Worth Reading November 22, 2022

November 21, 2022

In line with the dedication of this issue to the mid-term elections, we offer a few more reflections on that election here.

Republicans are losing races they could have won across the country. It is not just unelectable MAGA candidates coming out of primaries that is responsible. Nationwide and in Talbot County there has been a massive increase in mail-in ballots for Democrats.

This short note points out how large this shift is, and contains the recommendation that “Democrats have worked very hard for decades to move to an ‘election season’ where they can harvest ballots every day … so that by Election Day, they have already won. Whereas Republicans keep focusing on getting people excited for Election Day … That is not going to work in places where there’s massive unsupervised balloting and ballot trafficking operations, so [Republicans] either need to do a much better job of fighting those things, or they need to join and actually play according to the new rules of the game.”

A Republican state senator discusses the outcomes of Maryland races in particular, and again emphasizes how the Democrat mail-in strategy is working for them

An article in the City Journal discussed the recent local elections in Harris County, Texas, and what they mean for public safety and urban politics in Houston and beyond. Among other useful insights, one interesting comment relevant to Talbot County was that “Republicans need to be more active with civic and community groups rather than solely focusing on political organizations.”

Jonathan Turley’s columns are always worth reading, and this one on Biden’s return to demonizing Republicans on the eve of the election is good even in retrospect.

Chris Rufo discusses how Ron DeSantis is using culture wars successfully in his election strategy, and it is a lesson even candidates in local elections should learn from.

Worth Reading

JDQB:

Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal Interview was a highly favorable summary and review of Philip Howard’s new book Public Unions vs. The People. I had not appreciated that all presidents, even the sainted FDR, opposed public unions until JFK legislated them into existence supposedly “as a payback for union support.”. The book’s author, a lawyer, has concluded that the public union problem has become so entrenched that it cannot be solved politically, but must be attacked through the courts as an unconstitutional limitation on the executive power to terminate employees, a proposition that has strong constitutional precedent. A link is here (paywall). I was persuaded to buy the book.

I am new to Mark Halperin, who puts out a daily email called Wide World of News. On Saturday he did a short piece on Trump’s nearly two-hour stemwinder at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee CPAC conference. Then on Sunday he did an equally short piece critiquing DeSantis’ performance in his first “major” speech, which was at the Reagan Center. The former is The Trump Machine Hums at CPAC . and the latter is Is That All There Is?. Spoiler alert: he thinks Trump did way better than expected and that DeSantis did worse than expected.

WDM:

I urge readers to ignore the title and skim through the insider-only story of the Intellectual Dark Web to get to Christopher Rufo's perceptive discussion of the need for conservatives to get beyond writing polemics about CRT and gender ideology and get down to political action. One of his points, in bare bones, is that public school curricula are and always have been set by government bureaucrats, the political bodies that appoint them, and the voters that elect them. Conservatives should not therefore be deterred by accusations of "banning books" from electing their own to run the schools and revise the curricula. The other is that those who care about these issues have no choice but to work to take over the Republican party, as there is no other route to electoral success.