Dan Calabrese: If There's 1 Thing the Election Taught Us, It's That Americans Don't Want Radical Leftist Policies
We still don’t know who the next president is going to be, but there’s one thing we can conclude with certainty about this year’s election results: America does not want radical left-wing policies.
Voters sent this signal in several ways yesterday.
First, they sent it by re-electing almost all of the Republican U.S. senators who stood for re-election.
Going into this year’s Senate contests, Republicans were in a very precarious position, having to defend 23 of the 33 seats that were contested this year.
For comparison’s sake, Democrats in 2018 faced a similar situation. It was so difficult for them to overcome that, even in a year when they swept to control of the House, they actually lost two
Senate seats. It is extremely difficult to hold your own when you have to defend that many seats.
So going into an election year when they had to defend 23 seats, and with a not-all-that-popular president at the top of their ticket, it wouldn’t have been surprising for Republicans to lose six to eight Senate seats.
Instead, they lost — at most — a net one. If John James somehow pulls out an upset in Michigan, which is still possible as of this writing, Republicans will return next year with the same 53 senators they had in this session.
How is that even possible? It’s possible because voters heard the radical left-wing agenda of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris and, even if some simply wanted to be rid of Donald Trump, they were determined to send others to Washington who would serve as a check on the Democrats’ ambitions.
The second signal voters sent was to flip five House seats from Democrat to Republican.
This was not supposed to happen. All the polling indicated Democrats were going to increase their majority in the House and give Speaker Nancy Pelosi even more power to pursue her big-government priorities.
Instead, Democrats found themselves dumbfounded as they woke up this morning with a smaller majority than they had before.
Not only will Democrats not be able to get their looniest ideas through a Republican Senate, they’ll even struggle to get them through a Democrat House that includes quite a few House members from districts Trump won. These folks will be reluctant to sign on to the left’s most radical agenda items, meaning Pelosi might not even be able to get things like tax increases and government health care through her own chamber.
Finally, voters signaled their distaste for the radical left’s agenda by giving Donald Trump a much better showing than the polls had indicated. We still don’t know if Trump won or lost, but we do know the blue wipeout the media promised us came nowhere near happening.
The only way to explain this is to look at what voters saw of the Biden agenda. They heard him promise higher taxes, and a mask mandate, and more lockdowns, and the end of the oil industry.
They may have wanted someone other than Trump, but they don’t want these policies. So they may have been willing to vote for Biden just to bring the Trump era to an end, but they were
darn sure also going to send people to Congress who would stop Biden from letting people like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez set the agenda.
Biden may yet win the presidency. He ran on the most left-wing agenda in our nation’s history.
But he won’t be able to govern that way.
The voters saw to that last night.
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