach Clinton’s and Obama’s drubbings.
Although Republicans seemed on target to win a majority in the House, they weren’t achieving the “red wave” widely anticipated by commentators of various persuasions as the week began.
The Washington Examiner headlined, “Red wave crashes into blue wall,” while The New York Times bannered, “GOP gains edge, but its expectations dim.”
From the early days of Biden’s administration, when his radicalism became plain to all, people had waited nearly two years for November 8, when his allies would be swept massively from power. Those dreams didn’t come true.
Some commentators said that now Democrats are stuck with a Biden presidential campaign in 2024 if that’s what he wants, even though a few days earlier they were eager to see His Royal Decrepitude depart after one term.
Early on post-election November 9, national radio commentator Hugh Hewitt said, “Inflation is supposed to be the killer of incumbents, and it wasn’t….I’m trying to figure how inflation didn’t lead to an overwhelming victory in the House” for Republicans.
The Democrat durability seemed inexplicable by any honest standard. What about those millions of illegal immigrants Biden had rushed in? Were their numbers totally unrelated to voting totals?
You say that they can’t vote? Ah, but they can’t be here legally, either, but that had been no hindrance to a president who basks in degeneracy.
Investigative journalist Mollie Hemingway had been warning of Biden’s fiddling with the midterms, such as in her article posted June 23 at The Federalist website, “Yes, Biden Is Hiding His Plan To Rig The 2022 Midterm Elections.”
This article began: “President Biden really does not want the public to know about his federal takeover of election administration. Dozens of members of Congress have repeatedly asked for details, to no avail. Good government groups, members of the media, and private citizens have filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Not a single one has been responded to.
“All signs indicate a concerted effort to keep the public in the dark until at least after the November midterm elections,” Hemingway said. “The lack of transparency and responsiveness is so bad that the Department of Justice and some of its agencies have been repeatedly sued for the information.”
How Can We Fix It?
The Wanderer contacted five sources to ask for their observations on the midterms result. They all replied on November 9.
Blogger Mary Ann Kreitzer, who runs the Virginia-based Catholic Les Femmes — The Truth, said: “A disappointing outcome, but I don’t put my trust in politics, so I just shrugged this morning and went and said morning prayer. Perhaps we have not been punished enough for our crimes against the innocent.
“The question is,” Kreitzer said, “was the vote fraud-free? Are Americans so stupid that they are willing to elect an obviously incompetent senator in Pennsylvania [stroke victim John Fetterman] who makes Biden look like a genius by comparison? Did New Yorkers really care so little about crime with people being thrown in front of subway trains, an epidemic of rape, murder, and carjacking, often in broad daylight?
“Do the folks in Arizona really welcome the drug cartels flooding Arizona and the entire country with fentanyl? The governor’s race is tight, but the voting-machine problems in Maricopa County don’t instill confidence that a win for Katie Hobbs (if it happens) was legitimate,” Kreitzer said. “Many Americans probably feel the way I do. We can’t trust the vote until we have paper ballots, voter ID, and same-day voting, with rare exceptions for absentee balloting.
“But I’m not holding my breath. I’ll continue to vote and support good, moral candidates, but we are living in Sodom and Gomorrah and the only release may be the asteroid and Mary’s peace plan given to us at Fatima,” she said.
Northern California commentator Barbara Simpson said: “Election Day is over but you would never know it. Scores of results are held up with malfunctioning machines plus just inept tabulation. We were told it would be a ‘red wave’ but that never happened.
“It was a close race in many states,” Simpson said, “and with all the craziness, some of them will not be settled for at least two weeks! How is it in 2022 that the United States can’t conduct a national election that actually works? Do we know there was no cheating? Will we ever? Does anyone care?
“More importantly, how can we fix it? As citizens, we have a right to feel secure in the honesty of our system of electing the people who will make the laws we have to obey. As it is now, I’m sorry to say, the fix is in — only we don’t know who fixed it,” Simpson said.
Phoenix radio daily talk host Seth Leibsohn (KKNT, 960 AM) said: “This is the second election in a row that is trying to scream to self-satisfied Republicans and conservatives that we are, in fact, not a center-right country anymore. Leftism is very implanted in our body politic. You cannot graduate millions of high school and college students a year, for 30 or so years, having drenched them in socialism and expect it not to instantiate itself.
