OPINION: Last Week’s Gubernatorial Election Results May Be a Precursor of Elections in 2022 and 2024

If it wasn’t so painfully pathetic to watch, it might make you laugh out loud, but the machinations of our progressive socialist government are real.  It might look like you’re watching a very bad remake of an old Abbot and Costello movie if it wasn’t for the fact that the punch lines have serious consequences on each and every one of us.

Take the illegal immigrant who breaks and enters our borders and, instead of paying the consequences of his crime, receives a $450,000 apology for having been caught.  It’s not so outlandishly funny as it may seem; it’s what the Biden administration proposes.

Senator Lindsey Graham [R-SC], for one, was not amused; Newsweek reports that he posted his indignation on social media, saying: “I just about fell out of my chair when I read this. For the sake of our country, I hope this reporting is in error. This would be an OUTRAGE‼️”.

He was reacting to news that the Biden administration is considering settlements of $450,000 for illegal immigrant families separated while trying to unlawfully enter the U.S.

As Donald Trump Jr. put it: “You lost your business, your job, family members whose funerals you couldn’t attend.  The IRS wants to audit you if you had $600 in your bank account the government gave you $2000, but if you’re inconvenienced coming here illegally $450,000 EACH!”

Question: do the misguided souls who run our country these days think voters aren’t going to notice stuff like that, not to mention the disastrous exit we made from Afghanistan, the efforts to use our schools to brainwash our kids by teaching them to accept a socialist mindset or the unprecedented crisis at our southern border?  Duh!  Well, President Biden, the voters are not amused; they’re angry as we all saw last week.  You thought that the Democratic governors of Virginia and New Jersey, Terry McAuliffe and Phil Murphy, respectively, were sure bets to be reelected. 

Did you think the voters in Virginia and those in New Jersey, not to mention the voters across the country, are deaf, dumb, and blind? 

The polls had McAuliffe, who has been called a political hack, winning reelection handily; instead, he was ousted from office by Glenn Youngkin, a political unknown.  Strategist Keith Naughton says, “I think it’s clear that Youngkin and Republicans have found issues that work.  You’ve got to address voters’ direct concerns and not your own hobby horses, for lack of a better term. You’ve got to react to what the voters want.”

Senator Joe Manchin, the moderate Democrat from West Virginia, warned his party that they “have to be more attentive to the people back home.”  In other words, the party  — as it stands today with its growing share of socialist-minded members — is ignoring the fact that not all Americans are ready to give up their freedoms and willing to stand by as they take over their lives.

So, what happened in New Jersey?  The jury is still out.  It looks like Governor Murphy, a self-described progressive, had the edge, but his opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, would not go gently into the good night because, embarrassingly enough, Governor Murphy declared victory with a paltry number of votes, and so Ciattarelli is challenging him.  Prior to the election, Murphy was expected by the pollsters to win by a healthy 11% margin.  But when he was declared the winner on election night, the margin was less than one percent. 

The takeaway from all of this was summed up in an analysis by the Gallup organization: 

-The voters in both those states linked incumbents McAuliffe, who lost, and Murphy, who barely won reelection, with the politics of President Biden, bearing in mind that Biden’s approval rating “between his first and third quarters is the largest such swing since World War II.  Biden’s latest rating of 42% is even lower than his third-quarter average overall, according to Gallup. [Meanwhile, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll shows his approval rating fell to 38% over the past week.]

-Education issues [including the Critical Race Theory] played a major role in McAuliffe’s defeat.

Exit polls in Virginia showed that their two top-of-mind concerns were education and the economy.  Voters — particularly those with kids — did not take kindly to McAuliffe’s offensive comment that he didn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

-These issues may apparently sway voters in the 2022 midterm and the 2024 Presidential elections.

As Gallup puts it, “More Americans typically prefer a limited government role to an active one, [and] think there is too much rather than too little regulation of business and believe the government is too powerful … The optimal role of government in its citizens’ lives is one concern that is almost certainly going to persist in all elections at all levels going forward.” 

It’s interesting to note that last year, before the 2020 Presidential Elections, more Democrats and Independents expressed the desire to have the government take a more active role in making decisions that impact their lives.  For example, 56% of Independent voters at that time believed that the government needed to be more active in making decisions that impact our lives compared to just 38% now, according to Gallup.

Gallup’s research shows that “Americans’ preference for a limited government role is also evident when they are asked to consider the trade-offs between taxes and government services. Given a choice, half of Americans say they prefer fewer government services and lower taxes, while 19% want higher taxes and more services. Twenty-nine percent want taxes and services as they are now.”

The bottom line: although the Biden administration and a Congress that has been infiltrated by controlling progressive elements has been at the helm for just 10 months, the citizenry is ready for a dynamic change in direction back to the norms of the good old days.

John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.