Wednesday, August 3, 2022

DEMOCRATS - THE PARTY OF THE SPECIAL INTERESTS AND BRIBES SUCKING POLS - Dark Money Network Boosts Wisconsin Dem Who Wants To End Undisclosed Funding in Politics Group backed by Sixteen Thirty Fund to spend $5 million to support Mandela Barnes

 

Armageddon Looms for the Democrat Party

That deafening sound Americans are hearing all around them is the Good Ship Democratic Party crashing against the jagged rocks of political reality.

With the November 2022 midterm elections just weeks away, early projections point to a Republican Party electoral tsunami that could bury the Democrat party for the next several voting cycles.

Polls by Rasmussen, Emerson, and Trafalgar show the Republicans up by as much as 10% over Democrats in the generic ballot.  The Real Clear Politics "poll of polls" has Republicans projected to win a minimum of 223 House seats, the Democrats 179, giving the GOP de facto control of the House of Representatives.

RCP has identified another 33 congressional contests as toss-ups, races considered too close to call.  Of those 33 seats 29 were considered solidly Democrat until this election cycle.  Now Democrats must spend precious resources to defend seats they thought they owned.  Republicans could end up with a 240-plus-seat majority.

Just last June, a young Republican female candidate of Hispanic background, Mayra Flores, won a Texas house seat that has been in Democrat hands since the Civil War ended, and did so with the help of a large swath of Hispanics in the district.

Flores's victory confirms a belief, long held in conservative circles, that Hispanics are trending GOP, forming a voting bloc with the tens of millions of middle-class Americans who increasingly associate the Democrats with runaway inflation, crime in the streets, and the importation of thousands of illegal migrants.  Hispanics share Republican conservative values on abortion, parental rights regarding their children's education, and religious freedom.

Democrats fool themselves if they imagine that President Biden's slumping approval numbers are the sole reason for their bleak prospects.  Yes, in 44 states, more voters disapprove of Biden than approve.  A recent Quinnipiac poll has Biden at 31% approval and a whopping 60% disapproval.  History demonstrates that presidents who were underwater by Bidenesque levels — Obama, Clinton, and the like — can cost their parties between 60 and 70 seats in the midterms.

Certain that Biden is the main source of the Democrats' poor 2022 election prospects, the Washington Post just ran an editorial begging Biden to resign now.

However, Biden's leadership deficiencies are not the only cause of the Democrat party's electoral woes.  The party's progressive agenda is out of step with a center-right America.  To make matters worse, Americans perceive the Democrats to be tone-deaf to the concerns of average Americans.

Americans expected Democrats, who control both houses and the presidency, to be working feverishly to solve the problems that concern them most, such as inflation, the economy, violent crime, election integrity, school issues, abortion, election cheating, and illegal immigration.  A full 56% of Americans think we are in a recession.  Two of three live paycheck to paycheck.  Many Americans are now turning to local food banks to feed their families.

But when they turn on Sunday morning talk shows, all they hear are liberal media pundits and Democrat leaders prattling on about climate change, the war in Ukraine,  the January 6 hearings, COVID-19, and LGBT issues.  This is a total disconnect between Democrats and the American voter.

Worse, over the last few years, thanks to COVID-related mandates and economic lockdowns, voters have come to regard Democrats as a party quite comfortable with exerting autocratic top-down control over citizens' behavior.

Americans will not soon forget that Democrat mayors and governors used COVID as an excuse to declare national and local emergencies that enabled them to trample on a plethora of citizens' civil liberties for months at a time.

And just in case voters might forget the lockdowns, Democrat-run cities like San Diego and Louisville are reinstating all forms of mandates and restrictions in reaction to a slight increase in COVID cases this summer.

Since Democrats cannot run on the economy, crime, the border crisis, or inflation, they have decided to attempt to campaign on "cultural issues."

Good luck with that.  A recent Echelon poll reveals a wide and growing chasm between Democrat progressives and both Hispanics and working-class Americans on a host of cultural issues.

In the poll, Hispanics and members of the working class revealed that they agree with the statement "America is the greatest nation in the world," believe that you get ahead in America through hard work, think "athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender," and want their police departments fully funded.

