The election last week defied reality.
For example, John Fetterman, the Democrat victor in the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania, promised more inflationary spending, more lenient treatment of felons amid a violent crime wave and more of the Left's radical, parent-dissing sexual agenda. Yet he won.
Do you really believe that a majority of Pennsylvanians voted for a stroke-damaged, hardcore leftist who comes across as a professional wrestling villain?
I don't.
Celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz was not the strongest Republican candidate and was perceived by many as a RINO. But he should have prevailed in an election in which Democrats had to defend the Biden train wreck.
Even when the president is popular, the opposition party picks up at least 20 to 30 House seats and several Senate seats. The GOP should have taken 50 or 60 House seats and gained 10 more Senate seats.
With inflation raging, millions of illegal aliens along with fentanyl dealers pouring over the unsecure border, Mr. Biden exhibiting profound mental deterioration and his polling in the dumps, any reasonable person would expect a major course correction. But it didn't happen.
It appears Republicans will barely win the House and will not take the Senate, with Arizona and Nevada going Democrat after days of ballot counting, which nearly always benefits Democrats. Why didn't the GOP win big?
Here are some theories. It could just be that the Free Stuff Army that Democrats have been feeding with "woke" education for decades has come of age and votes for anyone promising more giveaways. Never underestimate the power of envy, the beating heart of the Democrat Party.
Voters aged 18 to 29, the prime target for Mr. Biden's billion-dollar student loan debt transfer to taxpayers, broke for Democrats by 28 points. (See related article)
The Dems made hay over the Dobbs abortion ruling, painting Republicans as extremists who hold pregnant mothers down, force them into labor and then cart them off to jail. Democrats also falsely accused Republicans of plotting to end Social Security and Medicare. Perhaps the smears worked.
Finally, in some areas, vote fraud may be baked into the system, especially in one-party urban districts. Although some states tightened election security after 2020, others still have COVID-excused extended early voting, no photo ID, unmanned drop boxes and millions of mailed ballots from compromised registration lists. Plus, hackable voting machines.
Does this prove that vote fraud occurred? Nope. Fraud is hard to detect and hard to prove. Looking at election anomalies that defy rational explanation is like detecting a huge, expanding ripple in the sea. You didn't actually see the tail, so you can't prove a whale was just there. But you know something big was.
Anyway, while the rest of the country scratched its head in disbelief over so many Democrat wins, Texas and Florida excelled for the GOP.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott crushed gun grabber and celebrity favorite Beto O'Rourke. Republican Monica De La Cruz won South Texas's new congressional District 15. However, Mayra Flores, who stunned observers by winning a special election in another South Texas district, lost to a Democrat incumbent in a newly drawn district.
In rock-solid Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt overcame millions spent on attack ads and prevailed over Joy Hofmeister with 55% of the vote. In Ohio, J.D. Vance handily defeated Democrat Tim Ryan, who had been endorsed by the self-immolating Liz Cheney.
But the biggest Republican feel-good story of all was Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis crushed Charlie Crist by 20 points and Marco Rubio retained his Senate seat with a 58% to 41% win over Val Demings. They won big in heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County, which had gone Democrat for the past 20 years.
Sen. Rubio is vocally anti-communist. Gov. DeSantis has worked to thwart vote fraud and governed effectively and boldly. He kept his state open and prosperous, bucking COVID hysteria. He and his appointees take on the establishment without backing down. This includes the media, Disney, teachers unions, LGBTQ activists and federal health commissars.
For example, the Florida Department of Health in July filed a petition championed by Gov. DeSantis and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo that proposed prohibiting doctors from experimenting on gender-confused minors.
Under rules approved on Nov. 4 by two Florida medical boards, doctors are now barred from providing puberty-blocking drugs, hormone therapy and surgery to people younger than 18. This is what sanity looks like.
In October, Dr. Ladapo outraged Big Pharma and the medical establishment by releasing a recommendation that young men refrain from getting COVID-19 shots. A Florida Department of Health analysis found "an 84% relative increase in cardiac-related death among males 18 to 39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination."
So, Dr. Ladapo acted.
Elsewhere, courageous, dissenting doctors are being silenced. But not in Gov. Ron DeSantis' free republic of Florida, a state of sanity.
As for the election, the leftist-dominated editorial board of one of my former employers, the Sun Sentinel, issued a sourpuss tweet entitled "Nice knowing you, Florida." They declared the state a "crimson hellscape."
Want to win elections? Govern like this.
This column appeared originally here.
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