RUSH: I have a piece here — by Salena Zito, one of our favorite columnists/writers.
She lives in Pittsburgh. She’s written for Pittsburgh newspapers. She gets her columns published in the New York Post. And what she did during the 2016 campaign was go to the areas of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio (which everybody had long thought were just Democrat Party strongholds) and she found overwhelming support for Donald Trump in these blue states. It fascinated her. She wanted to find out why. She did find out why. She wrote about it. It turned out that her writing and her theories coincided with the election result.
And the upshot of it is not that people voting for Trump in the presidential election like Republicans so much as that they don’t like the Democrats at all. The Democrats are driving away what used to be their base: The blue-collar and white-collar working class. The Democrats are driving them away with their social justice stuff and anti-American talk. They believe that most of the people like them think that America is so deeply flawed that liberalism and the Democrat Party is needed to fix it, to perfect it.
Most people don’t want to hear this about their country every day and every time some Democrat opens their mouth. Like Dianne Feinstein was interviewing in confirmation hearings for a Catholic female judicial nominee and just accused her — because she is Catholic — of having religious dogma, and she feared by looking at her writings and her speeches that she would impose her Catholicism on the nation before she would enforce the laws. And it was no such thing. And I’m thinking, “Dogma?
“You, Dianne Feinstein, are worried about dogma because the nominee before you is a Catholic?” And she thought nothing… I don’t even think… To be honest, I think the questions are written by her staff, and I think she does her best to read them, but I’m not sure. You know, this may be an order of fries short of a Happy Meal in there, but the bottom line is she nevertheless went on this assault. Dick Durbin joined her and as though Catholics and Christians represent greatest threat to this country because of their religious morality.
The more they do this, the more they’re just marginalizing themselves with people outside of both of the coasts. It’s why the Democrats are having trouble raising money, although I think we’re in a shift on that. You know, money is the mother’s milk of politics. It’s always been. But the way the two parties are shaping up, I don’t know that… You know, money is always gonna matter. Don’t misunderstand me here. But the differences the two parties is going to be so stark here. I mean, on the one hand, you’re going to have…
And the Republicans have a little bit of an identity problem now because they don’t really like Trump, and they don’t want what Trump is to become the definition of the Republican Party. But they haven’t done a good job of defining what the Republican Party is. They have eschewed a basic conservative agenda because the Drive-By Media criticism of conservatism scares them and intimidates them. But the Democrats are gone full-fore to the left. I mean, it’s practically communism on their agenda now. And they proudly, proudly articulate it.
They don’t use that word, don’t describe it that way. But that’s what they’re offering: Never-ending government, total investment in government. “Turn your life over to government! You can’t do it; government can. Let government do it all. Government’s where justice is. Government’s where fairness is. Government’s where sustainability is. Government’s where equality is,” and the other side is not gonna be anywhere close to that.
I don’t know that the Democrats can raise enough money to spread a message that is essentially extreme liberalism, socialism/communism, and have it matter outside of the strongholds they already have. So they’re gonna keep losing elections, but not because the country prefers Republicans. It’s because the country is so willing to reject Democrats, so eager to, and Trump’s election is the first sign of that. Now, the frustrating thing about this is the opportunity the Republicans are squandering. Never before…
I mean, this chance is never gonna come along again to have the White House, the House, and the Senate, and the ability to nominate judges to the Supreme Court and get them confirmed. This opportunity is once in a lifetime and certainly once in a generation. They’re squandering it. They’re squandering it because of this petty disagreements they have with Trump. “Trump’s an outsider. We don’t want Trump to succeed! The establishment’s gotta continue to rule the day. Trump’s a pig. Trump’s this and that. We can’t afford it!
“Our donors don’t like Trump. The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t like Trump. So we can’t help Trump.” In the meantime, they’re squandering the greatest opportunity they’ve ever been given because the nation is finally having its fill of Democrats. Now, you won’t see evidence of that because the media will never report that. The media will never create that picture for you. You have to look at other signs: Failing box office, NFL ratings down, more and more people being taken out of the public school system and being homeschooled.
All of the signs of the American population rejecting wildcat, madcap liberalism are everywhere, but it’s not reflected in the media. So they don’t know it. It’s like the point made last week, why they still can’t believe they lost the election, because all of their big data analysts told ’em it was gonna be a landslide. Hillary still cannot come to grips with the fact that she lost, because everybody she relies on told her she was gonna win in a landslide. All of the polls, all of big data analysts such as Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight…
All these people crunching all of these numbers with all of these predictions… “Hillary with an 82.8% chance to win! Hillary with a 79.7% chance to win! Trump with a 20.1% chance to win!” They believed it. The traditional polls had her winning in a landslide. Seven o’clock election night, they still thought it was gonna happen. We all know what did happen. So they believe what they see in the mainstream media. The mainstream media is not reflecting what’s happening in the country in terms of the Democrat, the far-left agenda being rejected. But it is happening, and the signs are everywhere.
And what the Democrats are doing is going further left. They think the message is not getting out, so they’re getting even more extreme. This opportunity is being blown! The Republicans have no way of capitalizing on this. They do; they’re just unwilling to do it. Frankly, folks, as a political savant analyst and observer, this is one of the most mind-boggling periods. Because I’ve been doing this for 30 years. The circumstances that I’ve been hoping for and advocating are happening, and not a thing is being done to triumph with it, to maximize it, and to use it.
This could be… If the Republicans played this right, this could lead to the beginning of the Democrat Party being dormant for 25 years. I’m talking about electorally. I’m not talking about public relations. As long as the media’s who they are, the country’s perception day in and day out is gonna be Republicans are racist, bigot, sexist homophobes — that Trump’s a pig, white supremacist, Nazi, KKK. That’s what the media’s gonna tell every day. But the reality on the ground in the country is not that at all. It even adds more to the opportunity that the Republicans with squandering.
And wouldn’t take much.
All it would take is repeal and replace Obamacare, build the wall, and get started in earnest on tax reform with the Republican Party joining Trump to do it. You know, get rid of Chuck and Nancy. Don’t let them play in this. Send them over to where they belong in the Democrat Party in the ash heap. Just get those three things done or get started seriously on them, and you would not believe the benefits that will redound both to Trump and the Republican Party. But the Republican Party doesn’t want to do it with Trump in the White House because they don’t want Trump being given credit as an outsider for being able to come in and do things that the establishment hasn’t been able to do in 15 or 20 years.