A Liberal in Trumpistan: November 2022

The red wave that wasn't.

11/15/22: We are only hours away! Tonight, Donald J. Trump has a big announcement to make! Will he run for president again in 2024? Will he reveal his long-delayed healthcare plan? No one knows what he will say, though it’s a safe bet he’ll claim he won the last election.

Knowing Trump, and having seen how he thinks, I expect him to say he’s running again in 2024 and simultaneously declare victory. He will say he won the popular vote by 50,000,000 and remind us, once he’s in office again, that he has the power to pardon himself.

While we wile away the minutes, waiting for the big reveal, we already know what transpired in last week’s midterms.

Donald’s picked band of election deniers has been all but wiped out. Kari Lake, running for governor in Arizona, was one of the last to grasp the inevitability of basic math, when a final batch of ballots left in Maricopa County was tallied last night. She did well with this last drop, but ended up 19,000 votes short.

Kari Lake, standing beside the Orange Dumpling.

They’re all legal votes once they’ve been counted.

It is true that deniers won a number of lower-profile races in almost every state. But that has much to do with how gerrymandered most districts in this country are. In Wisconsin, Derrick Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL who was at the Capitol when rioters stormed the building on January 6, did capture a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But he may not be crazy, having written in an opinion essay, that he did not go into the building that fateful day. He said he left Capitol grounds after watching “what should have been an exercise of free speech devolve into one of the most tragic incidents in the history of the nation.”

As for Kari, that lady is definitely crazy.

One of Donald’s favorite deniers – someone described her as “Trump with better makeup” – Lake made clear during her campaign that she intended to keep up a drumbeat of attacks on the free press when she won. “I’ll be your worst nightmare,” she warned reporters.

Lake also made clear she wasn’t going to accept defeat. If they counted all the votes and she won? Then she won!

Now that we know, and she knows that she lost, she insists that everything about voting in Arizona was rigged.

At 10:25 p.m. last night, facing inevitable doom, she tweeted: “Arizonans know BS when the see it.”

(Indeed. That’s why she lost.)

ALL WEEKEND, into Monday, I must have checked election news at least five hundred times. I wasn’t worried about the good Republicans, true conservatives, or the kind of candidates you knew wouldn’t whine and cry if they lost. So, I was thrilled to watch as one Trump-endorsed misfit after another went down to defeat. I particularly enjoyed seeing Lake’s election-denying pal, Mark Finchem, a man who never listened to a conspiracy theory he didn’t fall for, come up well short in his bid to be the next Arizona Secretary of State.

“In the back room with ballots.”

Watching the votes go against him, Finchem had only one possible choice. He would have to accept defea…

Okay. No.

By Friday, he was focused on “shenanigans that are obviously happening and have happened.” Democrats, he hinted darkly, were hard at work “in the back room with ballots” in Pima and Maricopa counties. Finchem didn’t bother to explain why an election board in Maricopa, Arizona’s most populous county by far, headed by a longtime Republican activist, would let Democrats come into a back room and cheat.

The head of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors was blunt. “This isn’t about partisan politics,” Bill Gates said. “It’s not about conservative versus liberal. This is about truth versus lies.”

Finchem currently trails by 122,000 votes, but he’s made clear, he’s not about to concede.

What kind of extremist kook is the guy – and how does that help explain why he lost? Finchem, a self-proclaimed member of the right-wing Oath Keepers, was photographed outside the Capitol Building during the January 6 attack, while many other members of the group were beating hell out of police and chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.” Since then, he has steadfastly refused to say that Biden was elected fairly. Naturally, Trump backed him completely during his campaign. Finchem, Trump said, was “a patriot who has fought for our country right from his earliest movements in government. Mark was willing to say what few others had the courage to say.”

Yeah. Because Mark was a nut. Thankfully, he was rejected by almost 53% of Arizona voters.

Finchem at a Trump rally - where else.

The race for Arizona Attorney General is closer, with Abraham Hamadeh, another Trump endorsee, and another denier, trailing by only 3,087 votes, with 95% of nearly 2.5 million counted.

So the deniers have one faint hope; and we can expect a recount, either way in his race. If there’s “rigging,” as Krazy Kari insists, it should be easy to find. But there isn’t, and it won’t be.

They’re all legal votes once they’ve been counted.

