By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, December 07, 2022
And with that, the 2022 midterm-election cycle is
now completely over: “Georgia’s Democratic senator Raphael Warnock was
re-elected Tuesday night, winning his second runoff in less than two years
by besting Herschel Walker, a scandal-ridden football star whom former
president Donald Trump had once called ‘unstoppable.’” With 100 percent of
precincts reporting, Warnock finished with 51.28 percent and Walker finished with
48.72 percent.
Yesterday, I noted that Republicans had won every other
statewide office in Georgia in 2022, but I forgot to mention an important
point: that every other Republican running statewide had won with more
than 50 percent, which was the threshold to avoid a runoff election.
Besides Walker, the Republican with the lowest percentage was lieutenant
gubernatorial candidate Burt Jones, who finished with 51.39 percent.
In every other race on the ballot, this was a good year
for Georgia Republicans. There’s no getting around it: Last night’s loss was on
Herschel Walker. We don’t know how much the allegations of paying for abortions
in the past, and the allegations of Walker’s own son, caused otherwise
Republican-leaning Georgians to not vote for him. But it’s hard to believe that
Walker’s scandalous past wasn’t a big factor, if not the decisive factor, in
the race. Yes, Warnock outspent the former NFL running back by a considerable
margin in the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history. But in the governor’s
race, Stacey Abrams outspent Brian Kemp, $46 million to $28
million. Kemp won by about 7.5 percentage points.
Back in October, when the Walker news broke, I wrote, “The
abortion accusation — coupled with the candidate’s son, Christian Walker,
accusing his father of running around with other women, threatening to kill
members of his family, and being violent — will be exceptionally hard to
overcome.” A lot of people gave me grief for acknowledging that obvious
consequence. The fact that you don’t want some accusation to be consequential
does not mean that it isn’t going to be consequential.
I also wrote back then:
The Walker news will leave a lot of
Republicans depressed, and it should leave them depressed. In this kind of
political environment, with Biden’s approval rating being lousy in just
about all of the key states, a bunch of nice, boring, generic
Republicans would likely be enjoying solid leads over Raphael Warnock,
Mark Kelly, Maggie Hassan, and maybe even John Fetterman. All Republicans
needed to do to win big this midterm cycle was to be normal. Apparently, that
was too much to ask.
I noticed that in the general election in November, a bit
more than 1.9 million Georgians voted for Walker. In yesterday’s runoff, a bit
more than 1.7 million Georgians voted for Walker. It seems reasonable to
surmise that roughly 194,000 Georgians were willing to vote for Walker and
overlook his flaws if control of the U.S. Senate was at stake, but were less
motivated to vote for him once Democratic control of the Senate was assured.
But give Walker some credit; he had the good sense
to concede the race last night instead of claiming that Warnock’s
roughly 90,000-vote margin reflected voter fraud or suppression or rigged
election machines or some other nonsensical conspiracy theory. Despite a lot of
fears that the 2022 midterms would end in chaos, most of the “election denier”
candidates ended up conceding their races. This year, the MAGA movement ended
with a whimper, not a bang.
A lot of “election denialism” is the phenomenon of
Pauline Kaelism on steroids — candidates and supporters who only interact with
an exceptionally small, like-minded sliver of the electorate and who believe
that their side is wildly popular. When the election results demonstrate that
they’re only appealing to a niche group, the cognitive dissonance between their
beliefs and reality spur them to believe that the election results must be
wrong, and some sort of sinister force rigged the vote totals.
Maryland offered a vivid example of this phenomenon this
cycle. It is a deep-blue state by almost any measure. Yes, outgoing governor
Larry Hogan is a Republican, but he’s mostly played the role of a social
moderate and fiscal conservative whose job is to block the excesses of a
Democratic state legislature. Hogan won by four percentage points in 2014 and
twelve percentage points in 2018, but he is about as outspoken a critic of
Trump as you will find among Republican elected officials. As
of October, Maryland had 2.2 million registered Democrats and just over 1
million registered Republicans. And polls consistently indicated that the
Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Wes Moore, had a roughly two-to-one lead over
Dan Cox, the GOP nominee. The gubernatorial race never appeared to be competitive.
