It’s The Big Ugly, and We’re Here For It

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

Perhaps a little focus on the foundation of the issue is in order.

Ever since the professional Republican apparatus decided to target, eliminate and destroy the grassroots movement known as the Tea Party, there was always going to come a time when the battle for the heart and soul of the GOP Club would take place.

CTH has been calling this battle ‘The Big Ugly‘ for around a decade.

The Big Ugly battle is essentially the fight between the grassroots working class base of MAGA voters and the professional political snobs in control of the Republican Club boardroom.

Some call it the ‘base’ -vs- the ‘establishment’.  There are other names and catchphrases, but the essence of the dynamic is the same.  A scruffy voting base, who, prior to Donald Trump, had no visible leader to represent their internal interests around the mahogany table.

Ordinary voters were in an abusive relationship with the people around the GOP boardroom.  The Club needed our votes, and our money (less so after the Citizens United decision) but had no intention of ever actually delivering on the priorities of the voters.  The Republican political establishment played Lucy with the football for years, and We The People always ended up flat on our backs, continually frustrated and feeling used.

In the same year the Tea Party rose up, the Supreme Court gave the GOP Club legal access to unlimited corporate money with the 2010 Citizens United decision.  Mitch McConnell used the newly unrestrained campaign finance mechanism to further diminish the influence of the unwashed masses and eliminate the movement; it’s all well documented.

For the next several years we watched and participated in a political pantomime with highlights to include the 2012 installation of Club member Mitt Romney to represent our interests.  Yeah, whatever…. It was a hot mess.   Bumper Sticker:

The base voters watched the GOP Corporate Club do nothing to block Obamacare, even after we gave them the House in 2010 midterms.  Obamacare was another Lucy and the football scenario, while the Senate wing of the Corporate Club created “comprehensive immigration reform,” including amnesty with Marco Rubio.  Eventually, the bloom wore off the ruse, and we dispatched Virginia Club official Eric Cantor as a message to the Corporate Club to knock it off.

The Corporate Club didn’t and doesn’t care.  Instead, while they sold out the working-class to the multinationals (TPA, TPP, Paris Climate, etc) they fought harder, gaslight more, and made even more promises they never intended to keep.  Lucy had an unending supply of footballs.

Then in 2015 things changed.  The voting base found a weapon for use against the Republican Club, the weapon’s name was Donald Trump.  From the very first poll conducted after his 2015 announcement Trump was leading the charge, and that lead steamrolled 16 other Club approved candidates.  The Club remained furious and vowed to remove the disrupter we sent into the boardroom.

Candidate Trump and President Donald Trump tried to deal with them fair and square on our behalf, but they rebuked him and us.

The Club schemed against him, connived in their little corporate groups to get rid of him, joined with the communists in common cause to cleanse the Club boardroom of the smell from oil, tar and fuel oil, and wanted that vulgarian representative of the dirty fingernail working class eliminated.  They want only the “approved Republican” presence.

So, it was always going to get ugly.

It was always going to get Big Ugly.

The Club’s enlistment of former TPP approving congressman Ron DeSantis as a foil against the MAGA leader is transparent.  DeSantis, funded by massive contributions from the Wall Street approval committee, replaces the prior approved candidate, Jeb.   This Big Ugly battle was always going to end up with vulgarian Trump -vs- the next Jeb.  The Club has selected DeSantis as Jeb.

Now, let’s be clear.  The Republican political establishment, which includes the entirety of the multinationals in/around it, hereafter just called ‘The Club’, doesn’t give a damn about actually winning the 2024 presidential race.  The Club didn’t give a damn when Romney was used either.

What the Club wants is full control of the Club agenda, that’s where the money is.  The color of the flag atop the Capitol Hill dome is irrelevant to the activity that takes place beneath it.  To understand, remind yourself of:  The 2017 Obamacare repeal vote, 2015 TPA and fast track approval, 2015 Corker-Cardin amendment for Obama’s Iran Deal, 2014 Gang-of-Eight amnesty bill, or more recently the 2022 unlimited Ukraine funding.

