I Knew the Election Would Be Close. Here’s How I Figured It Out.

I’ve been watching talking heads “explain” the election results for days now. 

I get the impression that Michael Moore and I were the only living Americans who knew that the election was going to be close. I know that’s not true, but in the alternative universe of made-up “news,” it’s the pretend reality. So, as one the two unofficial only living Americans who knew the election was going to be close, I suppose I should share how I came to such a “genius” conclusion.

How I Knew the Election Was Going to be Close.

1. I knew the election was going to be close because the reason that the party of a sitting president almost always loses seats in Congress in the first mid-terms after his election is (drum roll, trumpet fanfare) 

Because the president’s supporters are still coasting on the good feelings of winning the presidential election two years before, and 

Because they think “their” prez has got it all handled. 

So … they stay home and don’t vote. 

Meanwhile, the other party is all revved from losing the presidency and they get out and vote the heck out of the mid-terms. 

2. It was all different in 2022. 

This time the party opposite the sitting president (Biden) were fresh off an attempt to overturn the government of the United States and install a flaming lunatic (Trump) as America’s first dictator. 

This time the party opposite the president had just deep-sixed what half the population thought was their Constitutional right to abortion, and they did this in the face of the fact that 2/3 of the American people opposed this vehemently, and 

Then, the party opposite the president doubled down on deep-sixing the Constitutional rights of half the population by attacking raped 12-year-olds and blunderblussing their way through more insulting, degrading and flat-out woman-hating votes and lies than I can personally count without using a spreadsheet. 

The party opposite the president decided that it was a dandy time to ban books, attack Mickey Mouse (I’m not kidding), and invite a Putin-loving foreign fascist head of state to their biggest fund raising event. 

They also came out in favor of Putin over our own American president in a time of war and bragged non-stop about the vengeance they were going to take on the president and the American people as soon as they won Congress. 

They announced publicly that they were going to trash Social Security and Medicare, raise taxes on poor people, and give more of our tax money to the billionaires who finance and essentially own their party. 

They said that America should become a christo-fascist nation, somewhat like the Taliban or the fictional Gilead, and to put a cherry on top the whole thing, they said that as soon as they got power, they would impeach the sitting president, not for any reason, but just, you know, because they don’t care about this country and thought they would have the votes to do it. 

The upshot of all this hate was a Democratic rank and file that had just about had it. 

Contrary to political parlance, ordinary normal people were not “excited” about the mid-term election. What I sensed, and why I knew it was going to be a close election, was and is a deadly serious anger on the part of people who don’t get angry all that often or all that easily. 

All the crazies have been yelling and screaming and foaming at the mouth while they pound the ground with sticks for years now and they’ve gotten away with it. Their problem is that they’ve been too successful. They are getting what they want, moving their destruction from the realm of “they’ll never do that, not really” to “those crazy b——ds are actually doing that.” 

Whore Republican preachers, priests and bishops, along with the raving insane crazy means in the pews are successfully driving the sane people out of their own churches. More and more devout Christians are giving up on their Christian community because they can’t take the vicious political heresy any longer. I know this because some of them have begun to gravitate around me due to the fact that I’ve been vocal about my opposition to turning Christianity into a get-out-the-vote machine for American Nazis. 

Sane Americans have watched while screaming nut jobs have wrecked the schools their kids go to, driving the quality of education down and terrifying teachers so that they are quitting the profession rather than face the constant abuse. They’ve sat quietly while a billionaire-owned Republican Party and their whore clergy have stripped them of job security, living wages, and retirements. 

They’ve sat still for 50 years of organized destruction. 

So it should surprise no one that the crazy means of the Republican Party missed the fact that the big, sleeping bear of normal people is waking up and … get ready for this … their anger is revving. 

I knew the election was going to be close. I was way past disgusted with the constant mis-reporting of reality as I knew it by the press in the claims that there was going to be a “red wave/red tsunami/red hurricane.” But I am not a seer and there was a lot I missed. 

For instance, I was totally flummoxed when the election took place and it became clear that the talking heads who’d been hyping this crap actually believed their own palaver. I never thought they meant it. It was so obviously wrong that I could see it from my living room out here in red state Oklahoma. I had assumed they were lying to try to depress the Democratic vote. 

But it turns out these cracker jacks actually thought that the Rs were going to run the board. I am a total outsider to the world of the big-time national talking-head-o-sphere. But this has the appearance from the outside of a bunch of people who get all their thinking from talking to each other. They’re sealed up in their little world which they mistake for the real world. 

However it came about, the polls were just as FUBAR as the reporting. This is … I dunno … the 3^rd or 4^th national election?? … that the boys and girls of the polling industry have missed by a country mile. It’s pretty obvious how they missed this one. I’ll list the ways they did it. 

1. They polled the wrong people. They were polling “likely” voters, which means they missed a whole world of mad-as-hell young people and women.

2. Women lied to them about what mattered to them. Fear of being killed or hunted like animals by nut-job abortion laws drove the female vote. The short hand way to describe this is to say that abortion drove their vote. But that somewhat misses the point. 

Women are scared. And they are angry. But whole big bunches of them are not going to admit this or even say it out loud. Religious women, in particular Catholic and conservative Protestant women such as Southern Baptists, are not going to admit to anybody that they are going to vote for choice. 

The reason is simple. They want to be able to stay in their faith communities, and if they voiced their fear — terror is often more like it — of what overturning Roe means to them, their daughters and granddaughters, they’d be attacked, shunned, and even kicked out of their church homes.

They don’t want to die or see their daughters die at the hands of Republican politicians. They don’t want to be stuffed back into the box of pre-Roe terror, abuse and degradation that all of us of a certain age remember very well. But they’re too cowed by their bullying clergy and the crazy means who dominate their churches to say that out loud. 

So, they wuss the questions and keep their little mouths shut. And then, when they are alone with the confessional of the secret ballot, they vote what they really feel. 

The polls can’t be accurate when such a big piece of the voting universe is flat-out scared to tell the truth about what they think and what they are going to do. 

The polls missed what women were going to do, even though anyone with half a brain could see that train coming down the tracks. The polls totally ignored young voters — and the vehemently pro choice young female vote — for the simple reason they didn’t bother to poll them at all. 

So the polls were, as they have routinely become, FUBAR. The talking heads evidently don’t know anything except what they tell one another. 

It was a close election, and it was always going to be a close election, because the Democrats got out to vote. Nobody, except, of course, someone who was paying attention to what actual people were saying, could see that.