by The pollsters took another election on the chin. Few races turned out anywhere near what was predicted. The so-called red wave or tsunami has turned into, at best, a red rivulet. The US House may be Republican majority but it will be only so marginally. We still don’t know about the Senate. The Georgia senate runoff may be the deciding factor there.
In North Carolina, it was generally a good night for Republicans and conservatives. Rep. Tedd Budd (R-NC) defeated former Ch. Justice Cheri Beasley. He had a positive vote margin of approximately 135,000 votes. In my district, St. Sen. Chuck Edwards (R-Henderson) beat Buncombe County Commissioner Jasmine Beach-Ferrara (R) by over 30,000 votes.
In the North Carolina statewide judicial races for Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, it was a Republican sweep. Republicans will now have a 5-2 majority on the Supreme Court with the addition of Judge Richard Deitz and Trey Allen. With the US Supreme Court hearing Moore et al v. Harper et al, a case involving redistricting and the legislative prerogative, redistricting will probably come before the NC Supreme Court again.
Speaking of redistricting, the forced redistricting of Congressional districts by the NC Supreme Court resulted in a 7-7 split between Republicans and Democrats. Without this forced redistricting, it probably would have been 9-4.
The other NC results of note are that the Republicans regained a supermajority in the State Senate and are only one short in the State House. This bodes well for both the elimination of the pistol purchase permit as well as allowing church carry when the church has an attached school. Both bills were vetoed by Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) and had his veto sustained in this past session.
Moving on from NC, let’s look at Pennsylvania. I think it was widely expected that AG Josh Shapiro (D) was going to win the governorship over St. Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) and he did. It was the Senate race between Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman that got most national attention. It appears that Fetterman, damaged as he was from his stroke, has won that race by about 200,000 votes. I have looked at the results and one thing stands out to me. The PA Secretary of State’s office shows the votes on the day of the election and “mail in” votes. Fetterman got 886,217 mail in votes versus 217,932 for Oz. A 4-1 split like that is statistically suspicious in my opinion. This is especially true given that Oz had about 45,000 more election day votes than Fetterman. It just doesn’t pass the smell test.
As to Fetterman serving a full term, I’m going to go out on a limb and say he will be gone by mid-year 2023 due to “health reasons” with Shapiro then appointing a replacement to serve until Jan. 2025. I just can’t see Fetterman as being much more than a placeholder given his condition.
J. D. Vance along with Republicans in general had a good day in Ohio. They took the governorship, Vance’s senate seat, and the Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court along the rest of the Council of State offices.
Oregonians decided that they wanted to stick with the leftist policies of Gov. Kate Brown and elected Tina Kotek (D) as governor. Again, polls were deceiving as it appeared that Republican Christine Drazan might have been in the lead. Also, voters barely passed anti-gun Measure 114 which contains a magazine ban as well as requirements to obtain a permit before purchasing any firearm. Multnomah County, the home of Portland, provided the most votes for it. Why am I not shocked. I foresee that this will be challenged in Federal court given the Bruen precedents.
One last observation is that former President Trump was good at pushing candidates in the primaries. He was not so good at getting candidates that could actually win a general election. If you look at both New Hampshire and Georgia, Republican governors cruised to re-election while the Trump-backed Senate candidates struggled. Bolduc lost in New Hampshire and Hershel Walker is slightly behind Warnock at they are headed to a run-off. Meanwhile in Florida, both Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio who have been dissed by Trump won handily. I know Trump wants vindication for his 2020 loss to Joe Biden but there comes a time when you just have to suck it up and move on. Now that I’m officially a senior citizen, I think I can say we need a 2024 presidential candidate that is younger than me which automatically precludes him.
Concur with all, and I find it ‘interesting’ that the locations with ‘voting machine problems’ seemed to allow Dems to win in some surprising races…
Here in Michigan, pretty much everything that I voted for went the other way. A couple of local reps to the state congress that I voted for won, but I think that the house and senate plus the Governor all are in the hands of the Democrats now. That does not bode well at all, here in Michigan. At least we have a number of groups that keep very close tabs on the happenings in Lansing, so that they have a hard time sneaking anything past us.
The proposals that they pushed hard all won. One was for outside money to “help” with running elections. That basically means that they will get to spend money at the last minute to push the Democrats. Another one allows mail in votes that come in after the election date to be counted, as long as they are postmarked on or before the actual date. That means that if it is a Democrat vote, it gets counted, a Republican vote, it gets tossed.
The last proposal, of course is abortion. And we knew that would pass, since it is all that the Democrats ran on over the last 3 months or so.
I perhaps would not mind them winning so much, except the fact that they lied so badly, and nobody from the press even attempted to call them on it. Plus, the polling said that the biggest factor that concerned the people was the economy and also crime. But in the 2 governor debates, the moderators concentrated on abortion as the main topic of interest. It is no wonder that the Democrats did so well in this election, with the moderator of the debates basically convincing them that they really should be more interested in abortion.
The suck it up and move on bs is why the Republicans lost in MI, PA and are still counting votes in AZ. Failure to address the ballots, voting machines, and convenient machine failures only in Republican districts, lack of paper, and running out of ink that resulted IN VOTERS BEING TURNED AWAY WITHOUT VOTING!!!