By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — I recently noticed a man at daily Mass at my parish wearing a black hoodie with a large image of a skull on his back. What biker gang’s member was showing off its colors?
When I managed to read the words around the skull, it turned out not to be threatening a violent end to a gang’s enemies, but the classic Christian “memento mori” skeletal reminder that death comes to everyone, so be spiritually prepared for that day. If you’ve been good, resurrection follows.
Appearances aren’t necessarily what they seem.
Much analysis followed the November 8 midterm elections, including considerable surprise that the Republican Party didn’t do as well as anticipated.
During a November 16 interview on Phoenix-based KKNT Radio (960 AM), Cong. David Schweikert (R., Ariz.), a statistics guru, said it’s important to analyze the data, which could take weeks.
Still, when voters were mightily displeased during the first midterm elections of Bill Clinton (1994) and Barack Obama (2010), they soundly rebuked these liberal Democrat presidents. Clinton lost 54 House seats and eight Senate seats, while Obama lost 63 House seats and six Senate seats.
As bad as those presidents’ early years had been, there was no denying Democrat Joe Biden’s start in the White House, beginning in January 2021, had been astoundingly worse, with his policies intentionally inflicting immense suffering across the board on Americans in order to impose his far-left agenda.
However, as this was written overnight on November 16-17, the GOP had just hit the bare minimum for a U.S. House majority, at 218 seats, while other races still were being counted. Hardly a rout of Democrats.
Meanwhile, the Senate was at a 50-50 split, the same number as before the midterm elections, although a December 6 runoff is scheduled for one of the Georgia Senate seats.
It probably didn’t increase GOP activists’ enthusiasm around the nation, however, that generally passive Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, was reelected to that post on November 16 by a comfortable margin of 37 to 10 of his Senate colleagues, with one member voting “present.”
Nor was it inspiring that 12 Republican senators joined with Senate Democrats on November 16 to provide a filibuster-proof majority for a bill to codify “same-sex marriage” nationwide that opponents said threatened religious liberty.
With all of the nation’s frightening challenges, the best that a significant number of Senate Republicans could do, just a week after the midterm elections, was to boost a Democrat social-transformation priority?
The left-wing Los Angeles Times posted on November 16 to note “Republicans’ underwhelming performance in an election cycle when economic conditions, historical precedent and a sour national mood should have worked to their advantage.”
One major difference since Clinton’s and Obama’s devastating midterms was the introduction of mass mail-in balloting, supposedly as an emergency measure for the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, with countless millions of ballots being set afloat across the U.S. However, many states continued to use this system, which was regarded as a treasure to help Democrats.
The “Revolver” news and opinion site posted on November 12 that despite the many incentives for voters to repudiate Democrats, and the fact that the seriously stroke-impaired John Fetterman in Pennsylvania seemed all the more undesirable as a U.S. Senate candidate, 2022 was a new world in voting.
In Pennsylvania in 2018, the “Revolver” article said, “163,000 citizens voted early or by absentee ballot. In 2020, more than 2.6 million voted that way thanks to COVID and a borderline criminal effort to repeal Pennsylvania voting law by fiat.
“Crucially, though, Pennsylvania did not go back to normal afterwards,” the article said. “It kept the new mail-heavy approach, and so in 2022…close to 1.2 million Pennsylvanians again voted early or by mail-in ballot.”
Republicans remained focused on Election Day turnout, “Revolver” said, but Democrats mastered the opportunity to push people repeatedly for weeks to supply their ballots, even if they were unlikely voters or needed “hand-holding” to cooperate.
It said: “Could this involve fraud? Maybe, but even if there is no fraud at all, a superior early-vote operation gives Democrats an enormous boost. Instead of fretting about maximizing turnout on a single day, Democrats can use their ground game to harangue every likely supporter of theirs for weeks on end.
“They can knock on their door,” the article continued, “offer to ‘help’ them with their ballot, and in many states, volunteer to turn it in for them. By the time of actual Election Day, Democrats can focus all of their resources on whatever holdouts and marginal voters they still have.”
On the other hand, in at least some locations, Republicans showed they could play by these rules successfully, too. National conservative activist Charlie Kirk tweeted on November 16, “We will build the most sophisticated and aggressive legal ballot-harvesting operation in America and never let this garbage happen again.”
A few hours later, Kirk tweeted, “The House of Representatives is GOP-controlled thanks to how we performed in states with the most liberal ballot-harvesting and vote-by-mail laws — New York, Oregon, California. We can master this system. Democrats are praying that we refuse to try.”
A Banana Republic Dictatorship
The Wanderer asked three sources for their observations on the election results.
National conservative commentator Quin Hillyer replied: “The only place where questionable ballot processes might — repeat, might — have affected the outcome of an important race was in the Nevada Senate election. It’s long past time to put to rest the nonsense that the 2020 election was stolen, much less that 2022 was.
“These results were exactly what I expected all year,” Hillyer said. “Neither party gave voters reason to have confidence in them, so both parties, in essence, lost.”
Mary Ann Kreitzer, who runs the Virginia-based Catholic blog Les Femmes — The Truth, said: “I think the same steal we saw in 2020 was at work again with ballot harvesting, fraudulent ballots, counting for days after the election, and ‘discovering’ more ballots favoring Democrats until they got the desired Democrat win.
“Anybody who thinks Biden got more votes than anyone in history in 2020 or that John Fetterman won in Pennsylvania has to be as brain-damaged as those two,” Kreitzer said.
