No Fraud, No COVID Zombie Voters, No Future, and No Money.
A Post Midterm Election Analysis
It’s all over but the swearing in for most electoral contests.
In San Diego, we tilted a little right. My back of the envelope calculations indicated that –generally speaking– we were about 3% less liberal on statewide candidates and issues.
Statewide, Orange and Riverside Counties now have Democratic majorities on the boards of supervisors. There are new faces in Sacramento, but the Dems super-majorities stayed in place.
Nationally, the Red Tide didn’t happen. Republicans are fighting among themselves over leadership questions. Their leading Presidential candidate is lying down with dogs and thinks he’ll not come away with fleas.
Democrats in Congress saw a mostly smooth transition in leadership.
Let’s take a gander at what else is shaping up as we head into the year’s end.
1. The Election Fraud That Wasn’t. Millions of dollars went into the 2022 elections based on the Big Lie premise proclaimed by the loser in the 2020 Presidential election.
The Uline fortune, which has its origins in the Schlitz brewing business, funded the Voter Reference Foundation, which conducted audits of 2020 voter rolls in states coast to coast. The results? A big nothing burger, except for violating a whole lot of people’s privacy and being scorned by election officials from both parties for sloppy methodology.
It’s safe to say at this point that the only actual fraud was the promotion of the Big Lie, which Republicans used to raise mountains of money from donors. Locally, Carl DeMaio’s Reform California hustle has made numerous claims which have thus far proved either false or unverifiable.
Arizona is one state where Trumpanistas have made an effort to exploit what they say are election irregularities. A printer glitch combined with one person’s accusations on a right wing social media program have fueled the passions of right wingers looking to prove something hinky was going on.
The former President has taken to social media to demand that losing GOP candidate Kari Lake should be “installed as governor,” based on his assumptions that the vote count in Arizona was corrupt. What this means in reality is that he wants his more militant followers to take unspecified actions in protests.
Republican County Supervisors in Cochise County haven’t found any actual evidence of voter fraud, but they are still refusing to certify the results.
From the Record-Eagle:
Election results have largely been certified without issue in jurisdictions across the country. That's not been the case in Arizona, which was a focal point for efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election and push false narratives of fraud.
Arizona was long a GOP stronghold, but this month Democrats won most of the highest profile races over Republicans who aggressively promoted Trump’s 2020 election lies. Kari Lake, the GOP candidate for governor who lost to Hobbs, and Mark Finchem, the candidate for secretary of state, have refused to acknowledge their losses. They blame Republican election officials in Maricopa County for a problem with some ballot printers.
2. COVID Kills. Once the vaccine became available, the side effects of the right wing disinformation effort on the pandemic came back to bite them in the ass.
From a major study published by the National Bureau of Economic Researchers:
We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post- vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.
There is one startling detail about the very close (510 votes) Arizona Secretary of State contest: Healthcare writer Charles Gaba has tracked the partisan divide in COVID deaths and has come up with estimates of the excess number of deaths of Republican voters compared to Democratic voters across the country and state by state that have found support in other studies by other organizations.
His conclusion about Arizona is that there were probably about 4,000 excess Republican deaths compared to Democrats in Arizona as a result of COVID vaccine refusal, or at least in large part because of that. 510 votes is a smaller number than 4,000. Of course, we have no way of knowing if or how those people would have voted.
***
3. Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face.
It wasn’t on the ballot, but San Diegans voted for kicking the can down the road on climate change. Joshua Emerson Smith observed in the Union-Tribune that the victory of some Republicans in municipal elections effectively closes off a future funding path for building infrastructure for more mass transit in the county.
New tax money could effectively green light the transformation of huge swaths of the county by 2050 — something conservatives are deeply skeptical about.
Republicans and many affluent homeowners have spent the last decade fending off state and local efforts to transform sprawling auto-centric neighborhoods into dense, urban enclaves bustling with street life. Many residents enjoy the privacy afforded by single-family housing and have expressed little desire to hop on a train that could put them in close quarters with the region’s booming homeless population .
Meanwhile, Democrats and developers have argued that adding new apartment buildings near job centers is the best way to address the state’s ruthless cost of housing. They argue such construction is ultimately inevitable and will need to be serviced — as well as encouraged — by rail lines in order to avoid the type of mind-numbing traffic that’s engulfed Los Angeles, Dallas and other sprawling mega-regions that spent decades widening freeways.
The idea of a mileage tax–to replace taxes on a projected future slump in the sale of gasoline– has become a political landmine to the point where no elected official wants to discuss the topic.
More extreme examples of climate change are coming and local governments are not going to be doing much more than banning Styrofoam containers and signing off on happy talk promises.
4. Stop Asking Me for Money
A survey by the Civiqs organization of how Democratic voters feel about unsolicited fundraising emails and texts confirms that I’m not alone in my dislike of this process.
Via Daily Kos:
That’s just a smattering of the responses. According to Civiqs director Drew Linzer, there’s much, much more like that. They also heard:
“It is very annoying and counterproductive to building meaningful relationships with voters, volunteers, and donors. Receiving messages on behalf of out of state candidates makes even less sense and should be generally abolished as a practice.”
“I find it very annoying and it makes it clear my email has been shared or sold without my permission. This reduces trust which is important with political candidates. It also makes me regret the donations that I have made.”
In other words, “Make it stop.”
I know, I know: these campaigns bring in the bucks. Two thirds of us are pissed off by them. There has to be a better way; right now reading your email is like walking down the street and being accosted by encyclopedia salespersons every few steps.
I, for one, would be okay with refutations of GOP lies (or promises of milk and honey) with a donate button on the end. Occasionally. Especially if I’m living in the candidate’s district.
What’s worse is that “unsubscribe,” which is supposed to be the “free market” way of opting out of unwanted emails, does not work. I might not get any more emails from “The Committee to Elect Candidate X,” but “Librarians for Candidate X” will surely appear.
As much as I hate that Florida is becoming such a bastion of hateful politicians, I was secretly glad Senatorial candidate Val Demings lost. I live in San Diego. I have no record as a donor to legislative campaigns. I’m on Social Security. How does any of that add up to every other day emails and text messages?
I probably should have waited for Festivus to get this off my chest, but one holiday is as good as another.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com
Lead image: Clark Mackey/ Flickr