Progressives in the poll took the exact opposite position on every one of these issues.  Ironically, the poll reveals that it is progressives, not Hispanics, who believe that America is a systemically racist nation.

Hispanics, like most middle- and working-class Americans, are rejecting not just Biden, but the entire Democrat progressive ethos and the policies that emanate from that ideology, and are naturally attracted to a party that champions their values.

Do not expect a chastened Democrat party to learn any lessons from its coming 2022 election losses and moderate its progressive agenda.  The Democrats most likely to lose their seats are the party's so-called moderates running in "purplish" districts. Progressives running in deep blue progressive districts in NYC and San Francisco will keep their seats and be in position to run the party and set its agenda.

In 2023, party progressives will double down on the pursuit of their agenda items, including eliminating fossil fuels, putting all elections under federal government control, passing a federal late-term abortion bill, raising taxes on the middle class, packing the   Supreme Court, keeping the U.S. southern border porous, and enhancing administrative agencies' ability to control Americans' lives.

The GOP House members will propose legislation that promotes the party's commonsense, centrist America First vision for the next decade: creating prosperity and opportunity for all citizens, restoring American energy independence, protecting our borders, restricting government power to its constitutional limits, and maintaining a strong defense while avoiding unnecessary foreign interventions.

And polls indicate that Americans are choosing the GOP's vision of America's future over that of the progressive Democrat party, leading to the Republicans taking the House in 2022 and the Senate either in 2022 or in 2024, along with the presidency.

The two parties are evolving into entities espousing inherently contrary views of the direction America should take economically, politically, and culturally.

Pundits and media talking heads point to this emerging ideological bifurcation as evidence that America has become a "fundamentally divided" nation.  These critics could not be more wrong.  This divergence in philosophy and political agenda really signifies that Americans finally have a genuine choice about the kind of country they want America to be.

Sociologist Michael G. Zey, Ph.D. is the author of Ageless NationSeizing the Future, and The Future Factor, Professor, Montclair State University (retired).  www.zey.com.  twitter.com/futurist3000.  Facebook.


Dark Money Network Boosts Wisconsin Dem Who Wants To End Undisclosed Funding in Politics

Group backed by Sixteen Thirty Fund to spend $5 million to support Mandela Barnes

Mandela Barnes (Getty Images)
 • August 3, 2022 4:59 am

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Mandela Barnes, a Democratic Senate candidate in Wisconsin, is getting a major boost from a liberal dark-money network despite campaigning on a pledge to crack down on undisclosed funding in politics.

The Family Friendly Action PAC, a group run by Democratic political operatives that announced a $23 million election canvassing operation last week, endorsed Barnes, the presumptive Democratic nominee, on Monday and said it plans to spend at least $5 million to support his race against Republican incumbent senator Ron Johnson. The super PAC is primarily funded by the dark-money organizations Sixteen Thirty Fund and America Votes.

The funding is at odds with Barnes’s professed opposition to undisclosed political spending. The candidate has promised to "stand up to the corrupting influence of dark money" and highlighted the issue as a key plank of his campaign.

The Family Friendly Action PAC on Monday announced its endorsement of Barnes and said it was "proud to support him as he runs to replace Ron Johnson."

The super PAC received $1.4 million from America Votes and $285,000 from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, according to FEC records.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund is one of the largest liberal dark-money organizations and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the 2020 election. America Votes, another dark-money group, received most of its funding from the Sixteen Thirty Fund in the 2020 cycle, according to Politico.

Barnes has not publicly objected to the Family Friendly Action PAC’s endorsement or spending pledge. The super PAC’s Wisconsin state director Brita Olsen worked as a consultant for Barnes in 2019.

Barnes’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first time outside groups have moved to help Barnes despite his supposed opposition to dark money and corporate PACs. On June 15, the Democrat posted a note on his website saying he needed help getting positive advertising about his personal background out to the pricey "Milwaukee, Madison and the Green Bay media markets."

Days later, a group called the Courageous Leaders PAC—funded by Barnes donor Karla Jurvetson—poured more than $400,000 into ads promoting the exact message outlined by Barnes, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Barnes’s campaign also hired Marc Elias, one of the Democratic Party’s top "dark money" lawyers, the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this year. Elias’s firm works for Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consulting firm that manages the Sixteen Thirty Fund and similar groups.


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