A bad omen for 2024
November 8, 2023
Mike Huckabee
I dread having to tell you about Tuesday’s elections, because on the whole, they were another disaster for the Republican Party. I'll soften it by starting with the few bright spots, like the (too close) reelection of Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves and strong GOP legislative wins in Mississippi and Kentucky, but it would really be a shock if we’d lost those states. But all the high-profile races were a total rout.
Deep-red Kentucky reelected Democrat Gov. Andy Beshear by 52.4% to 47.5% over Republican Daniel Cameron. It’s a mystery why. Beshear is 180 degrees out of phase with most Kentucky voters, but he poses as a moderate while the reliable overrides of his vetoes of conservative bills have helped prevent voters who don’t pay much attention from realizing what his true colors are. Cameron took a lot of attacks, some of them shockingly racist, from Democrats who are especially terrified of letting black conservatives achieve prominent positions and disprove their false narratives. The results were hardly a shock; while polls had tightened, most showed Beshear ahead. Still, the actual gap was larger than the polls, and in a state like Kentucky, that’s a bad omen for 2024.
The worst news, though, came out of Ohio and Virginia. In Ohio, by a 56-44% margin, voters enshrined abortion as a constitutional “right.” This article explains what the amendment says and what Republicans in the legislature might do to overcome it. It also makes clear that the abortion laws being pushed by Democrats are actually far more radical than those in European nations they want us to emulate, and more radical than most Americans' beliefs on the subject, yet they keep winning on this issue.
https://apnews.com/article/ohio-abortion-amendment-election-2023-fe3e06747b616507d8ca21ea26485270
That vote was propelled by a pro-abortion campaign heavily funded by outside leftist groups that outspent the pro-life side by $10 million. Aided by media sycophants and their own utter shamelessness, Democrats have successfully framed the slaughter of babies in the womb up to the moment of birth as “women’s health care” or “bodily autonomy.” Ohio voters also voted to legalize marijuana, which along with abortion created a perfect storm to turn out their base. They plan to use abortion to the hilt in the 2024 elections, so brace for a tsunami of demagoguery.
In Virginia, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin was hoping for the GOP to retake the Senate, they not only failed but lost their majority in the Assembly. This race also was heavily impacted by abortion, with Youngkin pushing for a 15-week ban on abortion, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.
I honestly don’t know what to make of Virginia voters. They just lived through watching Democrats arrest parents for getting upset that their daughters were being raped in school by "trans" males in their bathrooms, and now, they’ve decided to hand power back to them in the name of "women's rights"?
On a larger level, how can anyone look at the worldwide disaster created by Democrat rule and vote to keep these people in charge of anything? The cities they run are violent cesspools of crime, homelessness and corruption; the states they run are losing population because all the sane, productive people are fleeing; and their national policies have everything from the economy to border security to the Middle East crashing down around their ears. Joe Biden’s only been in office for three years, and we once again have Nazis attacking Jews in the streets and the threat of World War III! Who can look at the endless catastrophes of Democrat rule and think the most important voting issue is being allowed to kill babies in the womb until the moment of birth?
There are a lot of problems to address if we’re going to stop these electoral debacles and save America from the certain destruction of four more years of Biden and Co. “in charge.” One is that after the Dobbs ruling, the Democrats were able to monopolize the framing of abortion, shroud its brutal reality in fuzzy euphemisms (“women’s health care,” “reproductive justice,” etc.) and convince too many women of the insane notion that the GOP wants to chain them in kitchens and force them to have babies. The pro-life movement worked so hard and so long to overturn Roe v. Wade that I fear they didn’t realize how much effort they would have to keep putting into winning hearts and minds state by state. They might have also underestimated their opponents’ conscience-free zeal in pushing abortion to the utmost limits. They have to redouble their efforts to fight back against the propaganda.
Another issue is turnout. In many of these races, the results could have been flipped if only a higher percentage of Republicans had voted, but they didn’t. Some think it doesn’t matter, “the Democrats will just steal the election anyway, so why bother to vote,” etc. Do you know what that kind of defeatist attitude results in? Defeat! As the horrific results of this election start to become apparent over the next year, I’m sure many Republicans will be complaining about how bad things are getting, and wondering how such incompetent people with such awful ideas came to power. If they didn’t vote, then they can look for the reason in the nearest mirror.
That brings us to the RNC. There was a big push to change the RNC’s leadership that failed, but we were assured they’d learned their lesson and had plans to turn out voters. Well…where were they? I heard a lot of complaints about important races not getting the funding they needed, and saw a lot of races lost to low GOP turnout. Meanwhile, the biggest news I’ve heard from the RNC lately was that it agreed to let NBC and two liberal news anchors host the next GOP primary debate. How many at-bats and strike-outs should they get before they're sent to the Democrat-run unisex showers?
Finally, a lot of people are trying to blame this latest election debacle on Trump, even though he had little to no involvement in most of these races. It’s true, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a big motivator for the Democrat base, but it’s a brain-wasting disease, and I’m sure that will be true for years to come whether Trump is in politics or not. Let’s face it: the current Democrat Party can’t run on its successes and achievements because it has none, other than knowing how to stay in power despite outrageous failure. It succeeds almost entirely on smears, vilification and scare narratives.
If they don’t have Trump, then whoever comes along next will quickly be smeared as “worse than Trump” (they used to say “worse than Hitler,” but I think they’re realizing a lot of their young base are admirers of Hitler.) To them, all Republicans are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic monsters who want to chain women in the kitchen and bring back slavery (which is odd because Republicans fought a Civil War to make Democrats give up their slaves.) And it makes no difference who the Republican is (just look at the wild attempts to paint new Speaker Mike Johnson as a crazy, dangerous radical right-winger when they don’t even know who he is.)
No, whether Trump is running or not, Republicans will always have to deal with the problem of misled, miseducated voters whose emotions have been fired up by phony Democrat propaganda. We need to have competent leaders to counter that, and the best way is to find someone who can motivate rational people to get off the couch and vote. That didn’t happen yesterday, and it’s going to cost a lot of innocent lives in Ohio.
Here's a round-up of election results…
Some commentary from Fox News…
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/top-takeaways-election-day-2023-what-they-say-about-2024-showdowns
And I think some pretty spot-on comments from Todd Starnes…
https://www.toddstarnes.com/politics/dont-blame-trump-for-what-happened-on-election-day/
And from Bonchie at Redstate.com…
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2023/11/08/republicans-werent-tired-of-losing-yet-n2166041
A Bright Spot In Tuesday’s Elections: Bonchie at Redstate.com also points out that while the GOP didn’t take the legislature in Virginia, they actually overperformed, winning in every district that voted for Biden by less than 9 points. Virginia is a blue state infested with federal employees, so it may be impossible for Republicans to take it. But the strength they showed even in a state like that could bode well for them in swing states in 2024. Hope that makes it easier to get through your day.