If Dem's Lose Virginia Governor's Race It's Time To Close Up Shop

"Close Virginia governor polls set Democratic nerves on edge" advised Kevin Robillard at Politico and indeed the democratic party hierarchy has every reason to be deeply concerned. The implications for the future of the party if their candidate Ralph Northam loses to the GOP contender Ed Gilllespie are profound.

Every traditional omen is in play for the Dem's leading in to the election. Virginia has gone Democratic in three straight presidential elections, both its senators, Warner and Kaine (the recent VP candidate) and its current, term limited governor, Terry McAuliffe are Democrats.

For all intents and purposes Virginia is not even a "purple" state but solidly in the "blue" column on the national and statewide levels (although the state house and senate are GOP controlled).

According to the polls President Trump's national aggregate approval rating is 39% and he is similarly under water in the Old Dominion. 

In the overwhelming majority of cases mid/off term elections go against the party that won the previous presidential election, often massively so. 

However, with Donald Trump the jury is out on whether the traditional playbook has been completely torn up. While the Dem's have won a scattering of state house elections the four congressional election and one senate election were all held by the GOP.

The GOP's winning margin in each congressional election was well down on the presidential year election but still,a win under circumstances where traditionally a number of those seats may have been lost. Further the left spent upwards of $30 million in Georgia trying to get their candidate Ossoff elected and still failed.

Given all factors,Trump's purported bad approval, a Democratic safe state, former President Obama and Tim Kaine campaigning for Northam, the media advising that "Trump's base is deserting him in droves" and the history of elections.

If Northam loses the Dem's will be in a world of hurt, the only excuse, one which would most certainly be trotted out is the old chestnut "all elections are local" where a preemptive strike is on the boards already "Are Democrats trying to lose Virginia's governor's race?"

Unfortunately for the GOP if it is victorious, the muddied waters of a nation wide DNC in chaos, the concept of a totally inept Virginia Democratic campaign has merits for the Dem apologists;

"Northam refused to take a tough stance on MS-13 in order to not upset the extreme activists in his party, but in doing so, he started to lose suburban families who have seen MS-13 murder people in their neighborhoods. Loudoun, Fairfax, and Prince William counties have seen numerous brutal gang murders in recent years, including one in my own neighborhood in Ashburn. The Washington Post's fact-check on the issue admitted there are more MS-13 gang members in Fairfax County than there are police officers"

And while the Northam campaign literally blacked out his black running mate for Lt.Governor's image from campaign literature they then managed to insult the Hispanic community;

 "And while Northam is dealing with charges of "subtle racism," the Democratic Party of Virginia authorized a hit piece on Latina Republican House of Delegates candidate Lolita Mancheno-Smoak, putting a picture of her face by a picture of a ravenous dog and a Jason Halloween mask."

Polling is muddled as we have come to expect ranging from Quinnipiac with Northam +14 and Hampton with Gilliespie +8 (with 26% "undecided in the latter case) and the latest poll from Republican associate "The Polling Co." has Gillespie +2. Thus it may boil down to the usual battle of turnout between the DC Democratic counties and the Republican rural areas.

As with the case of Ossoff in Georgia and the Dem's $30 million dollar losing effort the fact of President Trump's supposed poor approval rating may have no bearing on the determination of conservatives to ensure the Republican movement as Trump rightly defined it is stronger than a fractured factioned, message-less Democratic Party.

The only danger for the conservative movement from a Gillespie win is that it may finally waken the media and the DNC to the truth that endless attacks on Trump and "Trumpism" is a dead end and the time has come to attend to the need for objective reporting in the case of the former and putting their house in order in the case of the latter

Trump's Obvious Election Win Was Hiding In Plain Sight; Will It Be So In 2020?

 The key factor, hiding in plain sight, that pointed to a victory in the election for Donald Trump was obvious but a misled, often deluded and hate filled media's blinkers made it invisible.

 The media and pundits like the Princeton Consortium's Sam Wang, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver and worst of all the HuffPost Pollster Natalie Jackson who predicted a Clinton win varying from 80% to 98% were misled by flawed polling in key battleground states.

 With hindsight it is clear the polling models did not account for voters, especially in the Midwest, who had not voted for either McCain or Romney coming out strongly for Trump in rural areas. 

 That, allied to a drop in support for Clinton by non-whites/Hispanics, was more than enough to give Trump a substantial electoral College margin.

 The polls were well within in the margin of error as regards the popular vote, which is of course irrelevant, but the fact of her  "victory" was tempered by her running up huge margins in the Democrats coastal redoubts plus Illinois. This more or less correct polling would have led the prognosticators further off the correct path of poll analysis.

 Apart from a few, mostly partisan Republican bloggers who saw a Trump victory (including, publicly, yours truly I have to say) the most prominent person who was correct was an academic who based his analysis on a set of historic parameters.

Alan Lichtman, History professor at American University developed;

"A system for predicting the popular-vote result of American presidential elections, based upon the theory of pragmatic voting. America’s electorate, according to this theory, chooses a president, not according to events of the campaign, but according to how well the party in control of the White House has governed the country.

