Over the last couple days (and really weeks for Shapiro), I’ve listened to Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh provide their analysis on the lack of motivation for Republican congressional candidates as we head into November. In a year where it would seem that you’d have to be institutionally insane in order to pull the lever for this democrat party, it is coming as a bit of a wet blanket for the right to see polling data that suggests large swaths of people are doing just that.
— ‘Polling data’. Ha! I do find it somewhat amusing how right wingers continue to lean on, and provide in-depth analysis of, polling data which routinely underestimates the republican vote. I understand that it makes me a “science denier,” or “mouth-breather” of some sort to scoff at polling data but I am unable to shake my skepticism of ‘professional pollsters.’ I have yet to see consistent value of any polling organization. By value I, of course, mean any type of insight provided outside of merely counting up the number of registered members of either party in a given region. Shapiro routinely defends pollsters, going all the way back to the 2016 election, by citing how the vast majority of polls were “inside the margin of error.” LOL! The ‘margin of error’ for most polls that you find is +/- 3%. Sometimes I feel like you could hand me a voter registration list for any precinct, and I could give you a prediction within +/- 3%. In a country as divided as we are, +/- 3% might as well be =/- 20%. I just don’t think it’s good enough. But I digress.–
Anyhow, despite my troglodyte views on polls, the sentiment of republican voters headed into the midterms does seem to feel a bit weak. Beyond the fact that you have the mainstream media reporting dampened right-wing enthusiasm (duh), no matter what right-wing talking head you turn on, you do get a sense of impending dread radiating through the screen. Granted, this does seem to, historically, be the baseline for republicans headed into any election; the defeatist attitude. But in a year that’s seen, perhaps, the most obvious mismanagement of government, and insane social policy of any year that I can remember, this year seems especially depressing. The hand-wringing among right-wing pundits is predictable and, in my opinion, warranted given the sentiment that permeates the country. It is, however, important to be honest in our hand-wringing. For, while I have no issue with “purity tests,” so-to-speak, within a party (I’m actually in favor of it much of the time), I think that we must be absolutely certain of the ailment before we proceed with the friendly fire.
In their analysis, both Ben and Matt (as so many right-wing pundits do) tiptoe around what they believe to be the 10-ton elephant in the room for a few minutes before stepping in to make a short jab at the toenail of the beast before turning around and raising their arms in victory for the camera. As if they’ve just dropped some “hard truth” on all of us in some bold way that only they have the guts to do. Their motivations are laughably transparent, and it is disappointing to see 2 minds that, usually, operate in such logical fashion be swayed by their emotions to such an extent (although I believe I know why). Because the truth is, neither Matt or, certainly, Ben have ever, really, been Trump fans.
And I don’t mention this as some measure of the aforementioned ‘purity test,’ that’s not what I’m shooting for. Afterall, I don’t feel that their overall sentiment has missed the mark the last several months. I believe a significant portion of the Conservative electorate was ready to be done with Trump. We appreciated what he’d done, but we were ready for an actual conservative to get into office. And with the landscape the way it is, this seemed like our best shot at doing so. The left has gone so far off the rails, we may have thought, that 2024 could be our best shot to get a genuine conservative into office. And I think we were right.
Nothing was more grating than when I’d hear “It’s not DeSantis time yet. We need Trump in 2024 and he can be 2028.” Ugh, just typing it raises my blood pressure. As if every future election is, now, decidedly republican and we can simply line up our list of guys and proceed off into the sunset unimpeded (eyeroll). Beyond the fact that there are well over 99 problems that could go wrong between now and then (a b!tch certainly being one), it also just doesn’t make sense. Ron DeSantis is a more Conservative politician than Donald Trump. Period. And his ability to represent that position in a way that simply looks like rational common sense, despite the media attacks, is absolutely astonishing. And if the goal for conservatives is to turn the country from the path they are on and toward the right (and not just the unattainable middle) via the executive branch of government, the best time for a DeSantis-type figure would be now; when the left is so, incredibly, unpopular that, as the saying goes, a ham sandwich could win an election against any democrat. Give the country 4 more years of Donald Trump and that’s 1,460 days for independents to come up with a reason not to vote red, because that’s all independents and libertarians are ever looking for; a reason not to vote republican.
