Voter enthusiasm is a key ingredient to a winning campaign. The Democrats leveraged anger over the Dobbs decision to create enthusiasm and outperform expectations in both the 2022 midterm and the 2023 off-year elections. But that advantage isn’t likely to hold next year. Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot in either of the last two elections. But he probably will be next year, and the left has done everything possible to energize his supporters. Their lust to “get Trump” has neutralized their enthusiasm advantage.

Even though the Republicans underperformed in the last two elections, I refuse to be pessimistic about conservative prospects for next year. I say that because the Dems are clearly not optimistic about theirs. They didn’t indict Donald Trump four times because they think they have a winning position. They’re cheating with lawfare because they don’t have anything winnable to run on -- including their candidate.

The Dems are begging Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race because they know he is -- wait for it -- a loser! But they’ve got a gigantic problem. Joe isn’t likely to withdraw. His ego is too big, his intellect is too small, and running again may be the only way to keep his wife on the cover of Vogue and his whole family out of federal lockup. Besides, they have nobody better to replace him with (see: DeSantis/Newsom debate). The Dems are scared and the reasons are obvious.

State of the Parties

The Republicans recently ousted their Speaker of the House and underwent a few weeks of squabbling. The media declared it a party civil war which was likely to tear the Republicans apart for decades. Surprise! It didn’t.

While the Republicans were arguing with each other about debt ceilings and omnibus spending bills, the Democrats were debating what level of death and destruction the party should endorse. The party that advocates abortion as a valid method of contraception, is now split over whether the killing of babies is a valid tactic of warfare. Amazingly, they are actually arguing over whether the killing of Jews is good or bad -- and Jews are one of their most reliable voting blocs. That is not a path to party unity.

State of the Media

Why do socially and economically conservative people continue to vote for the party of debt, surrender, racism, socialism, and moral relativism? Because the MSM has become the propaganda arm of the Democrats. It has convinced voters that a vote for Democrats is a vote to save

• The planet,
• The children,
• The marginalized, and
• The oppressed.

...while a vote for Republicans is a vote for some combination of The Purge and The Hunger Games. And yet with all that gaslighting, the MSM has only managed to achieve a 50/50 split of the electorate -- nowhere near electoral dominance for their pals.

But now their influence is waning, because what they say doesn’t comport with what everyone sees.

• Twenty years of “the planet will be dead in 10 years”
• Seven years of “Trump colluded with Russia”
• Four years of “Joe Biden is the most trustworthy politician since Honest Abe Lincoln”
• “California is a model for the rest of the country to emulate”

Their narratives are no longer credible. Liars can only influence when their lies are believable. According to Gallup, public confidence in the MSM is hovering somewhere between timeshare salesmen and that Nigerian prince offering to share his inheritance. Americans may not know what the truth is -- but they know they’re not getting it from the MSM.

The MSM is headed towards Pravda territory. It lost its credibility when reality mugged the narrative. It didn’t matter if the paper said food production was up, if the people were hungry. The Soviet Union died about a nanosecond after Pravda became a joke -- and that wasn’t by coincidence. Public confidence in the MSM is currently under 20 percent. That’s not good news for the Democrats.

State of the Debate

While the Democrats continue to advocate socialism (i.e., spending other people’s money), we’ve had decades of socialist experimentation to observe. Lyndon Johnson implemented his “Great Society” initiative in 1965. Since then, we’ve acquired over $33 trillion of national debt, yet poverty and social inequities remain about where we started -- with a few transient ups and downs. The only thing the experiment got us was unintended consequences: economy crushing debt, creation of a permanent dependent class, destruction of nuclear families, and choking of business investment.

Hence the Democrats won’t debate ideas. Instead, they’ve become a living example of Godwin’s Law -- that if a debate continues long enough, someone is going to get called “Hitler.” When Joe Biden stood before a satanic backdrop and screamed about “semi-fascist MAGA Republicans,” was he making a cogent argument, or validating Godwin’s Law?

The Dems demonize their opponents because arguing the issues is a losing game for them. But that leaves them with a big problem. Demonizing their opponents only works if they can maintain the propaganda -- and it’s failing (see above).

State of the Voters

I keep hearing about the intractability of Democrat voters -- that they are beyond hopeless. Yet the electorate is sour on the state of America -- including a sizable number of Democrats.

According to an Associated Press-NORC Research Center poll, 78 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. As the Democrats debate the morality of killing the innocent, and the need to burden our children with more debt; perhaps this is an opportune time to open a dialog with the normal (i.e., not insane) Democrat party constituents. Only a few percent need be converted to make a huge difference.

I know what I’m going to hear. The system is corrupt. There will never be another fair election. It’s hopeless. To which I reply: life isn’t fair, but hard work and determination can beat “unfair” any day of the week. That’s because cheaters are lazy. They break the rules because they want a path to power that doesn’t involve the hard work of winning. So, let’s stop complaining about the intractability of Democrat voters and the unfairness of the system and get to work. If only 1 out of 100 Trump voters in Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia had dragged one of their non-voting conservative relatives to the polls in 2020, Trump would be President now. If 1 in 10 had done it nationwide, it would have been an epic landslide victory. A 10 percent increase in Republican turnout doesn’t seem at all insurmountable, but it will require work.

Those are the reasons I refuse to be pessimistic. The Democrats are fighting with each other, their policies have failed, they can’t debate, and their propaganda is unraveling. I understand the Republican Party propensity for fumbling the ball on the one-yard line, but I’d rather be on the one-yard line with them than gambling on a Hail Mary pass… from Stumbling Joe Biden.

John Green is a political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Idaho. He is a staff writer for the American Free News Network and can be reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.

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