Time only pulls us further away from the glory of 2016, which is now starting to feel less like the “dawn of a new day,” and instead appears to more closely resemble a last defiant breath.
By Eric Lendrum
November 14, 2022
The only thing longer than the list of GOP losses from last Tuesday’s election is the plethora of reasons the media has given for the unexpected Democratic victories.
Many are rushing in to claim they alone have cracked the code to explain this election. But while Democrats absolutely have a right to claim victory in 2022, their most prominent explanations are not only incorrect, they further prove that Democrats are confined to a bubble that is completely insulated from reality. The true reason for the Republican disaster of 2022 is a far greater existential threat than anything the Left could’ve imagined.
Debunking Democrats’ Dreams
Let us first go over the major reasons Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have given for their better-than-expected performance. With just the slightest bit of scrutiny, it is plain to see that none of these explanations is adequate.
Abortion. Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, Democrats immediately began playing the “abortion rights” tune on endless repeat. They insisted American women somehow have a God-given right to murder babies. In perhaps the most vile display so far from the pro-infanticide crowd (and that is a very low bar), NPR decided to air a full 11-minute audio recording of an abortion procedure.
And indeed, abortion did see notable victories in statewide ballot measures this year. The deep-blue states of California, Michigan, and Vermont all passed measures to enshrine the “right” to kill babies in their state constitutions. Meanwhile, pro-life measures failed in the solidly red states of Montana and Kentucky.
But the red-state votes seem to debunk the idea that abortion is a powerful political tool for Democrats. How is it that Kentucky voted to shoot down a pro-life measure by a 5-point margin in the same cycle Senator Rand Paul massacred his noose-wearing Democratic opponent by 24 points? And if Montana voted by 6 points not to implement constitutional protections for fetuses that survive abortions, how did Democrats not also ride this wave to flip either one or both of the state’s two congressional districts?
Clearly, just as in the failure of Kansas’ “Value Them Both” amendment earlier this year, there was a significant undervote between these pro-abortion measures and the actual statewide and various legislative elections. All this proves is that the Left may very well turn out unexpectedly high numbers of pro-abortion voters, but these same voters will not vote down-ballot; they will come out, vote only to legalize infanticide, and then go home.
January 6. With the exception of abortion in the second half of this year, no issue was more loudly trumpeted by the Democrats from the very beginning than the so-called “insurrection” on January 6, 2021 in the nation’s Capitol. Just as Joe Biden pathetically tried to launch his 2020 campaign on the protest at Charlottesville, the Democrats under Biden’s regime have done nothing but try to remind voters every single waking minute of every day that January 6 happened.
But apparently, the abysmal TV ratings for their January 6 committee circuses were not enough to send the message that voters simply don’t care about this charade. The political verdict is in: voters rejected the January 6 narrative. Not only were all but two of the 10 pro-impeachment Republicans forced out of Congress, but the election even brought down two of the biggest Democratic advocates of the January 6 insurrection hoax.
In Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, January 6 committee member Elaine Luria was defeated in her reelection bid by Republican Jen Kiggans in a massive upset. In Florida’s 7th Congressional District, J6 committee member Stephanie Murphy’s decision to retire was apparently an indication that even she saw the writing on the wall; sure enough, her seat also flipped red when Republican Cory Mills defeated Murphy’s would-be successor, Karen Green.
With both of the committee’s “Republicans” already gone after the primaries, and the other five Democrats on the committee all hailing from the deepest of deep-blue seats, no individual races in the entire country were more symbolic of the January 6 narrative than these two. And the voters made their voices heard. So stick a fork in the January 6 explanation.
Our Democracy™. In conjunction with the J6 theme, one of the Democrats’ other big messages ever since 2020 has been the myth that Republicans are somehow a threat to Our Democracy™, that efforts to investigate voter fraud are “undermining elections,” and that these dangerous “election deniers” are the harbingers of an incipient fascism. Thus, the Democrats especially went after any and all Republicans who even hinted at irregularities in 2020.And although the Democrats can point to some losses by prominent election integrity advocates, the numbers, once again, paint a much bleaker picture for the Left’s latest work of fiction. Of all places, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post has documented extensively every single “election denier” running for office, and is actively tracking the results of their races.
The verdict is already in: Of 291 candidates the Post identified as “election deniers,” 173 have won their elections, while 104 have lost, and 14 remain undecided. These not only include victories in deep-red areas, but several highly contested races, including Senator-elect J. D. Vance in Ohio, Attorney General-elect Kris Kobach in Kansas (in the same cycle where incumbent Democratic Governor Laura Kelly narrowly won reelection), and Representiative-elect Eli Crane in Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District, who defeated incumbent Democrat Tom O’Halleran in another surprising upset.
Donald Trump. One thing both the Left and mainstream “conservative” media outlets can share in common right now is their obsession with blaming President Trump for the GOP’s disappointing results. And, without sugarcoating it, it must be said that some of Trump’s endorsements ultimately did fall short, though some undoubtedly lost very close races due to voter fraud.
