by Andrea Widburg
In 2022, Republicans thought there would be a Red Tsunami. In fact, there was a Red piddle that didn’t even rise to the level of a puddle.
But yesterday, Democrats got that Tsunami. They flipped both the Senate and the House and did so massively. According to The New York Times, Democrats currently have 54-44 control of the Senate and 228-139 control of the House. Both numbers could improve for Democrats in the next days and hours. That’s not a tiny victory; that’s huge.
Some of the Democrat victories were more significant than others. Michiganders, by a large margin, voted for Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, a man who advocates for socialism, but whose values (and friends and family) align with the Muslim Brotherhood. His presence in the United States Senate is an almost apocalyptic sign of what’s to come for America.
Meanwhile, in the “red wall” of Texas, James Talarico won, cementing transgenderism and smiley-faced socialism as Texas values. Additionally, Texas now has a Democrat governor, Gina Hinojosa.
In South Carolina, the uninspiring Darline Graham lost her brother’s seat to Annie Andrews, while South Carolina’s first district (which is purple) sent a hard leftist, Nancy Lacore, to the House.
So far, the real Dan Sullivan is still winning Alaska, but it’s by a very small margin.
Other unexpected blue victories: Iowa now has a Democrat Senator, as does Kansas. The semi-incestuous Troy Jackson ousted long-time Senator Susan Collins in Maine. Sherrod Brown is now the Senator for Ohio. And of course, the usual blue states are still blue. In other words, the blue wall held, and the red wall crumbled.
What does this all mean? I have thoughts, which I present here in no particular order.
The traditional media are still the most powerful force in America. Republicans love to point to the media’s shrinking audience as a sign of their irrelevancy, along with the growing voices of many podcasters and alternative media sites. However, all those alternative sites are fragmented. Audiences must find them.
The old drive-by media, that anything but mainstream organism, is still the largest coherent voice. If it weren’t, Trump would be one of the most popular presidents ever. His accomplishments have been extraordinary. However, the media still dominate discourse. Think about what Trump has done. On his watch:
- Wages have risen
- Unemployment is low
- Inflation has slowed
- The GDP is growing
- Crime has dropped dramatically
- The border is closed (which is what most Americans claimed they wanted in 2024)
- Transgender is being removed from institutions (another thing Americans claimed to want)
- Trump has ended smoldering wars around the world
- Our genocidal enemy, Iran, is currently unable to field a nuclear weapon that could have reached half the world
- China’s trade depredations have been slowed or reversed
And that’s just the short list. He should be the most popular president in modern American history. Instead, he’s historically unpopular. That’s not natural. That’s a result of relentlessly negative media. Sadly, that unpopularity inevitably trickles down to down-ballot candidates.
In 2012, we saw the reverse happen thanks to the media’s control over Americans’ political perceptions: Obama had a disastrous record, but the media got him a second term anyway. The media remain powerful enough to set the discourse and control American beliefs. Until that changes, we have a very big problem.
Red states that were thrilled to bring in businesses from across the U.S. sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. If you bring in tech workers, as Texas proudly did, you’re bringing in college graduates. And when you bring in college graduates, you bring in leftists. South Carolina, another destination state, has seen the same thing happen.
Just being a profitable state brings trouble. Red states love to boast that they’re getting blue staters fleeing their failed Democrat states’ social and economic disasters. Yes, some are truly conservatives, but others are like this California family:
There’s a reason Rush Limbaugh called these leftist economic refugees “locusts.” Look at what they did to Colorado, once a stalwart Republican bastion.
Over Trump’s next two years, I don’t actually expect much to change. As Obama said when he lost Congress in 2014, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.”
Considering that, in both the first half of his second term, as in the first two years of his first term, Trump couldn’t get an ostensibly Republican Congress to work with him, the situation is static. Now, he still won’t be able to get Congress to work with him.
The problem is that this means that Trump will have had no long-term effect on American politics. As happened when Biden entered the White House, if a Democrat president gains the Oval Office in 2029, everything Trump accomplished will vanish with the stroke of a pen. That gives America all the stability of a crumbling third-world dictatorship, but at least for now, we won’t get two new states and a packed Supreme Court.
Speaking of the Court, here’s something I hate to say, but I’ll say it: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito need to retire instantly.
If something happens to these two elderly men after January 2027, there’s no way Trump can get a conservative Supreme Court justice approved in the Senate, and all bets are off for 2029. Trump has two months to ensure that their seats are aggressively conservative. If the Supreme Court goes hard left, the Constitution is judicially rewritten, and we’re on the way to Chavez’s and Maduro’s Venezuela.
Fortunately, because Democrats didn’t reach 60 seats in the Senate, they can’t do much, either. (That is, unless anti-Trump people like Lisa Murkowski help them reach critical mass.) The House, of course, will impeach every impeachable official in the Trump administration and investigate everyone else. They’d better lawyer up. It will be pure Lavrentiy Beria stuff: “Show me the man (or woman), and I’ll show you the crime.”
This time around, I sincerely hope Trump demands full due process, something singularly lacking in Congress’s previous show trials against him. At the end of it all, Trump, following in Biden’s footsteps, will be sure to preemptively pardon everyone in or near his administration, as well as all of his family members.
I know these election results were bad, but we cannot give in to despair. Despair is the enemy of functionality, and we must function really, really well if we want to put Marco Rubio (my current favorite) into the White House. And for God’s sake, when the still-all-powerful media say something nasty about Trump or any Republican, do your own research.
Finally, the next time elections come around, if you’re hesitating about voting for a Republican politician you don’t really like, remember Dr. Ben Carson’s wise words: “Unless Jesus Christ is on the ballot, you’re always choosing between the lesser of two evils. That’s why God gave you a brain.” There will never be a perfect Republican candidate, but I can assure you that there will be profoundly damaging Democrat candidates.