Under the Capitol Hill dome both Club wings of the UniParty apparatus feed the multinational corporate vulture, regardless of the color of the flag atop the spire.

The Republican Club has no interest in Ron DeSantis becoming President of the United States.  The Republican Club has interest in Donald Trump NOT becoming President of the United States.  Ron DeSantis is the foil, nothing more.  It’s not about Ron DeSantis, it’s about the Club, the mechanism behind Ron DeSantis – the same mechanism that put $200 million into his campaign as enticement for his usefulness.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis -vs- California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2024 is simply two clubs playing the illusion of choice game.

Ultimately, using history and modern politics as the perspective, if you really boil down the political sauce to its reduced state, what you find is… With DeSantis the DNC Club needs less ballot collection to defeat him. However, that’s irrelevant to the intent of his usefulness for the GOP club.

For the professional GOP Club, as openly expressed by the establishment politicians within it, the donors behind it and the media who promote it, the goal is to remove the populism within the club and bring back the multinational Club alignment with the corporations.  That alignment was severely damaged by President Trump and the America First economic agenda.

The core of the Big Ugly battle is a Club motive based on money, power and boardroom affluence, in essence, GREED.

For ten plus years on these pages, I have written extensively about how there was always, always, going to be a point where the Big Ugly battle was going to have to be waged.  We have waited and waited, looking at each moment, each conflict, each disparagement, each slight and snub, in hope the spark would ignite.

If the Big Ugly arrives in a contest between President Trump and Governor DeSantis, well, great; it needs to happen.

The bottom line is we need this Big Ugly fight.  Not only does the future of the GOP reside in the outcome, the future of a constitutional republic free from corporatism is contingent upon it.

Yes, this fight is going to be big, and it’s going to be ugly… and in the aftermath, hopefully lots of free footballs.

Bring it!

Florida, the New Capital of Red State America

The future of the Republican Party is not hard to find. National Republicans need to simply let Florida and its transformational governor show them the way.

by Josh Hammer for American Greatness

In what, overall, was a frustrating election night for Republicans, in which the oft-predicted “red wave” failed to materialize nationally, there was one state above all that provided a clear beacon of hope. That would be my adopted state of Florida.

In the Sunshine State Tuesday evening, Governor Ron DeSantis cruised to a second term with an astounding near-20-point margin of victory over former Gov. Charlie Crist, and Republican Senator Marco Rubio routed Democratic challenger Rep. Val Demings by more than 16 points. Both DeSantis and Rubio won the state’s most populous county, 70-plus percent Hispanic Miami-Dade County—DeSantis by double digits. Both Republican standard-bearers also won majority-Hispanic Osceola County, in the Orlando area, and DeSantis also flipped Palm Beach County from blue to red.

All other Florida Republicans running statewide also won, and Republicans also secured supermajority status in both the state senate and the state house. U.S. congressional races in Florida that were labeled before the election as toss-ups, such as the 13th and 27th congressional districts, uniformly broke for Republicans—and often not in particularly close fashion. Some other states, such as Texas and Iowa, also had good election nights for Republicans; but in no state did the GOP perform better, up and down the ballot, than in Florida.

All of this is simply astonishing from Florida, the one-time paradigmatic “swing” state that famously decided the 2000 presidential election by a paltry 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast. Indeed, just four years ago, DeSantis eked out his first statewide victory over Democrat Andrew Gillum by a margin of 0.4 percent. And DeSantis’ victory over Gillum was not even the closest statewide race in Florida that cycle; Rick Scott won his U.S. Senate race over Bill Nelson that same year by a microscopic 0.12 percent margin.

Yet, just four years later, Florida is no longer a purple state. It is a red state—in fact, a dark red state. Consider, as but one more data point, that DeSantis won reelection by a larger statewide margin than did Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, who won his reelection race Tuesday night by just under 14 percent. Oklahoma is perhaps the nation’s single reddest state; in every presidential election since George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, every single Oklahoma county has voted for the Republican presidential candidate. But in 2022, DeSantis won in former “swing” state Florida by a wider margin than Stitt did in ruby red Oklahoma.

