I’m not gonna lie. I was hoping for a bigger dent, any dent, in the results from what we got in the primaries. But this proved to me what all the strategists have been saying – voting loyalties are stubborn things, and you don’t flip them with a few signs and e-mails. It takes personal contact over months if not years to get people to trust you and rely on you for information.
We learned a lot last night about our district, and the races throughout the state and nation. A brief overview before I go on a much needed break for a bit.
First off, the big one for me was Prop 10, and that lost resoundingly – 61-39. This gives us some hope. Californians may ally 60-40 with Democrats, but they still believe you can’t legislate reality via price controls, or that the state should be managing property. We Republicans can and should build off this. Because the longer the Democratic Party retains a monopoly over our state, the harder they will push to take over property rights. Another prop 13 repeal is already on the horizon, and rent control battles are still brewing throughout the city and state.
We also saw a lot of voting irregularities this year and we’re still documenting them. Voting machines broke down across the city and state, including in our own precinct. Carrie and my ballots were left on the floor, uncovered, and we were assured they would be fed in as soon as the machine came back up. A whole lot of Republican voters, and voters over 50, were registered to vote by mail, including Carrie, when they weren’t. This effectively turned them from day of ballots to provisional ballots.
For the record, I’ve never seen these machines break down in all the years I’ve been voting. To have all this happen yesterday definitely raises an eyebrow of suspicion. If you’d like to share your experience, you can comment on this Facebook thread or reach me on our contact form.
Beyond that, we need to take stock of just how much we were up against this year. I wanted to run off issues I always thought were bipartisan – a legal immigration system, support for law enforcement, and defending American values. Instead my campaign was a losing battle against Democrat hysterics. Kavanaugh, kids in cages, Muslim Bans, Orange Man Bad, my blog documents all these lies the Democrats perpetrated. They had support in the media, major foundations, Silicon Valley, and even the outgoing Republican Party. Foundations like the SPLC would smear anyone who contradicted the Democrats, and Silicon Valley would then deplatform them so they couldn’t defend themselves against the smear. It took a fight just to allow established institutions like David Horowitz or Robert Spencer to engage in internet commerce.
All this is anti-democratic and anti-American, and if we lose this fight in the coming years we will definitely be hitting some dark times.
But we still need to look inward. I think the GOP definitely has some messaging issues, and just sticking to “lower taxes” isn’t going to win people over in this state. People don’t mind paying taxes if it goes to things they feel they need. Yes, it’s true, the taxes from Prop 6 aren’t really going to any road projects, but it was an uphill battle to convince people of that. Especially when the prop 6 proponents were outspent 10:1 with every institution in the state pushing for a NO vote – I suspect there will be litigation over the misleading title of the prop itself.
The homeless issue did very well for us. Even what I call the True Believers have a hard time defending these metastasizing camps. Even if you believe it’s all innocent women and children, letting them stay in festering underpasses is a problem for everyone. This issue is only going to get worse, and the Democrats will continue to use this to cynically claim the rent is too high and they need to take over property to lower it. We need to build off this kernel and build trust with residents besieged between menacing vagrants and politicians.
Nationally, the Democrats expectedly took over the House but the GOP expanded control of the Senate. I grieve for both Dana Rohrabacher and Steve Knight who both look like they’ve lost their seats to districts heavily targeted by Democrats. Democrats outspent Rohrabacher 3:1 in his race, with plenty of outside $ and support, including from Karen Bass.
But they won on a tactic that can’t last – intersectionalism + hatred for Trump. This means they don’t actually stand for anything and have no promises to keep and only stand for protecting people from bugbears. Maybe this is the future of America – as people get impoverished they continue to be fooled and scared into voting for whoever controls the media. I’d like to think that this nascent MAGA movement, still in its toddler stages, can mature from this election and rise to the challenge of confronting it.
That’s it for now. We’ll be regrouping over the coming days and weeks, and coming out with a major plan for the 2019-2020 election season. The issues we’re all facing aren’t going anywhere, and neither are we. We are the real resistance.
