Democrats promised a blue wave. What happened to it? We'll break down the election results. Also, I'll explain why Democrats taking the House might be the best thing that could have happened to President Trump. Finally, Florida voted to end the disenfranchisement of felons. It was the right call, I think, and I'll explain why. Date: 11-07-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Today on the Matt Wall Show, we'll talk midterms, of course. | |
| Did the fabled blue wave materialize for the Democrats? | |
| No, it did not. | |
| But why? | |
| What can we make of all this? | |
| I'll discuss that and other election-related topics. | |
| Also in that same vein of the election, Florida voted to restore voting rights to felons. | |
| I think that was the right call, and I'll tell you why. | |
| All of that is coming up on the Matt Wall Show. | |
| I'm not sure if you heard about this or not. | |
| It was kind of a little, a small sort of human interest story that the news was talking about last night. | |
| There was an election. | |
| They call it the midterm election. | |
| Maybe you heard about it results, which I'm sure you also heard Democrats took the house as expected Republicans kept the Senate picked up a few seats sort of not expected on that and Democrats gained 28 seats in the house made no gains in the Senate as opposed to say the 2010 midterm elections when obviously Obama was The president and Republicans gained 63 seats in the House, and I think five or six in the Senate. | |
| So that was a red wave. | |
| This is not a blue wave, as was advertised and as we were promised. | |
| Not a blue wave, not a bloodbath. | |
| Wasn't a red wave either. | |
| Wasn't a bloodbath in the other direction. | |
| Now, the spin doctors are going to go to work and spin it one way or another, as they already have been doing, obviously. | |
| There weren't any waves. | |
| There were some ripples going in either direction, which is not what we were told. | |
| Instead, I think the Democrats did basically what they had to do, what they were going to do. | |
| Given the way that the map was drawn up this time around, there really wasn't much chance or possibility that Democrats would fail to gain the House. | |
| So that was going to happen. | |
| It was inevitable. | |
| The question was whether it would be a trouncing and whether they could seize control of the Senate. | |
| At the same time, and the answer to that was no on both counts. | |
| That is pretty, it's kind of incredible when you think about it, because as most people know, the midterms are historically unkind to the party in power. | |
| And then when you add on top of that, the unique factors that Trump brings to the table, being a uniquely divisive president in that a lot of people love him, a lot of people really hate him. | |
| He's also unpopular, approval in the mid 40s. | |
| Whether you like them or not, there's no way around that fact. | |
| So that's something that Democrats should have been able to exploit, but they weren't able to. | |
| They exploited it to some extent, but not to a very large extent. | |
| So you have to evaluate their victory in the House. | |
| I think you have to evaluate it within the context of what was expected and what the sort of bare minimum Was for them and in that context, I don't think it was certainly was not a huge tsunami in their favor as was predicted. | |
| I think maybe they got a few steps above bare minimum. | |
| Though again, we can't call it a big win for Republicans either, but I think when you consider the Democrats and the advantages that they had or should have had going into this. | |
| And the fact that they, you know, were only able to pick up some seats in the House and actually lost in the Senate. | |
| And then also, several of their kind of up-and-coming rock stars, supposedly, that they'd put millions of dollars into and they'd brought celebrities down to campaign for these people in Florida, in Texas, in Georgia. | |
| And all of those lost, too. | |
| Their up-and-coming rock stars lost. | |
| Many of them. | |
| So when you consider that, it seems clear to me that there is still an obstacle in the way for Democrats. | |
| Now, of course, the rabid Trump haters, the really loyal Democrats, they're going to get those people. | |
| But it seems like there are plenty of people who don't really like Trump, aren't necessarily big fans of the Republican Party, yet are hesitant about supporting Democrats. | |
| And why is that? | |
| I think that there are many reasons for this, but let me just point to a few. | |
| Number one, the hatred for white men that you see on the left. | |
| I do, in fact, think that this is a problem. | |
| For the Democrats. | |
| Because there are around 100 million white males in America, and they don't especially like being constantly cast as the villain. | |
| And this liberal use of white man as a pejorative has the, I would think, not very surprising effect of alienating white men who aren't huge fans of having their identity reduced to an insult. | |
| And to compound the problem on top of that, plenty of non-whites and non-men actually don't hate white men. | |
| Nearly as much as Democrats seem to think and want and expect. | |
