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The Least Surprising News Story of the Day
A college friend of mine from Bernardsville, NJ, messaged me on Facebook yesterday about the victory of the truck driver (Edward Durr) over the president of the New Jersey State Senate (Steve Sweeney). He said something like, “Ha! So elections are fixed, huh? Where are your Republican conspiracy theories now, Mr. Tinfoil Hat?!”
I responded that yes, I was surprised that Mr. Durr had won. And yes, I was surprised that the NJ Democrats hadn’t cheated to keep the Senate seat. I told him that I figured that they would just keep counting until they got the result they wanted, or they would find some new ballots under the couch cushions, or whatever. But that hadn’t happened. And yes, that was surprising to me.
When the news came out this morning that Mr. Sweeney had not conceded, and that New Jersey’s election commission had found thousands of new votes and was in the process of ‘counting’ them, I messaged my friend again:
Me: How about that? NJ just found thousands of new votes. Or at least, that’s what it said in the newspaper. Not sure if it’s true. Could be just another conspiracy theory…”
Friend: Yeah, looks a little weird I guess, but these things happen. Not surprising, considering all the different polling centers and all. It’s good that they’re doing their best to make sure that every vote is counted.
Me: Looks like it won’t matter. The New York Times just Tweeted that a majority of the new votes are going for the Republican. So it looks like he’ll win by an even larger margin of victory than he already had.
She doesn’t seem surprised, either.
Friend: WHAT?!
Me: Just kidding, of course. No one is saying how those votes are falling. Because everybody knows. Including you, apparently.
Friend: Very funny. You really can be an [expletive]. I just want them to count every vote, and then we’ll let the chips fall where they may.
Me: Of course…
We’ve been friends for years (gosh – decades), so some name-calling is not as mean as it sounds. He’s from New Jersey, and he likes giving people a hard time.
But what gets me about our exchange is what is surprising, and what is not.
I was surprised that New Jersey had not put adequate effort into cheating to be sure that the Democrat kept his Senate seat. I mean, I was really surprised. I think my friend was too, although he didn’t say that, so I don’t know.
Perhaps they presumed this would be a slam-dunk re-election for the Democrat, and they didn’t bother to cheat. Until they realized that they had to. Or maybe not – I don’t know, obviously. But regardless of how this happened, I was surprised when the Republican won the election.
Neither of us was surprised when they found thousands of new ballots after the election was over.
My friend was extremely surprised when I told him that the new ballots were going mostly for the Republican. And he was not surprised when I told him that I was kidding.
I’m a Republican, and he’s a Democrat, and we both presumed that the Democrats would cheat to win an election. Or at least try.
And to be clear, we don’t really know if they are cheating. Perhaps they really did find thousands of new votes that had previously been overlooked. And perhaps those new votes really will go Republican. Neither one of those is impossible.
But my friend and I would both be surprised if either was true. So would Mr. Sweeney and Mr. Durr, I suspect. So would Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I suspect.
Some people will feel that this is not proof of anything. Others will feel that this is evidence of fraud. A lot of people will have a lot of different opinions about all this.
But no one will be surprised.
Published in General
I don’t know that there are any Republican states. There might be, but I can’t think of one. There are states where Republicans tend to win elections, but that’s not the same thing.
My own county in Michigan is majority Democrat, but Republicans win the vast majority of the county and township elective offices. The successful Republicans campaign and act in the realization that they represent a lot of Democrats.
Maybe city and village elective offices, too. I don’t remember for sure, and would have to ask. Living in a rural area adjacent to a small city, I tend to have townships on my mind.
the swamp rat finally conceded!
Wow! That’s amazing!
I’ll bet that I’ll be getting a few Facebook Messages tonight…
I thought of you as I read the article, wondering how this was going to affect your messaging. And this with the VA win does lift the spirits a bit.
The swamp rat must have figured out that he needed 180% of the outstanding votes to go his way.
I don’t see the 12,000 voted counted, or the current vote counts anywhere. Does anyone have a link?
I mean I can only think of two reasons to concede. Either the votes were counted and Sweeney lost, or they were found to be illegal, and they didn’t count.
Your surprise that a truck driver kept the office he newly won, even as you suspected the Dems might find enough votes to oust him under some seat cushions somewhere – that is exactly how I felt when Donald Trump won in 2016.
I could not believe that they would not cheat enough to get Hillary installed by Jan 20th 2017.
I did not know much about Donald Trump at the time, but I felt a glow of energy around his winning the prize. As though it were an event that God had ordained.
It would have been – and it probably was – a lot more difficult to increase cheating in 2016, than it was in 2020 after they had illegally changed voting laws in several states, etc.
It is truly an upside down world.
Trump has been castigated for saying out loud his belief that the election was stolen.
Well if 155 million ballots were cast in an election for which there were only 133 million registered voters, what else can he believe?
Why it is that the Dem leadership has been incredulous over Trump’s disbelief? The incredulity they show off these days is so hypocritical, as it was only five years ago they were screaming that Trump had stolen their election! After all, they promulgated the idea for all their followers to live by that not only had Trump stolen 2016, he did so by colluding with the Russian government to accomplish this theft.
So all in all, the only thing separating Trump’s lack of being a good sport versus how Hillary was totally a good sport is that she knew she owned the entire Dem party such that they would promote the idea Donald stole it.
While Trump has been the odd man out among the RINO-led Republican party. If he did not say it, no one in R leadership would.
I mean, look at who Cheney is these days – she certainly would not have mentioned the election being tainted as being even a slim possibility.
On some forums, those who supported Trump now have little faith in Republican Party members except for a small handful of those currently elected officials who are true to the same ideals Trump had.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that all the fuss people made about the stolen election of 2020 persuaded Democrats that this was not the time to overplay their hand.
They don’t think that deeply.
“Go back to sleep, now. It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”
Some don’t and some do.
Yeah, they do when they don’t think that they can get away with it, and it isn’t worth it to force it through.