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POLITICS

5 Ways Trump Shows How to Win Elections The future belongs to Republicans who care more about their voters than the media. Daniel Greenfield

What can Republicans learn from Trump’s victory? The biggest lesson is that the old way of politics is dead. McCain and Romney showed that twice. Now Trump has shown how Republicans can actually win.

1. Find Your Natural Base

The GOP is ashamed of its base. It doesn’t like being associated with the very voters who made 2016 happen. Its autopsy last time around searched for ways to leave the white working class behind.

There’s a party that did that. Their symbol is a jackass. They just lost big because they ran out of working class white voters.

The Democrats have tried to manufacture their base using immigration, victimhood politics and identity politics. The GOP has wasted far too much time trying to compete on the same playing field while neglecting its base. Trump won by doing what the GOP could have done all along if its leadership hadn’t been too ashamed to talk to people it considered low class because they shop at WalMart.

The GOP wanted a better image. It cringed at Trump’s red caps and his rallies. And they worked.

Trump won because he found the neglected base of working class white voters who had been left behind. He didn’t care about looking uncool by courting them. Instead he threw himself into it.

That’s why McCain and Romney lost. It’s why Bush and Trump won.

The GOP is not the cool party. It’s never going to be. It’s the party of the people who have been shut out, stepped on and kicked around by the cool people. Trump understood that. The GOP didn’t.

The GOP’s urban elites would like to create an imaginary cool party that would be just like the Democrats, but with fiscally conservative principles. That party can’t and won’t exist.

You can run with the base you have. Or you can lose.

2. Media and Celebrities Don’t Matter

The first rule of Republican politics is to look in the mirror and ask, “Are we trying to be Democrats?”

Twice Obama’s big glittering machine of celebrities, media and memes rolled over hapless Republicans. Republican operatives desperately wondered how they could run against Oprah, Beyonce and BuzzFeed. How were they supposed to survive being mocked by Saturday Night Live and attacked by the media?

The answer was to find voters who weren’t making their decisions based on any of those things.

The GOP’s approach in the last few elections was to try and duplicate the Obama machine. These efforts were clumsy, awkward, expensive and stupid. The Obama machine was great at influencing its target electorate of urban and suburban millennial college grads because that’s who ran it and directed it. But that’s not the Republican base. And chasing it was a waste of time, money and energy.

Instead of trying to duplicate the Obama machine, the Trump campaign targeted a class of voters who didn’t care about those things. The white working class that turned out for Trump was a world away from the cultural obsessions of the urban elites who had traditionally shaped both sets of campaigns.

Romney wanted everyone to like him. Being rejected hurt him so much because he wanted to be accepted. Trump ran as an outsider. Being rejected by the establishment was a badge of pride. He couldn’t be humiliated by being mocked by the cool kids because he wasn’t trying to be accepted.

Asking, “Are we trying to be Democrats?” isn’t just for policy. It’s also something for Republicans to remember when Election Day comes around. The Republican base isn’t the Democrat base. When Republicans commit to pursuing their base, they can stop worrying about what Saturday Night Live, Samantha Bee and random celebrities think of them. And they can just be themselves.

Out-Rigging the Vote Never Underestimate the inexplicable. By David Solway

There can be no doubt that the voting process was rigged against Donald Trump in more ways than one. According to reports, fiscal criminal and youthful Nazi collaborator George Soros’ vast fortune was in play to swing the election Hillary’s way, including fomenting violence at Trump’s rallies (for which Trump himself was blamed). Clinton cash, illegally gained, bankrolled a promotional campaign that blitzed the nation. Dead voters, multiple voters, illegal voters, and opportunely-pardoned felons, loyal Democrats all, were evident at the polls in considerable force, like the zombies swarming the last bastion of civilization in the 2016 film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. “Today’s voter lists,” writes former into-tech management consultant Paul Murphy, “are generally thought to include something like 1.8 million dead voters, 6.4 million illegals, 1.8 million ineligible felons, and perhaps 2.7 million people registered to vote in more than one state.” And of course the polls were skewed in Hillary’s favor through selective sampling techniques in what is known as a psyops strategy to influence the behavior of voters, creating the impression that Clinton was gathering momentum.