The bottom line is as straightforward as it would have been jarring to hear just a handful of years ago: Florida, the nation’s third-most populous state, has surpassed Texas, the nation’s second-most populous state, as the capital of red state America.

As Republicans lick their wounds from Tuesday’s various disappointments and engage in some deep introspection about what went wrong at the national level, one key question thus becomes: What lessons can Florida Republicans impart to Republicans elsewhere?

President Donald Trump’s 1.2 percent victory margin in Florida in the 2016 presidential election was prescient as a leading indicator; indeed, in the razor-thin DeSantis and Scott 2018 victories, both Republicans ran well ahead of national Republicans, who had a down cycle. But the “Florida miracle” story is impossible to understand without the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Floridian who shepherded the Sunshine State through it: Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis repudiated, far quicker than did others, the noxious lockdowns, mask requirements, school shutdowns and (eventual) vaccine passports that characterized those dark days of full-on COVID hysteria. In taking on what he has called the “biomedical security state” so aggressively, DeSantis appealed to both individual liberty and innate human dignity, pertaining to the choice of whether to take a novel vaccine and the ability to work and earn a living. DeSantis understood, from the get-go, that the national policy overreaction to COVID implicated not merely liberty concerns but also a blatant attempt by the American ruling class to subjugate “wrong-thinking” “deplorables.”

The more populist hue of DeSantis’ COVID-related policy also manifested itself in his approach to vaccine passports, where Florida resisted the “let every business decide for itself” mantra of chamber of commerce/libertarian Republicanism and instead opted for a statewide ban on vaccine passports. Outside of COVID, DeSantis has similarly shown a willingness to wield government power for the benefit of good and the detriment of decadence, such as his move to strip The Walt Disney Company of extra-legal tax benefits for its strident opposition to Florida’s law protecting children from teachers seeking to indoctrinate youngsters in vogue gender ideology. Furthermore, Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, an anti-“woke capitalism” measure that was championed by DeSantis and should ultimately be vindicated by the courts, is representative of the more “muscular” mentality Republicans must now take to issues of political economy.

The results speak for themselves. During the first year of COVID, from 2019 to 2020, Florida had four times the net income migration as the next closest state, Texas ($24 billion to $6 billion). And the individuals and companies moving to Florida seem to be those who are voting with their feet: Registered Republicans now outnumber registered Democrats in Florida by over 300,000, a shift of nearly 600,000 since DeSantis’ minuscule 2018 victory over Gillum. As the website Florida Politics reported last week, of the 394,000 active voters who have moved to Florida since the onset of COVID, they are twice as likely to be registered Republicans as registered Democrats. The Sunshine State’s brand of Republicanism has also made further inroads with the state’s Hispanic community; as mentioned, DeSantis and Rubio won not merely heavily Cuban (and to a lesser extent, Venezuelan) Miami-Dade County but also Osceola County, whose Hispanic population is majority Puerto Rican.

The future of the Republican Party is not hard to find. National Republicans need to simply let Florida and its transformational governor show them the way.

And we Know and On the Fringe- Nov 12

 

Don't have anything non boring to say. Here's tonight's news:

4 Realities Conservatives Must Swallow In The Wake Of The 2022 Midterms

The electorate has crossed a point of no return, shattering previous assumptions conservatives had baked in.

by Peter Burfeind at The Federalist

Unlike the left, the stunning under-performance of Republicans on Tuesday should not be an opportunity for screaming at the cosmos. It’s a reality check, and the sooner we adapt to reality, the sooner we can be optimistic about the future.

So what are the realities conservatives must face based on Tuesday’s shock? I see four things.

Donald Has Jumped the Shark

Donald Trump was a great president who did conventional Republican things conservatives dreamed about for decades. He’s absolutely responsible for 10,000 fewer babies being aborted due to his conservative appointments to the Supreme Court and their role in overturning Roe v. Wade. He kept us out of war. He kept Russia at bay. He brought up Chinese aggression as an issue. He kept North Korea silent. He fixed NAFTA. I could go on.

