[ The fundamental question is why the Democrats did not landslide
the Republicans nationally. This is the worst GOP in its history.]
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DEMOCRATS MUST FIRE CORPORATE POLITICAL CONSULTANTS  
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Ralph Nader
November 12, 2022
Common Dreams
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_ The fundamental question is why the Democrats did not landslide the
Republicans nationally. This is the worst GOP in its history. _

People wait in line on the final day of early voting at a polling
location at Bank of America Stadium on November 5, 2022 in Charlotte,
North Carolina., Sean Rayford/Getty Images

 

THE MID-TERM CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS are over, but the counting in
some very close races continues, which extends the time for
determining the margins of control over the Senate and the House.

What is known is that the Red Wave predicted by pollsters and
trumpeted by _The New York Times_ and other media almost daily did not
materialize. If there was any wave, it was a blue one, victorious for
direct democracy ballot measures raising the minimum wage in Nebraska,
Nevada, and Washington, D.C. Even in GOP-ruled South Dakota, voters
overwhelmingly approved Medicaid expansion via a constitutional
amendment.

Control of the Senate hangs on the Senate races in Arizona, Nevada,
and the Georgia runoff in early December between Warnock and Walker.
This year, the Senate Democrats had the advantage with twenty
Republican seats up for re-election as compared with fourteen
Democratic seats. Typically, the Democratic Party only seriously
contested five of these GOP seats, while conceding fifteen from the
get-go, leaving the Democrats with very little margin for error,
especially in a 50/50 Senate.

For the House races, New York Democrats produced their own
redistricting disaster. Dominating the state legislature, they passed
an extremely gerrymandered map that the state appeals court (4 to 3)
found unlawful. A special master was appointed who redrew the map,
which resulted in the GOP flipping four congressional seats. This
debacle could possibly hand the House of Representatives to the GOP.
This is a political boomerang for the history books!

The more fundamental question is why the Democrats did not landslide
the Republicans nationally. This is the worst GOP in its history. The
Trump-dominated GOP is serially corrupt, violence-prone, anti-labor,
anti-women, and anti-children. The corporatist GOP embraces compulsive
lying, dishonesty, brazenly authoritarian suppression of votes, and
dedication to corporate domination of our country.

Late in this year's campaign, the Democrats highlighted recent GOP
designs to lift the eligible age for Social Security while freezing
benefits and corporatizing further Medicare and Medicaid. Opposing any
increases in the frozen federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, any
improvements in workplace health and safety and backing union-busting
drives puts the GOP on the opposite side of labor.

The GOP's callousness toward children is despicable. The Trumpsters
opposed paid child care and family sick leave as well as expanded
Medicaid for children (provided by European countries for decades),
while they supported more junk food (sugar, fat, and salt) in school
lunch programs, repealed a ban on dangerous pesticides to infants and
blocked the extension in January of the $300 monthly child tax credit
to 58 million children that would have cut child poverty by a third.

The anti-women GOP continued its opposition to reproductive rights,
equal pay requirements and an end to marketplace discrimination.

Trump's deadly derision and delays in confronting the arrival of
Covid-19 in early 2020 led to the preventable loss of over 300,000
American lives. His Republican toadies in Congress and in state
government echoed his anti-science lies.

Trumpsters huddled with the oil, gas and coal lobbyists against faster
conversion to renewable energy and conservation. The GOP has called
climate catastrophes "a hoax." Reducing taxes on the super-rich and
big businesses to record lows, the GOP then asserts we can't afford
social safety nets and investments in repairing America's public
works.

Not long ago, such overt cruelties and neglect would have been
political suicide. But, with few exceptions, these subjects were not
placed front and center for the past year by the Democrats. The GOP's
campaigns are always on the offensive, placing the Democrats in the
defensive position of responding to fake assaults on claims about
catchphrases such as "defund the police," "socialism," "critical race
theory," and whatever other daily fabrications flowed from the GOP's
political sewers.

Of course, dialing for the same corporate campaign dollars as does the
GOP and giving over their campaigns to corporate-conflicted
political/media consultants have cursed the Democrats from being true
to their name for decades. These consultants, such as those exposed in
articles by _The Intercept_ (See article: "Democratic Consultants Cash
In On AIPAC Spending—Even As It Tries to Hand the House to
Republicans
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by Akela Lacy), have escaped the attention of the mainstream media.
Now that the election is over, will _The New York Times_, _The
Washington Post_, _The Associated Press_, and _Bloomberg_ bring the
light of day on these backroom manipulators, with regular corporate
clients to compromise them?

If Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy becomes the next House Speaker, the
Democratic Congress has two months before turning over the gavel. The
Democrats should buckle down and pass long-overdue legislation and
confirm judges and executive branch officials. They should hold a
variety of gripping public hearings on corporate crime, labor abuses,
harms to children, restoring the huge tax cuts of Trump for the
plutocracy, and entrenched rip-offs of consumers. Reaching tens of
millions of people, such hearings will throw the agenda gauntlet down
to the incoming Trumpsters.

Regardless of what happens next year under the GOP, the Democrats
cannot only place Trump's Party on the defensive, and encourage
defections on various votes, but they must also educate themselves
about how they need to campaign in the future before all the people,
all the workers, all the consumers, all the children.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel
free to republish and share widely.

RALPH NADER [[link removed]] is a
consumer advocate and the author of "_The Seventeen Solutions: Bold
Ideas for Our American Future
[[link removed]]_" (2012). His new book
is, "_Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All
[[link removed]]" _(2020, co-authored
with Mark Green).

* 2022 Elections
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* Ralph Nader
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