| And this may shock them to learn, but actually a significant number of women love men and appreciate men. | |
| So resentment towards, open resentment and contempt for 100 million Americans is, let's say, distasteful to most of those 100 million and to a good portion of the other 225 million. | |
| So I think that's a problem for Democrats. | |
| And a second problem. | |
| Nobody cares about celebrity endorsements, okay? | |
| I think Democrats rely way too much on celebrities and on the clout of celebrity to get the results that they want. | |
| You know, you had Oprah campaigning for Stacey Abrams in Georgia, and then she lost. | |
| You had Taylor Swift, to much fanfare, came out and supported the opponent of Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee. | |
| He lost. | |
| There are many left-wing celebrities who Came out in favor of O'Rourke, and he lost, and then many more who were trying to mobilize voters to manufacture this big blue wave, which did not materialize. | |
| So I think it turns out that in fact people don't really care that much what Oprah or Taylor Swift or George Clooney thinks. | |
| Most people are saying to themselves, or I should say most people are not going to say to themselves, Hmm, I really like Marsha Blackburn's policies, but then again, I also really like that song Shake It Off, so I think I'll vote for the other guy. | |
| Most people aren't doing that. | |
| So Democrats have massively overrated the ability of famous people to move the needle, and I think actually there's plenty of reason to believe that the needle might be moved in the opposite direction. | |
| And then the third thing, and this is really big, especially in this particular election, and I think this, more than anything else, explains why the Democrats not only didn't gain control of the Senate, but actually lost seats in the Senate. | |
| I think the number one reason for that, for sure, is Kavanaugh, which was This week, I said that this is going to be a big problem for the Democrats, and I think I was right about that. | |
| The Democrat treatment of Brett Kavanaugh was not only one of the most vile smear campaigns in modern American history, but I still think, and I think clearly this has been vindicated, this perspective, that it was also one of the greatest political blunders in modern American history. | |
| Because it turns out that a lot of people do not really like to see somebody dragged through the mud and destroyed vindictively, maliciously, on unsubstantiated allegations and innuendo. | |
| Most people do not actually delight, as Democrats seem to do, in the personal destruction of innocent men. | |
| And I think on top of that, you know, men, when they watch these kinds of witch hunts unfold, The first thing that men think is, well, we feel really bad for the man who's being targeted, but then also we think, well, what if that was me? | |
| And then women, I think, see this and they think to themselves, what if that was my son? | |
| What if that was my brother or my husband? | |
| So Democrats insist that we believe all women, but normal people know that sometimes women are lying, and sometimes men are not lying, and so the more that they try to force us to see it the other way, I just think it doesn't work. | |
| Imagine if the Kavanaugh soap opera had never happened. | |
| I think Democrats may well have won the Senate in that case. | |
| Then the fourth obstacle for Democrats, I think, And I would just put this under the broad category of madness. | |
| The Democrat Party has become associated with, rightly, I think, madness. | |
| PC madness, gender identity madness, Antifa madness. | |
| So there are plenty of people who look at that, and they are viscerally, instinctively, on a gut level, repelled by it. | |
| Because it just seems crazy to them. | |
| They don't want to be associated with these violent mobs who are throwing Molotov cocktails and everything. | |
| Polls show that over 80% of Americans are fed up with political correctness, and the fact that the Democrat Party owns political correctness and is sort of the arbiter of political correctness, that's a problem for them, because almost everyone hates it. | |
| And then the gender identity stuff, too. | |
| I've been saying for years that this is a bigger problem for Democrats than I think they realize. | |
| I don't think there are very many people who are going to the polls and the number one thing on their mind is that they want to oppose the liberal gender identity crusade. | |
| So it's not the thing that's foremost on people's minds, but it is there. | |
| It's something that people think about. | |
| When you've got one side of the political aisle insisting That men are women. | |
| And that, in fact, if a grown man wants to come into the locker room with our daughter or our wife when they're undressing, when you've got one political party that's making that case, I think that has the effect, again, of viscerally repelling a lot of normal people who may otherwise agree with Democrats on other issues and maybe aren't big fans of Trump or whatever. | |
| And then the fifth big thing, of course, is the Trump The Trump hate. | |
| Democrats have so much hatred for Trump, are so consumed by it, that it's getting to the point where you have to really hate Trump as well, to that extent, on that same level, with that same fury and passion, or the Democrats are going to alienate you. | |