 If the voters are content with the party in power, it gains four more years in the White House; if not, the challenging party prevails. Thus, the choice of a president does not turn on debates, advertising, speeches, endorsements, rallies, platforms, promises, or campaign tactics. Rather, presidential elections are primarily referenda on the performance of the party holding the White House."

 

Lichtman uses a series of 13 “keys,” which are true/false statements that he says can help predict whether the incumbent party will remain in the White House. 

For each of these statements, a “true” statement favors the incumbent party, but enough “false” statements portend their defeat in a presidential election. This model, he told the Washington Post in September, predicted that Trump would win"

The "keys, which include;Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections. Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president" are set out in detail.

 However, Prof.Lichtman, the media the psephologists and their pundit acolytes could all have 
spared the time and effort and misleading, for the most part, coverage by consulting one election predictor that has been correct since 1984 (now nine elections in a row.)

The Standard & Poors (S&P) financial index, when down prior to the election, saw the incumbent party lose and when up the incumbent party won-simple as that. The S&P was down 3.8% from the start of August 2016 and the incumbent party, i.e. Hillary's duly lost.

Certainly Prof.Lichtman's "keys" included two major economic parameters  but neither were as specific as the S&P guideline:

"Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign. Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms."

 What we can make from this, as long as this predictive model holds until it too fails of course as politics is always in a state of  flux in the long term, is that Bill Clinton's dictum "it's the economy stupid" is still correct and campaigns, get out the vote scrambles, scandals etc are all subservient to that principle. 

Currently the economy current is seeing substantial GDP growth, currently running at an annual rate of 3% with second quarter growth the highest in two years, unemployment down, average wages rising at the strongest pace since 2009, and the share market, as of this writing, at record highs,

 If this continues and history is still a guide all the "Trump Russia" and other "scandals" alarms and diversions MSM punditry and especially poor polling, will meet the same fate in the 2018 mid-terms and Trump's reelection in 2020 as they did in the 2016 election.

From The Media; Commentary For Conservatives 9/13/17 Part#1

It's Official: Democrats Are The Extremists Today LINK

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America Divided: It Starts With the Democratic Party

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Trumpist populism, though not without its blind spots, has a more incisive diagnosis of the defining political conflict of our age and of the central threats confronting the country than any of the other competing worldviews.

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Trump and Iran nuclear deal: Smart chess play could motivate the mullahs  LINK

It costs the president nothing, does not wreck the agreement, does not reimpose sanctions, and can be reversed if Tehran proves it is complying.

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Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood’s secular, liberal indulgences 

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Trump Made the Right Move on UNESCO

The agency is a den of anti-Semites.

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The general schools doltish press corps

LINK

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 Trump strikes a blow for health-care freedom

Free at last! That’s the message for millions who don’t get health coverage at work and, until now, faced two dismal options: going without insurance or paying Obama­Care’s soaring premiums. On Thursday, President Trump announced changes that will allow consumers to choose coverage options costing half of what ObamaCare’s cheapest bronze plans cost.

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Is Trump the Heir to Reagan?

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 Hollywood Should Never Lecture America Again

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How the NFL Lost to Trump 

LINK 

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Palin's America Stands Aghast At Dem/Hollywood America

The righteous indignation at the monstrous Harvey Weinstein, his enablers, those who knew but kept silent and the Democratic Party hypocrites who took his money and posed with him has rippled across the conservative media and middle America.

The outstanding commentator, with first hand experience of Hollywood Roger L.Simon has to my mind best and succinctly summed up the situation:

Hollywood’s politics have always been a self-serving charade, a liberal masquerade for a rapacious and lubricious lifestyle.  But now, thanks to the Weinstein scandal, we see it more clearly than ever. And it couldn't be more repellent. (I had always thought Bill Clinton would have made the greatest studio executive of all time. Now I'm convinced of it.)...

They have abandoned the culture -- and our children -- to the creepiest people imaginable.  What is going on in Hollywood is far from being just about Harvey. It’s approaching a pandemic"

The moral rot in American society started with President Clinton, the exposure of what the liberal establishment really thought of the non-coastal elite was, inadvertently exposed, and made plain with then candidate Obama's "bitter clingers" and Michelle Obama's "I have never been proud of my country" remarks.

Certainly President Nixon was ethically bankrupt over Watergate and President G.W. Bush was wrong on Iraq but neither man was an elitist nor personally morally corrupt.

In the 2016 election the voters, outside the Democrat's coastal redoubts, clearly signaled they had had enough and wanted wholesale change, especially from the Beltway crowd that Hillary and her cohorts represented. 

What has come to light in respect of just how morally bankrupt, corrupt, cynical and disgusting that cohort is has, forever, removed whatever amount of scales there were to drop from the public's eyes.

Sarah Palin saw all this in 2008 and for her honesty, unbending Christian values and worst of all being pro-life was vilified, satirized and hated on with a vehemence never seen before in American political life. 

