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I need to read you a story in the Washington Post that hit last night and is in today's paper.
Democrats have been sharpening their attacks on Republicans over the pandemic, former President Donald Trump, and other polarizing attacks. And now, emboldened by victory in California's recall election, party leaders are seeking to further escalate hostilities ahead of the midterm elections.
Beyond prompting a collective sigh of relief in a party reeling from a difficult summer, Governor Gavin Newsom's Tuesday win served as the first test of a revamped campaign strategy that Democrats quietly began assembling weeks ago, amid a realization that positive talk about President Biden getting the country back on track had run into the harsh realities of a delta variant coronavirus surge.
Chastened by the resurgence, the difficult Afghanistan withdrawal, and declining public confidence in Biden's handling to the pandemic and other issues, Democrats have gone on offense against the GOP following private summer polling that showed broad and growing anger at the Republican resistance to vaccination according to Democrats familiar with the discussions who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the tragedy.
The Quinnipiac Poll shows Joe Biden underwater. 42% approval in the Quinnipiac Poll, which tends to lean pretty notably towards the Democrats. President Biden's polling average has him down four points, 45 to 49. He is in the territory of Gerald Ford in terms of the polling average now regarding popularity. Gerald Ford was the least popular president other than Donald Trump in modern polling time.
I need to submit a proposition to you. What if Joe Biden's demands for mandatory vaccines at companies of a hundred people or more is not intended to increase compliance with the vaccination rate, but is rather intended to have the effect everyone said it would, for people to dig in their heels and not get vaccinated. What if it's part of a larger plan by Biden's strategists who know that people will dig in their heels and refuse to get the vaccine. Biden’s team can then use this message headed into the midterms to make people hate the Republicans.
In other words, what if this is all part of a larger plan to try to divide people from the GOP and make them hate Republicans so they turn out in the midterms to help Democrats. I don't like to go there in my thinking, but this Washington Post report and the polling seems to suggest that's exactly what the Democrats are doing. Their internal summer polling shows that more and more people are disdainful of the unvaccinated. It is obvious, even to Democrats, that if the President of the United States goes out and tells people to get vaccinated or else, they will dig in their heels and not do it. What if Joe Biden's announcement that he was mandating vaccines was in fact, an effort by design to get people to dig in their heels so that the Democrats could then turn around and blame the unvaccinated and tie them to Trump supporters?
They've been trying since January 6th to tie Republicans to the incursion into the Capitol and it's not working. They continue to beat that drum, but it has failed. Polling shows Republicans are not fully tied to that in voters’ minds, only some are.
I said this yesterday on the show. I know people who were headed to get the vaccine and then Biden said, “you better do it or else” and they were like, “screw you, I'm not getting it.” That's human nature. It was obvious that was going to happen.
Now you've got the polling that shows the Democrats intend to ramp up draconian vaccination measures. It's not a coincidence that Los Angeles County imposed mandatory vaccines and vaccine card checks before going into public areas or public arenas after Newsom won the recall. They waited to see if he would win the recall before dialing up the measures.
Back to this Washington Post story.
Democrats are openly touting vaccine mandates they once shied away from and chastising Republicans who oppose them. They're delivering sharper criticisms of the motives of the unvaccinated, a group that is largely Republican and spending much more time talking about Trump. A year after Biden won the presidency on a promise of uniting the countries, Democrats have embraced a far more divisive set of talking points that cast their opponents as a threat to the country. The contrast is going to be clear as we move into 2022 Democrat National Committee chairman, Jamie Harrison told reporters Wednesday. The contrast between folks who are card-carrying members of Trumpism and folks who are Americans through and through and are fighting for this country. You got that, you're a patriot or you're a Trump supporter. You're a traitor to the country if you're a Trump supporter. If you don't give the vaccine, you're a traitor. It's all part of a plan.
Ironically, the way to fight back isn’t the way Republicans will do it, they're not going to go get vaccinated. The people who are resistant to the vaccine are not going to get vaccinated. So what they will do is they will go into 2022 being the villains for the Biden administration.
I have a strong inclination to think that they'll actually overplay their hand on that. I don't think that it helps the Democrats here. Why? For a number of reasons, one of which is it prolongs the pandemic. They will try to blame Republicans. They will try to blame vaccine skeptics. But if Joe Biden demands that everyone goes and gets a vaccine or loses their job, and the pandemic continues to run unabated, he looks even weaker. This seems to be the case.
It's starting to fade in southern states. Florida is down 41%. Northern states are starting to increase their spread. West Virginia, even though it's a red state, has praised the governor for his efforts to get people vaccinated. West Virginia's seen a big spike in COVID rates. The media can't help itself. What it should be doing is covering hospitalizations and deaths instead of the spread of the vaccine. A lot of people who get the vaccine can get COVID, but don't go to the hospital or die, which is actually what we want.
