Click on graphic to enlarge
The electoral seesaw of the United States from one party to the other can clearly be seen by looking @ the presidential election results from 1968 through 2004:
1. After LBJ's Vietnam war effort was in the news every night & MLK & RFK were assassinated the country was ready for a change in 1968. Nixon defeated Humphrey & Wallace 301 to 191 to 46 electoral votes.
2. Nixon was reelected in 1972 defeating McGovern 520 to 17 electoral votes while receiving over 17 million more popular votes. Agnew resigned & Nixon resigned facing certain conviction in an impeachment Senate trial. Ford moved from VP (Agnew replacement) to President. Ford pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed while in office. This set up another change.
3. Carter defeated Ford 297 to 240 electoral votes in 1976 while receiving over a million & a half more popular votes. The slow Ford economy deteriorated further under Carter & there was an Arab oil embargo in 1979 & an Iran hostage crisis that set the stage for a change to Reagan.
4. Reagan defeated Carter 489 to 49 electoral votes in 1980 while receiving over 8 million more popular votes than Carter. Independent Anderson received over 5.7 million popular votes & Libertarian Clark received almost 1 million popular votes - neither received any electoral votes.
5. Reagan won reelection in 1984 over Mondale 525 to 13 electoral votes while receiving over 16 million more popular votes.
6. Reagan's popularity continued in 1988 as his VP Bush defeated Dukakis 426 to 111 electoral votes while receiving over 7 million more popular votes. After Bush's one term & his read my lips broken promise the electorate decided it was time for a change.
7. In 1992 Bill Clinton defeated Bush 370 to 168 electoral votes while receiving almost 6 million more popular votes. Ross Perot received over 19 million popular votes but no electoral votes.
8. Clinton benefited from a strong economy in 1996, that many credited House Speaker Newt Gingrich for, & won a strong reelection bid over Dole 379 electoral votes to 159 while increasing his popular vote margin to over 8 million votes. Perot received over 11.5 million fewer popular votes than in 1992 & again no electoral votes. Clinton was impeached for lying under oath (denied having a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky) & obstruction of justice. Presidential ethics was a major issue of the day.
9. The election of 2000 could not have been closer with GW Bush defeating Gore 271 electoral votes to 266 while Gore received over half a million more popular votes than Bush. Nader received almost 3 million popular votes but no electoral votes.
10. Although the outcome of Ohio was questioned by Democrats (they dropped the issue after one day), Bush won reelection in 2004 by a vote count of 286 electoral votes to 251 for Kerry while receiving over 3 million more popular votes than Kerry.
Anyone who is not a rabid Republican or Democrat voter could look @ the above list of quadrennial presidential election results & with an open mind, objectively see what caused the power swings from one party to the other over these ten presidential elections.
But by the time the 2008 election came about it was obvious that the nation was deeply polarized. Starting with Robert Bork's rejection (42 to 58) by the U.S. Senate to the position of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in 1987 (not mentioned in the list above), to Bill Clinton's impeachment, to GW Bush winning the presidency via a Supreme Court vote while losing the popular vote by over half a million votes something was different in America. (Note, I did not put Nixon's removal from office on this "something was different" list because people from both political parties knew Nixon's removal was justified especially after Goldwater told Nixon he was out. Actually, it was the epitome of a properly working political process as opposed to the polarization that happened in 2008.)
In fact we had a taste of what was to come before Clinton's impeachment in 1998 - a Martian who just landed on Earth in 1996 & saw the resumes of Bob Dole & Bill Clinton would never have correctly guessed the winner of the election.
BO promised to fundamentally change America & comfortably won two terms. During those eight years RTE documented the reasons why I felt that BO was the first president who was not working in America's interest. Carter had his problems but I never felt that he was deliberately trying to wreck America the way I felt BO did.
In 2016 the Democrats ran the one candidate in Hilary Clinton that Trump could surprise - "I surprised them" (his words). But by 2020 thanks to the cover of Covid, Trump's narcissism that turned off more people than his policies attracted, & the hostile anti-American media Joe Biden was elected president to the dismay of the country. Never has a president, including BO, worked more blatantly & deliberately against America than Biden.
Now for the first 143 years of this constitutional republic America did not fall prey to voting for candidates who promised the most benefits from the public treasury - instead we had leaders in both elected branches who followed the limitations of the Constitution. In 1930 federal government spending was 2.7% of GDP. By 2012 it was 24% & the Cato Institute had identified 126 federal welfare programs - this all flowed out of FDR's progressive government agenda. See graphic below & notice that from 1900 to 1916 the blue & brown lines coincide meaning the budget was balanced.
From the founding to the Civil War America was in the liberty to abundance stage of our history. From the Civil War to FDR's New Deal we were in the abundance to complacency stage as liberty started to be taken for granted as it was being replaced by security. And from the 1930s to the present, right in front of our eyes we have drifted through the complacency to apathy stage & into the apathy to dependence stage teetering on going back into bondage.