| That's kind of what they demand. | |
| They say Trump is Hitler, and they demand that we all see it exactly that way, where there's no gray area, there's no room in between. | |
| And that's scaring a lot of people away. | |
| And this leads into another point, where Democrats are consumed by hatred for Trump. | |
| Even more than that, the Democratic base insists that its representatives be consumed by hatred for Trump. | |
| That is going to be an even bigger problem for the next two years for Democrats, I believe. | |
| They now control the House of Representatives. | |
| So they have the ability now to launch investigations and to file subpoenas and to look at Trump's tax returns and do all that kind of stuff. | |
| And they've already made it clear that they plan on doing all of that. | |
| If they want to go for impeachment, they could try to go for that as well. | |
| And they're not going to be able to help themselves. | |
| The wheels of government are going to grind to a halt, even more than they've already been at a halt for the last several decades. | |
| They're going to grind to a halt. | |
| And there's going to be total dysfunction, even more dysfunction, as As Democrats in the House spend the next two years focused entirely on their vendetta against Trump. | |
| Just look at what they did to Kavanaugh. | |
| And they weren't even in power. | |
| They didn't really have the ability to actually do anything to him. | |
| But even there, they could not help himself, and they brought everything they could and just dumped it on Kavanaugh. | |
| True, false, doesn't matter. | |
| They weren't worried about the truth of it. | |
| They weren't worried about anything like that. | |
| They just wanted to destroy him. | |
| And so think about that, and then think about that times 100 for the next two years, because I think that's what we're in store for. | |
| It's not going to be good for the country to have even more dysfunction in government and to have a political party that is focused only on destroying the president. | |
| Not going to be good for the country. | |
| It's going to be very bad for the country. | |
| But politically, I think it may be the best thing that could have happened to Trump, actually. | |
| Maybe sort of counterintuitively. | |
| I think once we get past the 2020 election, And the results are in. | |
| I think we may look back and say to ourselves that the thing that sealed the deal was Democrats taking control of the House in 2018. | |
| Because people are... Just consider how sick people were when they saw the Democrat behavior towards Kavanaugh. | |
| And how fed up people were. | |
| And there were a lot of people that were fed up with it and sick of it, who even maybe said to themselves, you know, maybe Kavanaugh's guilty. | |
| I don't really know. | |
| But this is just way overboard. | |
| And I can't support it. | |
| So I think there are going to be a lot of people who look at what the Democrats are going to do over the next two years and are going to say, yeah, you know what? | |
| I'm not a big fan of Trump. | |
| Maybe he has been corrupt or done these things. | |
| I'm not really sure. | |
| But this is just way overboard. | |
| I don't want this to be the sole focus of our political system for years. | |
| I think people are going to get sick of it and the Democrats are not going to be able to help themselves and they're going to shoot themselves in the foot. | |
| All right, another point about elections. | |
| Yesterday, before the results came in, I tweeted something. | |
| I mentioned this on the show yesterday, this point, but I'm going to revisit it briefly. | |
| This is what I tweeted. | |
| I said, elections are important, but No matter who wins, 99.999% of your daily life and existence will be completely unaffected by the results today. | |
| Just a bit of perspective. | |
| Now, this tweet provoked a massive response, like 3,000 responses and counting, I think, and much of it was very angry. | |
| People were incensed, liberals especially, they were incensed at the notion that their lives don't necessarily hinge on the machinations of politicians. | |
| They were mad that I would dare suggest That they exist apart from election results, and that their existence will continue on, basically unimpeded, no matter who's in office. | |
| Many people told me that I'm just a privileged cishet man, and I'm clearly speaking from a position of bigotry and cruelty, etc. | |
| and so forth. | |
| But I posed the question several times, and I could not really get a good answer. | |
| I posed the question. | |
| I said, OK, give me some specific examples of ways that your life is directly, substantially, quantifiably harmed by the politicians in office. | |
| And since most of the people that were objecting were liberals, I could make it more specific. | |
| And I said, OK, we've had Republicans have controlled the government for two years, controlled Congress, controlled the executive branch. | |
| They've been appointing judges and everything. | |
| So tell me, over these last two years, how have you been directly and personally harmed? | |
| Give me specific examples. | |
