Some surprises and many lessons to be learned

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For pro-democracy Republicans and right-leaning independents, there's good news to take away from yesterday's elections. First and foremost, overall voter turnout was high in races across the country, and that's good news no matter what your political persuasion. Second, there's evidence that support for more traditional conservative values hasn't waned amid the national party's far-right swing. In other words, there may be hope yet for a post-Trump GOP that's closer to the pre-Trump GOP. For now, it's just hope; it all depends on how newly elected Republicans actually govern. We'll be keeping an eye on Glenn Youngkin, who will now lead Virginia, in particular. Youngkin campaigned mostly as a moderate, and though he had Donald Trump's support, he kept him at arm's length. Now that he's won the governorship, he has a unique opportunity to demonstrate that Republicans can still lead with integrity and seek to unify Americans—while rejecting extremism, lies, and conspiracy theories. We're
hoping for the best. —Miles Taylor

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** Youngkin puts Democrats on notice
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Gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin had his work cut out for him in Virginia. The relatively traditional business Republican, who had earned Donald Trump's support, had to figure out how to balance that potentially toxic endorsement with a throwback to technocratic conservatism, focused on education, low taxes, and government efficiency. Last night, he did it, defeating former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in the trending-blue state, on the strength of suburban Republicans who had flipped in 2020 to vote for Joe Biden. "We're finding out that Democrats were renting those voters, not buying them," said Jesse Hunt, spokesman for the Republican Governors Association. He's got a point. Democrats should pay attention. So should Republicans looking for a way forward sans Trump. —Politico ([link removed])
* — New Jersey. Residents of the Garden State are still waiting for the results of their gubernatorial election. The near-tie comes as a surprise to political watchers nationwide, who thought the election would be a slam-dunk for incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy. Instead, the race hasn't been called yet. At last count, Murphy leads by about 15,000 votes over Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli. If he wins, Murphy will be the first Democratic governor re-elected in the state in 45 years. —Bergen Record ([link removed])
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* — New York City. In the nation's largest city, former police officer Eric Adams will be the next mayor, defeating Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, by a large margin. Adams, the Democratic winner of the city's first ranked-choice election, is more moderate than his liberal predecessor, Bill De Blasio. His victory signals the start of a more center-left Democratic leadership that, he has promised, will reflect the needs of the working- and middle-class voters of color who delivered him the party's nomination and were vital to his general election coalition. —The New York Times ([link removed])
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* — Minneapolis. Voters in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by a police officer last year, rejected a ballot proposal to replace the city's police department with a new Department of Public Safety. The initiative would have brought radical change to policing, by changing the city charter to remove a requirement that the city must maintain a minimum number of officers. However, opponents said the proposal had no concrete plan to move forward and warned it would leave some communities already affected by violence even more vulnerable—and the voters agreed. —Associated Press ([link removed])

MORE: Takeaways from Tuesday's elections: Bad omens for Democrats —Associated Press ([link removed])


** Lerer: Lessons from the election
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"For five years, the [Democratic] party rode record-breaking turnouts to victory, fueled by voters with a passion for ousting a president they viewed as incompetent, divisive, or worse. Tuesday's results showed the limitations of such resistance politics when the object of resistance is out of power, the failure of Democrats to fulfill many of their biggest campaign promises, and the still-simmering rage over a pandemic that transformed schools into some of the country's most divisive political battlegrounds." —Lisa Lerer in ([link removed]) The New York Times ([link removed])

Lisa Lerer is a national political correspondent, covering campaigns, elections, and political power.

MORE: Can Joe Biden save his presidency? —Newsweek ([link removed])


** Whose idea was this?
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It certainly doesn't sound like a smart one. The Federal Election Commission has ruled that foreign donors can finance U.S. referendum campaigns, opening the door to foreign spending on fights over high-profile policy issues. Um, what? It's true. While foreign nationals are barred from donating to U.S. political candidates or committees, the FEC's decision will allow them to support ballot committees, providing another avenue for foreigners to directly influence U.S. voters and domestic policy. That means they could potentially spend money to influence the actual mechanisms of the U.S. democratic process. Fortunately, states remain free to ban foreign funding for state-registered ballot committees. Seven states already do. Hopefully more will join them after this questionable decision. —Axios ([link removed])


** Zhang: Time for a pandemic reset
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"On the ground, the U.S. is now running an uncontrolled experiment with every strategy all at once. COVID-19 policies differ wildly by state, county, university, workplace, and school district. And because of polarization, they have also settled into the most illogical pattern possible: The least vaccinated communities have some of the laxest restrictions, while highly vaccinated communities—which is to say those most protected from COVID-19—tend to have some of the most aggressive measures aimed at driving down cases. 'We're sleepwalking into policy because we're not setting goals,' says Joseph Allen, a Harvard professor of public health. We will never get the risk of COVID-19 down to absolute zero, and we need to define a level of risk we can live with." —Sarah Zhang in ([link removed]) The Atlantic ([link removed])

Sarah Zhang is a staff writer at
The Atlantic.

