Post Election Thread #1

We may need to do regular updates. I'll try to be more creative with the subject line, but this will have to do to get us started.

First, some reactions--brief excerpts.

Don Surber:

America re-elected President Donald John Trump on Tuesday. Now it is a matter of whether Democrats will concede. They control ballot counting in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and are dragging the election out. It is sedition, and the press will never call them on it.

Democrats have lied and spied on The Donald. They have investigated and impeached. They harp about democracy, and yet they have not accepted the results of the 2016 and 2020 elections.

They control the press, and they control the polls.

...

In Red China, Chairman Xi laughs as he pulls the strings of his Democrat Party puppet.

The strangest year of my life continues to get stranger as real Americans and communists wrestle for control.

Roger Kimball:

I have said all along that I thought President Trump would win reelection. The question was whether he would win by a big enough margin to insulate himself from the machinations of fraud, on the one hand, and litigation, on the other. 

I believe that Donald Trump did win the election last night. By my count he had chalked up well over the requisite 270 electoral votes necessary to win reelection. That was a little past midnight. I repaired to the arms of Morpheus confident that November 4 would ratify what was essentially a fait d’accompli [sic; pro tip: don't use foreign language phrases unless you know what you're doing] on the evening of November 3. 

No such luck. No sooner had my head hit the pillow than the Democrats in the urban centers of states where Trump was leading—in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee—stopped counting the votes. Why would they do this? Because they wanted to stanch the flow of votes going to Trump and buy themselves time to determine how many votes they would need to win. Finding the votes later on is never a problem. That’s what we pay corrupt party apparatchiks to do.

Surber and Kimball are sober analysts of the public square, not given to hyperbole.

Debra Heine says the Trump campaign maintains they're still in line to win AZ:

Mollie

@MZHemingway

Replying to

@MZHemingway

On call, Trump team says Trump will win AZ by 30K votes. Pointing out that their data has been right thus far (including close race in WI when media claimed it would be a Biden blowout)

9:13 AM · Nov 4, 2020

Sean Noble

@SeanNobleAZDC

It will take a couple days, but #AZ still has about 550K votes to count - those are early votes dropped off at polling locations or coming late - those will skew heavily GOP. If it gets to 65% both Trump and McSally would prevail.

8:39 AM · Nov 4, 2020

A slightly heavier read, but well worthwhile:

A Defunct Republic

Regardless of the outcome of the election, the mask is off America’s managerial elite.

By Pedro Gonzalez

...

Regardless of the outcome of the election, the mask is off the managerial elite, either because they’ve grown so complacent in their power or because they are too confident about the durability of the control they have over our lives.

Barring some catastrophic event, however, the shimmering superstructure of 21st-century government will and must remain in place. So the problem for a right-wing that historically sees itself as the “small” or “limited” government movement emerges: the only way to bend, break, and thus free ourselves from the managerial regime, is to pursue, seize, and consolidate power for ourselves. In other words, complete civil service reform and changing of the guard is essential.

That, however, will be possible only through the embrace and exercise of power in the fashion of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And this means there needs to be a new paradigm of thinking about these matters. There is no task more important than this if we are to take back control of our national destiny.

David Goldman:

Politico.com’s headline this morning reads, “Biden looks screwed even if he wins.” The Republicans kept a Senate majority and reduced the Democratic majority in the House. If Biden squeaks by, he will have no popular mandate, no Senate, and no help from the Supreme Court. He won’t be able to pass tax increases, big changes in health care, or his Green New Deal boondoggles. He will have the same headaches confirming his favorite nominees as Trump did, and worse, as a Republican Senate casts a jaundiced eye at Biden’s supporting cast.

The good news is that the election stymied the Democratic Party’s plan for radical transformation of the United States into an Orwellian state enforcing political correctness, and turning the federal budget into a pinata for Democratic constituencies. That’s the genius of the American political system. To make big changes you need either a big majority or a small majority for a very long time, and the Democrats have neither.

Whether Goldman is right that the Dem's plan for "radical transformation of the United States into an Orwellian state enforcing political correctness" has been stymied is what we all are waiting to see. I'm not as sanguine. The Senate can thwart outrageous appointments that require confirmation, but can do little about the continuing populating of the bureaucracy with radicals and the proliferation of regulations. The courts can help, but they're an unwieldy means of  exercising the type of control and influence that we desperately need.