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A Tsunami Isn’t “Coming.” It’s Here
It’s probably unfair, even inaccurate, to describe current political trends in the US as a “tsunami” unless of course, you’re a self-proclaimed “progressive” Democrat. Tsunamis are large and highly destructive ocean waves, often caused by underwater earthquakes or volcanic disruptions. Nobody asks for nor wants to experience one, perhaps unless you’re the actual tsunami. Politically speaking, of course.
In the minds of many Americans, the coming tsunami isn’t destructive at all, despite media attempts to portray it as such. It’s restorative. And there is plenty of evidence that Democrats asked for it, starting with the consequences of an open southern border, rising crime rates amidst soft-on-crime and defund-the-police strategies, weakness abroad, lingering COVID mandates, teacher unions prioritized over students, and raging inflation at home.
Except the tsunami is underway. There’s no stopping it now.
Elections and voter registration trends in places like Pennsylvania and North Carolina – which have open gubernatorial and US Senate races this fall – portend a large political realignment in Congress and local and judicial races. Talk about “climate change.”
Republicans are registering formerly Democratic voters at four times the rate that Democrats are making the reverse conversion in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, a warning sign for Democrats as they try to keep control of the U.S. Congress.
The Republican gains in Pennsylvania, home to a critical U.S. Senate race, follow a pattern seen in other states that could have competitive contests in November’s elections, as high levels of disapproval with President Joe Biden’s handling of his job are helping narrow the long-held advantage held by Democrats in numbers of registered voters. . .
In North Carolina, where a tight Senate race is expected due to the retirement of Republican Senator Richard Burr, Republicans so far this year have picked up three Democratic converts for every voter that Democrats have poached, according to state election board data. Throughout 2021, the Republican advantage was about half that.
In Florida and Nevada, the numbers of registered Republicans rose in the first few months of the year while the ranks of Democrats declined modestly.
Meanwhile, as reported by the conservative website uncoverdc.com, several local elections saw seats flip from Democratic to Republican. Even in so-called “nonpartisan” local races, such as Norman, Oklahoma’s runoff mayoral election, policies associated with Democrats – like defunding the police – resulted in upsets. Norman is home to the University of Oklahoma, the Sooner State’s third-largest city with a population of about 128,000, and one of more Democratic-friendly areas there. It is the original hometown of US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), but don’t blame them for that. Uncoverdc.com:
…former Norman Safety Manager Larry Heikkila “won the Norman mayoral seat in the Tuesday night runoff election over incumbent Breea Clark.” According to unofficial results, he won over 53 percent of the vote. In the Feb. 8 election, he received about 36 percent of the votes, with Clark receiving 32 percent. The win is significant because it represents a sea of change in politics for the city because of calls to defund the police amid rising crime rates. Two years ago, Democrats controlled city council seats and the mayor’s office. Now the democrats hold a “small majority” and lost the mayoral seat. Heikkila says he is not a “career politician.”
School board seats also flipped. Again, uncoverdc.com:
In Springfield, MO., two anti-CRT (critical race theory) candidates unseated incumbents. Kelli Byrne and Steve Mikoski were both opposed by the teacher’s union and the local chamber of commerce. Two conservatives won school board seats in the Rockwood school district, St. Louis County’s largest public school system serving over 22,000 students. Izzy Imig and Jessica Laurent Clark won with support from conservative groups like Moms for Liberty.
Katie Lyczak also won a seat in the Wentzville school district. The district is West of St. Louis and serves about 17,000 students. The Lee’s Summit Missouri school board also racked up two conservative seats. “Anti-CRT moms” Heather Eslick and Jennifer Foley won seats.
And a judicial race in Wisconsin joined the fun. As reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
With support from free-spending conservative groups and endorsements from major Republicans, Waukesha County Judge Maria Lazar easily defeated incumbent Judge Lori Kornblum for a seat on the Court of Appeals for District II.
Kornblum, 65, a former Milwaukee County prosecutor living in Mequon, was appointed to the Waukesha-based seat last year and began work there in January. Lazar, 58, of Brookfield, had announced last year she would seek the job via election. She was elected to the circuit court in 2015, after five years at the state Department of Justice and 20 years in private practice.
Lazar took 158,290 votes, to Kornblum’s 131,863, good for a 55% to 45% margin of victory, according to complete unofficial results.
Lazar’s win was the second time in two years a conservative-backed challenger defeated an incumbent appellate judge appointed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. Last year, Shelley Grogan, a law clerk to conservative Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley, beat Jeffrey Davis, who represented corporate clients at a major law firm and had served on the Court of Appeals for nearly two years.
Southeast Wisconsin – usually reliably or leaning Democratic territory – may be the week’s story. Republicans flipped County Executive posts in Democratic Portage and, for the first time, Kenosha County. And more.
Of course, the tsunami became evident last November in Virginia, with the GOP wins of the state’s top three elected officials – Governor Glenn Youngkin, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle Sears, and Attorney General Jason Miyares – along with capturing a majority in the House of Delegates.
The tsunami shows no sign of abating. In fact, it appears to be growing.
Climb aboard, hoist the sail, catch the wind, and enjoy the ride.
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Touche
Aside from the question of whether it’s better for Republicans to prolong the death of the painfully dying person, my question with this article is whether elections will ever represent the voters’ choices again.