But he will never win the presidency again, and the candidates he endorses do not do well. Given the fundamentals of this election cycle, the open seats in Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Hampshire, Arizona, and Nevada should have been easy wins. Instead, they were weighed down by the Trump name and the stupid Jan. 6 incident that everyone wants to forget about except Donald Trump and those who leverage his obsession with it into a leftist passion.

Trump’s recent putdowns of Gov. Ron DeSantis, dubbing him “DeSanctimonious” and telling him to back off a presidential run, were the last straw for me and many conservatives. We need to be done with him.

Two years ago, I wrote an article in these pages comparing Trump’s 2020 loss to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s death, arguing his loss will make his movement more powerful than anyone can possibly imagine. I still believe that. He’s brought new constituencies into the GOP. But a key implicit point of that argument is, Obi-Wan Kenobi died. He didn’t get in the way of Luke Skywalker’s (ahem, DeSantis’s, ahem!) rise.

‘Democrat’ Is Shorthand for ‘I Gotta Get Mine!’

The electorate has crossed a point of no return, shattering previous assumptions. Everyone predicted the fundamentals of the economy would determine harsh losses for Democrats. Yet here we are. A frighteningly close majority of voters don’t care how massive government spending combined with strangling our oil production has led to economic decline.

Clearly, a sizeable part of the electorate has baked into it a transactional relationship with the Democrat brand that gives the party a reliable handicap regardless of what’s happening in the real world. “Democrat” is now shorthand for livelihood security, essentially for one’s career in the bureaucracy or one’s government entitlements. 

The Republican brand is more about principles and ideas that in the long run perform better in the aggregate. This is a hard sell among an electorate, especially among younger voters, who have not been trained to think critically about second- and third-order effects, for instance, with Biden’s student loan bailout program.

Republicans will not do well simply being against what Democrats are for. They will need to figure out a way to frame their goals in big-time, tangible ways that have a direct effect on voters and overwhelm their natural adherence to the government party.

Examples of this would be an overhaul of the public education system to a system of vouchers, constitutional amendments clarifying deployment of the armed forces, or policy positions on climate change based not on stopping it, but adapting to it through free-market forces, working with and not against the fossil fuel industry.

The GOP Must Adapt to Snowflake America

The Arizona governor race should have been an easy win for the GOP. I loved Kari Lake’s spunky, confident, in-your-face style, but she got beat by a timid snowflake who was afraid to debate her and came off as kind of mousy.

However, to many Arizona voters, Lake seems grating while something appeals to them in Hobbs. The “own the libs” tone that so many conservatives expect and love probably doesn’t work in the suburbs or college towns.

I remember a few years back, conservatives had a sporting time with “pajama boy,” the pajama-wearing millennial Obama used to market the Affordable Care Act. I thought at the time, “Who on earth is this marketing ploy appealing to?” I was troubled by voices in the conservative wilderness crying out, “Pajama boy is the future. Ignore him to your peril.” 

They are right. The “pajama boy” ethos is a symptom of the new “safetyism” that’s enabled the “coddling of America.” A Hobbs “literally shaking” from a mean Lake trying to own her resonates with that safety-seeking swath of the electorate. 

Adjusting to that reality doesn’t mean giving up the rugged individualism, rough-and-tumble ethos marking conservativism, but it does mean perhaps framing our goals differently. Aren’t conservatives ultimately about being the watchdogs of culture, protecting (not scaring off) the little lambs? 

GOP Must Adapt to How Elections Are Run

Early voting and voting by mail completely changed how elections are run. The exciting news about polls moving favorably toward the GOP didn’t matter if much of the electorate had already voted. Democrats did not seem interested in late-October debates or even winning the argument; what do they know that we don’t know?

What they know is that elections are not about “winning votes” or even “getting out to vote” so much as they are about gathering ballots. (Read this very carefully.)

The Democrats have breached the chasm between “registered voter” and “likely voter.” That chasm used to favor the GOP. It suggested there was a part of the liberal caucus who would only vote Democratic if they had the energy to get to a voting booth. That “if” was always a big “if.”   That’s one reason why midterm elections were seasons of GOP success.

