The central thing used to be winning votes.  Now it is winning power — two very different things.

The first is predicated on the idea that ours is to be a government "of, by and for the people."  Today, the "people" are seen as merely an obstacle to be won over or, equally, bamboozled or ignored.  The goal is no longer reaching them, but getting past them.

Thus the selective hiding of essential facts and the blatant twisting of stories to those ends.

This has always been so on the margins — within cities owned and run by a corrupt party apparatus — but such was looked down upon and seen as an aberration.  Today, it's what hired political operatives, many lawyers, and the media see as simply the means to getting what they think they deserve: more power.

And "the people"?  These matter really not at all except as a means to an end.

And thus, making "the people" easier to bamboozle and easily countable or overcountable at election time is the long-term focus.

Again, such was long so in a few corrupt cities.  But today it is an almost open goal with noncitizens increasingly given a voice in the selection of elected (can we even reliably use the phrase "duly elected" any longer?) officials and, more recently, the push to allow convicted felons to vote.

So too the dumbing down of education — the more unlearned, the better — to ease the bamboozling and, yes, the outright vote-buying with government program giveaways — or so the common understanding has for some time been.

The selective silence about some election results, along with the loud trumpeting of other results, is also a part of this.  As is the timing of such.

This has been increasingly so as the shift from winning votes to winning power has become the modus vivendi.  But new to this election is the willingness to actually publicly stop counting votes until new ones can be "found," as are both the media's willingness to go along with this and the poorly educated's seeming willingness to accept both the fact of it and the excuses used to justify it.

That all the above has not totally succeeded is because of the fundamental truths that underlie our republic — especially that of the basic equality of man.  For while untaught and "deeply feeling" people have been successfully created by the system (check out the slang word "Karen"!), the bringing in of supposedly easy to lead and mislead migrants has not gone entirely according to plan.

Before the present Election Day debacle is resolved, due credit will have to be given to the bulwark that the supposedly easy to lead and mislead Hispanic population — most especially those who came here from Cuba and Venezuela — has proved to be.  They who had been fed the socialist lie and line before knew the "truth" about it.  Such simply were not easily fooled.  Thank God for that and them!

Image: Angr.