 Those at the very forefront of this endless attack were the same Hollywood denizens and their media supporters who have now been exposed as morally bankrupt or utter cowards in reaping the benefits from  their obsequiousness and speaking up when it was safe years later.

The Democratic Party, despite their  (some not all) returning Weinstein's tainted money is completely tied their Hollywood supporters in the public's mind. 

It is unimaginable that the very people who turned against that party in 2016 would be attracted back to it after it has been exposed as simply a vehicle for immoral leftism.

In the end Palin and Palin's America won, not through Palin herself being elected of course but via "Palinism in the presidency i.e. her chosen candidate, with the wherewithal to finance the campaign, won on her values. 

The roots of Donald Trump's historic presidential victory go back eight years to the 2008 presidential contest and the V.P. candidacy of Sarah Palin.  Palin, or more properly Palinism, had many of the same characteristics as the Trump ascendancy: a robust patriotic populism driven by intense love of country and rejection of big-government internationalism embodied by Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Certainly President Trump is not "Palin" in respect of his life story but he has become the vehicle for traditional values and is, as much as the GOP will let him, keeping his policy promises and, most certainly keeping his promises as regards the Supreme Court and lower level judiciary appointments.

For all their wealth and power and attached Hollywood glamor the Democratic party is at its lowest ebb office wise in 100 years. The bringing into the full light of day its disdain for the common man and the corrupt bargain with the decedents of Hollywood must be a disgusting sight to all Americans who hold the traditional view of American society dear.

Weinstein Affair Shows "Bernie Bros." Were Right And Were Robbed, As Were The Voters, Of Genuine Choice.

No I'm not a Sanders supporter although I clearly recognize there were points of confluence between the Sanders agenda and what Trump supporters responded to.

Numerous commentators viewed various aspects of both campaigns in which they saw a commonality, to take just one of many, here are some (minus the snark) from The Atlantic's Molly Ball's list;

• Both oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
• Both support maintaining or expanding current levels of Social Security benefits.
• Both support some upper-income tax hikes.
• Both lament the pernicious role of money in politics .
• Both opposed the Iraq war (Stan herself notes that Trump “would have left Saddam Hussein in power”) and believe the money spent on it could have been put to better use domestically.
• Both have been known to worry that increased immigration could depress working-class wages.

One could find fault with the list and add more from other sources but in my opinion there is enough, even from Ball's list, to show policy and values which Sanders and Trump supporters would appreciate-I certainly do.

But beyond policy the undeniable meeting of minds for both groups was the deeply held understanding that the status quo, as represented by the Obama administration, the Clinton's and the Beltway elite (including especially the RNC) needed to be swept away. The polls of voters on election night showed that "change" was among the highest factors in how they cast their ballots.

Again. I am not a Sanders supporter but I recognize and honor their honest and deeply held commitment to a values system that puts the economic advancement of lower income groups as a high priority. In other words Sanders supporters are driven by a moral, social justice imperative. 

That in my view their economic prescriptions would end up as having the opposite effect from their desired end, and their often vituperative, strident and ad hominem attacks on opponents is not the point. Rather the point is that, as opposed to Hillary, they stood for something and held to their beliefs with a passion.

We know now that the DNC under Wasserman-Schultz did everything possible to protect the establishment's anointed.

 Sanders supporters could I am sure provide a massive list of all the ways Sanders campaign was thwarted, but the DNC scheduling as few debates as possible and, deliberately, at the worst possible times for mass viewing, is just one of the blatant examples of interference with the democratic process.

In the end the most reprehensible actions by the establishment was to ensure Hillary was the nominee at all costs. That she turned out to be a flawed candidate, with grossly heavy baggage, a terrible campaigner who threw away the 'blue wall' by not even showing up in Wisconsin and too late in Michigan and Pennsylvania, would have dismayed Sanders supporters.

But it is now, in the light of Hillary's post election blame game (including a snit about Bernie) and
her connection to the monstrous Harvey Weinstein that the full extent of what the RNC did to the Sanders supporters is fully exposed.

It is clear to all objective viewers that the RNC/GOP establishment tried to foist a candidate with masses of policy but no policy "heart" nothing beyond wonkiness, to touch the desires of ordinary folks, and whose lack of moral values made her take five days to condemn her friend and financial backer Weinstein (without advising she would return his donations).

In retrospect a genuine choice, genuine for America's needs not the Clinton's or the RNC's, would have been a battle of ideas for change between Trump and Sanders. That this was denied by reprehensible means is a tragedy and an insult to Sanders supporters and their genuinely held values.
What a Bill and Hillary Clinton administration, with all their Hollywood hangers on, dubious finances and media enablers would have done to America is beyond imagining. 

What happens next for the Democratic Party is vital as if the establishment once again puts their status quo choice as the nominee the prospect of Sanders, or his successor, staying with the Dem's is moot. One thing is certain is that the Democratic Party would not deserve to have such members and surely the limits of their patience would be sorely tested.