No more. Through mail-in voting and early voting, the Democrats can connect an awful lot of bodies to an awful lot of “D”-marked ballots, demanding little energy at all to do so. They understand that this is where elections are won.

Conservatives can scream at the cosmos all they want about this new reality. It’s not going away. Adapt or die. Start building an army of volunteers to guide the hands of senile rural folk, shut-ins, and off-the-radar types to the “R” box, en masse.

Conservatives Can Still Be Optimistic

There are solutions to every one of these realities, so while disappointed, I’m not as despairing as many others are. Conservatives should not be despairing. Why?  Because (1) politics is not our religion, so we’ve got other sources of optimism in our families, churches, and jobs; and (2) Horace’s dictum endures — you can chase out nature with a pitchfork, but it will always come running back.

The fundamentals of reality remain in play. As long as leftism means a compulsion toward magical thinking on the laws of nature, we will always have an ally in the natural order. But far be it from conservatives to fall for magical thinking about their future.

It Looks Like DeSantis Has His Strategy to Fight Against Trump

Brandon Morse reporting for RedState 

Ron DeSantis has found himself in Donald Trump’s crosshairs and many people were wondering how the Florida Governor was going to deal with it.

While it’s infuriating to watch it happen, it was inevitable. Bringing down opponents is a large part of politics and Trump has never been one to go easy on anybody, allies and enemies alike. If Trump has a goal and you’re in the way, he’s going to attempt to bulldoze right through you. It’s been simultaneously a huge weakness and a great strength. The same fight that bruises friend and foe alike is the same fight that elevated America. To be sure, Trump’s presidency did this nation a lot of good and even set the stage for the death of Roe v. Wade.

It’s why Trump still has so many loyal followers despite being two years out of office. DeSantis, meanwhile, has a very loyal following of his own thanks to his incredible governorship of Florida.

DeSantis has proven himself to be everything the left hates. He treats his citizens like adults, defies authority when it’s necessary, and uses common sense as a gauge for whether or not an idea is worthy of keeping or discarding. This especially shined during the pandemic when DeSantis lifted restrictions when it became clear lockdown measures and masks weren’t working.

But it’s that fight that taught DeSantis how to brawl, so he knows when and how to strike. With Trump already beginning to throw out the first punches, we’re now being told what DeSantis’s strategy is to fight back.

And it’s to not fight back.

According to ABC News reporter Katherine Faulders, people close to DeSantis have said that his strategy is to “not engage and he has no intention of responding to the attacks.” Faulders added that this is “sure to anger Trump more” and it’s unknown if this is her own commentary or something her sources told her was the hope of the DeSantis team.

The question is, is this a wise strategy?

It might be good in the short term, but definitely not in the long term. Eventually, Trump is going to say and do something that will force DeSantis to step directly into the ring. Once that happens, there’s no stepping back out. If he doesn’t fire back at some point, it might run the risk of looking like weakness or, at the very least, Trump may say something that might fester in the heart of DeSantis’s campaign unless it’s refuted.

Rest assured, Trump will eventually get his way.

But for now, the strategy is a good one. The shock of Trump attacking someone so beloved as the governor of Florida isn’t exactly playing well for him and DeSantis is letting that move ricochet back at Trump. It’s definitely caused a great deal of controversy that is currently working in DeSantis’s favor.

But again, that strategy won’t hold out for long. Neither man has yet announced. It’s expected that Trump will throw his hat into the ring on the 15th, but DeSantis might be some time away from now given he just won reelection. However, this is DeSantis’s final term as governor of Florida, meaning that his iron is the hottest it will ever be and if he doesn’t strike now, it might be too cool by the time 2028 rolls around. His chances of announcing are high.

Trump and DeSantis clashing is, at this point, inevitable and the two men are already playing the game against one another.

Iranian man stuck in Paris airport for 18 years dies

 

An Iranian man who got stuck for 18 years in a Paris airport - inspiring a Steven Spielberg movie starring Tom Hanks - died today at the terminal, an airport official said.

