TRUST THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA TO DRAW ABSOLUTELY THE WRONG CONCLUSION FROM THE ELECTION RESULTS

CNN's Zachary Wolf sums up the elections:

The major takeaways? This is a more moderate and centrist country than activists on either the right or left let on, and Donald Trump fever may be breaking.

Really?

Wolf continues:

The system is working. Here's one thing everybody can be happy about: The election results, for the most part, are not being questioned. That may have a lot to do with Republicans doing well. But the results should prove to them that Trump's voter fraud myth is in fact a myth.

So now we all agree that our elections are fair? Apparently Ron DeSantis didn't get the memo. This happened yesterday:

Ron DeSantis proposes law enforcement office in ‘election integrity’ follow-up

During a rally in West Palm Beach on Wednesday, the morning after Election Day, the Governor told supporters he seeks another “election integrity” measure.

DeSantis’ proposal includes establishing a statewide law enforcement office to investigate and prosecute election crimes and fraud....

“If someone’s ballot harvesting, you report it to these people, and this is their sole job,” DeSantis said.

Also on his wish list is increasing the penalty for breaking the new “ballot harvesting” law from a misdemeanor to a third-degree felony.

Also yesterday, Josh Mandel, who's likely to be the next U.S. senator from Ohio, tweeted this:

Today is the 1 year anniversary of November 3, 2020 and the 1 year anniversary of the crime of the century.

I am calling to ABOLISH the January 6th Commission and REPLACE it with a November 3rd Commission. We MUST stop democrat cheating!https://t.co/T09uAyRvco

— Josh Mandel (@JoshMandelOhio) November 4, 2021

We're learning that eight Republicans who attended the January 6 Trump demonstration-turned-riot in Washington were elected or reelected to office on Tuesday.

Three were elected to state legislatures, and five won positions at the local level.

Although most have claimed they didn’t breach the U.S. Capitol on that day, all were participants in the demonstration leading up to the attack....

Currently trending on Twitter in the United States is the hashtag #ExposeNJ, a reference to a video clip just released by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas that appears to show a poll worker in New Jersey offering a ballot to a non-citizen immigrant. (It's a provisional ballot, and the poll worker doesn't promise that it will be counted.)

And then there's Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft, who posted this yesterday:

On One Year Anniversary of the 2020 Election Steal – Was the 2021 Virginia Race a Head-fake by Democrats?

... One year ago 300,000 votes magically appeared for Joe Biden in the middle of the night to give him the win in Virginia. These magical votes have yet to be explained. The Democrats, fake news and even the Republican Party are incurious.

So where were the magical votes this year? Was this omission on purpose? Was this part of a larger psyop on the American public? Was this part of their game? Throw in McAuliffe as a sacrificial lamb knowing they can steal any future election at will?

So, was the 2021 Virginia race a head-fake by Democrats on the American public?

Also see HuffPost's feature story on Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who resisted Trump's efforts to overturn the Georgia election results and is now doomed in his reelection bid -- losing in party straw polls and unable to score any major endorsements.

So, yeah, the GOP is totally over Trump.

Wolf writes:

Here's what Republicans and Democrats should take away from the results.

Leave Trump behind. Maybe Republicans didn't need to change voting laws, as they have been doing in key states, attempting to drive down Democratic turnout. Maybe they just needed to drop Donald Trump, as Republican Glenn Youngkin did on his way to winning the governor's race in Virginia, defeating Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

It wasn't a bomb-throwing wannabe strongman who won over voters in the blue state. It was a smiling rich guy in a zippered vest who toned down but did not abandon racial issues that appealed to Trump supporters and seized on notions of so-called "parental choice" that appealed to suburbanites.

Oh -- Youngkin "toned down but did not abandon racial issues that appealed to Trump supporters" and that's a sign that we've moved on from Trump? And I guess the congressional GOP also intends to "not abandon racial issues": Yesterday, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy announced the rollout of a "parents' bill of rights" intended to make the Critical Race Theory fight national.

We know that Terry McAuliffe repeatedly linked Glenn Youngkin to Trump. In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy, who was barely reelected, tried the same tactic on his opponent, Jack Ciattarelli.

Murphy's ads portray Ciattarelli, who cut a moderate image in the legislature, as a right-wing acolyte of Donald Trump who would transform a reliably Democratic state into Texas....

“Trump politicized covid mask-wearing, and that's what my opponent does, too,” Murphy said [in a debate]. “He spoke at a ‘Stop the Steal’ rally with white supremacist, Confederate flags. We've got video, we've got photographs of it. There's no denying that led to Jan. 6 where, by the way, a New Jersey-native policeman was killed. He has praised Trump's greatest legacy as his three Supreme Court justices. That's a threat, directly to reproductive freedom. So I'm more than comfortable talking about Trump, because these are facts.”

If this backfired and drew pro-Trump voters to the polls while not sufficiently motivating anti-Trump voters, that's not a sign that the Trump era is over. That's a sign that he's still driving turnout. He's clearly not the only reason GOP voters went to the polls, but we're not in a post-Trump era yet. Alas, the media is desperate for a Republican Party it can endorse wholeheartedly, so the belief that Trump's decline is imminent never goes away.