The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Tick, tock.
Tick, tock.
It’s been three days since the midterm elections and we still do not know which party will control the next Congress and set the national agenda, not in the House or the Senate.
But one thing is crystal ball clear. The Republican surge in the polls reported by every pollster in America and every mainstream and many alternative news outfits in the country, predicting a Red Wave on Tuesday, never materialized. It was a Red Mirage, as we indicated 7 days before the election.
As far as I call tell, I was the only journalist with academic experience who called that correctly, as did Michael Moore, a celebrity character and film maker. We also both called it right in 2016, when the professional pundits said Hillary Clinton was going to win against Trump.
Democrats, women, African American voters, college educated Republicans and independents did show up to vote — many by mail and absentee ballots or drop box votes — for good candidates and against Trump’s “Big Lie” toadies in many states, including key battleground states.
Most notably, John Fetterman is celebrating his victory today in the Pennsylvania Senate race where he faced Nazi sympathizer and celebrity doctor Oz (from the land of Oz) of New Jersey. We were the first to call for Oprah’s public endorsement of Fetterman in that race on Facebook and Twitter, and by dog she came through on the Thursday before the election. That probably saved the day in urban and suburban areas, especially in and around Philadelphia, where no doubt many women and especially Black women overcame their doubts about voting for Fetterman and acted on that recommendation.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock in Georgia did in fact best former star fullback Herschel Walker, even though he apparently did not get 50 percent of the vote (although mail in ballots are still being counted, which favor Democrats). He got 1,941,511 votes so far — 49.42% — while Walker got 1,906,261, or 48.52%.
While the Associated Press and all the talking heads on TeeVee are already calling that race, according to the online results from The New York Times only 95 percent of the votes have been counted in that contest as of our press time on Friday.
I am going to go out on a limb here and say Democrat Mark Kelly will win the Arizona Senate race, since he is leading by nearly 6 percentage points with 82 percent of the votes counted and reported. The late votes will favor the Democrat. Republicans don’t vote by mail. Trump told them not too.
If Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, the incumbent Democrat, comes back to win that race when all the mail and drop off votes are counted, the Democrats will control the upper chamber no matter what happens in Georgia.
The Republican Adam Laxalt, a former attorney general who helped Trump’s efforts to overturn Nevada’s presidential election results in 2020, holds a slight lead with 90 percent of the votes counted and reported. He has 450,534 votes, 48.97%, while Masto has 441,546 votes, or 48%. So the margin is only 8,988 votes, and even the pollsters and pundits admit most of the remaining votes to count should favor the Democrat. Stay tuned.
The Big Lie Lost
Another thing is clear from this election, according to the results in many states. Although we won’t know all of the results for a while, the midterms had a resounding takeaway for our democracy, according to the Brennan Center for Justice and other sources.
“Americans reject election denial.”
Many election deniers in competitive races were defeated. And these races were happening in states with a diverse array of political leanings. What does all of this tell us? American voters want our elections to be fair, safe, and independent: “an extraordinary repudiation of election deniers.”
Somehow enough people got the message. It’s not clear how with our messed up communications system.
“Think about it,” the Brennen Center says. “In the six key swing states that determined the 2020 election, conspiracy theorists ran for office to seize the electoral machinery for 2024. In Michigan and Georgia (in the primary), extremist candidates for secretary of state lost. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where governors have power over election administration, election deniers fell short. So far, the conspiracy theorists are 0-4.”
In Arizona and Nevada, while the results are not final, election deniers running for secretary of state may lose. In fact, some of the most prominent election deniers did worse than other Republican candidates running on the same ticket. Voters paid attention.
A Resounding Takeaway For Democracy: Americans Reject Election Denial
The House
And even in the contests for seats in the House of Representatives, the vote counting is not over.
Every famous pollster and pundit in America said the Republicans would win control of the House easily, based on the same historical precedents of what’s happened in the past in midterm elections when a sitting president was below 50 percent in the polls.
I said we are living in a different world now, and you can’t judge the present or the future based solely on what happened i2030n the past. Trump changed things. There is no doubt about it.
So to take over control of Congress, the Republicans would have to win 218 seats. As of Friday morning, it looked like the Republicans were going to take 211, and the Democrats 194, with 30 seats still undecided. In the most competitive districts tab, the graphic shows Democrats leading in 18 races, and Republicans leading in 6. In races where Democrats were supposed to win, there is only one race, in Western Maryland, where the Republican is ahead with 92 percent of the votes counted and reported. In the tab for districts where the Republican was favored to win, the Democrats are winning in one race in Washington State, with 70 percent of the votes in.
So that would be 195 for Democrats, and 212 for Republicans. It’s unclear where the other 28 races are in this reporting.
Just another reason people don’t trust the media, on top of all the attacks from Trump and the Republicans on the right who expect their people to just listen to talk radio and Fox News and use Trump’s failing Truth Social platform for information and talking points.
Public Confidence in the Press, Media and American Institutions Continues Free Fall in the U.S.
A Note on the State of the Planet
On another subject while we await the actual, final election results, a note about the state of the planet.
Since Rachel Maddow has stopped appearing on her nightly show on MSNBC, the liberal news junkies have fallen in with Heather Cox Richardson, a historian — not a journalist — who has started publishing a “newsletter,” not a column, and a “podcast,” not a show. I’ve tried checking her out a few times, but yesterday I got a notification on Facebook that she was “live.”
So I clicked on it, and she was in her pajamas at a friend’s house, like a Covid Zoom video, and was talking about the political future of Generation Z, or Gen Z. Only she didn’t even know the years or ages associated with Gen Z, but she blathered on about their political future anyway, as if they had one.