“The only results I trust anymore are in states with election-integrity policies in place,” she said. “Voter ID, in-person voting, same-day results, and no huge last-minute ballot drops. My bet is that most people in the country (besides the ideologues who, as long as they win, don’t care about election honesty) know the vote is rigged. Georgia will go to the Democrat just like the last runoff. It’s in the bag.
“Until we have serious election reform, which may never happen with the liars and cheaters running things, we can’t trust the election process,” Kreitzer said. “We are living in a third-world banana-republic dictatorship. I don’t see any way out, but I know there is no injustice that will not be righted in the end.
“I don’t put my trust in politicians, but I was sure disappointed to see a reformer like [Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate] Kari Lake taken out by the fraudsters. I think the focus at this point has to be on local elections, especially school boards, to rescue our children. It all begins there.”
Northern California commentator Barbara Simpson began her reply on November 16 by noting Donald Trump’s announcement the previous evening that he was running for the presidency again before she got to the topic of the “red wave” that disappeared.
“In a way, you have to feel sorry for Donald Trump,” Simpson said. “He’s loved and hated — seemingly in equal parts by Republicans and Democrats. You have to give him credit, he’s strong and goes ahead with what he believes — which is more than you can say about the average politician.
“What happened to the ‘red wave’? Nothing,” she said, “because it didn’t really exist and what did was trampled by liberal media. There is a lot of soul-searching going on but, bottom line, the future of GOP politics will depend on how the average American voter sees the future of this country.
“They don’t like what exists under Biden,” Simpson said, “and for them Trump is the future — like it or not, Democrats!”
The hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton national radio program on November 14 said Republicans actually won millions of more votes than Democrats in the midterms, but the votes weren’t evenly distributed and so didn’t bring a larger win of U.S. House seats.
A November 10 post at Breitbart news, citing the Cook Political Report, said: “Republicans have won nearly six million more votes nationwide in races for the House of Representatives, but have flipped relatively few seats, suggesting talk of a ‘red wave’ may have anticipated the overall mood of the country but not the final result of the election.”
Something Is Severely Wrong
Citing this considerably greater number of GOP votes, Sean Hannity on his November 14 national radio program said former House GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich said this election defied all election models.
National radio talker Sexton said on November 15 that when Democrats could elect the worst candidate in the nation, Pennsylvania’s Fetterman, but Republicans couldn’t elect the best one, Arizona gubernatorial candidate Lake, “Something is severely wrong” with the election system.
There were significant questions about election integrity in the Grand Canyon State, where Democrat Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who oversaw elections and refused to recuse herself, was said to have beaten Lake by six-tenths of one percent, 50.3 to 49.7, as of November 16, before the vote was finalized.
Lake hadn’t conceded.
On November 11 the incoming Arizona Senate president, Republican Warren Petersen, told Phoenix talk host James T. Harris (KFYI, 550 AM) that the state-capitol establishment is “terrified” of Lake because she’s beholden to no one.
Like some other radical Democrats, the strongly pro-abortion Hobbs campaigned from her basement and repeatedly ducked debates, while Lake campaigned to crowds across the state and said she’d debate Hobbs anywhere, anytime.
Mechanical impediments to voting arose swiftly on Election Day.
Within minutes after polls opened at 6 a.m. on November 8 in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county by far, Lake received reports of numerous voting tabulators that didn’t work.
About 20 percent of voting locations reportedly had serious problems.
A video of a poll observer in suburban Scottsdale, east of Phoenix, showed him saying that in 42 years of voting, “I have never experienced such chaos, confusion, and voter suppression.”
He told of voters with looks of disbelief after they futilely tried to cast their ballots for more than a half-hour, after having already waited in line to vote for more than an hour — being told to try moving their completed ballots back and forth between tabulators that didn’t work, or to try something else.
A separate video showed a line of voters that was blocks long in the exurb of Anthem, north of Phoenix, waiting to be able to vote.
The Western Journal news site said it “received over 20 exclusive videos featuring Arizona voters explaining how difficult it was for them to cast their ballots. One voter had to wait in line for seven hours.”
It took a week of counting by Maricopa County before Hobbs was projected to be the gubernatorial winner. This echoed 2020, when the local uniparty establishment said Joe Biden won the presidential vote here. Biden had been endorsed by both the late GOP Sen. John McCain’s widow, Cindy, and unpopular former GOP U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake.
In 2022, Republican Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates gave news conferences lecturing the public on the county’s noble work for the midterm. A key ally was Republican County Recorder Stephen Richer, first elected narrowly in 2020 as a reformer but who soon mocked voters.
On November 14 The Post Millennial website posted that in 2021, Gates and Richer “started a political action committee to stop MAGA candidates.” Their PAC’s website, the “Pro-Democracy Republicans of Arizona,” said they’re “fighting to keep our democratic institutions alive.”
Lake is regarded as a MAGA Republican.
The issue of abortion was on the ballots of five states in the midterms. In each case the pro-abortion side of the question won — even though strongly pro-life political candidates and incumbents also won.
I wasn’t in any of those states, but anyone can imagine the barrage of misinformation the pro-abortion side presented in advertisements with tens of millions of dollars in spending that matched the influence of pro-abortion dominant media.
Fifty years ago, in 1972, Michigan voters strongly rejected a pro-abortion ballot proposition. This year a majority approved installing the “right” to abortion in the state Constitution.
That shows what more than a half-century of pro-abortion propaganda dressed up as “news” can do to some people’s beliefs. But it won’t last forever. Even pro-abortion radicals can be converted to the side of mercy, as was militant twentieth-century national abortion champion Bernard Nathanson, MD, who became a strong pro-lifer.
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