In another blow to the fantasies of the MAGA faithful, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly thumped another denier, and will return to Washington D.C. for a second term. When I checked, in the early hours this morning, Kelly had piled up an insurmountable 125,000 vote lead over Blake Masters, another “patriot” who thinks Donald J. Trump deserves to be sitting in the White House right now. Masters hasn’t conceded, but says he might after every single legal vote is tallied.

Here, we should point out that unless somebody can provide evidence to the contrary – a sticking point that Trump and Masters, and all their denier pals fail to grasp – they’re all legal votes once they’ve been counted.

The news for deniers in Nevada wasn’t much better. First-time Democratic candidate Cisco Aguilar turned back a bid by Jim Marchant, organizer of the “America First” movement, a man beloved by Rejected-President Trump and all the dopey QAnon folks, to become Secretary of State.

Again, the race was tight, with Aguilar winning by 33,000 votes. But it may sting a little more when Marchant ponders what might have been. In Nevada, an option in every contest is to mark a box labeled: “None of these candidates.” As of this morning, 17,693 voters had made that their choice, almost enough, had Marchant run a less divisive campaign, to have given him a win.

IF THE DENIERS and their spiritual leader were the biggest losers this week, there was still plenty of drama. California voters, by a 2-1 margin, approved a change to the constitution that enshrined a woman’s right to choose. Seven in ten also voted to allow sports betting on Native Americans’ tribal lands in that state. In Colorado, 88.9% of voters okayed a property tax exemption for spouses of slain veterans. With 99% of the vote tallied, right-wing Dream Barbie, Rep. Lauren Boebert, was hanging on to a lead of 1,122 votes in pursuit of a second term. Two years ago the gun wielding Boebert carried her congressional district by eight points. Connecticut voters chose to legalize early voting, while sending five Democrats to the U.S. House of Representatives, and zero Republicans.

DeSantis the biggest winner of all!

Voters, of course, were all over the place, on parties, proposals, and personalities. In Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders – last seen lying for President Trump, while serving as White House press secretary – seemed to Arkansans to be a great choice for governor. She cruised to victory with 63% of the vote.

As for Florida, voters picked Republicans to fill almost every open position, both at the state and national level. Pundits have now declared Gov. DeSantis the biggest winner of all in 2022.

DESANTIS FOR PRESIDENT – 2024?

(Naturally, Trump has already started to attack his potential rival – because Trump is always about Trump.)

Trump has already said that he "made" DeSantis.

What other results should we consider if we want to get a sense of where voters might really stand? In California, Congressman David Valadao, one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, is hanging on in a contest to hold the state’s Twenty-Second Congressional District.

So, a potential win for the GOP!

And a slap in the face for Donald J. Trump.

In the State of Washington, Rep. Dan Newhouse, another one of the ten, did win another term, capturing 68% of the vote.

In the same vein, Democrats flipped another Washington seat, one held by the GOP for over a decade. The incumbent, GOP Congresswomen Jamie Herrera Beutler, had likewise voted to impeach Don – but had been primaried and defeated by Joe Kent, a former Green Beret, and a kind of lunatic Trump pick.

Voters rejected Kent and his election-denying extremism, choosing business owner Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat, instead.

The frustrated former chair of the Washington State GOP insisted Beutler would have won the seat with 60% of the vote, and described Kent as “the freakiest of the MAGA freaks.”

As NBC News explained,

Multiple media organizations have reported on Kent’s ties to right-wing groups. The Associated Press reported that he had paid Graham Jorgenson, who was identified by law enforcement as a member of the Proud Boys, more than $11,000 for “consulting” work during the primary. He also became a close political ally of Joey Gibson, who founded the Christian nationalist group Patriot Prayer, which has orchestrated a number of violent rallies in the Pacific Northwest.

Kent’s own top adviser was one of the organizers of a rally last year called “Justice for J6,” which aimed to cast those arrested for their participation in Jan. 6 as “political prisoners” and had Kent as one of its guest speakers, according to the AP [Associated Press].

So, rather than an easy win for Republicans, Trump and Kent delivered a narrow loss of a critical seat, with Perez winning by a little more than 4,000 votes out of 300,000.

The election deniers storm the U.S. Capitol Building.

This morning, Republicans remain one seat short of retaking control in the U.S. House of Representatives. They almost inevitably will – but if they should fail, we all know who to blame.

Most elections played out as pollsters predicted, though others did not. As expected, Idaho, Indiana, and Iowa voted red. Whereas in Illinois, 58.9% of voters approved a measure to add the right of workers to bargain collectively to the state constitution. Since the measure required 60% approval before it would be implemented, it may or may not pass as final votes are recorded. By contrast, Iowa voters thought it would be wise to specifically add the right to bear arms to their constitution. They also decided to send Sen. Chuck Grassley back to Washington, even though, if we count the tree rings, the guy is 200 years old.