My comment?
“The Earth will not even be habitable for Gen Z.”
In other words, what are you talking about? And people are all gaga over this?
The same is true of all these amateur redneck comics on YouTube. I guess they are somewhat entertaining for people. But don’t trust them for actual information. I’ve checked out a couple on the recommendations of friends. Not interested.
Maybe I’m just an old codger, #CodgerPower, with only 40 years of experience in the news business and more college degrees than any Kat. But I would like my information to come from educated, trained, experienced journalists.
Not people who write newsletters or do podcasts.
Or all these free-lance kids with no institutional memory being hired by The Washington Post.
So in thinking about this, I did a little math.
As you all know, I recently turned 65, but still hit a 300 yard drive on my birthday. The only way Trump could do that is if the Secret Service kicked the damn ball for him.
Happy Birthday: Living Beyond the Curse of 64
At that time I was riffing on stress as the real killer, and reporting that the life expectancy of us Baby Boomers was going down, not up.
The Real Killer: The Role of Stress in People’s Lives
Based on previous predictions considering the advances in health care from the World War II generation, what Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation,” we were supposed to live on average until the age of 79. But now that has been downgraded to 73. For some reason we lost 6 years of life expectancy in the 21st century.
Why?
Probably stress.
So that means if I meet that projected life expectancy, if I somehow manage to live for eight more years, I should live until the year 2030. That’s almost a decade, a long time.
But I’m thinking, what will the world look like in 2030? And do I really want to be here?
I was also thinking about global warming and climate change in relation to this.
In a story that is now being totally ignored on social media and buried by all the Red Wave v. Red Mirage memes about the election, scientists are now telling us we only have nine years to get our shit together. To avoid “catastrophic warming.”
“To have a chance of keeping global temperature rise within 1.5 degrees Celsius, humanity can release no more than 380 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over the coming decades — an amount equal to about nine years of current emissions, the report says. Avoiding warming beyond 1.5C will require the world to curb emissions by about 1.4 billion tons per year, comparable to how much emissions shrank in 2020 as a result of the economic slowdown from the coronavirus pandemic.”
That means the level of driving, manufacturing and oil and gas production would have to go back down to levels during the economic, travel shutdowns during the pandemic. This is going to be hard if not impossible. It appears around here, on the interstates and Beltway, that traffic is not only back up to pre-pandemic levels. It has surpassed it, and drivers are as stressed as ever.
But if fossil fuel use does not dramatically decline, “in a few years we will no longer be able to say it’s possible,” said Julia Pongratz, a climate scientist at the University of Munich and an author of the Global Carbon Budget report released Friday. “And then we would need to look back and say we could have done it and we didn’t. How do we explain that to our kids?”
World has nine years to avert catastrophic warming, study shows
In a story I wrote this summer about wild, native brook trout, I reported this.
Earth’s temperature has risen by 0.14 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1880, but the rate of warming since 1981 is more than twice that, and 2021 was the sixth-warmest year on record based on temperature data. Averaged across land and ocean, the 2021 surface temperature was 1.51 degrees Fahrenheit (0.84° Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average and 1.87 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial period (1880-1900). The nine years from 2013 through 2021 rank among the 10 warmest years on record.
Climate Change: Global Temperature
We just witnessed two catastrophic hurricanes that hit the state of Florida in the past month. Was that Trump’s fault? The governor Florida, Ron DeSantis?
Yes.
They both deny that the Earth is actually warming, and say “there is no such thing as climate change,” even as Trump had to evacuate for his golf club in Jersey, and DeSantis had to deal with disaster officials, including old Joe Biden himself. It was not reported widely, and ignored on social media, but young Ron had to kiss old Joe’s ass to make sure he gets billions in disaster aid — so the rich people could get the federal government and U.S. taxpayers to rebuild their beach houses and condos for them for free.
It’s not just their fault.
What about all these rich people who demanded to be allowed to build their fancy homes and high rise condos right on the beach, with no dune line in between them and the oceans?
I have been writing about this for literally 38 years.
In 1984, in my first full time professional job as a newspaper cub reporter, I covered a trial in the courthouse in Bay Minette, Alabama, in which the lawyers argued about where the building and dune lines should be established along the beach in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach. A building boom hit the place after Hurricane Frederick plowed through in 1979.
The Alabama Department of Environmental Management in the state, setup as a one stop pollution permitting agency by then Governor Fob James, set the building line right on top of where the existing dune line was at the time. There was not enough land to build the buildings behind the actual existing dune line. They would have had to make a small sacrifice and build across the street to have any chance of preventing the “beautiful white sand beaches” bragged about in Chamber of Commerce literature to continue to exist.
We had a word in those days for what the foundations of high rise condos on the beach caused.
“Erosion.”
But that’s too big a word for the Republicans who even then were trying to take over the government in Alabama from George Wallace.
Big money won. Greed won. Human selfishness and stupidity won.
Now here we are, and we all lose.
As for Gen Z? They better learn how to fly space ships to Mars and beyond, and fast.
Eight years ago I fled from the beach on the Gulf Coast to the mountains in Virginia and Maryland to escape this catastrophe. Very soon millions more people are going to figure this out and follow me. Are those states ready for the influx? Do they even have a plan on paper started to begin to deal with this?
Of course not.
If you want to move to Florida and drown with Trump, go ahead. Not me.
Facebook graphic: Artist unknown
There are a few things I would still like to see and do in this world before I go. Hopefully I can get to them before the year 2030.
Good luck out there. Stay safe.
You have been warned, and not just by yo mama.
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