On the EDge: Election 2018 a lose-lose situation

November 5, 2018 Utah Channel 3

OPINION — There was a time when those who actually study the political scene could make an educated guess regarding how the elections would turn out.

There were real issues, real candidates – well, at least better candidates – and the science behind politics was not some witch’s brew of random ingredients.

Not now.

Oh, on the Southern Utah level, you can pretty well rest assured that anybody who is an incumbent or is a member of the Republican Party will emerge victorious.

That’s a given, especially in Republican-charged Utah where voting may be a birthright, but the DNA of that birthright is soaked in red. The Democrats just don’t have a chance. Some of that, of course, is because they rarely find bright, charismatic candidates who can break through that barrier of Republicanism.

The rest of it is pretty much up for grabs, though.

You never know how the public will respond to propositions on the ballot. It will be interesting to see just how much the Mormon church has manipulated followers into voting against Proposition 2, which once had a very healthy lead in the polls.

But as far as the rest of it? I see only one clear-cut winner as Mitt Romney will, in all probability, be ushered in as Utah’s newest senator. Although his family has Southern Utah roots, he spent most of his life in Michigan and Massachusetts and, thus, is pretty much a carpetbagger who flashes his Mormon credentials whenever he needs to solidify his gig, as he did his figurehead leadership thing during the 2002 Olympics, a decade later when he made his run for the presidency and now in his endeavor to join the United States Senate.

The rest of the ballot is, however, anybody’s guess, particularly in the guessing game regarding the possibility of a Blue Wave sweeping the House and, perhaps, Senate.

Whether we see the seat of Congressional power switch hands won’t be known until much later tonight. Any claims made before the final votes are tallied are simply wild guesses.

We really don’t know if the president carries the influence to keep the Republicans in power or if, indeed, the Democrats have truly had enough and have found a way to inspire their followers to make it to the voting booth.

What about that youth vote? Will the swelling anti-conservative fervor that surfaced after the last tragic Florida killings hold and, as it seemed at one point, engage young voters across the nation?

Maybe.

Or, maybe not.

There are no clear indicators from the electorate.

But, we’ve been through this before. I mean, when the president first declared his candidacy, there were many who thought it was merely a stunt being pulled off by a perennially publicity hungry reality TV personality looking for more headlines.

The longtime pundits didn’t take him seriously, in fact, there are those from the president’s inner circle who didn’t take him seriously.

He started to show up in the polls and built a campaign that was anything but traditional and bulled his way into the convention where he captured the nomination.

But, he wasn’t given much of a chance to win the White House. At least at first.

Clearly, Hillary Clinton would become the next president of the United States, right?

That’s what the pundits told us, what the polls told us, what those who put pencil to paper to figure the odds told us.

And, to a certain extent, they were correct as Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes, but was taken down by the Electoral College tally.

Even the professional oddsmakers weren’t ready for that and those guys make a living by predicting everything from who will win the Super Bowl to the winner of the Kentucky Derby and the real run for the roses, the race for the White House.

Of course, there was the stunner of the FBI making a couple of odd announcements about Clinton at the end of the campaign. We will never know just how much that influenced the final vote and, at this point, is either simply an historical footnote or a reason for continued sour grapes, depending on your perspective.

I do remember writing, in the run-up to the 2016 election, that things were so skewed that I wouldn’t bet on the outcome using somebody else’s money, that things just weren’t adding up. Had I been pushed into a corner and forced to put money on the table, I would have had to wait until the day before the election to make a final guess, which is all it really would have been, and despite all the drama, would have still abstained.

I’ll do so again today.

It is simply impossible to know how voters are going to respond when they cast their ballots.

There has been a lot of discussion about this being the most important election of our lifetime.

Of course, once again, that depends on perspective.

Among Democrats, there is a certain level of urgency, desperation, desire for payback among those aggrieved by the administration.

I don’t know if that is the most honorable way to go into the voting booth, although I can certainly understand the frustration.

Among Republicans, there is a certain smugness that comes from being on the winning side. I don’t know how motivated they will be and I certainly can’t read the tea leaves to figure out how many remain truly in the administration’s camp and how many are ready to jump ship. The data is skewed that badly.

I do believe, however, that whichever way it goes, we are in for more bad blood.

Should the Democrats take back the House and Senate, you can bet that the administration and the Republican Party will make every effort to discount and discredit the election, that the fix was in. You can bet there will be charges of voter fraud, that the Deep State manipulated the whole thing. The discord will make the first two years of this administration look like a tea party.

Should the Republicans retain Congressional control, we will most definitely see the Democratic Party in shambles, searching desperately for a flagbearer to right the ship and pointing shaky fingers of blame for being either too soft, too liberal or too lazy.

Old school figuring would lead to a prediction that the Democrats will win back control of the House tonight and that the Senate will, most likely, be retained by Republicans.

Should that happen, we can look forward to a kind of embattled obstructionism from both sides that will virtually leave us with an impotent government.

So, no matter which way it goes, it all looks pretty grim – a lose-lose situation – for the country and that’s not good.

No bad days!

Ed Kociela is an opinion columnist for St. George News. The opinions stated in this article are his own and may not be representative of St. George News.

Email: edkociela.mx@gmail.com

Twitter: @STGnews, @EdKociela