These stages combined form the Death Of Democracy.
I have documented that Millennials & GenZers have their own interests & they are different from those of past generations. America's youth has been college educated by progressive professors who were part of the main socialist-communist movement of the last 50 years that continues today.
These young people are interested in racial equality, healthcare, global warming/climate change, & student loan forgiveness. It is only because America is so wealthy (their parents that is) that today's youth can focus on such things as opposed to making a career & starting a family.
A poll conducted in March by the WSJ/NORC @ the University of Chicago received quite a bit of media coverage over the past month because the results of the poll - some of which are given in the graphic @ the top - are so dramatic that they are alarming. Readers of this blog should not have been surprised.
The poll found that the importance of patriotism in America had fallen off to 38% - I am surprised it is that high considering all the indoctrination in schools & in the media where America is always portrayed as a bad place of racists.
Religion had fallen off in importance to 39% which again is not surprising since much of America today considers government to be their religion, which quite simply cannot lead to a fulfilling satisfying life.
Community involvement has fallen off in importance to 27% - why get involved when there is the socialist lure of free healthcare, high minimum-living wage paying jobs, & the general understanding that there will always be a government program to depend on for every eventuality Millennials or GenZers come across in life with of course the unspoken (& really never thought of) law that they will always have the freedoms they currently enjoy & mistakenly believe can be taken for granted.
The poll found that the importance of money increased but then only to 43% which agrees with another part of the poll that found that less than 2 out of 3 people aged 18 to 29 think hard work is important to them personally.
None of the above information favors Republicans' near term electoral chances. The GOP would be wise to not concentrate on Trump's legal problems which will only get worse when we hear from Fani Willis (DA - Fulton County Georgia) & Jack Smith (Special Counsel - Trump retention of classified documents & parts of the January 6 Capitol riot).
The presidency can only be won by receiving a majority of electoral votes in the electoral college & that should be the entire focus of everyone who thinks Biden & the Democrats are purposely working against American interests. Republicans should concentrate on having a staff of community organizers in about ten swing states, starting right now, to have any chance of winning the presidential election & keeping control of the House in November, 2024. This step would bring Republicans to the level Democrats never abandon regarding community organization election efforts.
Two recent elections that the GOP lost contain valuable lessons for Republicans in this regard.
On February 28 Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot ran for reelection. Lightfoot is a radical progressive who shut down the city for more than a year during Covid, bankrupted small businesses, allowed rioters to burn down whole neighborhoods, presided over the worse crime wave in 50 years, & let the schools go to hell (in two dozen inter-city schools there is literally not one child that can read or write @ proficiency level) - source Chicago native Steve Moore.
Lightfoot finished third & was eliminated from the runoff election on April 4 that was necessitated because no candidate received over 50% of the vote on February 28..
Paul Vallas, a moderate Democrat, received the most votes on February 28 after campaigning on fighting crime & improving education in the city. Many conservative writers like one of my personal favorites, Dan Henninger, thought that Chicago had seen enough in Lightfoot's destructive progressive ways & had come to their senses ready to elect Vallas.
The problem was that the second place finisher on February 28, Brandon Johnson, was a Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) favorite who was even to the left of Lightfoot (i.e., more progressive) & he won the runoff 51.4% to 48.6% (287,551 votes to 271,443 votes). Turnout was 33.2% meaning 17.1% of eligible voters elected the new Chicago Mayor.
Johnson strongly opposed education reform including charter schools & had been critical of the police - in 2020 calling defunding the police "an actual, real political goal," but later said he would add 200 detectives & focus on addressing the root cause of crime. Vallas supported education reform & had campaigned on adding 1,000 police officers on the streets & planned to restore morale in the department. Vallas was backed by the police & firefighters unions & the business community while Johnson was backed by the CTU & other public sector unions. Vallas is white & Johnson is black. Interviews with many black voters indicated they were for fighting crime but voted for Johnson. Putting these interviews into perspective on the national level - this mindset is how Biden could get reelected president in 2024.
In a preview of Johnson's progressivism - over the weekend of April 15-16 hundreds of teenagers, organized via social media, rampaged the city vandalizing & burning cars (including a $120,000 Tesla) before the overmatched police force could break up the mayhem - two boys 16 & 17 were shot & taken to the hospital. Lightfoot condemned the incident while Johnson took the side of the rioters not wanting to "demonize youth who have been starved of opportunity."
So the CTU is satisfied & the 67% of eligible voters who didn't vote can't blame anyone except themselves if they feel unsafe opening their front doors or leaving their cars parked on the street. National Democrats are also satisfied - they awarded the 2024 Democrat National Convention site to Chicago.
Chicago is a town that has given up on itself. Two thirds of the city's electorate is too disinterested to want to have a say in choosing their leaders. A substantial portion of those who did vote are unionized meaning they make a decent living but in a town where one mistake in judgement regarding how safe a neighborhood is could result in being shot. The rest move.