And yet Trump won against the odds, prompting the question: Were there really enough votes in flyover country and leftover country to offset the oleaginous corruption greasing Hillary’s route to the White House and to discount the vote-rich conurbations and coastal corridors, the mentally vacant celebrity class, the entire left-liberal elite, the fraudulent pollsters, the lying media, the deceased, the duped, the traumatic feminists, the compromised academics, the blizzard of snowflake students blanketing the eduscape, the Muslim fifth column, the disaffected Libertarians voting for nonsense candidates, and the turncoat Republicans who may as well have registered as Democratic operatives? This seems a rather implausible assumption.

I have a theory, which I will share with bemused readers. I believe the key factor in producing so improbable an electoral outcome was, frankly speaking, Israel, not the country itself but the all-powerful Cosmocrator who rules the universe, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For the Lord knew that the policies of Barack Obama’s administration had put Israel at critical risk in the most volatile region in the world, and that the leaders of Iran, taking a page from their ancestor Haman the Agagite, were plotting the wholesale destruction of the Jewish state. The Lord also knew that Hillary Clinton and the crime syndicate known as the Democratic Party would advance Iran’s genocidal project.

Neither did He forget the plight of the American people under a venal and iniquitous regime nor America’s covenantal vocation. Did not the Pilgrims see themselves as Israelites in the wilderness—“We shall find that the God of Israel is among us” John Winthrop preached in his 1630 sermon A Modell of Christian Charity—and did not the Declaration of Independence echo the Sinai covenant? Did not John Adams write in a letter to Thomas Jefferson “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize man than any other nation” and did not Lincoln at Independence Hall in Philadelphia quote from the imprecatory Psalm 137? Were not Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem bound together? CONTINUE AT SITE

The Unbearable Lightness of Anti-Trump Hysterics By Patricia McCarthy

Donald Trump’s victory on November 8 was a shock to liberals all over the country, all over the world. So confident of their own brilliance, superiority and their own rightness in all things, his win was a major shock to their tender but blinkered sensibilities. It had apparently not occurred to them that he could actually win. So out of touch with the American people outside of their personal space, they were completely taken by surprise by his electoral success.

Hillary and her inner circle were shocked as well. It never occurred to them that her many crimes, her foundation schemes to enrich herself, her lifetime of lying and her carelessness about national security would filter down to voters. They assumed regular people, those stupid people Jonathan Gruber counted on to accept the nonsense that is Obamacare, would not know about or read the thousands of leaked Podesta emails that expose the totally self-serving nature of the Clintons and their staff. The emails prove that they care nothing about the country, the shrinking middle class, ISIS, or Iran’s nuclear ambitions. They care only about winning, keeping power and staying rich. Liberals routinely and mistakenly view the American people as beneath them, as ignorant. To their great shock, the deplorables are more informed than Clinton and the DNC ever thought possible.

Van Jones on CNN of course blamed the defeat of HRC on racism. He called it a “whitelash.” Clever? Not so much. He is among the most racist pundits we have had to endure these past eight years. His hatred of white people oozes out of every pore. He has no clue about the country he is so in the habit of vilifying. He is an Al Sharpton, a typical race hustler, in a fancy suit and expensive glasses.

Cokie Roberts reliably blamed sexism. Hillary lost because she is a woman. Men just don’t want to see a woman in the White House! Nonsense. It curiously has not occurred to her that it might be Hillary’s record abent of any achievement, her criminal history, her pathological lying, or her abuse of victimized women in the furtherance of her husband’s career that turned voters against her.

The worst example of mind-numbed bias was Martha Raddatz, a long-time progressive who was inexplicably allowed to “moderate” one of the debates. Fighting back tears, not only did she describe Trump’s victory as a victory for racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia — all the usual accusations that spill so easily off the tongues of liberals when describing conservatives — she claimed no military servicemen would be safe under a Trump administration because he so clearly knows nothing about the military or foreign policy.