I say all this to say ‘I get it.’ In many ways I agree with Ben and Matt in their desire to move on from Trump. And I hate that any criticism of a right-winger’s criticism of the trump movement comes with so much baggage. The internet, after all, is a large-scale Yelp platform. Creators, especially in alternative media, only get the fanatical reviews of their takes, in either the positive or the negative. And Trump makes every right-wing commentator feel as though they’re backed into a corner. I do not mean to do that, but I suppose it’s unavoidable. Instead, as mentioned before, my only desire is to make absolutely certain that, if you’re going to stick a finger in the eye of your own party, you best make damn sure you’re correct. And I don’t think they are.
Now that I, myself, have done a significant amount of dancing…to the point. In both Matt and Ben’s opinion, one of the major factors dampening republican support has been the party’s current focus on Donald Trump. They’ve both spent a sizable portion of their (brief) insights on the issue talking about how, “as the party continues to focus on Trump and not the Democrats, the support fades.” Shapiro went as far as to claim that “Trump backed senatorial candidates are doing the worst in the poll,” which is very disingenuous. This ignores the fact that Trump-backed candidates performed very well in the prelims. And even if he were to say “sure, he does well with the base, but not in the general,” he’d also be ignoring the fact that Trump, generally, lent his endorsement to candidates in more hotly contested races. Theoretically, these candidates would be in slugfests anyway so you have a ‘Schrodinger’s Endorsement,” of sorts, going on.
For his part, Matt went as far as making the stomach-turning statement that “If the Democrats didn’t think it would benefit them to focus on Trump, they wouldn’t have done it” (speaking of the raid). Oof, that makes me vomit a little bit. As if Democrats have any earthly idea what they are doing, and are doing anything other than swinging blindly into the air. This 4D chess theory that keeps being used in our political discourse has got to stop. I’m wearing out the enamel on my teeth from gritting them so much. And even if that were true, are we so quick to forget that that exact “strategy” backfired on them dramatically in 2016? With the same guy, no less!
Needless to say, I don’t find either of their cases to be compelling. The FBI raid on Trump has not, in my experience, been a benefit to the Democrats. Even the Democrat and Independent friends that I have do not even attempt to argue the legitimacy of the raid. What’s easy to miss is that the allegiance to the FBI does not run as deep with Dems and Inds throughout the country as it does with the talking heads on MSNBC and CNN. I think that’s why you’ve seen a couple Democrats even come out and criticize it.
No, the raid on Trump is not to blame for the poor polling of Republicans, in my opinion. Sometimes the simplest answer is the right answer. And, for my money, the reason for poor GOP polling is quite simpler and much sadder. It’s a statement on just how much ground has been conceded by the right over the last 60 years. It’s a reminder that, in the grand scheme of things, the pendulum has not, really, even begun to swing the other direction. At best, it may be at, or approaching its apex. But to claim any type of wide-spread conservative momentum at this point would be foolish. At least the full suite of Conservative values. Because the singular reason, I believe, for the poor showing has been Abortion.
Being from a red state that recently enshrined abortion into the state constitution following the Roe V Wade decision, seeing the mobilization of people around the abortion issue has been extremely disappointing. I was reminded that, on abortion, there is far less unity on the right than we like to believe. Whereas the Democrats seem to be almost in lockstep in their desire for relatively liberal abortion laws, the right is less so. This, combined with the fact that Independents and Libertarians are far more likely to vote with the left on abortion does not bode well for the right in November.
And this was always going to be the case. I think many of the right-wing pundits instinctively felt this way when the decision came down, but we convinced ourselves that we had much more support than we actually did and just tried to ignore it away. “It’s just giving the states the right to vote on it,” you could hear being screamed from the microphone of every pundit and from the lips of numerous politicians in Washington. And while, yes, that’s certainly the case, this type of defense does not have much mileage with the average non-politico. Despite the massive increase in politicization of our country, I am constantly reminded that, for still a great many people out there, politics is not where they spend the majority of their time.
Within my own peer group, again in a red state, division over the issue was present. The attributing of motives, the calls for centrism, and the general indifference all played a roll. Factors that you know would never arise among our left-wing counterparts. It is easy to forget that, just 5 minutes ago, one of the most popular positions to hold in this country was that of the “Fiscally Conservative and Socially Liberal.” While it seems unfathomable to hold such a position today(especially to those of us consumed by the news), there is still a significant contingent of this group today; and most of them are registered republicans.
