November 16, 2022
"BLASPHEMY" DRIVES DEMOCRATIC BASE, DOOMING REPUBLICANS
Republicans are fortunate that their party didn’t exist back during the Inquisition or the French Revolution. Those were extinction events, and the 2022 election results foreshadow that 2024 will be an one of those events if the Republicans foolishly nominate Donald Trump for president.
For a large chunk of Americans, and now certainly a majority, voting Republican is blasphemy.
During the Inquisition, which began in 1233, those who disbelieved Roman Catholic orthodoxy – thereby committing blasphemy -- were burned-at-the-stake, drawn-and-quartered, put in an iron coffin and/or tortured to death. The Church decided who blasphemed and died. During the French Revolution, the guillotine replaced those more barbarous practices. It was off-with-their-heads for all monarchists. The state decided who blasphemed and died.
And then there was the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) in czarist Russia, the rise of the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, Mao’s Red Guard extermination of dissidents (1964-68) in communist China. It was all about political conformity. No “Threat to Totalitarianism” could be tolerated. Liquidate those who dissent – the blasphemists. Keeping power is uppermost.
In 2022, a whole lot of people on the Far Left believe that voting Republican is akin to self-genocide of self-respect and self-esteem, traitorous to their generation, gender, country and world. It would be the “End of Democracy,” fascism and the “End of the World.” It would be cultural blasphemy. An idiotic so-called historian even proclaimed that a Republican win would result in “killing our children.” Those on the Far Right are equally shrill, decrying socialism and the End of America as-we-know-it. So much for rational political discourse. I hope we’re not dusting off the guillotine.
It is indisputable that the Far Left will prevail in the long game, which looks sooner rather than later. Usually the older establishment conservatives die and the next generation, which has morphed into comfortable, family-oriented middle age, takes over and maintains the status quo with minimal tinkering.
That won’t happen when the millennials and Gen Z take over. For many of them, their personal/cultural beliefs transcend societal issues. Voting “D” is now virtue-signaling, like driving an electric vehicle or still wearing a facemask outside by yourself.
That was evident on Nov. 8.
Crime, economic distress, inflation, wealth shrinkage and immigration were not on the Left’s radar. They don’t blame Biden or the Democrats. They don’t seem to care if those problems are fixed. They definitely don’t want to let the Republicans try to fix them. They care about protecting their personal beliefs and feelings.
A pre-election poll found a profound nationwide gap between women, with single women voting “D” by 37 points, or about 68-32 percent, while married women slightly favored Rs; among men, singles favored Ds by 7 points, and married men were Rs by 10 points. As America has become less marriage-conformist, that bodes ill for the Rs.
That was painfully evident in Illinois, where Republican performance was abysmal and Trump-endorsed Darren Bailey’s candidacy was an abject failure. He lost to Governor JB Pritzker 2,170,428-1,719,218, a margin of 461,210, and was such an anchor that Republicans LOST two state Supreme Court races, and LOST five Illinois House contests but no Senate seats. They are now in a 78D-49R House minority and a 41-18 Senate minority.
“You won’t get an inch of Illinois,” Prtizker blared on election night.
Democrats used to have legislative super-majorities, which were over 60 percent. Now they have mega-super-majorities near two-thirds. It hasn’t been like this since 1964 when voters elected all 177 state reps at-large in the “bedsheet ballot” debacle. People voted straight-ticket and the result was 118D-59R. Republicans bounced-back to win control in 1966.
That won’t happen in 2024.
“It will be worse” in 2024, said Matt Podgorski, a POSSIBLE Trump/Bailey casualty in his 9TH DISTRICT run for county commissioner. As of Nov. 12 he was up 52,025-51,730, a microscopic margin of 295 votes over Pritzker-funded Maggie Trevor (D).
Podgorski carried the 40th, 41st and 38th ward precincts by 9,740-6,832, getting an impressive 58.8 percent, and Trevor won the 170 suburban precincts by 44-898-42,285.
The latest count of mail-in and provisional ballots show him up 2,791 in Chicago, but there is still a final suburban dump. Bailey lost the district by 20 points 960-40 and got 48.3 percent in the cop-heavy 41st Ward, where Kim Foxx lost 73.2-21.9 percent in 2020. So Podgorski ran 10 points better than Bailey. This is a culmination of 6 years of focused recruiting and organizing, of getting volunteers into party office and nominated for public offices.
