[Film-maker says the salient lesson from the midterms for
Democrats is to stop depressing their own vote with pessimism, fear
and conventional thinking]
[[link removed]]

‘I NEVER DOUBTED IT’: WHY MICHAEL MOORE FORECAST ‘BLUE
TSUNAMI’ IN MIDTERMS  
[[link removed]]


 

Edward Helmore
November 14, 2022
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Film-maker says the salient lesson from the midterms for Democrats
is to stop depressing their own vote with pessimism, fear and
conventional thinking _

Michael Moore: ‘There are more of us than them'.’ , Anthony
Harvey/PA

 

In the lead-up to last week’s midterm elections in America, the
punditocracy of commentators, pollsters and political-types were
almost united: a “red wave” of Republican gains was on the cards.

But one dissenting voice stood out: that of leftist filmmaker Michael
Moore. Against all the commonplace predictions, he had forecast
Democrats would do well. He called it a “blue tsunami”
[[link removed]].

 
That proved to be true in his home state of Michigan, where Democrats
[[link removed]] won governor, house
and senate for the first time in 40 years, often by large margins.
It’s been more of a blue wall across the rest of the country, where
Republican gains mostly failed to materialize, with the exception of
Florida. But even so, the strong Democrat performance has stunned
people on both sides of the US political divide, delighting the left
and sparking hand-wringing on the right.

With the Democrats retaining power in the Senate, and a chance that
even the House could remain in their control, suddenly Moore is
looking like a prognosticator par excellence.

“I never doubted it – there was no way the Republicans were going
to have some kind of landslide,” Moore said in an interview.

But, he added: “I don’t have any special powers, I’m not related
to Nostradamus or Cassandra, but I was stunned once again that nobody
was willing to stick their neck out. I was just trying to say that
common sense, and data – and if you’re not living in a bubble –
should bring you to the same conclusion that there are more of us than
them.”

“We’ve won seven of the last eight elections in the popular vote,
we’ve got more registered, we have a new crop of young people every
year, plus the fact that 70% of eligible voters are either women,
people of color, or 18 to 25 year olds, or a combination of the
three,” he said. “That’s the Democratic party’s base”.

In the last of his increasingly popular mass emails, Mike’s Midterm
Tsunami Truth #41
[[link removed]],
published on Wednesday, he wrote a devastating critique of the
conventional wisdom of a US electorate focused on economic woes,
fearful of crime and resigned to the loss of abortion rights, while
non-plussed by the election-denying Republicans.

“We were lied to for months by the pundits and pollsters and the
media. Voters had not ‘moved on’ from the Supreme Court’s
decision to debase and humiliate women by taking federal control over
their reproductive organs. Crime was not at the forefront of the
voters ‘simple’ minds. Neither was the price of milk. It was their
democracy that they came to fight for yesterday,” he penned.

Moore doesn’t have an answer for why pundits, pollsters and the
media get it repeatedly wrong but theorizes that self-reinforcing
storylines become established that are hard to back away from. He also
questions the fear-mongering that’s often implicit in narrative
lines the media adopt. “They may be trying to gin up the vote
through fear – ‘This is going to happen so you’d better get your
butts to polls’. They may think it’s noble, but I don’t think
it’s noble at all,” he said.

And there are questions for the political machinery. As anyone who has
voted knows, the moment you register to vote or donate to candidate,
the inbox is almost instantaneously bombarded with what Moore calls
“scare emails”.

“Don’t they understand that’s just going to depress the vote? If
we don’t keep the House I think the reason for that is the scare
tactics of the Democratic party and perhaps some enablers in the media
who are ginning up this, ‘Trump is on his way back, folks, here
comes the big bad boogie man’. By doing that they hurt the thing
overall.”

He wants a more positive message from the left, based less on scaring
people and more on inspiring them. Already a self-defeating post-Trump
narrative is taking shape, Moore believes, and it revolves mostly
around Florida governor Ron DeSantis. “Oh, DeSantis is going to win
because he’s like Trump but he’s smarter oooh, oooh”.

DeSantis does represent the kind of forceful, base-pleasing
call-to-arms that Democrats fear. “He is clever to rent private jets
and fly refugees up to Martha’s Vineyard,” Moore says. “Do you
know the sort of orgasmic feeling that happens inside a right-winger
when they see him doing something wonderful and crazy like that,
slamming it right in the liberals face.”

The left can learn a lesson from that playbook: get creative, though
not cruel. He points out that wasn’t until 10pm the night before the
vote that Democrats finally put up a campaign ad featuring LeBron
James, the most popular basketball player in America, asking voters in
Georgia to vote against Herschel Walker in Georgia.

“Why didn’t they do that months ago? They wait until the last
night to put up one of great African American sports stars?”

Last summer, when John Fetterman was laid up recovering from a stroke,
his campaign went on Cameo.com
[[link removed]]and,
for just $400, recruited reality-T.V. star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi
of MTV’s Jersey Shore fame.

“Hey Mehmet! This is Nicole ‘Snooki’ and I’m from ‘Jersey
Shore’” Polizzi said in a video posted
[[link removed]] by
Fetterman on Twitter, adding that she’d heard that he’d moved from
New Jersey to Pennsylvania to “look for a new job.”

“And personally, I don’t know why anyone would want to leave
Jersey because it’s, like, the best place ever,” she said. “And
we’re all hot messes. But I want to say best of luck to you. I know
you’re away from home and you’re in a new place, but Jersey will
not forget you. I just want to let you know I will not forget you.”

The question for Democrats, Moore says, is why they wont use
story-tellers, writers and creative people more often?

In 2016, before Hillary Clinton lost the election, Moore, Amy Schumer,
Chris Rock and Bill Maher offered to write lines for her debates with
Trump, he says.

“We offered to write great lines to throw at Trump whose his skin is
so thin – and if she delivered them right – would just slide in
and he’ll explode on the stage on live TV’, Moore recalls. “We
were all-in on it, and nobody was going to know”.

The gang presented the scheme to the Clinton campaign – and got
flatly rejected.

“They said, why would you do that? You know Amy, her comedy is
apparently kind of dirty. Chris Rock, well he’s kind of
controversial. They didn’t even get to me. They were so afraid of
fucking up and being blamed… oh, so you were the one who let Amy
Schumer and Michael Moore
[[link removed]] into the campaign.
Thanks a lot!”

“That proves my point that we won when they stuffed $400 on the
Jersey Shore lady. We need more of that. Call me. Call a couple of
Monty Python people. Call us!”

Moore says two out of three emails he got after starting his email
newsletter were from readers who signaled that they’d depressed
themselves into thinking the mid-terms were a lost cause. Their
reasoning followed, again, the narrative line of Biden’s low
approval rating, inflation, the economy, crime and so on. They ignored
the still burning rage of the loss of women’s reproductive rights.

“I said, what’s inflation or past elections got to do with
anything? We don’t live in that time anymore. There are now going to
be more women doctors than men, more women lawyers than men. Don’t
you have a clue that there is something going on? You can’t take
human rights away from an entire gender and not have that blow up in
your face”.

The point was proved by the number of wins secured by abortion rights
activists in ballot measures. There were wins in Kentucky, Michigan,
California, Montana and Vermont, in addition to Kansas over the
summer.

Thus the salient lesson from the midterms is, to Moore, for Democrats
to stop depressing their own vote with pessimism, fear and
conventional thinking. “The average liberal, progressive leftist
needs to immediately stop think you’re going to lose. Stop it, stop
it, stop it. Think ‘the American people are with us’,” he said.

===

* Michael Moore; 2022 Midterm elections;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]