The Closing Argument

Why Republican and right-leaning independent voters simply must come to the polls and beat back the Democrats’ quest for Congressional power on Tuesday.

Count this writer as highly suspicious of the media hype surrounding Tuesday’s midterm elections, to the tune that the Democrats are poised to gain as many as 50 seats or more in the House of Representatives. That relentless narrative reeks of a “fake-it-’til-you-make-it” ploy on the part of not just the usual suspects in the Democrat media but many of their NeverTrump Republican colleagues, whose rantings are increasingly shrill and nonsensical.

The truth is, there is no demonstrated polling advantage suggestive of this purported Blue Wave. There is a slight Democrat advantage in generic-ballot polling, which is of negligible predictive value when there is an actual ballot with actual candidates, and there is a historical advantage given to the party opposing the president. But in truth, the vast majority of the seats contested on Tuesday are (1) currently held by Republicans, and therefore naturally red districts, and (2) very much to be decided on Election Day, with polls of those races close enough and polling unreliable enough to offer no reliable forecast of how things will turn out.

Sean Trende of RealClear Politics opined on Twitter that he sees scant evidence of this much-discussed Blue Wave. “The most puzzling thing for me in this election (and the reason the scenario of Rs barely keeping/just barely losing the House keeps nagging at me) is this: the overall atmosphere isn’t that atrocious for Republicans, and a lot of ‘big picture’ signifiers of waves aren’t here,” Trende said. “Like, if you compare it to 2006, Trump’s job approval is substantially higher than Bush’s 37%. The economy is significantly better. Republicans have about the same amount of baseline exposure in the House (i.e., Rs in D-leaning seats).”

Trende continued. “We haven’t seen a massive surge in Democratic party identification. The enthusiasm gap is present, but not really of the magnitude that we’ve seen in the past.”

After conceding the possibility that the Democrats do have an opportunity at flipping the 23 seats they need for a House majority takeover, Trende noted that “But we also have a LOT of House seats that are polling within a point or two. If we get even a *slight* break among undecideds toward Republicans they end up keeping a lot of those seats.”

Trende’s analysis combines with an interesting poll Rasmussen Reports released late last week indicating that the real advantage the Democrats have is in the volume and intensity of the obnoxious screeching their voters are engaging in during the runup to the midterm. To wit…

Just as in 2016, Democrats are more outspoken about how they’re going to vote in the upcoming elections than Republicans and unaffiliated voters are.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 60% of Likely Democratic Voters say they are more likely to let others know how they intend to vote this year compared to previous congressional elections. This compares to 49% of Republicans and 40% of voters not affiliated with either major political party.

That 11-point Democrat advantage in haranguing their friends and neighbors is almost twice the 52-46 advantage the Dems held over Republicans in 2016, and we all know how well the polls predicted that election.

So there is the possibility of a Red Wave the pollsters are missing — and that the partisan Democrat media refuses to acknowledge.

We already know it’s more than a little likely the Republicans could add as many as four or five Senate seats if things go well. And that prospect flies in the face of the major media narrative — wave elections don’t break one way in the House and the opposite way in the Senate.

With all that said, America simply can’t afford the Blue Wave. Our readers must do everything they can to overcome it with the Red Wave.

This Democrat Party is a threat to our way of life and it must be denied political power. It is a virus on our body politic and must be quarantined to its safe precincts in inner cities and college towns, and pressured into remission from there.

Why? During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Sen. Lindsey Graham made the best argument when, to paraphrase, he said a party so covetous of political power is unqualified to have it based on the lengths to which it will go.

Graham’s point has been made over and over again as the midterms have neared, but last week the former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who would return to power if the Democrats were to gain those 23 seats, went on the late-night leftist extravaganza hosted by Stephen Colbert and promised that all which is necessary to improve our ugly national political tone is to put her in charge of the House.

“Well, I think when we win, you will see evidence of that. Because when we do win, we will have, as we open the new Congress, we will honor the vows of our founders, E pluribus unum, from many one,” Pelosi said. “It’s OK to disagree in the marketplace of ideas, that’s exciting, but it is also important to find solutions that unify and not divide.”

As the Washington Free Beacon noted, Pelosi’s promise was similar to the statement Hillary Clinton made earlier this fall that “civility can start again” after the Democrats achieve power.

And there you have it. To the Democrats power is more important than civility. The ends justify the means.

They proved this in the Kavanaugh hearings. They proved it in the 2016 elections, when they sent violent thugs to start fights at Trump rallies. They’ve also proved it time and again on the campaign trail. If you’ve paid attention to James O’Keefe’s work infiltrating Democrat senatorial and gubernatorial campaigns to do investigative journalism, you’ve seen a consistent, unmistakable pattern of strategic deception and contempt for the average voter. Whether it’s the campaigns of Phil Bredesen, Kirsten Sinema, Andrew Gillum or Beto O’Rourke, the attitude is the same — lie and cheat, act in bad faith, none of it matters if you win.

And of course, slander the opposition with the most defamatory epithets possible — as DNC chair Tom Perez did on Sunday as he called the entire Republican Party racist for discussing border security as a paramount issue.

But these liars and reprobates promise, of course, that all will be well if they’re just given the House of Representatives back. They promise civility then — we’ll have civil impeachment hearings, civil investigations of every department in Trump’s administration, and civil government shutdowns as they hold the federal budget hostage to their demands for a massive tax increase.

That will be civility. It’ll be plenty civil — so long as you let Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters define what “civility” means.

The Republican majority’s performance in the House of Representatives could have been better in the current Congress, and Paul Ryan as a lame-duck House Speaker has been less helpful and energetic than he could have been. That said, it’s been the Senate, with its weak 51-49 majority and Chuck Schumer’s obstructionist Democrat caucus, which has held up most of the legislative agenda Republican voters would have preferred to see pass.

And yet that tax cut Bernie Sanders and the rest of the Hard Left demand to eliminate did pass, and the American economy has roared since. We’re on pace for the first year of better than three percent economic growth in more than a decade. The labor participation rate has grown, despite the downward pressure of Baby Boomers retiring, and wage growth is on fire with unemployment at historic lows.

The other side’s response to this? Barack Obama is running around the country pathetically claiming he’s the cause of our current prosperity. Which should surprise no one — Obama’s party is animated by the theft of things earned by others. If it is rewarded for its atrocious behavior on Tuesday, America deserves the result which will come.

Though this writer is unconvinced the pollsters, pundits, and partisans busily touting the Blue Wave have a finger on America’s pulse, the prospect of Nancy Pelosi returning to power is too distasteful to accept. There must be no Blue Wave. Do not let your vote go uncounted on Tuesday.

https://spectator.org/the-closing-argument/