Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

The Good News

Republicans suffered a thumping by Democrats across the country, Tuesday, not only losing their majority in the U.S. House, but also losing the Senate — beaten badly in GOP strongholds including Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas.

Plus, Senate contests in Alaska and ruby-red Mississippi are still too close to call.

The only “conservative” bright spots? Ballot issues decided by the very same voters who booted the GOP and boosted Democrats. 

Take California’s Proposition 40. Puh-lease. Though the ever-envious left loves the idea of confiscatory taxation against people whose only crime is producing wealth, the actual votes of Californians have the Billionaire Wealth Tax losing by 11 percentage points. (If we can live long enough to see Golden State ballot tabulators actually finish counting, we may legitimately celebrate.)

Citizen Only Voting measures swept at the ballot box in five states: Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia. “The laws are expected to prevent any local jurisdictions from moving to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections,” NBC reported, “which some municipalities have sought to do in recent years.”

Yes, non-citizens are now voting — legally — in 24 U.S. cities in four states and the District of Columbia. In most of those cities, even non-citizens here illegally are empowered to cast a ballot.

Conversely, since 2018, more than 45 million voters in 20 states have had the opportunity to decide whether their state and local elections should be limited to American citizens. Thus far, Citizen Only Voting is 20-0. 

More sanity? Nebraska legislators placed a constitutional amendment on Tuesday’s ballot to weaken their term limits; more than 80 percent of Cornhusker voters said, “No.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Illustration created with Grok Imagine

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

When Experts Are Wrong

Standard theory has it that “mid-term elections” serve as a “referendum on the President.”

In a typical article this weekend, a political scientist trotted out that common wisdom and then went on to say that “control of the referendum has shifted. It is now a referendum on leadership, on character . . . and that’s not good news for Donald Trump.”

My crystal ball is in the repair shop, but I have my doubts. The “experts” got the 2016 election so wrong in no small part because they were leveraging their expertise to influence the outcome more than understand the contest.

Academics, journalists and other Democrats want today’s votes to serve as a “referendum on leadership” because they yearn for their leaders and not Trump. 

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed and a Slate follow-up interview, Yale computer scientist David Gelernter explored the lack of “rapport between the left and what I consider the average American.” He also dismissed as absurd the idea that Donald Trump is racist — a mainstay of the Democratic critique of the president. What Trump is, instead, is “the average American in exaggerated form — blunt, simple, willing to fight, mistrustful of intellectuals” but completely without “constraints to cramp his style except the ones he himself invents.”

The Democrats, meanwhile, “have no issues” — except their hatred of Trump, argues Gelernter.

Thankfully, the mid-terms often serve as a check on the power of sitting presidents. But if “average Americans” hear the reasons to vote for the opposition party as all about how racist and xenophobic Trump is, it may work no better than in the last election.

Prophecy’s a tricky business.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


PDF for printing