Podgorski founded the Northwest Side GOP Club in 2016 as a pro-Trump group and rival to establishment McAuliffe/Doherty/Stephens dominance. They have since coalesced and Podgorski had 2022 support from local mayors and trades unions.
“Now there’s nobody left except (state rep Brad) Stephens and (county commissioner) Sean Morrison,” said Podgorski. “There’s not a Republican legislator within 20 miles” of the 9th District.
Morrison won re-election by 3,610 votes, and the county board is now 16D-1R.
Bailey got 16.1 percent of the vote in Chicago, losing to Pritzker 540,846-106,050. Bailey got just 34.6 percent of the vote in the Cook County suburbs, losing 472,748-233,257. Bailey also lost the collar counties of Lake, Will, DuPage, Kane and Kendall by a combined 111,821 votes, winning McHenry by 4,966. No Republican can win statewide while losing the Chicago metro area by 821,491 votes, as Bailey did. The Republican brand has become toxic and voting Republican has a stigma. If Trump is the 2024 nominee and gets obliterated, mused Podgorski, it might be time to “consider founding a new party.”
1816: Not counting George Washington, who was basically non-partisan, there had been five presidential elections since 1796. One was won by the Federalists (Adams), a New England-based party which favored a Hamiltonian strong central government with trading ties to England, and four won by the Jeffersonian “Democratic-Republicans” (Jefferson and Madison) which favored state’s rights and limited government. The War of 1812 exposed the Federalists’ traitorous blasphemy. They opposed war with England, won at the Battle of New Orleans.
The last Federalist ran for president in 1816 against Jeffersonian James Monroe, lost 183-34 in the electoral vote, and the party went extinct.
1852: The Whigs were a faction of the new Jacksonian Democrats, who were Jeffersonian, agrarian, continental expansionists and pro-slavery. The Whigs favored internal improvements, and a stronger government and Navy. In the seven elections between 1828 and 1852 the score was Democrats 5, Whigs 2. By 1852 slavery was the pre-dominant issue. The candidates were Franklin Pierce (D), a Northerner with Southern sympathies (called a “doughface”) and general Winfield Scott (W). The Whigs opposed expansion of slavery, but not the institution itself, while the Democrats wanted it expanded into new states and territories.
Pierce won the electoral vote 254-42 and the Whigs went extinct. But politics abhors a vacuum and moralists in New England and northern states decided that their anti-slavery personal beliefs dwarfed societal issues, particularly the fact that the South’s plantation economy was based on using free labor to plant and harvest tobacco and cotton. So they founded the Republican Party.
In 1856 they ran General John Fremont, an Abolitionist, for president and he lost the EV by just 174-114. By 1860 the party had moderated and nominated Abraham Lincoln, who was anti-slavery-expansion but not an abolitionist. The northern Democrats nominated Stephen A. Douglas, whose “popular sovereignty” solution – let the voters decide whether to permit slavery – made him the Trump of the day. And southern Dems ran a candidate.
The result was predictable: Lincoln (R) won the EV 180-12-72, but Democrats did not become extinct. It took them awhile, but after the South was readmitted Democrats won Congress in 1874 and the presidency in 1884.
1912: Teddy Roosevelt was youthful, energetic, popular and had lots of “progressive” ideas, like national parks and monopoly-busting. He decided not to run for a third term in 1908 and anointed William Howard Taft as his successor. Taft turned out to be a do-nothing standpatter. Enraged, Roosevelt ran for president in 1912 on the Progressive Party ticket, splitting the Republicans.
Predictably, Woodrow Wilson (D) won the EV 435-88-8 even though his popular vote of 6,286,214 was 1,413,728 less than the combined Roosevelt-Taft vote of 7,6999,942. It was thought America now had a 3-party system: Right (R), slightly Center-Left (P) and Left (D). But Wilson and his Congress (D) governed too far to the Left and by 1914 Teddy and most Progressives were back in the fold. In 1916 Wilson won the EV 277-254 by promising to “keep our boys out of war.” But then 5 months afterwards got into WWI.
Unlike Trump, Taft went out to pasture (becoming U.S. Supreme Court chief justice in 1921). But like Trump, Roosevelt was the party’s dominant figure, popular and much-beloved. Roosevelt was supposed to run again in 1920, but died in 1919.
Trump is running again but he’s not Teddy Roosevelt. Will the Republican Party support him? That’s yet to be determined.
Read more Analysis & Opinion from Russ Stewart at Russstewart.com
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