Americans need something majestic to look at now, what with lawyers contesting the outcome of the election between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Those lawyers are like dogs fighting over some leathery pig’s ear. They growl a great deal. But there won’t be a resolution until the courts weigh in.
But I did find something we could cast our gaze upon. It was going to be blue. It was going to be big.
That big blue wave.
And much of what I read or watched on cable news leading up to the election promised that wave would hit America like a tsunami and wash our national sins away.
Remember the big blue wave? What happened to it?
Where is that blue wave that was promised by the media and liberal pollsters, the one that would bring with it the cleansing waters to give us the great liberal utopia?
We were told that blue wave would help turn over control of the Senate to Democrats, and give greater control of the House, while repudiating those Trump voters forever and ever. And after the wave would come the time of mopping up as they packed the Supreme Court.
And then, after the mopping up, those Truth and Reconciliation Commissions would hunt down the survivors. Didn’t I read that somewhere?
But there was no blue wave.
“It’s been remarkable to see the stability not only between the 2016 and 2020 presidential map, but also in congressional races and Senate races up and down,” said Rachel Maddow, the high priestess of the left on MSNBC. “On either side, you’re not seeing — not only no wave, it’s like a pond where you drop in a rock and there’s no ripples.”
No ripples? Oh, no. A pond without ripples is a bleak thing indeed, like something horrid from another universe.
But in this universe, where the laws of physics do still apply, giant waves aren’t created by pundits and pollsters like some story told to children. They’re created by people who go to the polls. And people did go to the polls.
There was a repudiation. But not the one the left counted on.
Whether Trump’s presidency survives the discovery of bushels of late mail-in votes in swing states, and the court challenges to come, the liberal project has been stopped by voters who came out for the president.
Without the blue wave, the liberal agenda is on hold, at least for now.
Trump’s voters voted. He had more votes in this election than the last. He had more votes in blue-wave Illinois than the last time. U.S. House Republicans didn’t lose seats. They gained seats, at least six by my last count. The Senate appears to remain in Republican control, meaning no Supreme Court packing.
If Biden becomes president, common wisdom has him fighting weakly against a Republican Senate. He’s not the Joe Biden of the 1980s. He’s something of a husk being used by others as their totem.
But a Republican-controlled Senate could still help Biden. It would shield him from attacks coming from the left wing of his own party as it seeks dominance. He’d have an excuse to brush aside their wacky policy initiatives. Biden could still blame the Republicans. C’mon, man! But inside, he’d feel relief.
And if the Trump turnout will tell Democrats anything, it’s that half the country has rejected those hard-left policies and the media jamming personal agendas down their throats.
This also was a sketchy election for Democratic identity politics, as Trump increased his standing with Latino voters nationally.
This hurt Democrats in Florida, with Cubans and Venezuelans who know firsthand what socialism can do to a nation.
And in Starr County in Texas along the Southern border, reportedly the most Hispanic county in America, there were amazing changes. Hillary Clinton carried Starr County by 60 percentage points in 2016. This year, Biden won by only 5.
In solidly Democratic and pro-Biden California, you might expect a few ripples to help a controversial state ballot initiative that would impose racial and gender preferences in state government. But it was defeated by 12 points, though its passage was a goal of identity politics-driven Democratic Party elites.
All this has driven some left-leaning pundits into hysterics. They’re insisting they live in an irredeemably racist country. And others continued labeling Trump voters — as they have for much of the past four years — as deranged members of a cult simply because those voters disagree with the liberal agenda.
That’s like trapping a dog into a corner with sharp sticks. Some dogs cower. But others begin to growl.
The millions who came out for Trump on Election Day don’t see themselves as racists or cult members. They see themselves as Americans.
The same mistakes made by many pundits and pollsters in 2016, when they were certain Hillary Clinton would become president, were made again in 2020 by those predicting the big blue wave.
They have a preconceived narrative about people who don’t see things the way they do, and they don’t want it to change, the way a child demands you tell the bedtime story about the glass mountain and the golden apples the same exact way you told it the night before.
They don’t understand, or care to understand, those who don’t live in their world. They don’t like them. And that’s what happened to the big blue wave.
It was a story they kept telling themselves.
Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — at www.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.
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