The 2022 midterm elections should be a slam dunk for Republicans, but despite President Biden’s overwhelming unpopularity, warning signs are emerging that it may not be the oft-discussed Red Wave the GOP is hoping for.
One indication is the fundraising numbers. As Fox News’s Tucker Carlson points out, in June, Democrats far surpassed Republicans in online donations, $64 million to $26 million, which doesn’t just mean Democrats have more money to back their campaigns, but that the level of commitment among Republicans is lacking. And this isn’t just happening at the national level, but in individual races, too.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has chalked up some of the Republicans’ problems in Senate races to mediocre candidates. But is there something more going on?
According to Carlson, if you actually wanted to win an election (and he leaves open the possibility that McConnell may not actually want to win since that would require running things as opposed to complaining about them), you may want to have candidates focus on issues that voters truly care about, such as illegal immigration and crime.
“Now, these are two issues that didn't just arise out of nowhere,” Carlson said. “They're the product of policies the Democratic Party put in. They were intentional outcomes. We have millions of people coming in illegally and we have a lot more murders than we had two years ago. These two issues, immigration and crime, don't simply annoy voters, though they very much do. These two issues threaten the existence of our society. So, maybe you should run on them. That seems reasonable, but that's not what they're doing.”
Instead, the Pennsylvania Senate race, for example, has turned into a fight over crudité, despite Democrat nominee John Fetterman’s radical positions and questions about his post-stroke fitness, not to mention the very real problems in that state of crime, which Democrat policies are responsible for.
“Now, you'd think this being a democracy, that voters would punish anyone who had anything to do with turning Philadelphia into the disaster you just saw and John Fetterman certainly did have a hand in that,” Carlson said. So far, however, GOP candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz is struggling.
Carlson explains how Republicans could turn things around in the next few months months if they wanted to see results.
“OK, crudités is 20 bucks. Got it, but that's more important than everything else that's going on right now: Law and Order,” he said. “You see it on the streets of our cities. You see it at our southern border. It's collapsed. So, if you're a Republican voter and not just a Republican voter, any voter, you probably want to know what is the government going to do about the fact that I can call 911 and no one shows up? What are you going to do about the fact that our border is open to the world and that millions of them have come in illegally? How can you take the country seriously when it doesn't even have a border? And it doesn't, and we know that because on video, every single day people stream in.”
He continued: "So, if every Republican candidate just repeated, repeat after me, 'law enforcement, law and order is not racist. Law and order is a prerequisite for civilization, and if it goes away, so does the country,' you would win the votes not simply of your own voters, but of a lot of other voters and people who have never voted before and any normal Democrat would agree with that because it's inherently true, but is the opposite of what we have.”
It's not difficult, but if Republicans don’t begin listening to voters, November will be an “actual disaster,” according to Carlson.