Fox News’s Tucker Carlson gave his theory on Wednesday for why Republicans had such a disappointing midterm election despite a favorable landscape.
While plenty have made the case that candidate quality issues, suburban women, abortion, or former President Trump were to blame, Carlson suggested something else entirely.
“[T]he mechanics of an election. They matter. In fact, they matter sometimes more than any individual running in the election. The way people vote makes a big difference to the outcome..."
He noted the Pennsylvania Senate race was a perfect example.
Two and a half years ago, the last administration, its Republican allies in Congress, watched passively, seemingly in glassy eyed sedation as the Democratic Party used the pretext of COVID to rewrite election laws around the country in order to get its own candidates into office. They didn't do it by accident. They knew what they were doing. Last night those laws, many of which are still on the books, paid off generously. John Fetterman bombed in his one public debate. You saw it. He humiliated himself. He made a mockery of the election, but it didn't matter by that point.
Thanks to early voting, Fetterman's margin was already in the bank. Nearly 70% of Democrats had voted early in the Pennsylvania races. Only 20% of Republicans did. It's over, but it doesn't need to be repeated. These are fixable problems. You can get your message out. You can force the other side if you try hard enough to agree on fair election rules, but you can't do any of that unless you acknowledge these problems exist.
But he also argued "access to channels of communication" played a role as well.
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“Why does that matter? Well, because you can say whatever you want, but if no one hears you, you're not really speaking and that's the case for Republicans so often, as if Republicans can communicate their message unencumbered on a single cable television channel and a handful of relatively low traffic websites. That's it,” Carlson continued.
“The rest of the American media amounts to a gigantic filter designed to distort what Republicans are saying,” the host added. “It's a campaign apparatus and only the Democrats have it. Now you can whine about that ("The media are liberal!"), but it's not about liberal or conservative. It's about winning elections and Democrats can win because they have that. If Republicans want to win elections, too, they might spend some money to fix that, to achieve parity.”
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