And he’s still younger than Sen. Diane Feinstein of California!

Already amended 203 times.

American politics are never dull, and we saw that again last week. In Kansas, the Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, won a second term. Seven blue counties, where most of the people live, gave her a majority of all the votes cast, and ninety-eight other counties went red.

In Kentucky, an amendment to the constitution that would have ended the right to an abortion failed, 53% against.

In Louisiana, it’s easy to add amendments to the constitution, and eight were up for a vote. The current constitution was ratified in 1974, and has already been amended 203 times. Now, one proposed amendment remains undecided, with voters approving three (#204-206) and rejecting four. For whatever reason, voters decided not to remove slavery as a form of punishment for certain crimes, which means prison labor remains legal under the Louisiana Constitution.

In the faraway Northeast, Democrats (and a Socialists or two), wiped out Republicans like blue bubonic plague. Maine went entirely blue, rejecting former GOP governor Paul LePage’s bid to return to power by a wide margin. Maryland sent seven Democrats and one lonely Republican to Congress. Massachusetts went with nine Democrats, one of whom ran unopposed. Voters also approved a measure to raise taxes on incomes of more than $1,000,000.

In Michigan, Democrats had a great time. Voters not only rejected an entire slate of election deniers, championed by Trump, but also passed term limits for members of the state legislature – twelve years, total, per person. That idea passed by 66.5%.

Proposal 22-2 also passed, with 60% in favor, closing the door on Team Trump’s dream of stealing Michigan’s electoral votes if they lost a close vote again in 2024.

That measure,

Amends the Michigan Constitution to create early voting and right to sign an affidavit as an alternative to showing photo ID to vote. Requires state-funded return postage and drop boxes for absentee ballots. Clarifies that the state canvassers board has a nondiscretionary duty [emphasis added] to certify results.

In other words, if Michigan voters pick a president next time around – as they did in 2020, when Biden won the state – no canvassing board can just ignore the vote and refuse to certify results.

Finally, 56.7 percent of Michiganders voted in favor or adding protection for a woman’s right to choose, and also the right to purchase and use contraceptives, to the state constitution.

A petty former president costs his party multiple seats.

In a race to represent Michigan, in the Third Congressional District, Team Blue captured a seat previously held by Peter Meijer. He was another one of the ten who voted to impeach President Trump. Naturally, the former president targeted Meijer and any other lawmaker who crossed him, backing Joe Gibbs in the GOP primary, instead. Gibbs, a denier who also said he thought it was a mistake to grant women the suffrage, did win. In the general election, however, he was snuffed out, with tens of thousands of women naturally voting against him.

In defeat, Gibbs wallowed in self-pity, like Donald, himself. Gibbs blamed the Republican “Machine,” for his loss, told supporters defeat was “no fault of our own,” and whined about the “media” and “the wealthiest liberals” from New York and California donating money to support his opponent, Hillary Scholten. He went on to hint that because “precinct-level returns per candidate in Kent County” went dark after midnight on Election Night, his campaign was unable to track “local anomalies,” an “unacceptable situation at a time when people are losing faith in the security of our elections.”

Gibbs claimed his campaign pitted “Crazy vs. Normal,” imagining he was the “Normal.” He failed to explain how Meijer won the same seat in 2020, by a 53%-47% margin – over Scholten.

Whereas Scholten garnered 54.8% of the vote two years later. Versus 41.9% for “Normal,” the guy who called the Nineteenth Amendment a mistake.

This is a great country and democracy almost always prevails, if not always in exactly the way we might hope. Missouri voters decided to legalize marijuana, for adults, 21 and up, and tax weed at six percent. Arrest records for non-violent offenders, related to marijuana, will be expunged. Montana stayed as red as a MAGA cap, but Montanans rejected a ballot measure that would have required medical care for infants born alive, but with no hope to survive. They decided to leave the decision to doctors as to what should be done. Nebraska also remained red, but voters did approve a worker-friendly increase in the state minimum wage – to $10.50 per hour immediately, rising slowly to $15.00 in 2026. Not great; but a start.

Voters in New Hampshire puzzled over whether or not to call a constitutional convention; and by a 66%-34% margin said no.

Seven out of ten voters in New Mexico approved a proposal to increase education spending, using revenues from gas and oil exploration.