Mehran Karimi Nasseri died of natural causes just before midday in terminal 2F at Charles de Gaulle airport outside the French capital, the official said.

Caught originally in an immigration trap - unable to enter France and with nowhere to go - he became dependent on his unusual place of abode and increasingly a national and international cause celebre.

He called himself "Sir Alfred", and a small section of airport parquet and plastic bench became his domain.

Mr Karimi Nasseri's peculiar story came to the attention of Hollywood director Spielberg, inspiring 2004 film "The Terminal," which starred Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Hanks played a man who becomes trapped at New York's JFK airport when his home country collapses into revolution.  

Mr Karimi Nasseri's stay at the airport ended in July 2006 when he was hospitalised and his sitting place dismantled. He then lived in a number of shelters in Paris.

After spending most of the money he received for the film, Mr Karimi Nasseri returned to the airport a few weeks ago, the official said.

Several thousand euros were found on him.  

Born in 1945 in Masjed Soleiman, in the Iranian province of Khuzestan, Mr Karimi Nasseri took up residence in the airport in November 1988 after flying from Iran to London, Berlin and Amsterdam in an effort to locate his mother.

He had been expelled from every other country he landed in because he was unable to produce the correct paperwork.

At Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport an informal support network grew up around him, providing food and medical help along with books and a radio.

In 1999 he was granted refugee status and the right to remain in France.  

"I'm not quite sure what I want to do, stay at Roissy or leave," he said after being handed the right to live in France.

"I have papers, I can stay here, I think I should carefully study all the options before making a decision."

He didn't leave then.

"He no longer wants to leave the airport," his lawyer Christian Bourguet said at the time. "He's scared of going."  

https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2022/1112/1335743-airport-resident/

Is Trump Shooting Himself in the Foot?

Jeff Charles reporting for RedState 

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past week, you have already witnessed what appears to be the start of the Clash of the Republican Titans™. Former President Donald Trump has all but completely declared war on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis despite the fact that he has not even indicated whether he intends to challenge Trump for the GOP presidential nomination.

On Thursday, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to take a series of swipes at the Florida governor, calling him an “average Republican Governor with great Public Relations.”

He slammed DeSantis for closing Florida at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and claimed he approach the former president “in desperate shape” in 2017. “Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would Endorse him, he could win,” Trump wrote.

The rest of the post went on in similar fashion. The point was clear: Trump was calling out the man who many see as his most formidable opponent for the GOP nomination should he decide to run.

DeSantis, fresh off of his triumph against Charlie Crist, has remained silent, not bothering to respond to Trump’s attempt to Jeb Bush him. His restraint isn’t surprising. He has shown that he is willing to punch back when it is strategically sound.

But a recent poll conducted just before the midterm elections might be not only a glimpse into Trump’s motivation for attacking DeSantis but also an indicator that, once again, he isn’t doing himself any favors. The most recent Morning Consult poll measuring the attitudes of Republican voters regarding the 2024 presidential primary revealed that the former president’s support has declined significantly.

The survey revealed that support for Trump among Republican voters has fallen from 53 percent last November to 48 percent. Over the past 12 months, his numbers have ebbed and flowed, hitting their highest in August after the FBI served a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. But now, it is below the halfway mark.

Support for Gov. DeSantis is at 26 percent, while another 26 percent would prefer a candidate who is neither DeSantis nor Trump. This means 52 percent of conservative respondents said they would rather have DeSantis or a different Republican take up the mantle than have the former president make another run at the White House.

Indeed, even looking anecdotally, I can tell you most of those I’ve seen interacting on Twitter much prefer DeSantis to the former president. But it is also worth noting that those favoring the governor would gladly support Trump if he secured the nomination and vice versa.

Even so, it cannot be denied that some of Trump’s popularity has waned. While most on the right still view him favorably, they are ready for someone younger to carry the torch forward. Others feel he has too much baggage to mount a successful campaign against the Democratic nominee. But the survey also reveals more pertinent information about how Republicans are viewing each candidate.

