You know, I’m watching the polling for the upcoming midterm elections, and I have to tell you…. I haven’t seen the Republican rank-and-file this fired up in decades. I have also not seen Independents as angry as I am seeing them this last month or so. Motivated.
Just about everybody on one blog or another has commented on the amount of Fire coming out of people who have heretofore been nearly silent on the Republican side. Grassley, McConnell, Graham, and so on. These are people who you would normally expect to keep their silence, or at the least trying to placate the Democrats by playing along with them. No longer. I have attributed a lot of what we’re seeing out of these people to a lack of a John McCain. But I begin to wonder if a lot of it isn’t finally a bit of light seeping through the heads of the establishment hierarchy….The understanding that the rank-and-file are truly motivated and members of The Establishment had better start swimming if they want to survive the oncoming wave.
I can’t help but think that absent the outrageous unethical and illegal tactics being employed against Brett Kavanaugh, the midterms would have been in the Democrats pocket because there would have been nothing to motivate the conservative voter to vote for the GOP. Indeed, there has been a fair amount of activity by the GOP establishment who until just recently has been trying to work against Donald Trump on all fronts.
Certainly Trump has been outperforming the expectation of conservatives, (myself included) and if he was actually on the ballot, the conservative base wouldn’t need the additional motivation.
As it is… Well, let me explain it to you this way….
In the very first post I ever wrote for this blog, I quoted Fleet Admiral Yamamoto:
It is recorded in our history books that when he looked down at the ship full of smiling, victorious faces… faces of his flyers, just having returned from Pearl Harbor, Japanese fleet Admiral Yamamoto was quiet, pensive, even apprehensive. He later wrote in his private diary,
“I fear all I have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”
I wonder if the Democrats even begin to understand how much damage they’ve caused themselves with independent voters. I wonder too if they recognize that the anti-democrat tsunami that they themselves started will be their undoing regardless of how the vote on Saturday turns out.
I wonder also if they see that they’re turning off their own voters.
Consider [1] Slate:
In fact, however, the Kavanaugh spectacle seems to have evaporated the Democrats’ enthusiasm edge, according to a poll conducted Monday by NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Marist. In July Democrats were likelier, by 10 percentage points, to say the November elections were “very important.” That gap has now narrowed to a statistical tie. “The result of the hearings, at least in the short run, is the Republican base was awakened,” Marist head Lee Miringoff told NPR.
If they do see it, they’ll never admit it.