But even though Tim Michels lost the governor’s race in Wisconsin, Senator Ron Johnson won reelection to the Senate, and Derrick Van Orden was elected to the 3rd congressional district. While J. R. Majewski lost Ohio’s 9th district, J. D. Vance was elected to the Senate. The GOP may have lost a new district with a 2-point advantage in North Carolina, but Rep. Ted Budd decisively won the Senate election.
Contrary to what Paul Ryan may say about the GOP supposedly suffering more losses during Trump’s presidency than ever before, the fact is Republicans can now say they have done better in the years Trump was in office than in the years he was out of office. In 2018, the GOP defied the historical midterm trend by seeing a net gain of two seats in the U.S. Senate, despite losing the House.
And in 2020, the same year Trump “lost” to Joe Biden, the Republicans managed to pick up a stunning 14 seats in the House of Representatives; not only was this higher than the 13 seats they won in the “red wave” election of 2014, but this is also clearly a much higher total than the party will walk away with in 2022. Think of that: The GOP gained more House seats in the cycle that Trump “lost” than they did in the midterm cycle of Biden’s term in office.
The Inevitable Demographic
Once we have thoroughly demolished these progressive dream reasons for the results of the 2022 midterms, we must turn to the truth about what happened, which, as it turns out, is even more devastating than any of these fictional reasons.
The cliché is “demographics is destiny,” and the adage holds some truth. Plenty have warned about the ongoing demographic shift that is only being drastically accelerated by Biden’s disastrous—and intentional—open-borders and pro-amnesty immigration policies, destined to provide citizenship, and the right to vote, to millions of illegal aliens who will be forever loyal to the Democratic Party for generations to come.
But even more lethal than the demographics of national origin—which can be stopped with a common sense, America First approach like the one embraced by President Trump—is the one and only demographic that literally, physically cannot be stopped, no matter what we do: age.
One of the exit poll numbers that has been making the most rounds on social media since Tuesday is this staggering statistic from CNN, depicting the political preferences of the various age groups. This year, voters aged 65 and older voted GOP by 13 points, while voters between the ages of 45 and 64 went Republican by 11 points. By contrast, voters between the ages of 30 and 44—the oldest of Millennials—supported Democrats by just 2 percentage points.
But, saving the worst for last, the very bottom of the data reveals the number that is the most catastrophic for the Republican Party and for the country: Voters ages 18 to 29—the Millennials and Generation Z, also known as “Zoomers”—voted for Democrats by a landslide margin of 28 points.Not only was the youth turnout this year the highest for a midterm election cycle in 30 years, but this particular generation turned out to vote exactly the way they had been told to do. Behold, the seeds of decades of indoctrination in education, pop culture, and social media have finally sprouted now that these kids are all of legal voting age. Sprinkle on the finishing touch that is Biden’s unconstitutional student loan forgiveness plan, and these loyal voters were ready to swarm the polls to reward Democrats. The generation that believes global warming is real, embraces sexual degeneracy and mental illness as “pride,” and is willing to live and die before the altar of “multiculturalism” and “diversity,” is now prepared to express these delusional beliefs at the ballot box. Republicans may very well have been targeting the parents of these brainwashed kids, who are justifiably angry at what their children have been put through for years; but they did not count on those very same brainwashed kids turning out to vote themselves.
A Long-Gone Dawn
The Right’s efforts to take the fight right back to the Left on cultural issues may be one final example of “too much, too late.” While culture always has been the answer, we may have begun a large-scale counteroffensive only after the damage had already been done. The indoctrination these children have gone through was too persistent for too long, and it is now part of their very way of life. All of their friends, boyfriends, and girlfriends believe in it, so to turn against these views now would be to alienate themselves from their much-desired social groups.
With the historic decline in religion in the United States, many of these atheist or otherwise areligious youths (“nones”) now see this brand of far-left politics as their own religion. They are not fighting for Eternal Life, God in Heaven, or salvation of fellow man; but instead, they are fighting to save the planet, to free oppressed minorities, and to change the world as we know it, ostensibly for the better.
In any case, it’s all the same to them. They are fighting for something bigger than themselves, and thus, like the progressive martyrs they fancy themselves to be, are willing to pay the prices of historic inflation, increased gas prices, and higher crime.
There will soon come a time when the most reliably Republican age group, Baby Boomers, are no longer around in the large numbers they are today; we may already be seeing this shift, as many of these older Trump voters who cast a ballot in 2016 are not around anymore. When that happens, the relatively smaller Gen X will be completely outvoted by Millennials and Zoomers. If 2022 is any indication, this eventual demographic shift paints a very dark picture for the future of our civilization.
And there may very well be nothing we can do to stop it.
While there are some silver linings to Tuesday’s results, the fact remains that the America of November 8, 2022 is very different from the America of November 8, 2016. The slow march of time only pulls us further and further away from the glory of 2016, which is now starting to feel less like the “dawn of a new day,” and instead appears to more closely resemble a last defiant breath.
About Eric Lendrum
Eric Lendrum graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the Secretary of the College Republicans and the founding chairman of the school’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter. He has interned for Young America’s Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the White House, and has worked for numerous campaigns including the 2018 re-election of Congressman Devin Nunes (CA-22). He is currently a co-host of The Right Take podcast.