At time of writing, it does not look good for Republicans to take the Senate, although they may narrowly win the House. What I am hearing is that many of the candidates endorsed by Donald Trump won in their primaries, but lost narrowly in the general elections. But there was one VERY bright spot. Florida governor Ron DeSantis beat his Democrat opponent like a bongo drum.

Here is the story from The Blaze:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis easily won reelection Tuesday, as multiple news outlets called the race with unexpected ease as the night’s vote-counting began.

DeSantis, who was initially elected in 2018 by an extremely narrow margin over Andrew Gillum, had a much easier time in 2022 against Democrat Charlie Crist, who has formerly lost statewide races as a Republican, an independent, and a Democrat and who is widely unpopular statewide due to his transparent political opportunism.

DeSantis’ reelection campaign was viewed by many as a trial balloon for a potential 2024 presidential campaign after DeSantis established himself as a national figure by bucking restrictive federal COVID guidance issued by former President Donald Trump’s COVID czar, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Under DeSantis’ guidance, Florida was among the first states to insist on sending children back to public schools for in-person learning and to reject vaccine and mask mandates.

These policies, which have since been adopted virtually nationwide, earned him the ire of the vast majority of the national media, who frequently invited Fauci on television to rebuke him. However, they made him a national celebrity with conservatives who chafed under Fauci’s policies and contradictory messages.

DeSantis also garnered national attention by championing legislation that prevented sexually explicit instruction for children grades K-3, which was falsely labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” law by Democrats and their allies in the media. DeSantis made parental rights in education a cornerstone of his reelection campaign, repeatedly hitting on the issue on the stump and in debates.

DeSantis’ easy victory also broke the trend of Republican candidates underperforming some expectations on election night.

This is very good news. If we want to take back the White House, the candidate with the proven record is right here. Florida is a swing state, but somehow this guy went from a swing state margin of 0.4% to a margin of 19.61%. How did he do it? He did it by producing results as the governor of a state.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was busy on election night. Except he was cheering on the loss of a Republican candidate for Senate in Colorado.

Daily Wire reports:

Former President Donald Trump (R) cheered as Republicans lost a potential pickup in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday night.

Trump made the shot on his social media platform against Joe O’Dea (R) in Colorado as many Republicans across the country underperformed expectations.

“Joe O’Dea lost BIG!” Trump said. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

[…]O’Dea lost to incumbent U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) in a race that had grown unexpectedly close in recent days with the RealClearPolitics average recently indicating that the race had moved from “lean Democrat” to “toss up.”

Reporter Alex Roarty noted how Trump had approached the race vs. how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) approached the race. “Going to be a topic of conversation moving forward that Trump told his supporters not to vote for O’Dea — while DeSantis recorded a robo-call for him,” Roarty tweeted.

I am not sure that we should be looking to Donald Trump for candidate selection or leadership of the Republican party at this time. Many Trump selections lost badly on Tuesday night. But DeSantis won. I think we need to pick candidates who win, and not candidates who lose. People who lose while fighting still lose. If DeSantis is our candidate in the general election in 2024, he will win the election.

I’m writing this on Monday night. I always write blog posts the night before and schedule them for the next day. I am really looking forward to news about what voters think about Joe Biden’s socialist policies over the last 2 years. In this post, I report on a recent Wall Street Journal poll, and I have a story about Joe Biden’s closing remarks to the voters about his priorities going forward.

First, here’s news of the Wall Street Journal poll, reported by Breitbart News:

In August, Hispanic voters favored Democrats by 11 points. That lead has been cut to five points in October.

In just four years, Democrats have lost Hispanic support by 26 points.

The margin of five points in October is far less than in 2020 when President Joe Biden was favored over former President Donald Trump by 28 points. In 2018, Hispanics favored Democrats by 31 points.

A similar exodus from the Democrat party is seen among black voters. The poll found 17 percent of black voters would vote for a Republican in 2022. In 2020, that number was only eight percent, a nine point swing in two years. Eight percent also supported Republicans in 2018.

