The Patriot Post® · Election Postmortem
By Mark Fowler
“Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.” —Peggy Noonan
Democrats are bewildered — again. The midterm election in the first term of Barack Obama’s presidency saw a monumental shift in political alignment. Formerly Democrat states turned red, and many Democrat officeholders were thrown out. This was a rejection of much of the Obama platform, the Democrat Party, and the notion of fundamental transformation of the United States.
This year, it appears a similar upheaval has taken place. Donald Trump won the popular vote, the electoral vote, and flipped the Senate, while the GOP retained control of the House. Kamala Harris, shoehorned in as the Democrat nominee, underperformed in virtually every demographic compared to Joe Biden in 2020. She performed worse than Biden among women, African Americans, Latinos, and urban voters in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit. On the other hand, Trump improved his performance among all of these demographics and improved his vote totals across thousands of countries, losing ground in just a few hundred counties compared to 2020.
The Biden-Harris regime lost because of the persistent lies about the border. Notwithstanding the repetitive mendacity of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Harris, the border czar, the border was never closed, and millions of immigrants flooded in, displacing Americans, requiring billions in support, and bringing with them thousands of criminals. Many American deaths, rapes, and property crimes occurred that were preventable. Americans resented this disruption in their lives for which Harris and Biden were responsible.
Harris lost because she could not articulate a solution for the inflation caused by the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act, which pumped billions of dollars into the economy, resulting in average price increases of 21% and a net average loss of disposable income of about $11,000 per family.
Harris, the nominal leader of the “Party of Women,” lost because she supported biological males competing against women in women’s sports.
The electorate rejected Harris because she supported the ridiculous notion that miscreants in prison “deserved” sex-change operations at taxpayer expense.
Harris lost because she had no message other than hackneyed bromides; she offered hope but no delivery of solutions.
Harris lost because she and the coastal elites have no understanding of the concerns of the working men and women who struggle to feed and clothe their children while they watch illegal immigrants, the gender-confused, and indebted college graduates get special privileges and money from the government. Money taken from them in the form of taxes.
Finally, Harris lost because a majority of Americans saw that she was simply unqualified. She lacks grace, intelligence, and gravitas. If she had these attributes, she could have formed a vision, made an argument, and pressed her case. A case stating more than that she grew up in the middle class. A case indicating her awareness that Biden’s decisions were sometimes mistaken. She foolishly wanted to be the candidate of change while displaying an inability to separate herself from the Biden record. All she had was name-calling, declaring Trump a fascist.
She is the perfect example of the Peter Principle — an incompetent rising through the hierarchy until reaching the point of incompetence.
Meanwhile, at several Ivy League universities, where the supposed intellectual elite are being educated, students are being offered time off from classes or assignments as well as given milk and cookies, time with Legos, therapy dogs, and safe spaces to recover from the election. These are her supporters.
If we want real leaders — if we want a return to American values — let us replace Congress with 535 machinists, nurse-anesthetists, farmers, welders, plumbers, electricians, secretaries, and policemen. The present lot has stayed far too long for any good they might have done, as Cromwell observed about Parliament centuries ago.
Mark Fowler is a board-certified physician and former attorney. He can be reached at [email protected].