On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Election recap
- RIGOP’s missing point
- Chair v. chair
- Mail ballots
- Media bias
Featured image by PawelCzerwinski on Unsplash.
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We may (or may not) be past having to prove media bias, these days, but an Amanda Milkovits headline in the Boston Globe still seems worth a short note:
Voters largely reject candidates affiliated with conservative group Parents United RI
Contrast with this Boston Globe headline on an Edward Fitzpatrick article from September:
Top R.I. legislative leaders withstand challenges from progressives
Conservatives are “rejected.” Progressives are “withstood.”
The Globe is obviously not alone in this, but readers must remember that all of its reportage must be adjusted to account for its ideological mission.
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The Rhode Island Saga, Post 5
When our heroes entered the Marketplace, they discovered five characters with varying leverage. In a business context, we’d call the first category “customers,” which translates in politics as “voters.” Here, our heroes face a unique problem, given “the irreducible something that hints at their ability to overcome the specific challenges of our time” — namely, their “innate conviction that a community should pursue the optimum balance of cooperation and individual liberty, structured so that people can be as free as possible while having opportunities to cooperate as much as possible.”
For marketers selling the competing product of big government, the transaction is much more straightforward. They sell government as the arbiter. People gather together and exchange their votes for advantages from the politicians. Phrasing it less cynically, the vision of the dominating ideology in the Ocean State is that government should be the primary system for our cooperation, and the vote is how individuals buy a say in what that vision should be.
Of course, such transactions are easy to capture with scams, but the relevant point for this post is that the sale is easier. For the Left, your vote is your contribution to a system of morality. So, in addition to those voting for direct payments or favors, progressives’ voters are buying the positive feeling of taking moral stands.
For the heroes of the Rhode Island Saga, this is not the case. To them, individuals define their own morality, and the moral society is one in which everybody voluntarily behaves well, not one in which regulators and police enforce a moral code. Government, in this view, is an institution for maintaining the rules of the game, not defining the identity of the citizenry, and the vote is the individual’s mechanism to enforce these rules, which is something a truly moral society would be able to take for granted.
Fundamentally, our heroes’ proposition is that people shouldn’t have to vote for them, or anybody else, in order to preserve their rights. If the rugged family on the hill comes down to vote, that, in itself, is an indication officials are straying too far, and even those for whom the family does not vote ought to take notice and make adjustments.
(Notice a key distinction, here. In the first view, citizens vote to get something from their officials; in the second, citizens are seen as having such power that officials feel they can only lose good will, never buy it.)
This point of view inherently means voters have a tremendous amount of leverage. Rhode Island’s experience bears this out. The Republican base will fracture with a gust of wind if one faction thinks the other waved a fan. There is nothing in the campaign, directly, for their voters, so it takes very little to withdraw their support. Worse, with such miniscule prospects for the GOP, those who would directly benefit from the policies of freedom they would pursue know that they can’t deliver. Being correct on policy is great, and being intellectually consistent can feel good, but it doesn’t take much to tilt that scale at least to a neutral position. Again, our heroes’ target audience doesn’t have to vote, certainly not for our heroes, and certainly not at this early stage when votes in support of our heroes are almost certainly futile.
How the heroes should respond to this reality is a question we’ll consider when we arrive at a later landmark in the Rhode Island Saga. For now, we need only recognize that the very nature of the worldview by which our state can uniquely be saved leaves all the power in the hands of the people. Our heroes cannot rely on a sense that their “customers” need them, much less that they have no choice but to vote for them.
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Story pitch: Behind the scenes, secretly and heroically, a selfless former President leans into his own clichés to create space for his political party to disengage from him. Sacrificing his own aspirations, he masterfully appears to stumble over his reputed faults because he realizes it is the only way to hand off the torch of his influence and save his country.
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In the long days since most Congressional districts in the United States managed to provide sufficient vote counts for victors to be named, Republicans have only needed approximately one-quarter of all remaining districts to claim a majority. Thus far, the Democrats have beaten the odds, and the GOP is still eight seats away, which is still about one-quarter of the 33 that remain.
On first glance, it might seem to be an even-handed kind of thing — the ratio of needed wins remaining the same right up until the end — but that’s only the case if you start from the end point and look backwards. That is, maintaining this ratio only makes sense if you believe the system is constructed so as to end up with a tie. If you’re flipping a coin repeatedly and, at some point, heads outnumber tails by a big margin, then it won’t be surprising that the gap evens out over the course of a bunch more flips.
But votes aren’t like flipping a coin, and it’s relevant that the GOP took such an early lead among most of the country. I’ve also left out, so far in this post, the characteristic of the votes’ delay. Being unable to finish the count on election day makes the remaining states a group. Other things equal, one would expect the last quarter of reporting states to carry on the ratio of the majority. In other words, Republicans would have continued winning more than half of the remaining seats. But they haven’t; instead, Democrats have made up ground.
So, either Democrat districts are especially bad at elections, or there’s something fishy going on. That seems like a distinction without a difference.
Here’s another consideration I haven’t articulated thus far: Democrats have made “election denier” an epithet (except when it might apply to their allies), but that’s a convenient distraction from their own rhetoric. They — on up to the occupant of the White House — have been insisting that a big Republican win would be the end of democracy, ushering in a new era of fascism in the United States. It seems to me that somebody who really believes such a thing would be likely to see a little bit of cheating as acceptable in the service of a good cause.