The WSJ poll sampled 1,500 people from October 22-26, including 180 black voters with a 7.3 margin of error and 400 Hispanic voters with a 4.9 margin of error.

Why is this happening?

But with the rise of crime, illegal immigration, and inflation, which disproportionally impacts less financially wealthy citizens, black and Hispanic voters have moved towards the Republicans.

I just want to re-assure white Americans that you are fine to vote for the Republican party. You are not racist if you do. Your freedom-minded fellow citizens of color are voting Republican, and there is room for you. I myself am a non-white legal immigrant by merit. This is my first election. I voted in the primaries, and I early-voted a straight Republican ticket in the generals. You are welcome to join me in voting against transing kids, higher gas prices, COVID fascism and skyrocketing inflation.

Here’s another story from The Federalist that I thought was interesting:

…Joe Biden’s closing message for 2022. “We’re going to be shutting these [coal] plants down all across America and having wind and solar,” Biden told a crowd in deep blue California on Friday, arguing that it was “cheaper” to generate electricity from wind and solar.

[…]In California, which not only leads the nation in “clean energy” production but is leading the rest of us into rolling blackouts, residents pay 24.62 cents per kilowatt-hour for energy, around double the national average. There are only three other states where residents fork 20 or more cents over, the isolated Hawaii and Alaska and the frack-banning New York. The price of a gallon of gas in California is around two dollars over the national average, at $5.458. In Texas, it’s $3.173.

[…]Biden reiterated his position at a rally for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul later this past weekend. Responding to a climate activist heckler, Biden shouted: “No more drilling. There is no more drilling! I haven’t formed any new drilling.” It’s one of the few true things the president has said in a while. The Biden administration, even during historic spikes in gas prices, effectively shut down any new federal leases.

This is what Americans voted for in November 2020:

Now everyone understands what Biden meant. We have lived under it for 2 years. His words. Your dollars. He has learned nothing. His position has not changed at all.

If gas prices and inflation are not important to you, then don’t forget about the COVID lockdowns.

The Manhattan Institute explains:

A new study from Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Applied Economics supports what I and others have long maintained: lockdowns do not work, and their economic, social, educational, and psychological costs far outweigh any health benefits they might bring.

[…][T]he Hopkins literature review and meta-analysis, by Professors Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve Hanke, finds that lockdowns—“defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI)” such as school and business closures and limitations on movement and travel—“had little to no effect on Covid-19 mortality.”

[…]The Hopkins findings echo and confirm the conclusions in an April 2021 review by Canadian economist Douglas Allen that lockdowns had little or no impact on the number of Covid-19 deaths.

I don’t think there is a single Democrat in the Biden administration who understands how the world works. On any topic. It’s just virtue signaling and distrust of freedom from top to bottom. These people are not qualified to lead. They are disconnected from reality. We need to vote them out and replace them with people who are better at crafting policies that achieve results for us – the voters.

At the time of writing, I’ve already voted a straight Republican ticket in my state. My state senator is not up for re-election this year, but my state representative is, and so is my federal representative. I was concerned that maybe after the 2020 elections, it might not be worth it to vote. But a recent article from The Federalist notes that Republicans have been busy making sure my vote will count.

Here’s what happened in the 2020 elections:

The 2020 election was a massive wake-up call for many Americans on the right. In the months leading up to it, Democrats forced through changes to hundreds of laws and processes governing how elections are conducted.

The rule-change scheme was run by Marc Elias, a Democrat election attorney who also ran his party’s Russia collusion hoax, which falsely claimed Donald Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia. Sometimes Democrats’ 2020 changes were instituted legally. Frequently, though, they were effected by other means, such as getting a friendly state or local official to change the rules unilaterally.

The 2020 election plan… sought to flood the zone with tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots, historically understood to be riper for fraud and other election irregularities than supervised, in-person voting. The plan also involved the private takeover of government election offices to run Democrat-focused get-out-the-vote operations. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, financed the project, doling out $419 million to two left-wing groups that focused grants and assistance to government offices in the Democrat areas of swing states.