Excuse me! Barack Obama has done such terrible damage to our men and women who serve that he should be in the brig. He tied the hands of his generals who stayed. He fired those, hundreds of them, who refused to do his anti-military bidding. Obama’s ridiculous rules of engagement have been the cause of hundreds, maybe even thousands of American deaths in Afghanistan. Our guys are hardly allowed to defend themselves. Trump will change that. Raddatz is sadly typical of the uninformed left. So oblivious to facts that do not fit with her own ideology, she has become as ignorant as she thinks Trump’s irredeemable voters are.

Trump and the Democrats The lesson: Progressive government can’t be imposed from the top.

Donald Trump’s victory is already inspiring reflection about the future of the Republican Party, and rightly so, but Democrats don’t seem to be undertaking any similar introspection. This is a mistake, because they wouldn’t have been ushered out of power up and down the ballot if the American public wasn’t rejecting the results and methods of the last eight years.

Liberals are attributing Hillary Clinton’s loss to FBI Director Jim Comey, while the more honest admit her email scandal and Clinton Foundation ethics were problems. Others note she was a less than inspiring campaigner. The left’s all-purpose answer seems to be that the same American people who elected President Obama twice have defaulted to their traditional sexism, racism and xenophobia.

Blaming “white-lash” is silly—of the roughly 700 U.S. counties that Mr. Obama won twice, about one-third broke this time for Mr. Trump—but these cultural rationalizations are lamentable and instructive. Too many liberals, and some conservatives, simply cannot imagine how great numbers of Americans think and perceive their own interests. Thus wrong opinions must be the result of cognitive limitations or character flaws. Mrs. Clinton called Trump supporters “deplorables,” “irredeemable” and “not America,” as if there could be no other explanation.

These failures of empathy are also a staple of Mr. Obama’s rhetoric, with his moral lectures about who we are as Americans and the arc of history always bending toward—well, his point of view. For the President, and most prominent Democrats these days, opponents who debate policies and principles never do so in good faith.

For eight long years Mr. Obama’s belief that he holds the mandate of heaven has guided how he has used and abused presidential power. He was elected in 2008 on a message of hope and centrist unity, but he was soon ramming through 40 years of pent-up progressive priorities. Recall his famous 2009 brush-off of Republican Eric Cantor, who had proposed some bipartisan ideas for the stimulus: “Eric, I won.”

Democrats imposed ObamaCare on a straight partisan majority, though the polls showed there was no political consensus about a new entitlement among the oft-invoked, rarely consulted American people. National health care is no more popular today and is now misfiring in all the ways the critics predicted. The GOP was frozen out of all major economic decisions in 2009-10, and one price was the weak recovery that persists to this day.

Democrats did have a historic supermajority, but that wasn’t a mandate to do whatever they could get away with, and they lost a record 63 House seats in the midterms as punishment. Mr. Obama then feinted toward a grand bargain with John Boehner, only to ambush the then Speaker with politically impossible tax-increase demands at the 11th hour.

The President won re-election in 2012 by converting a decent man like Mitt Romney into a monster who would prosecute a “war on women.” He also weaponized identity politics to polarize voters for his own purposes.

The GOP’s Down Ballot Sweep The party adds to its historic dominance at the state level.

How a President Donald Trump will change the Republican party isn’t obvious, amid countless media predictions of doom. But one under-reported story of Tuesday’s election is that reform-minded Republicans continued their march in the states, and the party controls a record 69 of 99 legislative majorities across the country.

Republicans flipped three state legislative chambers, including the Iowa senate and Kentucky house, which turned for the GOP for the first time in almost 100 years. Bluegrass State Republicans defeated the house speaker, who was first elected in 1980, and the GOP controls both legislative houses and the governorship. Watch for right-to-work legislation, pension reform and school choice.