| And nobody could really do that, aside from, I'll give you one typical response. | |
| Somebody tweeted and said, in an attempt to answer this challenge, said, They listed a bunch of ways that they've been harmed, apparently. | |
| This is what they listed. | |
| Healthcare, clean water, breathable air, freedom from violence, education, the well-being of our neighbors, the future of our climate, trade with other countries, tax rates, ability to obtain contraception, Social Security. | |
| And they said that Yeah, 99% of your life isn't affected if that 99% does not include any of those things. | |
| Implication being that Republicans have hurt us on all of the levels that were just outlined there. | |
| Now, of course, the suggestion that a person has not been able to breathe or drink water since Republicans took office is obviously, let's say, a bit of an exaggeration. | |
| One might even call it a hysterical lie. | |
| And it does bring up the question of how are you still alive after two years of this if you haven't been able to breathe and you haven't gotten a break from violence, you haven't been able to drink or any of that for two years. | |
| So it seems like you have actually survived somehow in spite of all that. | |
| But this echoes the utterly hysterical delusional claims from many other people who say that their lives have been hanging in the balance and have been greatly harmed by what's been going on in Washington. | |
| Now, if these were unborn children responding, then I would have to agree, because unborn children, their lives really do hang in the balance, depending on what laws are passed. | |
| But as for born people in modern America, my point is simply that our well-being does not substantially hinge on what politicians say and do. | |
| And the fact that, despite all of the hand-wringing, despite all of the panic from Democrats and liberals, Trump got into office, we had Republicans controlling Congress, And things worked out okay for them. | |
| They're still alive. | |
| They're still living their life. | |
| They don't live in a dictatorship, despite what they claim, because they can do what they want. | |
| They can say what they want. | |
| They can carry about however they want. | |
| In fact, we've learned that they can even go in the streets and throw rocks and burn buildings, and they won't necessarily even get arrested for that. | |
| So they've got a ton of freedom. | |
| They've got arguably more freedom than they should have. | |
| Which only proves my point. | |
| That yes, elections are important, and politicians have the ability to cause harm, yes, but not nearly to the extent that we seem to think, judging by our reaction to elections. | |
| Because every election, the side that loses will Act as though life as they know it is over, but then life continues. | |
| And most people just continue on and in their daily lives, they wouldn't really even be able to tell who's in control of the government or who got elected to office because it really has no bearing on most of what they do throughout their life and throughout their day. | |
| I said 99.99% of what you do throughout your day, you know, based on that, you wouldn't be able to tell who's in office. | |
| And I think that that's true. | |
| Um, Really, what I'm trying to communicate here and what I'm trying to convey is that we have freedom, actually. | |
| And it's a testament to our founders who set up this system that even when there is so much incompetence and so much dysfunction, even in spite of that, we still have freedom and we could still live our lives, those of us who are born, which is quite a caveat, I realize, but that's what I'm talking about right now. | |
| It's interesting to me that people are so resistant to this idea. | |
| Um, that people could be angry and offended simply because I said that they have freedom and they can still live their lives and their life will not be over just because the politician that they wanted to get an office didn't get in. | |
| Why would someone be angry at that? | |
| I'm trying to, it's, I'm trying to encourage you and say, you'll be fine. | |
| Really. | |
| I promise. | |
| Um, you have freedom, but it seems like people don't want that message and they don't want to, to realize that they have freedom. | |
| And the only explanation I can think of for that is that even though people have freedom, they don't really want it. | |
| And they don't want to believe that they have it, and they don't want us to believe that they have it, because the only rationale I can think of, the only way to explain it, is that they're just looking for excuses in their life. | |
| Because with freedom comes a certain amount of accountability and responsibility. | |
| You're responsible for your life. | |
| And there are a lot of people in America who do not want to be responsible for their own lives, don't want to take the blame for anything, and so that's why they make this absurd claim, they speak in this apocalyptic manner about elections and politicians and policies and everything else, because they don't want freedom. | |
| And so I'll tell you, even though we do not right now live in a dictatorship, and we still largely have freedom, When we get to the point in America where a large number of people don't want freedom and would prefer not to have it, and are in fact trying to convince themselves they don't have it, well, that's when you do get into a dangerous point. | |