This radical change… included the widespread practice of placing ballot drop boxes predominantly in Democrat areas of the country, mailing out unsolicited mail-in ballots or applications for mail-in ballots, using well-funded teams of ballot harvesters both inside and outside of government, lowering and changing the standards for mail-in ballot acceptance, and fixing or “curing” ballots that were improperly filled out.

[…]Big Tech and the media ran coordinated disinformation campaigns to benefit Democrats by suppressing news that hurt the party. Big Tech also deplatformed effective conservative voices and media outlets, suppressed fundraising emails from Republicans, and elevated certain information to help Democrats.

This was the challenge facing Republicans in 2020. And here’s what they did in the last 2 years after the 2020 elections:

The Republican National Committee, other party entities, and dozens of public interest election nonprofit groups built over the last two years a multimillion-dollar election integrity infrastructure that passed laws improving voter ID and other election security measures, defended those laws from legal attacks by Democrats, and sued states and localities that failed to follow the law. They also recruited, educated, trained, and placed tens of thousands of new election observers and other workers throughout the long midterm voting season.

[…][B]ans on so-called Zuckbucks, the private takeover of government election offices, were passed and signed into law in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Pennsylvania is still a problem, because the Democrat governor vetoed legislation passed by Republicans to improve election integrity. Georgia was a problem last election, but look – they’ve improved:

Georgia passed much-needed reforms related to voter ID, mail-in voting, and drop boxes, in addition to the Zuckbucks ban. The result has been record-breaking early, in-person voter turnout, across demographics, surpassing 2 million voters this week.

Meanwhile, the Foundation for Government Accountability worked with states to make policy changes to clean voter rolls, ban ballot trafficking, secure ballot custody, roll back Covid waivers, enact penalties for election lawbreakers, require chains of custody, secure drop boxes, pre-process absentee ballots, improve absentee voter ID, and dozens of other types of reforms.

Florida has been working steadily to improve its election system since the disastrous 2000 election. Last year, that meant banning Zuckbucks. This year, those changes included “requiring voter rolls to be annually reviewed and updated, strengthening ID requirements, establishing the Office of Election Crimes and Security to investigate election law violations, and increasing penalties for violations of election laws.”

Incidentally, the Center for Renewing America filed a complaint with the IRS over the tax break that Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan received for their 2020 election meddling.

It’s probably a good idea for conservatives to just get off Facebook. Definitely do not pay Zuck for advertisements.

The Republicans passed legislation, but they also took the Democrats to court:

The RNC got involved in 73 election integrity cases in 20 states for the midterms, with plans to expand. They won a lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for restricting the rights of poll challengers; got Maricopa County, Arizona, to share key data about its partisan breakdown of poll workers; won an open records lawsuit against Mercer County, New Jersey, for refusing to share election administration data; won a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections for restricting the rights of poll watchers; and reached a favorable settlement against Clark County, Nevada, in which the county agreed to share information about its partisan breakdown of poll workers on a rolling basis.

The Republicans also trained thousands of election day poll watchers:

The RNC hired 17 in-state election integrity directors and 37 state-based election integrity counsels in key states. They conducted more than 5,000 election integrity trainings, recruited more than 70,000 poll watchers and workers, and worked with more than 110,000 unique volunteers nationwide. They set up an issue reporting system and distributed copies of Poll Watcher Principles for states. If voters encounter election issues, they can file a report, and attorneys will be dispatched to resolve the issues. Sites were set up in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Congressional Republicans also got in on the action. Rep. Rodney Davis, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee, notified all 50 states that he would be deploying dozens of specially trained election observers to protect the integrity of the ballot box.

[…]The Election Integrity Network, which started with a podcast on election integrity issues hosted by longtime election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, grew into state summits, which then built out into coalitions in states, attracting people to weekly meetings. The network has trained 76,000 poll workers.

So, there’s every reason to think that your vote will count on Tuesday. I voted. You should go vote, too. We need to get gas prices lowered, rein in inflation, and make sure that the pandemic fascists are investigated. Plenty of reasons to vote Republican.

By the way, if you’re looking for a good book on what happened in the 2020 elections, Mollie Hemingway’s “Rigged” is a great choice.