Deep dive on a Sunday afternoon

Created
Mon, 16/01/2023 - 09:30
Updated
Mon, 16/01/2023 - 09:30
The following piece by Michael Podhoretz [subscribe here] has gotten a lot of coverage lately and seems to be making an impact. It’s super dense and super fascinating for political junkies. If you are someone who likes to go deep on election analysis and you have a few extra minutes, check it out. I find it persuasive. (But what do I know?) This analysis provides compelling evidence for a very different explanation of the midterm results than what most analysts are offering – an explanation which I have been arguing was possible for more than a year. Even before November 2021 (when Democrats suffered major losses in Virginia and elsewhere), I argued that America is an anti-MAGA majority country when it knows that MAGA is on the ballot. I have consistently underscored that to the extent that Americans understood the stakes of the midterms to be about defeating MAGA, they would once again show up in sufficient numbers to bar the door. All that was needed to confound the usual midterm rout for the president’s party was making sure that 2020 voters understood that, just as they didn’t want Trump for President, they certainly didn’t want his criminal accomplices and MAGA fascists to take over Congress and their state capitals. This midterm bore that out to a stunning degree. Where voters understood the stakes, they voted as they had in 2018 and 2020; where they did not, they met the pundits’ expectations about a Red Wave.  On November 8th, that expected Red Wave…