| And I think if we continue on, if we persist in that mentality and that philosophy, then who knows? | |
| Maybe years down the line, we won't have freedom. | |
| Maybe we really will live in a dictatorship because it seems like that's what everybody wants. | |
| So that's something to be careful about. | |
| One more thing I wanted to mention relating to the results last night and getting away from Republican versus Democrat. | |
| There was an interesting vote in Florida. | |
| They voted to restore voting rights to felons so that a felon who gets out of jail, completes whatever additional requirements are necessary, that at that point they can then get the vote back and be re-enfranchised. | |
| Now, convicted murderers and convicted violent sex felons, they will not be They won't. | |
| They're an exception. | |
| But everybody else can vote again. | |
| And I think that that's that that's the right call. | |
| And that's how it should be in every state. | |
| I think I think it's pretty absurd actually that we disenfranchise people who commit crimes forever for the rest of their life. | |
| They can never vote again. | |
| Even if, I mean, let's say you take a guy who at the age of 18 falls in with the wrong crowd, commits a robbery or something, felon. | |
| That's a felony. | |
| It's a serious felony. | |
| Goes to jail as well as he should. | |
| And then gets out after four or five years or whatever. | |
| And then even fast forward the clock to the guy is now 60 years old. | |
| And he committed this crime when he was 18. | |
| He got out of jail. | |
| He's been out of jail for 30 years or more. | |
| But the way the law works in a lot of states, he still can't vote. | |
| Maybe he's had a job. | |
| He's been a contributing member of society. | |
| He got a college education. | |
| Still can't vote because of something that happened 30, 40 years ago. | |
| I think that's crazy. | |
| I just think it is. | |
| Once you've served your time and you've paid your debt to society, I think the just and right thing is to let someone then go and live and move on. | |
| If someone has committed a crime that is so heinous that they can never really repay the debt and that they should face lifetime consequences for, well, then that's someone who should still be in prison, in my mind. | |
| This is one of my, I don't want to get sidetracked here. | |
| This is one of my big problems with the sex offender registry. | |
| Now, I like the idea of knowing where sex offenders are, But if you're telling me that someone has committed a crime that is so heinous that now they're a threat to society for the rest of their lives, and I can't even trust, you know, I need to know where they live so that I can make sure that my kids never go anywhere near that house. | |
| Well, it seems to me that's someone who should still be in jail, right? | |
| If it's someone who needs to be on a registry, then what you're telling me is that they're still a threat. | |
| So they should be in jail. | |
| If they're not a threat anymore, then they shouldn't be on a registry. | |
| So there should be no need for that. | |
| And I think of the same thing with voting. | |
| If you're telling me that this is someone Who has done something so terrible that they should have their voice taken from them politically for the rest of their lives, then it seems like that's someone who should still be there. | |
| But if they did something that doesn't really justify those kinds of lifetime consequences, then once they get out of jail, then they should be able to return to their life. | |
| And I say this as someone who is not I'm not one of those people, as I've made clear, I'm not one of those people that believes that we need to get everybody out to the polls and that America and our democracy is benefited just by shoving the highest number of warm bodies into the polling station that we can. | |
| I don't think that at all. | |
| In fact, I'm in favor of disenfranchising some people. | |
| I'm in favor of disenfranchising people who are oblivious. | |
| Who don't know anything about our government, about the system, about the candidates that they're voting for. | |
| If there was a way to weed them out and disenfranchise them, I would. | |
| But a felon who does not fall into that category, I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to vote. | |
| In fact, someone who's been in jail, I think that they have seen the system from the inside, literally. | |
| And so they have a perspective that I actually think is kind of valuable. | |
| in the voting booth. | |
| It may be, I'm sure it's a sort of cynical perspective about the government, but good. | |
| I think we could use more cynical, I think we could use more people who are cynical about government in the voting booth come election day. | |
| So I think their perspective is valuable. | |
| Even if you don't think it's valuable, that still does not justify removing the vote from them. | |
| So I think that Florida got that one right. | |
| All right, we'll leave it there. | |
| Thanks for watching. | |
| Thanks for listening, everybody. |