Voters Rewarded Covid Bravery
Governors who followed logic and science gained – while irrational tyrants were punished electorally.
Tuesday’s election results provided strong evidence that voters rewarded the true leaders who stood courageously against the Covidian mob in 2020 and 2021. In contrast, the lockdown tyrants who happily did the bidding of Big Pharma, Fauci, and the fearmongering media…saw supporters flee.
The overall trajectory of the midterms understandably disappointed many on the political Right. Given the intense and persistent unpopularity of Joe Biden, plus the overall dissatisfaction of the citizenry by almost every metric, most prognosticators (including me) expected better broad results.
Yes, there are areas of significant success, like Florida and Long Island and the triumph of JD Vance. But nationally, the unwillingness or inability of Republicans to match Democrat efforts at the mechanics of early vote collection and mass ballot mailing thwarted a seemingly imminent wave election.
But amidst this mixed bag of results, one outstanding and unqualified success was the sharp disparity in the electoral fortunes of the most rational virus governors vs. the harshest virus bully governors.
Even those favoring highly restrictive mitigation measures regarding the virus would likely concede that perhaps the four most stringent states in America were probably California, New York, Illinois, and Nevada. Conversely, the most liberating states in approaching the virus were likely South Dakota, Florida, Iowa, and Georgia.
As the charts below display, the election trajectories for these two groups of incumbents diverged sharply depending upon their virus records.
The states that endured the harshest lockdowns, school closures, mask requirements, and Big Pharma injection mandates saw a combined average vote margin loss for these Democrat incumbents of -9% from 2018 to 2022.
This analysis treats Kathy Hochul as an incumbent since she was Cuomo’s lieutenant governor and fully supportive of his Covid policies. Notably, all four of these governors lost ground -- in blue states, and in a year that was generally highly friendly to incumbents. In the case of Sisolak, he inflicted particular pain on the tourist-dependent hospitality industry that dominates Las Vegas and he was bounced from office, in no small part because of his draconian virus clampdowns.
But from the earliest days of the virus, some real leaders displayed true political courage. The brave governors willing to use common sense, study actual data, and employ a reasonable risk/reward approach to mitigation were pilloried in the spring and summer of 2020. Failing to follow every dictate of the woke mob of covid purist fanatics brought the immediate wrath of Washington politicians, corrupt public health authorities, and a complicit corporate media.
Those media mavens, in particular, disregarded the actual facts and instead aggressively propagated a narrative of maximum fear. The motivation of legacy media platforms – in open cahoots with the aligned Oligarchs of Big Tech -- was twofold. First, they sought to terrify a population into staying home, consuming media and tech products on screens, instead of living productive lives of work and community. Second, these organizations and powerbrokers overtly used the virus and the lockdowns they themselves pushed to politically tarnish their foremost public enemy: President Donald Trump.
But thankfully, profiles in courage emerged. The first to step up most boldly were two women governors, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Kim Reynolds of Iowa who refused to lock down in the first place. Then, Brian Kemp of Georgia fully and aggressively reopened the Peach State. The favored magazine of the ruling class, The Atlantic, wrote an April, 2020 hit piece against Kemp titled “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis similarly endured the torrent of attacks from pseudo-scientific “experts” and media mouthpieces doing the bidding of Big Pharma. But Governor DeSantis turned Florida into America’s favored freedom destination for those seeking a refuge from the harsh and unscientific restrictions of blue states. DeSantis defied the paranoia and declared that the “biggest obstacle is fear sparked by constant doom and gloom and hysteria that has permeated our culture." No wonder so many Covid refugees came to visit Florida as a respite from the tyranny of locked-down states, and so many stayed as well.
As the chart below displays, these brave governors were rewarded mightily at the ballot box. Four years ago, they each won in tight races. But this time, all four cruised to re-election, and clearly their Covid record played a pivotal role.
Overall, the 2022 election results must compel a lot of introspection and analysis for the patriotic populist movement. We must learn from the successes and adjust accordingly to prevent repeats of the underperformances. But we should also celebrate this important divergence regarding governors and the virus.
Millions of us suffered serious consequences for opposing lockdowns and mandates. Thankfully, politicians who stood tall when times were tough were rewarded, and the cowardly tyrants lost support. Now…let’s accentuate those trends!
Unspoken premise: those who reveled in the inevitability of the Big Red Wave lost a high degree of credibility---not only with me...but with millions of voters. So did commentators who assured their audiences that "massive apparatus" had been put in place to prevent fraud. Once the delays started it was obvious no such apparatus existed. Instead we were repeatedly treated to "live" shots of ONE person outside a count center....complaining he or she couldn't get inside [i.e., no law enforcement officials or legal teams had been enlisted in advance to get conservative journalists INTO the buildings in which the alleged fraud was ongoing]. I still believe that lots of honorable people are working to correct the mess we're in ---but their political instincts don't match their integrity. Apparently, they didn't learn as much in between 2020 and 2022 as they thought they did....or told us they did.
The key question is, what are we going to do in 2024 to prevent more cheating in GA PA NV AZ? As Trump and Lin Wood have said, if we don’t fix 2020, there’s no 2024.