It’s been said that if we vote harder and get a victory of 20% the election can’t be stolen. They seem to have optimistically pulled that number out of thin air. But it’s also been said that Trump either won by 7 million votes or even 14 million. If true, then his margin of victory was between 10 and 20%.
Meanwhile, those who fortified the election and counted the votes are steaming ahead, undeterred and now more practiced. And further it appears to me that unregulated and unverified voting (ballot drop boxes) has not only been unchecked by state governments, even Republican ones, but that it’s being approved in more and more states.
I may be too pessimistic to see the improvement in election integrity. Does anyone have an update on what has been definitively done to restore it?
That doesn’t equal a promise to govern like a moderate.
I agree about Romney and Cox. Utah needs to get their act together- they are a deep red state and have squishes running their government. They can afford to go hard conservative.
I would draw the line at running people like Collins out. I don’t like her – I like Romney much more- but Romney is wasting a safe seat and Collins is stealing a lib seat. Romney should move to MA and take a lib seat there- he’d be much more popular in the Republican party if he did that.
It is going to take determination by each and every one of us, right now, during the primary season, to compel the senators and representatives to replace the Lyin’ Ryan, Misleading McCarthy, Mendacious McConnell leadership.
Yes, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. (I heard that somewhere.)
Maybe Putin? :-)
No. The RepubliCAN’T leadership in Congress has demonstrated they absolutely will not actually confound Democrats, only strike poses on video to generate more campaign contributions and set up their next lucrative career after Congress. We all know we will see, at most, Obamacare “battle” 2.0. The only way to actually confound and begin to reverse the Democrats’ agenda is to make winning the primaries this year contingent on a pledge to remove McConnell and McCarthy. Doing so burns the candidates’ boats on the shore now and so provides the only realistic assurance of any real change resulting from our votes in November.
AND.
The McCarthy/McConnell party, if allowed to continue on its decades long arc, is nearing a critical point. A McCarthy/McConnell agenda over the next two elections will result in the Republican Party going the way of the Whigs, becoming the irrelevant 3rd party, and a new major party replacing the GOP by the 2028 presidential election.
If we start now, we can have one ready by 2024.
A necessary precondition of winning is surviving.
Nominate the best Republican candidates we can. Then, whoever they are, elect them.
Because there’s a real, existential danger to unchecked Democratic rule. They are willing to burn down our institutions to secure their positions, and they can’t be left in a position to do that.
So Republicans have to win. Do the things that will help to achieve that.
Amazing how much my past actions and the reasons for them agree with some people hereabouts from whom I’ve not much heard previously.
Drew, just when I am tempted to give up on you, you file a brilliant comment like this!
DIABLO?
You’ve missed that on every other thread?
Democrat In All But Label Only.
It rhymes nicely, but please explain just how you justify attaching the adjective of “Lying” to Paul Ryan.
Please contrast with “RINO.”
Presumably, they figure DIABLOs are worse.
Will you please wake up?
Listen to the Bill Barr interview at 40:00. Keyword “strong arm”.
Look at Heath Mayo’s Twitter feed. He sounds like a student council president. He voted for Biden and he doesn’t want to talk about it.
Everything Moves Towards Communism All Of The Time™
Everything Moves Left All Of The Time™
Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland begs to differ.
Better for whom? That was the Tea Party’s hope. After the GOPe killed it they dined off its remains for quite some time though a variety of grifts that financially enriched them. And got their RINO (or, as some are now putting it, American In Name Only) comrades elected.
The culmination of the bipartisan collaboration on immigration is the border collapse under Biden. It is is on track to admit 6 million illegals to the USA this year and within three months will include amnesty.
This means irreversible, existential change. It will destroy the remains of the working class citizenry (a word rapidly becoming obsolete if not functionally meaningless) and further, perhaps irreparably, harm the middle class.
As Steve Bannon keeps saying, every American town is now a border town.
One question is whether the smylers with the knife who took our money and votes and then broke our borders and shipped our manufacturing overseas deserve the Eighth or the Ninth Circle of Dante’s Inferno.
We “optimistically” thought the Romneys, Ryans, Murkowskis and others shared our principles. They don’t. They will share, though; they’ll take our money and votes as long as we give them and see their election as a “victory.”
Good question. So why is there so much opposition to primarying them?
Perhaps another argument in favor of term limits.
If the democrats manage to maintain power in this election it is over. If they expand their majority in the Senate by even one vote it is likely that they will create two states, pack the supreme court, and make voting fraud the norm. Once that happens your new party isn’t worth its charter and the only way to get political change will be from the end of a gun.
Who is opposed primarying them?
I like that.
If the chances of getting term limits could ever be less than zero, it’s probably now.
The main obstacle to term limits is term limit advocates. However, as you point out, there are other obstacles right now, too.
I disagree with you there. The main obstacle to term limits is self interest. The people voting for the term limits are the people they would be applied to. The only way term limits are going to happen is if they are forced on the political class.
Term limits enable the bureaucracy and the lobbyists. It’s been a disaster in California.
Problem is, the term limit advocates always insist on such severe term limits that even a huge fan of term limits, such as myself, will not be in favor. There isn’t enough support for drastic term limits, and shouldn’t be. And we don’t need drastic term limits to make a huge difference.
Yes, and modest term limits won’t have those problems.