Donald Trump may have the media’s front pages…
But Americans on the whole have tuned him out…
(Except in Florida)
And they aren’t afraid to vote that way…
The Grand ole Party has some thinking to do….
No excuses, Republicans. Everyone thought you had just about the ideal issue environment for a midterm election, and the exit polls verified it. Seven in ten voters said they were “dissatisfied” or “angry” with the state of the country. Around three-quarters of voters nationally characterized the state of the economy as “poor” or “not good,” and the same amount said that inflation has caused them severe or moderate hardship. About two-thirds said that gas prices have been causing them hardship. You had parents livid about the learning loss in schools because of the long closures for Covid-19 and inappropriate materials in the curriculum. You had an unpopular president, who was such a liability that Democrats couldn’t let him go anywhere near a swing state.
And the nation, deeply dissatisfied with the way the Democrats were running things, looked at what the GOP offered as the alternative and concluded, “Nope, I’ll stick with what the Democrats are giving me” in a lot of key places.
If you can’t elect a lot of Republicans in an environment like this, when can you?
I don’t ever want to hear another Republican claim he stands for the silent majority. As I warned in September, if your silent majority doesn’t show up to vote in large numbers, it doesn’t have that much say in how this country is governed. We could even argue that a silent majority that doesn’t vote might as well not exist at all.
There was one spectacular bright spot for Republicans: the state of Florida, where Ron DeSantis absolutely demolished Charlie Crist, in the kind of landslide that alters the political identity of the state. As of this writing, DeSantis beat Crist, hitting almost 60 percent to Crist’s 39.9 percent….