Connecticut 2024 Postmortem

Capitalizing on Democrat Party campaign errors, soon to be President Donald Trump, much reviled by Democrats and media allies as an autocrat slightly removed from Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, has made a clean sweep. He won the presidential office with a plurality of electoral votes – Trump, 277 Harris 224.

Newsweek noted, “At the time of writing, [Nov 06, 2024, at 11:33 AM EST], Trump garnered 71,571,943 votes, or 51 percent of the popular vote, while Harris received 66,512,020, or 47.4 percent. In a separate story, Newsweek wrote, “With Republicans having been declared winners of the White House and the Senate, the race for the House of Representatives remains undecided. There are 435 voting members of the House, with 218 needed for a party to hold a majority. So far, the Associated Press has called 199 seats for the Republican Party and 180 for the Democrats. Of the 56 uncalled races, Republicans currently lead in 23, and they need to win 19 of those to secure a majority. The Democrats lead in 33, and they need to win all of those as well as five districts where Republicans are currently leading to get a majority. Therefore, Republicans are favorites to win a small majority in the House, meaning they would control both chambers of Congress and the White House.”

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The campaign messaging of soon to be former US Vice President Kamala Harris was deliriously confusing, to say the least. She presented herself to voters as both an agent of change and an ardent defender, for four arduous years of President Joe Biden. “Either/Or” was not in the Democrat’s campaign lexicon this year. Square circles were not impossible, provided you were willing to reinvent the past and leap blindly into a hopeful and joyous imaginary future.

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Hoisted into the Democrat National Campaign by a highly unorthodox Deus ex Machina, Harris carefully hid her prospective policies, domestic and national, from the voting public. She avoided media interviews, even those directed by hosts regarded as friendly, and the usual filters – participation in a Democrat Party primary contest, for instance -- were conspicuously absent in her case.

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We still do not know for certain which important Democrat decision makers threw the hapless President Joe Biden out of Air Force One without a parachute. But former Speaker of the US House Nancy Pelosi has told the New York Times that "had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race."

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Some commentators suspect that Harris short circuited traditional Democrat conventions and commitments because she wanted to enter the White House with a blank slate upon which she might write, once elected, whatever she chose. In an open society, such secrecy is usually regarded as highly suspicious and undemocratic, a charge Harris leveled with increasing desperation at Trump, who had become in Democrat Party circles little more than a cardboard cutout, a campaign scarecrow.

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The cardboard cutout, needless to say, refused to oblige Democrats.

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Here in Connecticut, Trump’s mass and weight were not sufficient to propel state Republicans into office. Democrats continue to hold all (seven) seats in the U.S. Congress. In Connecticut, Harris garnered 54.65% of votes cast to Trump’s 43.7%.

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State media often notes that U.S. Representative Chris Shays was the last Republican to hold office in the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation. It might be more informative to mention that Shays was the last Republican member of the state’s U.S. Congressional office to lose his position to left leaning Democrats. Politics, this writer has insisted to no avail, lies downstream from societal issues. Like other Connecticut Republican members of the U.S. Congressional Delegation Shays styled himself a “fiscal conservative” but a “social liberal.” During the present election season, Shays told us in a commentary piece that he would be voting for Harris, swelling Democrat votes for Biden’s Vice President in “the land of steady habits” by one.

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The political configuration in Connecticut, most especially in the state’s larger oppressed cities, has not changed for decades. Republicans in the state will never learn what they should from a stunning Trump victory if they continue to give an ear to the state’s left leaning legacy media. Virtually all Republican members of the U.S. Congressional Delegation who were – noted the past tense – fiscal conservatives and social liberals have been replaced by neo-progressive Democrats who are neither fiscal conservatives nor social liberals in the manner of, say, President John F. Kennedy.

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Most neo-progressive Democrats are out-of-the-closet-pink-tinged revolutionaries for whom all the guardrails of traditional American democracy, including constitutional breakwaters and an abhorrence of massive deficits, are temporary distractions. Does the Electoral College more equitably distribute presidential power to smaller states than election to office by popular vote? Well then, abolish the Electoral College. Is an independent Supreme Court necessary to insure a proper constitutional separation of powers? Well then, pack the court with politically obliging justices. Are schools largely the province of municipalities rather than states or the federal government? Let us heap upon this creative and productive educational structure a crushing weight of transformative regulations that will radically change the direction of pedagogical decision making from municipalities to a federal education nodule in Washington D. C.

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This leftward movement away from productive and proven democratic norms is most visible in areas of the country that bracket the United States such as California and the northeast United States. Though gargantuan, California’s per capita state debt is less than that of Connecticut’s. California ranks 21st in the race to the bottom, Connecticut 4th. Politically the New England States are far closer to California than they are to the nation’s southern and middle states. And whenever California sneezes, Connecticut catches a cold