The last Republican, or member of any party except Democrat, to serve as Mayor of Chicago was in 1931 meaning the rot & stagnation of one party rule is intransigent.
If the trouble in Chicago had been handled by the voters with a change in leadership like the presidential elections I listed hereinbefore from 1968 through 2004 a Republican would have been elected like Rudy Giuliani was in NYC in the 1990s - a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 4 to 1.
The other disheartening election that took place earlier this month was in the suspiciously called swing state of Wisconsin in a technically nonpartisan race - a state Supreme Court race in which a conservative judge was vacating his seat (retirement) thereby putting the one-vote conservative majority of the court in jeopardy of becoming a one-vote Democrat majority.
Democrat Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County judge, campaigned on striking down the state's anti-abortion law that had been enacted in 1849, & supported a referendum to make it easier to increase or deny bail. Democrats spent over $1 million in the primary to support (i.e., hand pick) Protasiewicz's opponent in the general election, Daniel Kelly, who after being appointed in 2016 by then-Governor Scott Walker to fill a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, lost an election in 2020 to retain the seat. Kelly also had ties to Trump which Democrats love to run against, feeling he would be easier to beat in the general election than Wisconsin Circuit Court judge Jennifer Dorow - a primary election strategy trick being used more often by Democrats in the age of Trump. Protasiewicz won a ten year term by 11 points in another election that shows the importance of abortion - Kelly was endorsed by Wisconsin's top three anti-abortion groups, while Protasiewicz was endorsed by abortion rights advocates like Hilary Clinton.
Protasiewicz ran on the full-throated radicalism of the Democrat party platform: taxpayer-funded abortion on demand throughout all nine months of pregnancy (& even being left to die after birth in Governor Ralph KKK Northam's Virginia).
Matt Elbert, writing in the WSJ, points out that in all six states where abortion was directly on the ballot since the SCOTUS Dobbs decision in 2022 voters either resoundingly rejected further restrictions or fully enshrined abortion into their constitutions - states including Kentucky, Kansas, & Montana.
These pro-abortion results have left frightened Republicans calling for the party to get their abortion position more in line with voters, but doesn't this mean changing their moral views to what they perceive to be winning electoral-political views? How do you compromise your moral conviction, your feelings about right & wrong, with a negotiated political strategy to win elections? There is no young couple in America today, who is buying a condom in a drug store, that doesn't know when a new life begins.
Many Republicans hurt themselves by not being able to articulate a clear position on abortion & yet when they do they can win. Anti-abortion gubernatorial candidates like DeSantis won in Florida by 19 points, DeWine won in Ohio by 25 points, Kemp won in Georgia by 8 points, & Abbott won in Texas by 11 points.
South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, running an exploratory program concerning running for president, has said in recent days "I am 100% pro life", then saying in another venue he would sign the recent Florida law that bans most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, & then in yet another venue says he would sign a bill banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. So what kind of principle or position is it, to be compromised to be politically competitive, that protects the baby @ 6 weeks but permits its killing @ 5 weeks? It's the same person.
Isn't it best to just say what you really believe?
Doug - great sum of the repeated Democrat / GOP swings with reasons explaining each.
ReplyDeleteSo what is likely in the 2024 POTUS election? Although I voted for Trump twice (and will again if it is Biden-Trump), I am strongly supporting Vivek Ramaswamy for POTUS.
Consider following:
Biden advisors pushed Biden in a very sharp Socialist progression. This resulted in unprecedented federal spending that contributed to the worst inflation in 40 years.
Add to this:
Brazil, France, Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, Pakistan, Malaysia in processes of replacing $ with China’s Yuan,
border policy that may be OK with 100,000 Fentanyl deaths per year as collateral damage for flood of likely Democrat voters,
$85 Billion of most advanced weapons left in Bagram Air Base – likely confiscated by China,
China Spy balloons, buying of US farm land near military bases, selling China oil from our Strategic Reserve.
This is deep Biden baggage; but narcissist Trump can negate this and Biden can win. Instead let’s focus on 37 year old successful entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy – likely to implement zero based budgeting, eliminate duplicative Gov spending, fully extend the America First agenda. His communication skills and temperament are stellar. Look for him to win all GOP primary debates and force and destroy Biden.
Hi Doug - Thanks for another thought inspiring post.
ReplyDeleteWho are the abortionist?
The Muslims have 8 to 14 kids. Clearly, they are not the abortionist.
The Hispanics are too catholic to kill their babies. They are not the abortionist.
For lower middle class blacks babies are a source of welfare income. They are not the abortionist.
Primarily it’s Caucasians that kill their babies. This fact becomes evident when you see the faces of the protestors on TV.
White America is so confused they believe that killing their babies is the answer to the world’s problems.