I could spend an inordinate amount of time speaking to how, if voters were required to know anything, this may not be as big of an issue but, the truth is, the culture that we so often decry as corrupted and degenerate, I believe, is really corrupted and degenerate. Prior to the over turning of Roe V Wade, I’d often point to abortion as, perhaps, the number 1 indicator of the rot in our culture and failure of the right. While the undoing of Roe V Wade is a bright spot on this issue, in general, it’s easy to forget that the ruling was not voted on by the country. Rather, a handful of “smart” people in Washington. As far as the country goes, our feelings toward abortion have not really changed. Whether dragged there or not, much of the country had arrived at abortion as a “necessary evil,” if not “good”; at the very least a “woman’s right.”
And there we arrive at the crux of all our issues; women. And not, so much, women as ‘Women’s Groups.’ Because it’s not lost on me that the majority of the Pro-life movement is made up of women. But, due to the outstanding marketing campaign around the abortion issue going all the way back to….well I don’t have raw data, lay off, you’d be hard pressed to find any type of women’s representation in society, outside of this group, that doesn’t full-throatedly champion unfettered abortion.
And men, for our part, want nothing more than to please women; a characteristic that’s lead to many of our political ills. So, when the prevailing belief is that “women” want abortion, any man without a strong opinion will almost always come down on the side of the left. Of course, none of this is ground-breaking insight, and could serve as the impetus for many other long-winded screeds, so we’ll leave it there.
The point is, for anyone that was starting to believe that the culture would be a manageable fix, the midterm elections should be a slap in the face. If you ask me, there have been plenty of indicators that the rot in our culture is much more than any 1 or 2 generations can sufficiently address. Call me a puritan, but the relatively scant presence of God even with many of the loudest critics of leftist culture has always been somewhat of a black pill for me. People tend to believe that the world began the day they first noticed it. Not, necessarily, the day they were born but, perhaps, the day they first had an opinion on the world. And some started sooner than others. Regardless, many in the current-day anti-woke crowd are not so much ‘anti-woke’ as they are ‘woke-light.’ They agree with many of the basic tenets of the post-modernist ideology and merely seek to rewind the clock to the day when the water in the pot was not so hot. They want to go back up the slipper-slide and stop somewhere in the middle. Since I’m smarter than everyone else, I’m capable of considering that the pot has been heating up since well-before I was born. And the only way to avoid the inevitable is to get out of the pot. Religion, if you ask me, is the only way out.
Luckily, there are many in the Conservative, and many other movements, that do recognize this. And perhaps we made the mistake of assuming that our numbers were much larger than they are. But we shouldn’t shy away from success. The overturning of Roe V Wade was a good thing. If it happens to cost us congress, wasn’t it worth it? A truly small victory, merely the opportunity to vote on it, but a victory nonetheless. And we can recognize that small victory, recognize the consequences that come with it, and understand that there is a butt-load more work to do. What we don’t need to do is place the blame for those consequences on someone or something else. Yes, that includes Donald Trump. He’s not the reason for poor GOP polling. Abortion is. And may even be the reason we don’t take back Congress. And while I know it’s tempting to point fingers at the “feckless republicans.” This time around? I don’t think there will be a finger to point. It should be worn as a badge of pride. ‘We overturned Roe V Wade and lost congress….but we overturned Roe V Wade!” We just need to hike up our skirts and get back to work.
[Side Note: In Ben’s defense, he did give a tiny bit of air-time to the Roe V Wade decision as a factor, but quickly turned to Trump. For obvious reasons. Nothing can be done about Roe V Wade now. And his disdain for Trump, the personality, has been waiting for an opening to take it’s shot. I just don’t think this is it.]
[Side Note 2: The emergence of Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire has been fascinating to me. A guy that, at first, I believed to be a redundancy at the company has emerged as my favorite personality at the company. His voice is one of the best in the ether. His unashamed invoking of Christianity into many conversations is exactly the type of thing we need, but will be the most resisted, if you ask me. He’s not right all the time, though. Obviously.]
AgingMillenial 