Republicans defended majorities in states such as West Virginia, Michigan and Maine, where Democrats dropped $2 million on some senate seats. The GOP held on to supermajorities in the North Carolina house and senate, and it added to majorities in the Wisconsin assembly and senate. The Ohio house supermajority reached an new high. These gains will allow for more innovative ideas from state laboratories.
The GOP also cleaned up in a few Democratic strongholds: Republicans gained four seats in the Illinois house, ending a Democratic supermajority. Great news for Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, who has been held hostage on public pensions, education and even passing a budget. The party of Lincoln took the Minnesota senate, and the Connecticut senate is now an 18-18 tie, a result that may save the state from more progressive taxation and spending.

Republicans lost the house and senate in Nevada, a defeat driven by Sen. Harry Reid’s turnout machine and a poor Trump performance in the state. The latter also hurt Republican candidates for the New Mexico house, which Democrats took. Republicans now hold the governorship and both chambers in some 25 states. The number for Democrats? Four. CONTINUE AT SITE

A Blow to the Non-Elite Elite Biased and incompetent elites polluted the 2016 election, and they are getting what they deserved. By Victor Davis Hanson —

There were a lot of losers in this election, well beyond Hillary Clinton and the smug, incompetent pollsters and know-it-all, groupthink pundits who embarrassed themselves.

From hacked e-mail troves we received a glimpse of the bankrupt values of Washington journalists, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, and wealthy donors. Despite their brand-name Ivy League degrees and 1 percenter ré​sumé​s, dozens of the highly paid grandees who run our country and shape our news appear petty and spiteful — and clueless about the America that exists beyond their Beltway habitat.

Leveraging rich people for favors and money seems an obsession. They brag about wealth and status in the fashion of preteens.

Journalists often violated their own ethics codes during the campaign. Political analyst Donna Brazile even leaked debate topics to the Clinton team. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank reportedly asked the Democratic National Committee to provide him with anti-Trump research.

Reading about the characters who inhabit the Clinton campaign e-mail trove, one wonders about the purpose of their Yale degrees, their tenures at Goldman Sachs, even their very stints in the Clinton campaign. Was the end game to lose their souls?

One big loser is the Obama Justice Department — or rather the very concept of justice as administered by the present administration. It has gone the tainted way of the IRS, VA, and NSA. The Justice Department clearly pressured the FBI to limit its investigation of pay-for-play corruption at the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.

Seemingly every few weeks of the campaign, FBI director James Comey flip-flopped — depending on whether the most recent pressure on him came from rank-and-file FBI agents, the Clinton campaign, or his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Lynch met with Bill Clinton in a secret “accidental” encounter on an airport tarmac while Hillary Clinton was under investigation. Immunity was granted to several Clinton aides without the FBI obtaining much cooperation in return. Clinton techies invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to testify before Congress.

Clinton campaign organizer John Podesta was in direct contact with his old friend, Peter Kadzik, a high-ranking Justice Department official who was tipping off the Clinton campaign about an impending hearing and a legal filing regarding Clinton’s e-mails. Until he was reassigned, Kadzik was in charge of the Justice Department’s probe of the Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner e-mail trove.

A special prosecutor should have been appointed. But Democrats and Republicans alike had long ago soured on the use of special prosecutors. Democrats felt that Ken Starr went way beyond his mandates in pursuing Bill Clinton’s excesses. Republicans charged that Lawrence Walsh’s investigation of the Iran-Contra affair had turned into a witch hunt.

REALITY INTRUDES

It isn’t nice to delight in another’s misery, but in the case of Hillary Clinton an exception can be made.

Fairfax correspondent Paul McGeough, just two days ago assured his SMH and Age readers with the full measure of his magisterial authority:

On Wednesday, Americans will awake from a nightmare. Donald Trump will not be their president.

But relief will be short-lived. It will be more a “ha, ha, gotcha” moment appropriate to a lingering Halloween mood; because Trump is likely to be a sore loser, ready to inflict serial new nightmares on the US before he’s done with politics.