New Yorkers voted overwhelmingly in favor of a proposal to authorize bonds to fund climate change mitigation projects.

Florida voters decided to keep taxes low, and ask the federal government to bail them out every time a hurricane hits.

North Carolina, in recent years increasingly a battleground state, sent seven Republicans and seven Democrats to U.S. the House of Representatives. Another Republican, Ted Budd, won the chance to represent the state in the U.S. Senate in a close race.

It was a good election if you like to smoke weed.

There was something for almost everyone – except the election deniers who lost. North Dakota set term limits for the house, senate, and governor. Eight years, boys and girls, that’s all you get! Oklahoma stayed red, and Rhode Island stayed blue – only smaller. Oregon and Massachusetts elected the first openly lesbian governors in U.S. history, Tina Kotek, and Maura Healey. South Carolina sent Sen. Tim Scott, an African American, back to Washington, with 62.9% of the vote. If you know the history of that state, and you’ve heard of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman who bragged about using violence to disenfranchise “negro” voters, and arch-segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond’s bi-racial daughter, it shows we’re making progress for sure.

Voters in South Dakota not only legalized marijuana, but over the objection of their governor, voted to expand Medicaid coverage. Yeah, you heard that right. South Dakotans voted for Obamacare!

Lawmakers stuck to their seats with Gorilla Glue.

AND SO IT GOES in America, every election, every time. Voters decide on a wide array of issues, and elect a mixed bag of human beings to go off and make laws and in other ways run the show. Tennesseans, unlike their red state brethren in Louisiana, did outlaw slavery as a form of punishment – and then voted overwhelming to prohibit union membership as a condition of employment in any workplace in the state. Because unions work hard to improve wages and working conditions for…people in Tennessee and other states. There were no ballot measures for voters to consider in Texas, but the state did win the award for “Most Outrageously Gerrymandered Voting Districts.” This left voters with little choice but to send mostly-GOP representatives back to Austin and Washington, there to schmooze with lobbyists, and in their spare time attend to the people’s business. Beto O’Rourke ran again, this time for governor, but didn’t win – again – which has become an annoying habit. Gerrymandering in New Jersey made it difficult for voters to rid themselves of elected officials who might be only marginally competent – or worse – in this case, helping Democrats stick to their seats as if placed there with Gorilla Glue.

Gerrymandering keeps politicians safe in red states and blue.

What else happened? Utah is Utah. So a whole bunch of Mormons won office at all levels. Sen. Mike Lee, a Mormon himself, did have to fend off a different kind of challenge. Evan McMullen, a former Republican, and a Mormon, of course, and an honest one at that, ran as an independent, and for a time looked like he might have a shot. But Sen. Lee prevailed and will be heading back to D.C.

McMullen is the fellow who exposed Rep. Kevin McCarthy, back in 2016, when, in a closed-door meeting, Kevin announced to the party caucus that he thought there were two people Vladimir Putin paid.

Namely: Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Donald Trump.

McCarthy denied it when the free press reported the story. Then the free press told him they had tape.

Then Kevin admitted he said it, but it was only a joke.

And now Kevin – what a comedian! – will likely replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

So it went, in one of the craziest midterms ever. Vermont added a right to “personal reproductive autonomy” to the constitution, got around to banning slavery after only 236 years, and stayed almost totally blue. In Virginia, Democrats running for two hotly contested congressional seats squeaked by, helping jeopardize, at least slightly, GOP dreams of retaking control of the House. West Virginians voted on two seats of their own – with both Republicans piling up almost two-thirds of the vote. In Wisconsin, Sen. Ron Johnson won a third term (after once promising he’d only serve two) and he’ll be heading off to D.C. again, after besting his Democratic opponent by 26,000 votes out of more than 2.6 million cast.

Mandela Barnes, his opponent, conceded the day after the election, which is what mature candidates do. He didn’t whine about voting being “rigged,” or make wild accusations about “illegal immigrants” pouring over the border from Canada, hey, to vote.

Finally, we come to Wyoming, the other square state, where not much happens unless you’re a Republican. Going against trends, ~~Wyomians~~, ~~Wyomings~~, ~~Wyomins~~ … um … people in Wyoming … did raise the retirement age for state judges from 70 to 75. Because nothing says, “Equal justice under the law,” quite so clearly as judges with dementia.

And, yes, there will be a run-off election in Georgia, pitting Herschel Walker vs. the incumbent, Sen. Ralph Warnock, on December 6.

So it’s not over yet.