The media is so accustomed to focusing on COVID rates, not hospitalization, that they can't get out of the habit. Now COVID rates are going up in the north because it's clearly seasonally impacted by people going inside and suddenly, it's not going to help them. Are they really going to blame a bunch of blue states where COVID is going up? Blue states that voted for Joe Biden? They're going to see the spread. New England states, the Northwest coast, the rust belt, they're all seeing the increase. But this is all part of a plan now, this is a very deliberate pattern in practice.
They saw Gavin Newsom win the recall and they've misinterpreted the results. California isn't like other states. California is unique. You've got to recognize that it's unique in its progressive spirit and in how far left it has gone and how the Republican party itself went nuts and broke apart. Virginia may be getting close unless the GOP saves itself. But California doesn't translate to the rest of the nation. California is exporting Californians to the rest of the nation at a rapid clip so much so that by the next census, they may very well lose seats in U.S. Congress for the first time. We're only a couple of years past the previous census. But the Democrats have interpreted Gavin Newsom's win there as a way to now put the pedal to the metal, accelerate mandatory vaccines, accelerate lockdowns, accelerate vaccine card mandates, and vaccine passports.
There's some polling that shows American's support vaccine mandates, but not by the federal government. They don't want the federal government to do it. They're okay with employer mandates, but not federal government mandates. When you begin to vilify the unvaccinated you forget that many have a real legitimate concern for not wanting to get vaccinated. For many young women, it is pregnancy. Others have had COVID and don’t feel the need to get vaccinated. I know plenty of people who were skeptical of getting the vaccine and I'm very pro-vaccine. But a lot of my friends who were skeptical wound up ultimately getting it after other members of their family got deathly ill.
They don't like the government forcing people into it. The Democrats looked at the California recall election and think that Californians would be okay with it, and really California's aren't super okay with it. The problem was Larry Elder made it a Larry Elder versus Gavin Newsom race and Californians were less okay with Larry Elder and more okay with vaccine and mask mandates. This tells you everything you need to know about why Larry Elder running a big campaign in California probably wasn't a good idea.
But this is now part of the Democrats’ strategy. In order to win in 2022, they've got to have a villain. Donald Trump is off the stage. They're going to try to bring him back. If Donald Trump can't come, who is going to be their enemy? The unvaccinated. Polls suggest people are getting tired of them. They will vilify people who are unvaccinated. This is the party of Barack Obama, the man who told his supporters to take guns to knife fights, the man who told Hispanic voters that Republicans were the enemies, the man who told his voters to get in the face of people and yell at them if they were telling lies about Obama. The man who started an office in the White House where you could turn in your neighbor if they were lying about Obamacare. This is par for the course.
The media doesn't like to talk about that aspect of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama, but it's real, it's documented, it happened. Now they're going to escalate it with gusto and try to make you, if you're unvaccinated, the bad guy. They will aim to tie you to Donald Trump and scare people into voting for the Democrats. I think a lot of people are not going to do what the Democrats think they're going to do.
I think you once said to never assign malevolence when stupidity would do just fine, but the former seems to be a better explanation for a lot of his policies. Nearly every unvaxxed person I know who is reasonably educated about these shots would happily take the Novavax shot once it is approved because it is more traditional technology, has a better safety profile and appears to offer better protection against Delta. If he cares about saving American lives, he will dramatically ramp up production of monoclonal antibodies and help fast track more traditional alternatives to the big three… not to mention the other protease inhibitors for early treatments that already have a lot of good clinical data supporting them.
Then the Democrats are making two major mistakes.
First, they are counting on a biological weapon to behave in a predictable manner - that it will continue to infect enough people to keep up the rancour. Biological weapons do not work that way. Ask any of the researchers from Fort Detrick or Dugway Proving Grounds - they'll tell you that predicting the effects of the weapon are very uncertain. The probability is that the number of infected will drop precipitately as all of the survivors of the current wave add their immunity to the population. As you state, there will be a brief flareup in Northern, Blue states, but even they will not suffer as much as the South in the summer. If that happens, the Democrats will be seen as piling on to sick people for nothing - and all the sympathy will switch to the unvaccinated. Throw in some anaphylactic reactions to the vaccines, some more exploding hearts, and a few ADA lawsuits, and the Democrats will be the villains.
BTW, I have noticed that everybody who asks if SARS-COV-2 is a weaponized virus has carefully avoided asking the people who would know - the experts at Fort Detrick and Dugway. Instead, they ask bio-researchers, doctors, and intelligence analysts, none of whom have any experience of how biological weapons (intentional or not) work. Weaponized viruses do not behave like normal epidemiological agents. Biological agents are also developed in very particular ways to achieve the desired goals - even in these days of CRISPR.
The second problem the Democrats will have is that the very people they are treating to rule 13, "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. " are a major portion of their base - blacks, Hispanics, and unions. Those three groups have the lowest percentage of vaccinated members. You say the Democrats misread Gavin Newsom's results because California is progressive. I daresay that Democrats made a bigger mistake in not realizing that those three groups voted against him. He made it to 63% on the votes of White Supremacists (also known as urban and suburban, educated, wealthy white Democrats).