What’s all this based on? The losing part is a gut feel, supplemented by the late polling and high turnout numbers in early voting, especially on a Latino surge that is especially ominous for Trump.

And those nightmares to come? That’s based on what I suspect will be Trump’s inability to walk away from the crater of his campaign, without attempting to make it into something else – remember his claim that he always makes success from failure?

Americans woke up as usual. The Fairfax rags continue sleep-walking to their doom.

Roger Franklin Morning in America? (Update 2)

Quadrant Online spent the day watching Americans exercise their franchise in a presidential election that has already re-written the rule book. Can Donald Trump, the abrasive, egomaniacal outsider the Establishment loves to hate, pull it off? To borrow from Obama: Yes he did!

WEDNESDAY, 10am: So it’s President Trump, who should end up with around 300 Electoral College votes.

As I type, Hillary Clinton is preparing to make her belated concession speech. The TV footage of her walk to the waiting limo, Bill by her side, showed a woman wearing a fawn pant suit* and a supercilious smile. It is the same grin one sees on public figures who find themselves in court, where the defeated presidential candidate may well find herself.

Yes, she has been “cleared” of the email scandal, sort of, by the Eastern District investigators based in Brooklyn. But there is another probe being conducted across the East River by the Southern District, where the focus is on pay-to-play allegations involving the Clinton Foundation. This office is run and staffed by people who were hired by Rudy Giuliani, a Trump surrogate and hot tip to become Attorney General. The Brooklyn operation, by contrast, is run and staffed by people hired for the most part by Loretta Lynch, who was appointed to that post under Bill Clinton and subsequently elevated to Attorney General by Obama.

Does one need to be terminally suspicious to see why the foot-dragging email probe took so long and why, having identified a rash of violations, the Brooklynites deemed them unworthy of prosecution?

Now the Manhattan crew will be able to get the co-operation they have been requesting from across the river. Expect a grand jury to be convened and, if the leaks and whispers are correct, charges brought.

Should that happen there will be both justice and poetic justice in the wind. Throughout their public lives the Clintons have used and discarded those who might and did help them — Whitewater associates, the future trader who made Hillary a small fortune in the cattle market by assigning profitable trades to her account after the market closed.

Now, denied the White House, the Clintons aren’t of much use to anyone.

This is going to be marvelous theatre, count on it.

*rather than do a McGeough, let it be admitted that the footage of Hillary and Bill just screened on CNN was, as it turns out, from the archives. The colour of her pant suit is not yet known, but she will be wearing that felon’s smile. It is all she has left to hide behind

************

WASHINGTON DC, 7.30pm: Once upon a time, in a more innocent age, Americans liked to crow that their electoral system was the fairest, best and most reliable in the world. Mind you, they said much the same about the cars that poured out of Detroit as well, only to be disabused of such ill-founded confidence by the plagues of Toyotas, VWs and other imports that, with the help of a bloody-minded United Auto Workers, humbled Ford and General Motors while seeing Chrysler sold off to Fiat.

Democracy might prove more vigorous, though no less prone to breakdowns, if today’s 170-mile tour of Pennsylvania and its polling places is any indication.

Unlike many other states, Pennsylvania obliges its citizens to vote on Election Day and not a second earlier. Today, in Philadelphia, that heavily black city was queueing with a patience that would have put a Londoner to shame. The City of Brotherly Love, it need hardly to said, always go Democrat, although you have to wonder why. Time after time, mayors and City Hall pols, hangers-on, judges, police, state legislators, local officials and union leaders have traded their offices first for monetary gain and later, in the case of the less careful, for jail cells. Corruption in Philly is as much a part of the local culture as the cheesesteak and it has been that way for quite some time, at least since the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens observed that the city was corrupt and content to stay that way. That was back in 1903 and the contentment yesterday was palpable.