And yet Cox apparently genuinely believed he was going to win on
the morning of Election Day. “Our internal data demonstrated a massive shift of
swing voters our way and a huge turnout of Republicans — neither of which is
reported to have occurred,” Cox wrote in a released statement.
Now, think about that. Cox put a picture of himself with Trump on his campaign signs, with
“TRUMP ENDORSED” on the top in big letters. Trump won 34 percent of the
vote in Maryland in 2016 and 32 percent of the vote in Maryland in 2020. Cox
did everything possible to tie himself to a man who won the votes of only about
a third of Marylanders. On top of all that, he apparently never had enough money to run television ads.
And somehow, Cox convinced himself he was going to win.
But the day after the election, Cox did what a losing
candidate is supposed to do: “I wish Governor-elect Wes Moore and Lt.
Gov.-elect Aruna Miller and their families every blessing and success to ensure
that he will keep his word and govern positively for all Marylanders.”
Moore won, 64 percent to 32 percent.
In Pennsylvania, it took GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug
Mastriano nearly a week to accept the results, but in a livestream, he declared that, “As difficult as it is to accept the
results, there is no other course but to concede, which I do, and I look to the
challenges ahead. Josh Shapiro will be our next governor and I ask everyone to
give him the opportunity, and to pray that he makes the decisions that are
beneficial for the state and not necessarily for his party that he leads well —
because it affects all our lives.”
Shapiro won, 56 percent to 41 percent.
One of the lone holdouts in this election cycle was
Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, and with the exception of one insane and pointless attempt to refuse to certify election
results in Cochise County, her refusal to concede has had few real
consequences. Current Republican governor Doug Ducey congratulated Democrat
Katie Hobbs, their staffs are working on the transition, and life goes on. The
old Arabic proverb, “The dog barks, but the caravan moves on” seems to fit;
Lake insists the election is illegitimate, but most Arizonans are ignoring her
claims and moving on with the rest of their lives.
Jon Gabriel, a.k.a. “ExJon,” writes over at CNN:
Yet conspiracy theories, which made
a big impact in 2020 in Arizona and elsewhere, are barely making a ripple
today. Losing candidates can allege fraud if they want, but Arizona Republicans
now demand proof. Two years of Trumpian “stop the steal” nonsense wore everyone
down — even many of the true believers . . . few Arizonans are buying her
story. Her Trump-style campaign failed, and her Trump-style post-election
complaints are failing as well.
The “democracy is hanging by a thread in these midterms”
argument was driven by the events after the 2020 presidential election, but
from the perspective of December 2022, the violent crisis of January 6, 2021,
was enabled by a rare perfect storm of bad actors. It doesn’t matter if Doug
Mastriano doesn’t concede on Election Night. It doesn’t matter much if Lake
never concedes she lost the election. Neither one has had the nerve or
shamelessness to try to gin up an angry crowd and overrun a state-capitol
building, and if they or another sore loser tried, it’s unclear if they would
attract a significant number of hardcore followers willing to assault police
officers in the name of such a conspiracy theory. Trump’s demagogic power as an
incumbent president was unique, and the current process of certifying the
presidential-election results offered too much of a window of opportunity for attempts
to reverse those election results.
One more reason to reform the Electoral Count Act of
1887.
ADDENDUM: There is something amazing about
how the “Covid Zero” policy of a strict, merciless, inhuman regime such as
China’s can be kept in place for so long, justified by an insistence that it is
a matter of life and death, with no room for exceptions, lest the country
endure near-apocalyptic mass casualties . . . and then just like that (snaps
fingers). . . .
Eh, nevermind:
Citizens who contract the virus and
exhibit mild or no symptoms will no longer be required to check into a state
facility to quarantine and can do so at home now, according to a
ten-point order issued by the Chinese National Health Commission
on Wednesday. Testing requirements for people traveling within China have also
been dropped and officials were ordered to discontinue frequent arbitrary
lockdowns. The order told officials to “more scientifically and accurately”
demarcate “risk zones,” with a faster timeline for opening up high-risk zones
after they have recovered.
Oh, hey, maybe all of these draconian restrictions of
your daily life and the suppression of natural and needed human contact weren’t
so necessary after all! Whoopsie!
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