Wildcard – Beware Midterm Complacency

Complacency sneaks up on you, even with resolve and good intentions. Before you know it, energy, focus, and outcomes – slip away. We know how it works – especially in politics. Here’s a gut punch: If Conservatives do not wake up, sharpen their message, swing like every pitch counts, they will lose the Senate, maybe the House – left wins.

Look at the data 100 days out of midterms. Messaging is all over the place, distractions a dime a dozen, Trump raid, January 6^th, Liz Cheney, COVID 4.0, Monkey Pox, Ukraine, shark bites, drought, Inflation Reduction Act, Trump to blame for everything, Biden and Democrats nothing.

Polls are shifting, messages muddy, wishful thinking, hopeful assumptions replacing hard-headed expression of what ails us and why, planning, strategy, and hard work in the field. Politics is a zero-sum game; if Republicans stumble, Democrats pull up – regardless of reality.

Needed is focus on big things, the massive tectonic plate shift happening in our culture, economy, and political process – an intentional concentration of power by the left wing of the Democrat Party, including attacks on American history, traditions, institutions, and way of life.

In sum, leftist Democrats are fomenting attacks on bedrock American values. In at least SIX big ways, the left is seeking to “transform” America, twist the truth to concentrate power. How?

• Attacks on Parents. The Democrat Party, at the local, state and federal levels, is giving nodding approval to – and in many states actively pushing – federal control over local school boards, replacing parents and local priorities with national union representatives and the federal government. When a parent is no longer in charge of their children’s education, that is not America.  

Parents are deeply worried about their children’s moral, physical, and academic education, proper teaching of math, biology, history, core truths, the definition of boys and girls, safety in locker rooms, bathrooms, Title 9, equal opportunity, merit in sports and academics over entitlement, honoring personal faith. For that, they are called terrorists, investigated. That is not America.

• Attacks on Public Safety. The Democrat Party has imperiled public safety by deriding law enforcement, permitting political violence, inciting racism in schools and streets, attacking legitimate Supreme Court decisions, permitting justices to live in fear, shadowed, threatened, chided, and nearly killed, not prosecuting those attacking pro-life centers (100 attacks since Dobbs). They opened our borders, triggered record homicides, drug trafficking, and overdoes. That is not America.
• Attacks on Rule of Law. They tacitly accept cancelling free speech for conservatives on campuses and online, walk away from accountability for a presidential candidate who fed lies to the FBI to nobble her opponent, and a vice president who carted his son on Airforce Two to China, where the son sucked up tens of millions of dollars, memorialized in real evidence currently in FBI possession. No Democrat speaks about it. That is not America.
• Attacks on Language. When a pro-inflation act is entitled “Inflation Reduction,” when an economy in recession is called “robust,” when higher taxes, overspending, shutting down the energy sector, giving away money are described as the opposite, when illegal aliens – aliens who break the law by illegal entry – cannot be called that, this is an attack on truth, an Orwellian attack on language.
• Attacks on Jobs. When rolling federal giveaways, from COVID money and federal unemployment benefits to loan forgiveness create record entitlement, higher prices, real wage reductions, predictable unemployment, consumer doubt, fast rising interest rates, a sudden drop in home sales, and tight labor market, someone is killing economic independence, entrepreneurism, individualism, economic stability, and jobs. That is not America.
• Attacks on Rights. When repeated lockdowns throw people out of school and work for years, penalizing them for attending church, working, gathering with friends or family for holidays, ruining a generation’s ability to socialize and learn, bankrupting thousands of small businesses, isolating tens of millions of people which triggered mass rises in drug abuse, suicides, and crime, basic rights are under attack. That is not American.
• Attacks on Elections. When defending election integrity is considered hate speech, conspiracy talk, disallowed, illegal, suspect, or “violent extremism,” something is not right. When election procedures change to accommodate COVID fears, questions naturally arise about mass ballot mailing, ballot harvesting, out of precinct voting, suspended roll checking, executive override of legislative rights, time and date changes, new methods for vote casting and counting, and the potential for electoral fraud. They must be addressed. In a democracy, election integrity matters. When one party demeans the other for asking, something is wrong. That is not America.

Net-net, the problem is the Democrat Party is attacking America. Overrun by leftist activism and ideology, a major portion of that party openly contests core American values. Republicans, Independents, and centrist Democrats must focus on big things, and condemn what is not right.

Complacency is sneaky. It creeps on a body politic like an ugly infection, leaves people weary, disoriented, dismayed, ultimately disappointed after an election they thought they would win. In these 2022 midterm elections, America cannot let complacency win. If it does, we all lose.