Roger Franklin: The Unspeakable vs the Unpalatable

Ever the gentleman, Ronald Reagan would have disapproved of his party’s latest presidential candidate’s language and vulgarian demeanour, but he would also have recognised a man whose message, like his own, resonates with an electorate sick of business-as-usual politics.
Monday night in Washington DC, election eve, and who, apart from the pollsters, knows what to think? Hillary by two-to-four percent, that seems to be the final consensus of all their sampling, weighting, adjusting, tickling, divining and projecting as the grand kabuki drama of this year’s presidential race staggers toward its climax 24 hours from now and the foot-stomping, snarling and grimacing is done. Or do you ‘go with your gut’, as a Trump acolyte put it this afternoon while picking through a bargain bin of marked-down Hillary ’16 T-shirts at a shop on E Street specialising in electionabilia.

“Would they be discounting them if she had a chance?” wondered Emily Shernhoff, 47, who was visiting the US capital from Iowa and wanted some small-change gifts for Democrat friends back home. “They want the White House,” she began, paraphrasing an old gag, “but all they’ll get is a lousy T-shirt.”

As theories and auguries go, the 70% discount on Hillarywear seemed as good as any, possibly better than most. At the counter, the young black woman ringing up my purchases endorsed that particular prognostication more than somewhat. Who would win tomorrow’s vote, she was asked, going by the merchandise her store has been moving?

“Trump,” she said. “We’ve sold a lot more of his T-shirts than hers.”

So that must be why Hillary’s T-shirts are discounted.

“No, Trump’s are marked down too.”

I took the full-price unit back to the shelf, found the bargain bin and saved myself $12. At the counter once again, it was hard not to smile. The handsome T-shirt, in Republican red and bearing the Trump name above his campaign slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, bears a label proclaiming it was made in Honduras – imported tariff-free under the NAFTA pact that the man whose cause it espouses has vowed to “renegotiate”, if not scrap altogether.

Elite Media Meltdown The most egregious reactions from the mainstream press on the Trump victory. November 10, 2016 Joseph Klein

President Obama and Hillary Clinton struck positive notes of healing and reconciliation in their public remarks following President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning victory. However, the elite liberal media establishment, which had largely served as a propaganda arm of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, continues to lash out at the president-elect as if the campaign were still in full swing.

The New York Times’ lead editorial on November 9th, entitled “The Trump Revolt,” regurgitated the charges the Times’ editors and columnists have leveled at Trump so frequently during the last year. Trump “has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people,” the post-election editorial proclaimed. “We know he lies without compunction,” intoned the Times’ editors, who seem to have forgotten the description by the Times’ late columnist William Safire of Hillary Clinton as a “congenital liar.” Using typical left-wing race-baiting tactics, the editors wrote that Trump “has recruited as his allies a dark combination of racists, white supremacists and anti-Semites,” citing a celebratory tweet by David Duke, whom Trump and his campaign have repeatedly disavowed.

To top it off, the Times’ editors darkly warned that the change Trump’s supporters had voted for risks placing the United States “on a precipice.”

One of the New York Times’ lead op-ed writers, Thomas Friedman, wailed that “at the moment I am in anguish, frightened for my country and for our unity. And for the first time, I feel homeless in America.”

The leftist Huffington Post’s senior politics editor, Sam Stein, wrote that Americans “chose to jump into the abyss” by electing Trump. Mirroring the Times’ race-baiting, Stein wrote that Trump “is a nativist, and one who has brought in his wake a scary thread of anti-Semitism and racism that has marred the entire 16-month presidential campaign.”

Slate featured articles with such outrageous headlines as “White Women Sold Out the Sisterhood and the World by Voting for Trump” and “White Won.” The latter article’s sub-heading was “We are still the country that produced George Wallace. We are still the country that killed Emmett Till.” One headline Slate did probably get right was “Donald Trump Will Erase the Obama Era.” Obama had made the election a referendum on his own legacy and the voters gave him their verdict.

David Corn wrote in Mother Jones that “America is broken.” Trying to be too clever by half, Corn added that “Hate did trump.”