MORE: CDC panel of advisors votes to recommend Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 —The Boston Globe ([link removed])
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** Goldberg: Our social media problem
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"There are many reasons Facebook and the social media companies that came after it are implicated in democratic breakdown, communal violence around the world, and cold civil war in America. They are engines for spreading disinformation and algorithmic jet fuel for conspiracy theories. They reward people for expressing anger and contempt with the same sort of dopamine hit you get from playing slot machines. As the recent Facebook leaks reveal, Mark Zuckerberg has made many immoral and despicable decisions. But even if he were a good and selfless person, Facebook would still probably be socially destructive, just as most other big social media platforms are." —Michelle Goldberg in ([link removed]) The New York Times ([link removed])

Michelle Goldberg is an author and a
New York Times opinion columnist.

MORE: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system —The New York Times ([link removed])


** Focus on domestic extremism
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Top FBI and Homeland Security officials testified before the House Intelligence Committee today on the agencies' respective efforts to counter domestic terrorism. The witnesses answered questions on a variety of topics, including the rise of white supremacy, the protection of civil rights and civil liberties, the role of social media in the spread of extremist ideas, distrust of federal law enforcement agencies, and the attorney general's investigation into threats made against local school board members. —C-SPAN ([link removed])
* — Of course, not all extremism is terrorism. Some of it is just plain insanity. To wit: scores of QAnon believers gathered in downtown Dallas, Texas, yesterday afternoon in the hopes that John F. Kennedy, Jr., would appear, heralding the reinstatement of Donald Trump as president. The conspiracy theorists assembled near Dealey Plaza, where former President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Needless to say, the younger Kennedy, who died in a plane crash in 1999, didn’t show. So the Q folks were disappointed. Again. —The Dallas Morning News ([link removed])
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* — The devil made her do it. More from the insanity file here. Emerald Robinson, Newsmax's White House correspondent, tweeted out (but later deleted) a warning to Christians this week. She claimed that COVID-19 "vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked. Read the last book of the New Testament to see how this ends." Well, there's a whole scientific refutation to this craziness that's too long to recount here, but suffice to say, it has very little to do with Lucifer. —Forbes ([link removed])
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* — Here's why it matters. It would be nice to dismiss all of this as some fringe lunacy on the far-right, but we can't. Thanks to certain media outlets, social media, and leaders in government, these conspiracy theories have worked their way into the mainstream. And some folks are taking things further, by letting others know that they are willing to take matters into their own hands. Have you seen any all-black American flags hanging in your neighborhood and wondered what they meant? They mean "no quarter given," and may even imply a willingness to use political violence. —Bucks County Courier Times ([link removed])

MORE: Stunning survey gives grim view of flourishing anti-democratic opinions —The Hill ([link removed])


** Von Drehle: Build Back Bipartisanship
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"In the last remaining purple districts, people understand that a truly representative government is one that struggles to reflect the entire population. No party or faction wins all the time. No platform or agenda is entirely adopted. No one is shocked to lose an election. No one gets overconfident when they win. Here, we scratch our heads over a Republican Party lost in a fever dream of election fraud that never happened, and cringe as Washington Democrats form a circular firing squad over a pie-in-the-sky agenda that they never had the votes to pass. We fear that a year from now we'll reach another Election Day to find, again, little to like from either Team Red or Team Blue. There's a better way, if only Americans could embrace it. The color purple." —David Von Drehle in ([link removed]) The Washington Post ([link removed])

David Von Drehle is a
Washington Post columnist focusing on national affairs and politics.

The most important outcome of the insurrection investigation: Participants and encouragers must be prosecuted and publicly exposed as violators of constitutional law, local laws, and criminal law. Include also those who characterize overturning an election with violence as "patriotic" as aiders and abettors. —Anna K., Washington

The one conclusion from the Jan. 6 commission that matters most? So many are equal, but here's one: The Democrats, from President Biden, to Vice President Harris, to Attorney General Garland, right down the ticket, are complicit in what happened on Jan. 6 and the next one. If they continue to do pretty much NOTHING—slow-walking the investigation, not talking about Jan. 6 and acting EVERY day, giving slaps on wrists to the people charged for invading the Capitol—then besides being complicit, they are also worthless. Not legally complicit, but in the court of moral judgment, as well as the polls.

I am not a Democrat, but I supported them in the last election to stop the criminals in the White House and hold the corrupt former administration accountable. Then Jan. 6 happened, and it could not have been more important, more urgent, to hold them accountable. Not with words and petty sentences, but with the same tenacity, seriousness, and speed that our government would act if it were mostly non-white people, especially if most were Muslims, who did what was done that day. To prosecute people with charges that are more than what a kid caught smoking pot would get. To not be cowards. To not go down rabbit holes filled with BS planted by Trump and the MAGA-hatters but to stand up and fight for this country, to defend the Constitution and our democracy. If they don't, we can kiss our democracy goodbye before 2024.

I did not support these people for them to fight and argue about how much money they can spend by such-and-such date. It's been 10 months, and they still seem clueless about what to do. They are not acting to protect voting rights, and they are doing little to prevent fascists from overthrowing our government. They play right into Trump's hands by dragging their feet and running out the clock for him and the GOP. Hitler did not come to power overnight, it took years to destroy Germany, beginning with misinformation and disinformation, and ending with a world war. Use the powers you have, and stop kowtowing to an insurrection party that's filled with, and run by, fascists! —Bill T., Arizona
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** The views expressed in "What's Your Take?" are submitted by readers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff or the Stand Up Republic Foundation.
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