From the report:

While roughly 2 in 3 potential primary voters who aren’t backing Trump or DeSantis described the former as conservative, effective and having good policy ideas, the largest share (68%) view him as a man who “does what’s best for himself,” far more than the 26% who say the same of DeSantis.

Compared with DeSantis, these voters are more than twice as likely to say Trump is divisive and almost three times as likely to say he is a fraud, with a similar spread when asked if he is “bad for America.”

Further according to Morning Consult:

Roughly 2 in 5 of these voters said Trump’s accusations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election or his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, were reasons not to back another presidential bid, similar to the 45% who cited his social media habit and his age (40%) as more negative than positive.

However, a greater percentage (68 percent) rated Trump as “effective.” The former president also had more respondents (63 percent) describe him as a “strong leader.” He also scored higher in other important categories, including having “good policy ideas” and possessing the ability to “help Republicans win,” along with others.

Still, this survey was taken just before Trump went full Leeroy Jenkins on DeSantis. His conduct in this regard could lower his numbers, as many didn’t approve of his handling of the matter. Indeed, while most of the base still loves Trump, they also love DeSantis. While people expect a matchup between the two, it seems many are not happy that it has already gotten so ugly – and DeSantis’ silence means Trump is the one who will be blamed for going on the offensive before it was necessary. Nevertheless, should DeSantis decide to throw his hat into the ring, I believe we just got a preview of what to expect over the next two years.

It Was Always Going to Get Messy for Republicans Over 2024

Brandon Morse reporting for RedState 

Republicans are a far more interesting beast than modern society gives them credit for. Despite its embrace of populism, the right-leaning ideological wing of American politics is made up of individualists making it something of a miracle that they come together to do anything. It’s the shared belief in small government and freedom that drives the right, looping in everyone from Republicans to Libertarians and everyone in between to vote for a single candidate.

This miracle isn’t easily come by, however. A lot of metaphorical bloodshed happens before a consensus is reached. Oftentimes, the infighting becomes so bad that by the time the dust settles, the disagreements about who is and isn’t the best person for the job cost Republicans elections, and Democrats walk away with victories.

In fact, more often than not, Democrats aren’t elected because they convinced a majority to vote for them, but because the right fails to unite on one person. If they did 100% of the time then Democrats would be a party that rarely wins anything, except in specific areas. Alas, individualists aren’t like collectivists.

With 2022 somewhat in the rearview, more and more eyes are quickly turning to 2024. The general election is going to be one of the most contentious in history. Many Republicans are holding a grudge against Democrats for one reason or another. Some because they can’t help but think Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump, and others because they blame Democrats for stealing everything else from their lives.

But with a sea of individualists lining up to fight, this will only make the primary that much more intense for Republicans. There was never a chance that it would be happy-go-lucky and that right-leaning people would join hands and sing kumbaya. This was always going to be a blood bath.

Donald Trump was always going to be Donald Trump, and he was always going to viciously tear down anyone that might remotely threaten his rise to the White House. Friend or foe, Trump treats every obstacle the same. This is a double-edged sword, though. Raheem Kassam made a very good point in that Trump’s nature while infuriating and insulting, is the same nature we appreciated about him when he got into office.

This doesn’t make his attacks against other Republicans right. DeSantis has done nothing but earn the respect of the people and be, arguably, one of the best governors the United States of America has ever seen in its history.

It’s likely that DeSantis is going to run in 2024 and when he does, he’s likely going to come back at Trump. From what we’ve seen of DeSantis, it’s likely he’s going to go on the offense and the fight between the two is going to get nasty.

Moreover, the fight between their supporters is going to get nasty. The very people who would rather lose limbs than see Trump in office again will do whatever they can to support DeSantis in the primary. This will include a myriad of establishment types, some moderate leftists, and possibly anti-Trump groups such as “The Lincoln Project.” Trump will have equally voracious support if he manages to make his points against his opponents well enough and not look like a man blindly flailing against the opposition.

Money will be sent, insults will be traded, campaigns will be launched, and backs will be stabbed. This isn’t going to be pretty and it’s definitely not going to be nice.

