I have a home in Kansas City and saw first hand what happened when Dobbs was on the ballot. Right up to the election the local and national media called it for the anti-abortion crowd. I saw the new voter numbers and realized that was stupid reporting. I was proved right. That carried over to Sharice Davids election. The Republican Kansas legislature gerrymandered her district so she would lose. Nobody thought she had a chance. She ran hard on the abortion issue (her opponent was standard Republican anti-abortion) and won handily. Of course, the media will tell you that she was able to tie Sam Brownback around her opponents neck but it was Dobbs that carried the day.
The biggest news out of last night is Dobbs proved to be Republican Kryptonite. In other news I am fucking sick of conventional polling and herd media repeating yesterday’s results.
Polling models look broken. The forecasted results based on sample sizes and methodologies employed here among mainstream pollsters defy any sense of the word reliable. I’m thinking that polling organizations are gazing at their navels this morning.
But that’s how the modern profession works. No one wants to be out over their skis actually reporting news that no one else has. That’s hard work. Easier to find a slipstream from another “journalist” and spin variations of their invented narrative and if you’re proven wrong, you’re just one among many. Being different means having to back up what you’re saying, and that’s hard work.
I was a little down last week, but other things than the election were going on too. Some R&R and good early voting stats over the weekend brought me back.
Several hours before polls opened on Tuesday for Election Day in Florida, former President Donald J. Trump warned the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, against mounting a challenge to Mr. Trump’s own anticipated presidential candidacy in the 2024 election cycle.
“If he runs, he runs,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. DeSantis to a handful of reporters traveling with him on his private plane — recently refurbished and put back into use — after a rally Monday night in Dayton, Ohio.
But Mr. Trump added, in remarks published on Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal, “If he did run, I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering. I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife, who is really running his campaign.”
The former president, preparing to announce a rare candidacy for the White House after a defeat, was thus openly threatening to smear the person who would be considered his leading rival, should he choose to run.
Mr. Trump, who for decades threatened business rivals and partners, reporters and critics alike with lawsuits or the possibility of being humiliated, has taken slash-and-burn politics to new heights
I’m looking forward to seeing some strong, new, forward-looking Democratic leaders showing what they can do in the next couple of years. Fetterman’s eye-catching but people are rightly praising Shapiro too. He’s smart, energetic, committed. I like the way things look for the future, I really do.
I think the guy about whom unflattering information will come out isn’t only DeSantis. The GOP sees now there’s no muddling through this. They have a problem.
