posted November 29, 2016 09:47 AM            

Back in 2000, we spent 30 days arguing about the election until VP Al Gore finally accepted that George W. Bush had won Florida. In other words, the election night Florida call stood but most of his supporters still think that Mr. Bush stole election. That's what nasty recounts do! Results don't usually change and bad feelings just get worse.

It won't take 30 days in 2016, but the hard feelings will continue.

Our good friend Richard Baehr believes this is all about making Mr. Trump illegitimate, especially in the minds of liberals who just can't believe how the movie ended at 2 A.M. when Pennsylvania spoiled it. After all, some of them were apparently popping champagne on their way to the Clinton headquarters.

The real problem with recounts is that they don't change results or explain the sorry state of the Democrat Party. In short, the Democrats are on the verge of irrelevancy, unless you live in a minority district that they win without opposition.

The party is probably going to be in the minority for a while, as Amber Phillips points out in the Washington Post:

November was a tough election cycle for Senate Republicans, who were defending 24 of the 34 seats up for grabs, many in states that Obama won twice.

It will basically be the reverse in 2018. Democrats are defending 10 seats in states that Trump won, sometimes by double-digit margins. Midterms are normally kind to the party not in power, but this map shows serious head winds for Democrats.

Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Jon Tester (Mont.) are running for reelection in states that voted for Trump over Clinton by 19 points or more. (In West Virginia, Trump won by 42 points.) If these Democratic-held seats and a few others fall to Republicans in 2018, it's possible the GOP's 52-seat majority becomes a 60-seat supermajority.

At the very least, it looks likely Republicans will pick up a few seats.

More bad news for Democrats: Some political analysts think that if Republicans turn seats in red or red-leaning states, such as West Virginia, Indiana and Missouri, those seats could stay Republican for a long time. Especially if 2016's presidential election is any indication.

My colleague Philip Bump calculated there were 27 counties that had supported the Democratic candidate consistently for at least 40 years that switched to Trump in this year's election. Those counties were clustered in states such as Indiana and Michigan, where Democrats will be defending Senate seats.

We don't like writing party obituaries because parties have many lives. After all, have we not been reading for 20 years that demographics would doom the GOP?

Nevertheless, Democrats have problems. They seem to be talking over the heads of most Americans who don't live in San Francisco or the East coast.

They've focused too much on defending abortion rather saving jobs from moving overseas. They would rather fight for same-sex marriage than accept a Nativity scene during the holidays. They would rather say "I don't want to offend anyone" than Merry Christmas.

They are so invested in political correctness that they speak a foreign language that most Americans can't understand. (***Speak English, not PC Gibberish***)

So go ahead and recount. It won't change the results.

My first advice to the Democrats is to come to terms with reality. Simply put, most Americans would rather talk about jobs than climate change.

posted December 08, 2016 09:30 AM            

So far, they've blamed fake news, the so called AltRight, Putin, Comey, Koch and the Irredeemable Deplorables in "Flyover Country".

Let me help these excuse making Socialist democrats out. It's really very simple. You should take the word of the Marxist Messiah, Obama.

"I'm not on the ballot this election but my policy agenda is on the ballot."

America "Rejects" Obama's Socialist BS. It was a masterstroke of stupidity for Hillary The Corrupt to double down on Socialist stupidity and vow to continue Obama's agenda.

There's a similar move away from stupidity in Europe. It's time for competence in world capitals.

The collapse of the political left
Michael Barone
12/7/16

It's been a tough decade for the political left. Eight years ago a Time magazine cover portrayed Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt, complete with cigarette and holder and a cover line proclaiming "The New New Deal." A Newsweek cover announced "We Are All Socialists Now."

Now the cover story is different. Time has just announced, inevitably though a bit begrudgingly, that its Person of the Year for 2016 is Donald Trump. No mention of New Deals or socialism.

It's not surprising that newsmagazine editors expected a move to the left. The history they'd been taught by New Deal admirers, influenced by the doctrines of Karl Marx, was that economic distress moves voters to demand a larger and more active government.

There was some empirical evidence in that direction as well. The recession triggered by the financial crisis of 2007-08 was the deepest experienced by anyone not old enough to remember the 1930s. Barack Obama was elected with 53 percent of the popular vote—more than any candidate since the 1980s—and Democrats had won congressional elections with similar majorities in 2006 and 2008.

Things look different now, and not just because Donald Trump was elected president. It has been clear that most voters have been rejecting big government policies, and not just in the United States but in most democratic nations around the world.

Leftist politicians supposed that ordinary voters with modest incomes facing hard times would believe that regulation and redistribution would help them. Evidently most don't.

The rejection was apparent in the 2010 and subsequent House elections; Republicans have now won House majorities in ten of the last 12 elections, leaving 2006 and 2008 as temporary aberrations. You didn't hear Hillary Clinton campaign on the glories of Obamacare or the Iran nuclear deal, and her attack on "Trumped-up, trickle-down economics" didn't strike any chords in the modest-income Midwest.

Republican success has been even greater in governor and state legislature elections, to the point that Democrats hold governorships and legislative control only in California, Hawaii, Delaware and Rhode Island. After eight years of the Obama presidency, Democrats hold fewer elective offices than at any time since the 1920s.

Things look similar abroad. Britain's Conservatives, returned to government in 2010, are in a commanding position over a left-lurching Labour party. France's Socialist president, with single-digit approval, declined to run for a second term. European social democratic parties have been hemorrhaging votes, and got walloped in Sunday's Italian referendum. In Latin America and Asia, the left is declining or on the defensive.

Overall history is not bending toward happy acceptance of ever-larger government at home. Nor toward submersion of national powers and identities into large and inherently undemocratic international organizations. The nation-state remains the focus of most peoples' loyalties, and in a time of economic and cultural diffusion, as Yuval Levin argues in his recent book The Fractured Republic, big government policies designed for an age of centralization have become increasingly dysfunctional.

Barack Obama doesn't seem to have noticed this, at least until some time between nine and ten o'clock election night. Shrewder center-left politicians who have shown they know how to win elections have. Bill Clinton urged his wife's campaign managers to put her out in rural areas speaking to voters' concerns. The thirty-something geniuses she installed in her trendy Brooklyn headquarters knew better.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking in Washington this week, said, "We have to pay attention to culture and identity," and argued that in response to Islamist extremism, "Political correctness can't get in the way."

Such advice suggests that a sharp shift in current leftist strategy, which includes "identity politics" appeals to minorities at home and obeisance to the wisdom of supranational entities like the Paris climate change conference and the European Union.

What's missing in that is a concentration on the interests of one's own citizenry. To the left that smacks of nationalism, which some seem to regard as only a baby step away from Nazism.