The question becomes whether or not we’ll be able to cut through the nonsense that outside forces try to wrap us up in. The Democrats would love nothing better than a full-on Republican civil war with hurt feelings and unrepentant hatred all around. The media is going to do its absolute best to capitalize on the fight between Trump and DeSantis, and fuel fires that won’t go out years after the battle is over.

Individualists are going to war with each other over ideas, and that’s not going to change. In fact, it shouldn’t. Just don’t let the people who want to see this nation handed to those who care only about power take advantage of your passion.

Fight, but fight well, and fight intelligently.

Delayed Results Are Killing Americans’ Trust In Elections

For Americans to trust democracy, states must bring back 

Election Day — not election weeks.

by Jordan Boyd for The Federalist

Democrats tried to frame the 2022 midterms as a referendum on Republicans, whom they’ve branded a “threat to democracy,” but the real threat to our nation is how little Americans can trust elections that drag on for days or weeks.

Many Americans already have a hard time believing that although nearly 75 percent of voters think the country is on the wrong track, they chose to keep many of the same crises-causing candidates. But assuming that discrepancy can be explained by the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote machine and other factors, Americans have bigger doubts — namely that three days after polls closed, voters still don’t know who controls the House of Representatives and the Senate, nor who will govern several western states. Thanks to complications on Nov. 8 and hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots to tabulate, Arizona and Nevada aren’t expected to deliver their final tabulations until next week.

Confidence in our nation’s elections is at an all-time low. Yet swing states with key races now routinely prolong counting for days even though polling strongly suggests that severely undermines the public’s trust in elections.

Some states have grown so comfortable with this system that they’ve started to preemptively announce delays, with corporate media going so far as to characterize early Republican leads as a “red mirage” before vote counts even started.

“It’s going to take a few days,” Pennsylvania’s Acting Secretary of State Leigh M. Chapman said at a press conference before Election Day. “It doesn’t mean anything nefarious is happening.”

Corporate media largely frame this overall decline in trust as a Republican issue, saying it stems from former President Donald Trump’s unjustified anger over the 2020 election, which they say — despite record turnout, mass mail-in balloting, vote delays, and a slew of irregularities in multiple tipping-point states — was the freest and most fair election the country has ever had. But the truth is, voters on both sides of the political aisle despise anxiously awaiting tabulation because they know it opens the door for problems and meddling.

Even if this election were as safe and secure as they claim, the fact that it now takes days and possibly weeks to learn who will control the halls of power for the next few years sows reasonable doubt in the minds of Americans. Without a principled and structured system for quick, accurate calculation, confidence in elections plummets.

Voters want to know, for instance, how the largest county in the battleground state of Arizona (and the fourth most-populous county in the country) — where the officeholder in charge of running elections is at the top of the Democrats’ gubernatorial ticket — can be rife with problems in election after election. Is an election “rigged” if, after weeks of mail-in balloting, some Election Day voters — which skew largely Republican — are prevented from casting their votes? And what does it do for election integrity when only a few thousand votes trickle in each day following an election, with no clear answer as to why it’s taking so long or when the final tally can be expected? How does a polling place in the swing state of Pennsylvania run out of paper on Election Day? These are valid questions, not conspiracy theories, and they’re the types of concerns that shatter voter confidence.

Corporate media, which are guilty of delaying race calls for no good reason, want to blame the nation’s decentralized election systems for the holdup. That doesn’t work, however, when voters recall that Americans in decades past knew who the winners were before their heads hit the pillow at night.

It is still possible to determine victories on Election Day. Not only do most civilized countries manage to tabulate votes in a reasonable timeframe, but so do many large states. For instance, after entering the national spotlight for discrepancies about counting during the extremely narrow 2000 presidential election, Florida dedicated two decades of work to building and fine-tuning a safe, effective election system that gives voters the results on the same night.

For Americans to trust democracy, which politicians and the corporate media claim is under fire, states must embrace election systems that yield rapid and accurate results and are worthy of voters’ trust.