Posted on 02/11/2022 3:44:11 AM PST by Kaslin
As we race toward this fall's midterm elections, it is obvious to even cursory observers of our political landscape that Democrats are in for a shellacking. As of this writing, both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have job approval ratings that are underwater by double-digit margins. Even more ominous, the RealClearPolitics polling average for voters who have been recently asked about the direction of the country reveals an astonishing 37.5% margin in favor of the idea America is on the "wrong track."
Put simply, voters can't stand Biden, hate Harris even more and emphatically think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Also auguring poorly for Democrats is the near-ironclad rule of American politics that a sitting president's political party will lose seats in the first post-inauguration midterm election. Sensing the writing on the wall, 21 sitting House Democrats have now announced they do not intend to run for reelection -- compared with only six House Republicans. The only real question is whether Republicans up and down the ballot this fall will prevail at rates that exceed the Tea Party wave midterm election of 2010.
In a desperate attempt to stave off, or at least mitigate, a veritable electoral bloodbath, Democrats have conveniently decided that now is the time to finally stop obsessing over COVID. Yes, now -- right as other polling evinces a majority of Americans want to cease or seriously lessen COVID-induced lifestyle restrictions. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul just announced an end to the Empire State's statewide masking requirement for businesses, although a mask mandate regrettably remains in place at schools and health care facilities. What's more, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Oregon and California -- all of which, like New York, are Democratic-governed -- announced this week their own plans to lift indoor mask mandates either later in February or in March.
These Democratic leaders have invariably pointed to receding caseloads, and perhaps "the science," more generally, to justify their obviously coordinated reversals on mask mandates. To be sure, mask mandates (for inefficacious masks) and vaccine mandates (for vaccines that do not stop transmission) are bad public policy. So, good for Democrats for finally catching up. Welcome to the party, guys; some of us have been here for a while already.
But Democrats cannot plausibly pretend that "the science" has changed in any meaningful way. All that has changed is their ever-plummeting polling and ever-sinking expected fortunes this fall. Hochul and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have not had some sort of grand epiphany. There will be no "mea culpa," no acknowledgment that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had it right on COVID all along. There will be no apologies for the ways that divisive vaccine mandates and pointless mask mandates harm our social fabric and undermine the common good. If Democrats could still politically get away with imposing their will, they would do so. It just turns out they can't.
Fortunately for Republicans, Democrats' risible volte-face on COVID hysteria will not spare them the American people's wrath at the ballot box this fall. For starters, even in terms of COVID, most blue-state parents still face the indignity of seeing their children masked up in school, and thus subject to all the attendant pedagogical and developmental harms wrought by forcing school-age youngsters to cover up in face diapers. Voters also have a long enough memory to recall Biden's imperious OSHA vaccinate-or-test workplace mandate, which was thankfully enjoined by the Supreme Court but which still amounted to a more brazen act of administrative overreach than anything even former President Barack 0bama ever attempted.
But the Democrats' impending electoral rebuke is far more encompassing. Just this week, the consumer price index -- the most widely used and cited measure of inflation -- hit a 40-year high, reaching 7.5%. Inflation is regressive insofar as it disproportionately harms lower-income consumers, but it harms everyone. And over the past year, used car prices have shot up 40.5%, gasoline prices have skyrocketed 40% and the price of eggs at the supermarket has increased by 13%. These numbers are simply staggering, and suggest a comeuppance is due.
The Biden-Harris track record in any number of other core governance areas is also appalling. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data for the 2021 calendar year reveal that an astonishing two million aliens were apprehended or turned themselves in -- holding aside, of course, those who were successfully able to infiltrate. The yearlong border crisis, viscerally seared in many Americans' consciences due to the images that emerged last fall out of besieged Del Rio, Texas, was exacerbated by deliberate Biden-Harris decisions. The administration's rescission of the highly effective Trump-era "Remain in Mexico" policy comes to mind.
On the foreign policy front, Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal, though overdue and correct in theory, was so botched, humiliating and galling in its execution that it was impeachment worthy. Meanwhile, thugs Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who have Taiwan and Ukraine squarely in their respective crosshairs, scoff at the United States and openly propose a new world order. At the same time, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world's number one state sponsor of jihad, inches ever-closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon.
The American people historically punish political incompetence, and the doddering dolt who is our commander in chief is a Harvard Business School-worthy case study in gross incompetence. Republicans are on track to win big this fall, and at this point there is nothing Democrats can do to prevent it.
I wouldn’t be so sure, Democrats have short memories. Republicans have a way of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The elections are a lifetime away, politically speaking.
Watched FNC last night a little. Heard Ted Cruz say that democrats and their propaganda apparatus are inching ever closer to blaming republicans for the mandates. It’s getting there.
This is what is especially galling. The GOP is doing everything it can to sandbag itself for fear that they might have to actually make good on what they promise the voters every election cycle. That and orange man bad.
NYS hasn’t recanted.
Kids and employees still being muzzled.
I think we should start a contest to predict what new crisis they manufacture by June. They ignore the growing list of wreckage already accomplished and I don't want to give them ideas, but it would be fun.
My money is on some huge domestic environmental disaster that collapses interstate commerce and travel. Perhaps white supremacists (FBI) blowing up rail lines across the country? Maybe gasoline distribution pipelines?
From NYS...
63 new sites.
Doesn’t sounding she’s recanted to me.
Still haven’t figured out how an honest is going to be held without voter integrity. See 2020.
Sheesh..... honest election.
It will save them unless Republicans keep playing offense on this issue.
“Democrats’ Recent Rejection of COVID Insanity Will Not Save Them This Fall”
Correct. Democrats are counting on voter fraud to save them this fall.
Karma.
Democrats can lie all they want about how great the economy is, but when people see price increases in the double digits for basic necessities and how they have less and less money, they’ll know they’ve been lied to.
Wait until summer when the shootings, BLM, and ANTIFA, begin in earnest.
The Dems need to be kicked out at all levels of government. They are totally corrupt, inept, and bald face liars.
... short of massive cheating at the ballot box...
Those $1200 IRS booster payments we received the last couple of years didn't last long and neither did woke corporations and governments that upped minimum hourly pay to $15.
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