The midterm elections may have taken place in November, but WorldNetDaily has continued to whine about the outcome — and, of course, manufacture conspiracy theories about elections being stolen from Republicans. Brad Lyles — who has pushed voter fraud conspiracies before — did so again in his Dec. 2 column:
The obvious diagnosis is: Democrats cheat.
And if Democrats don’t cheat, Democrats don’t win. And since Democrats are so fantastically skilled at cheating, they win even when everyone hates them and hates everything they’re doing.
Cheating wins.
Of course, as outlined earlier, multiple factors in addition to cheating played a significant role in neutralizing Republicans’ Red Wave – but it is the cheating that is foundational. Because none of the multiple other factors pertinent to our defeat, or victory, have relevance as long as cheating remains. Cheating defeats them all. Cheating is the ultimate hole card; merely consider Maricopa County this very week.
Cheating will always defeat even the most aggressive efforts to win elections – even if every such effort is executed perfectly. Even if Mitch McConnell were really a Republican.
The most recent example of efforts – beyond those to prevent cheating – include Republicans’ newfound awareness of Democratic success – legal success – at capitalizing on their assault upon election integrity in 2020. And it is clear that Republicans must achieve success in this new world as well, understanding that collecting ballots is more important than winning hearts and minds or having well-attended rallies. Winners now win with ballot harvesting, ballot boxes, focused canvassing, early voting, mass ballot mailing, etc. Mastery of these new election mechanics is crucial to any future Republican success.
However, even if Republicans achieve success in this new arena, their electoral victories will be short-lived, because no matter how many votes or ballots Republicans deliver, Democrats will always find more – because Democrats will manufacture more – because Democrats cheat, and they do it well.
The same day, Josh Hammer insisted that Donald Trump should still be an example for Republicans to follow, even though most of his candidates lost on Election Day and nobody really likes him:
Trump’s manifold personal flaws and recent headline-grabbing self-inflicted wounds aside, there is still much to learn from his dominance of the 2016 Republican presidential primary field. Trump ran to the “right” of his median competitor on some issues, such as immigration, but he ran well to the “left” of his median competitor on other issues, such as trade, health care and entitlements. On foreign policy, he was the most critical of all candidates on the debate stage of the instinctive ultra-hawkishness that had become post-Cold War GOP orthodoxy.
While it is impossible to ignore the dominant halo effect of Trump’s global celebrity status, GOP primary voters also rallied to Trump’s nationalist, populist strand of conservatism. He broke through the Democrats’ Rust Belt “blue wall” in the general election, upsetting Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin (not coincidentally, all states that were disproportionate victims of globalization). He narrowly lost those same states in 2020, but all of them – along with Wisconsin’s western neighbor, Minnesota – are now considerably closer each election cycle, in the age of this more nationalist and populist GOP, than they were during the “dead consensus”/”zombie Reaganism” years of the 1990s through the mid-2010s.
Joseph Farah spent his Dec. 5 column ranting that a push in some localities to lower the voting age to 16 is part of an evil democratic plot:
Beyond potentially gaining more votes by lowering the voting age, some observers see the Vote 16 push as part of Democrats’ broader effort since the 2020 election cycle to change a host of voting rules, such as instituting universal mail-in voting.
Just last year, 125 House Democrats voted in favor of an amendment to the For the People Act, which included several Democrat-backed election rule changes, to add a provision to the legislation lowering the voting age for federal elections to 16.
It’s coming. They’re serious. They just never give up.
Andy Schlafly was still parroting Donald Trump’s discredited election fraud narrative in his Dec. 6 column and ranting about early voting, basically arguing that Republicans can’t win if more people are allowed to vote:
The unjustified suppression of free speech on social media and the exploitation of rampant early-voting ballots have severely tainted the last two elections. The sooner both problems can be rectified, the sooner election integrity will be restored.
Donald Trump’s tweetstorm, not on Twitter but on his platform Truth Social, hit a nerve. Trump pointed out that “steps must be immediately taken to RIGHT THE WRONG. Only FOOLS would disagree with that and accept STOLEN ELECTIONS. MAGA!”
[…]A record number of early ballots were cast in Georgia this year, more than during the pandemic in 2020, plus another 2 million early votes in the runoff. Some conservatives mistakenly think that the record early turnout in Georgia is the way of the future, when the real future for our nation is returning to one Election Day.
No wonder Republicans are losing Georgia. Republicans cannot win an election that has “record early voter turnout.” As The Western Journal’s Floyd Brown told Steve Bannon on “The War Room,” there is no path for Republicans to win statewide elections in Arizona, Georgia and other must-win states without a return to in-person voting on Election Day.
Richard Blakley spent his Dec. 8 column similarly lashing out at early voting, effectively declaring that states who can’t elect Republicans be kicked out of the union:
Florida’s outcome, with its legal voting system, is in line with pre-election polling. But now, with the weeks of counting all the votes and the eyebrow raising “42 million” early votes, and stunning record-breaking numbers of absentee ballots being dropped off on Election Day, we are expected to believe that Republicans lost the U.S. Senate, and nearly failed to take the U.S. House, and many state legislatures and local elections flipped blue! That almost makes you think that someone counting Democratic ballots might have been messing with the figures, where if someone did a thorough check behind them they just might say, “Look, twins … again and again and again!”
Originally, to be a state in the union, there were a series of criterion, among which the petitioning territory had to show governance that prevented lawlessness, making it such that this territory had the capacity to interact lawfully with other states. If states cannot use their governance to insure legal voting, the most important aspect of being a part of a republic, then perhaps their statehood should be reexamined. Maybe it is time to drop some stars off the flag. At the very least, perhaps a probationary period needs to be instituted for states, whereby they can lose their statehood if they cannot get their act together and correct their lawlessness.
[…]Maybe we can reconstruct some of the voting systems, by having strict voter ID requirements, strict laws against voter fraud, severe prison terms for anyone caught trying to commit voter fraud, no mail-in ballots sent to every voter, no ballot drop boxes, no ballet harvesting, no ballots accepted for days after Election Day and no counting relentlessly for days on end. This would be like putting the figures back where they need to be in a manger scene that has been dismantled. Perhaps by doing this, no one examining ballots in the future will have to say, “Look, twins.”
Like Schlafly, Blakley is arguing that Republicans can’t win if too many people are allowed to vote.