Progressives can proclaim this conspiratorial, if they must, but if it turns out that the states that happened to have delayed results also happened to go disproportionately to the party that happened be projected to lose the election, and which happened to have motivated its supporters with warnings that a loss meant the loss of democracy (not to mention rights and entitlements, like Social Security), questioning the results would not (to put it mildly) be unreasonable.
Featured image by Obi Onyeador on Unsplash.
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Yeah, I know the election results are still in the air, so the coin hasn’t stopped spinning on the ground, yet, but let’s make this Day 1 of talking about how the world can be better, rather than how others are making it worse and, more importantly, start doing things to make it so.
Sorry to be mushy, but not only is that how I feel, but it’s increasingly obvious that it’s the only practical solution.
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First a note to those who might be newly engaged in politics or have forgotten: It isn’t at all unusually for the media narrative to switch after the votes are in. Thus, whereas before, commentators would say that it might be such a big “red wave” that the Republicans would take the Senate, indicating that there could be a wave even if that did not happen, afterwards, that switches to insisting that there was no wave at all because the Republicans didn’t win the Senate by several seats (or, at this point, might not win it at all).
That said, declarations that the red wave did not emerge, compared with other midterm elections are tending to ignore that this is the first midterm in the new world of post-COVID mail balloting. In economic terms, mail balloting moved the supply of ballots down and to the right, meaning that more could be had for a lower price, and given their constituencies and organizational structure, Democrats benefit more from that.
That’s part of the current political reality, and Republicans have to solve the puzzle.
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Triumphal Democrats on social media provide a lesson it’s important for Rhode Island conservatives and Republicans to remember: Being on the winning side feels good. Being a sure bet is a powerful asset. Success builds on success, as they say. Winning elections is validation, even if the race is skewed. Any strategy for change must address this human default.
A thirty-something-year-old bit from comedian Louis Anderson comes to mind. Asking why poor people in the inner city might become drug dealers, he acted out the decision between dealing and working for minimum wage at a fast-food restaurant. The analysis applies well to the question of why Rhode Islanders might emotionally invest in the Democrat Party.
Most of the outcomes, today, were beyond the margin of fraud (except to the extent that legal ballot harvesting is implicitly fraudulent). These results are the lay of Rhode Island’s political landscape. Please note that this is a statement about politics not beliefs, which might be different.
Let me segway, for a moment, to Republicans’ relative performance; the first question has to be, “Compared with what?” I’m not in a position to run the numbers, just now, but having watched Rhode Island elections closely for a couple decades, I’d suggest that the GOP candidates did well compared with the standard. High-30s to mid-40s represents an increase from baseline. It’s not enough, and it’s not a good sign for the party or the state that this is the high-water mark, but don’t believe any spin that makes too much of the fact that Democrats won. Rather, it would have been a major upset if they didn’t. (We got our hopes up with Fung, but mostly we discovered that the Democrat machine had more umph in reserve it could deploy.)
So, what then? Honestly, a big part of Rhode Island’s problem, which is felt most acutely by Republicans but is, don’t you doubt, a very real worry for the state as a whole, is that it is simply easier to get out of here than to try to arrest the downward spiral. If you’re young and only want to build a life for yourself, the obvious move is to move. Without the federal government pouring money into the state, relying on its own politically inbred leadership, the state will be in major trouble. Fly! Go!
But if your ties here are too deep (and let’s not forget that living in one of the lowest-opportunity states in America is still winning the lottery, historically speaking), or if you share my missionary bent, turn your attention to answering the question of what can actually change direction.
On that question, I’ll make two observations. First, we cannot rely on good candidates to fly in and save us. Consider Fung, Guckian, and Lathrop. Not only were they all supremely qualified, but they’ve been engaged in the state in their own ways for years. Even if there is no line to get to the front of the GOP pack, there is value going through the motions of delay. Second, the pugilistic approach of some, with whom I’ve worked closely, is doomed to fail. It doesn’t recognize where we actually are.
To these ends, I’m doing my best, while trying to earn a living on the side, to return to an approach I think will make a difference, with my Rhode Island Saga series. I hope the candidates who ran this time around will join me in stepping back and reevaluating, rather than throwing up their hands and walking away.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which Rhode Island has ill-advisedly joined, requires that, whenever enough states have joined to control the Electoral College outcome for the President of the United States, all participating states must give their Electoral College votes to whichever candidate won the most individual votes nationally, no matter what their own citizens wanted. You don’t have to be a political analyst to suspect that Ocean State Democrats assume their party’s current advantage in Rhode Island and urban areas nationally will be eternal so that the national popular vote will only ever differ from the Electoral College in their favor.
Of course, they’d never make the argument in those terms, so they did things like insist the national popular vote would make Rhode Island more relevant to politicians, leading them actually to campaign here. In reality, the Electoral College basically doubles Rhode Island’s importance in presidential elections, so the compact would actually cut our relevance in half.
What makes us irrelevant to national politics is that we’re small, yes, but also that we’re the owned property of a particular party. The solution would be to reform the many systemic factors that give insider Democrats insurmountable advantages. For evidence, consider this tweet and article from Amanda Milkovitz of the Boston Globe:
Politics is like the economy in this regard. When people have competitive options, things go better. It therefore behooves us to err in favor of competition in the structure of our laws and civic culture. But as with businesspeople, politicians don’t like uncertainty and risk, so when they can, they’ll tilt things in their favor.
Featured image by Josh Carter on Unsplash.
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… no matter how much you lose (or is taken from you) … you will always be able to find moments like this, because they are your relationship with God, and that relationship is eternal.