“Now add major cultural institutions from almost all schools, all media, all entertainment, almost all professional athletics, and also corporate America,” Leibsohn said. “We ignore this to our peril. And this election is a message, too, that for two years, a lot of Democrats said they would never vote for Democrats again. Why? Lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, school closures and manipulation of our children; these were the cultural issues of this election and the past two years.
“Candidates that ran on those issues in a big way by and large got those Democrats and stirred up their base. Candidates that listened to ‘it’s the economy stupid,’ and ignored the cultural issues, did not,” Leibsohn said. “Daniel Patrick Moynihan is still right: Culture is more important than politics. Ben Wattenberg is still right: Values matter most. I wished more consultants and candidates understood that.”
Conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard said: “At this time, Republicans appear likely to win most statewide offices in Arizona, picking up a Corporation Commission seat, and hanging on to the attorney general’s and governor’s offices. The two races in doubt are the Mark Kelly/Blake Masters U.S. Senate race and the Adrian Fontes/Mark Finchem secretary of state race, as expected.
“But with around 550,000 ballots left to be counted statewide, those Democrat leads of 85-90,000 votes are still within reach, even if the Democrats are favorites at the moment,” Querard said.
“Republicans also look like they are going to capture an open U.S. House seat in southern Arizona and defeat incumbent Tom O’Halleran in northern Arizona,” he said. “So a respectable night for Republicans, even if the margins on most of these races were closer than expected.
“A Trump endorsement is very helpful in primaries and a drag in general elections, as Republicans saw yesterday in various states,” Querard added. “He has a large and devoted following within the GOP, but independent and moderate voters, who usually decide close races — or, when they shift en masse, can create wave elections — still react negatively to him overall, and that creates a real drag on GOP performance in many of these competitive districts.”
National conservative commentator Quin Hillyer said: “Republicans in this environment should have had a net gain of at least four Senate seats and at least 25 House seats. That they didn’t do so is almost entirely the fault of Donald Trump.
“Trump endorsed awful candidates ahead of ones who would have won easily; scared off other good candidates in left-leaning states that could have had a chance to win; kept himself front and center in the campaign (thus inspiring large Democratic turnout because he riles them up so much rather than receding into the background); and sat on nearly $90 million he raised that could have been raised by other GOP candidates, without donating the money to actually help them,” Hillyer said.
“He is a one-man wrecking ball against the Republican Party,” he said.
“Stop It!”
Radio host Leibsohn, during his November 9 post-election program on KKNT, questioned some of Trump’s current behavior. Noting his own strong backing for Trump in recent years, Leibsohn wondered why the former president was taking verbal shots at Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had just wowed the political world by being re-elected by around 20 points.
Leibsohn said he was starting to think of Trump in the same terms as the GOP’s Richard Nixon, who had won the presidency with a 49-state landslide in 1972 but was his own undoing, having to resign that office in 1974 because of the Watergate coverup.
Nixon was “probably the most impactful Republican of the second half of the twentieth century,” Leibsohn said as he pondered whether Trump was revealing an inferiority complex regarding DeSantis.
For better or worse, Trump showed himself to be something of a force of nature, giving a speech in driving rain in Miami to a typically large crowd as Election Day approached.
As for Republicans being down at the mouth now, an optimistic-sounding Leibsohn said that his advice is, “Stop it!” Although Republicans say the election result isn’t as good as they hoped, he said, the Democrats say it’s not as bad as they feared. Leibsohn asked if people would rather be in the position of the Democrats.
National conservative radio host Mike Gallagher took a similar positive stand the morning of November 9, telling Republicans, “When you don’t get everything you want, don’t lose perspective.” He said the GOP won, even if it was a field goal from the 55-yard line.
During their November 9 program, national radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton said that if Republicans can’t win by a landslide now, it shows the opposing camps of voters are in “trench warfare,” where they’re dug in instead of being persuadable.
If Democrat voters stuck with their party despite what they’re suffering, the radio hosts said, and they voted for a candidate as awful as Pennsylvania’s impaired Fetterman, they must regard themselves as enduring “righteous suffering” on behalf of their causes like climate and being soft on crime.
Next week: More on the midterms, including election integrity and abortion.
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