The Hidden Good News About the Election

Yes, there really is some.

Zerohedge recently published a nice article on a theory I’ve been discussing for months: domestic migration has bolstered the conservative voting base in red states, while draining it from historically blue ones.

The myriad concerns about election fraud have been documented extensively elsewhere, so for the purposes of this analysis, I’m going to take the official election results at face value. They’re damning enough on their own. Also, in the perhaps overly optimistic hope that most of the fraud focused on races for Congress, I’ve used the data from the governors’ races.

Finding 1. Democrats Lost Faith

While overall turnout in 2022 was lower than the last midterm election in 2018, almost all of the decline was on one side of the aisle. Democrat candidates for governor received three million fewer votes nationwide.

Much of this decline can be traced to California and New York. In 2018, Gavin Newsom won with 7.7 million Democrat votes. In 2022, he won with less than 5 million. That’s a staggering 2.3 million vote drop for Newsom. In terms of percentage, New York Democrats were even less enthusiastic than California Democrats. Kathy Hochul received 600,000 fewer votes than Andrew Cuomo did in 2018, while Republican Lee Zeldin got over 400,000 more votes than Marc Molinaro did four years ago.

However, the trend was most evident in red states. The following chart shows red states first (Alaska through Wyoming), and then blue states (California through Wisconsin). As you can see, Democrat candidates in red states logged precipitous declines in vote counts compared to four years ago. The lone outliers are Massachusets and Maryland, where roughly a million Republican voters stayed home (or had their votes lost).

These results are comforting for an important reason: there’s a common concern that people who flee liberal enclaves will then vote for the policies and candidates that ruined the places they came from. At least based on votes for governor, it appears that this concern is unfounded. Blue-state refugees are voting red not blue.

Finding 2. Victory Margins Grew for Republicans, Shrank for Democrats

Despite substantially outspending Republican candidates, blue state governors won by smaller margins than four years ago, while many red state governors won by larger margins.

Looking at the victory margins in 2022 vs. 2018, you can see that Republican governors won red states by larger margins (especially Florida and Ohio), while Democrat governors held blue states by smaller margins. California, New York, and Illinois in particular experienced precipitous drops in the number of Democrat votes.

In other words, in contrast to the oft-repeated theory that Democrats attracted votes from abortion-concerned voters who otherwise would have voted Republican, Democrats all across America voted for their own candidates less than they did four years ago.

Finding 3. The Popular Vote is a Dead Heat

In 2018, Democrat candidates for governor received 46.2 million votes nationwide, compared to 43.4 million for Republican candidates. That 2.5 million “popular vote” lead almost completely evaporated in 2022, with Republican governors nationwide earning within 200,000 votes of their Democrat colleagues.

Let’s take another look at the vote-change chart.Anything above the zero line in this chart shows more votes cast in 2022 compared to 2018. Anything below the line shows fewer votes cast in 2022. As you can see, in most states, the number of Democrat votes diminished, while the number of Republican votes increased.

The outliers to this trend are Massachusets, Maryland, and Arizona. In fact, they’re such significant outliers that it makes you wonder what happened.

Finding 4. Democrats Lost Ground Almost Everywhere

Looking at total votes per state in 2022 vs. 2018, you can get a good sense of the overall trend: Republican votes for governor were almost universally the same or higher, while Democrat votes declined almost everywhere.

Conclusion

Democrats did better than expected in the 2022 midterms because Republican voters have been fleeing Democrat-controlled states for the last three years, not because voters actually prefer Democrat candidates.

Despite fear-mongering over abortion, the vote counts show that Democrat voters were less motivated to go to the polls than they were four years ago. In contrast, Republican-leaning voters showed up en masse to vote for Republican governors.

So, be of good cheer. Despite all the ballot hijinks and polling shenanigans, Democrats are clearly losing ground everywhere. The Federal government is going to do what it’s going to do, but at the state level, voters are sending a clear message that we want less insanity and more freedom. Let’s hope our Republican get the memo.