The Depth of Democrat Defeat in 2016: Liberalism Was Rejected and Repudiated

The election on last Tuesday, week ago today, you can call it the icing on the cake or a nuclear bomb, I don’t care what, but even before last Tuesday, the Democrat Party was disappearing. And it just amazes me the illusion that was created that hid that from everybody, even though it was right in front of us. We knew it. We knew they were losing seats in the midterm elections, but because of Obama’s approval rating and the illusion created by the media that the Democrats were ascending, we were convinced to ignore what we were watching. We were convinced to ignore what we saw.

But I’m not gonna let that happen again. I’m gonna stay focused on this because this defeat — do you know how many states in this country now have a Democrat governor, Democrat legislature? Take a guess. How many states, there are 50, not 57. There are 50 states. How many of those states have a Democrat governor and Democrat state legislature? The number is five. However, it’s actually four. In Connecticut there is a tie in the state senate there, and the tiebreaker goes to the Democrats in that case. But in real numbers there are four states that have a legitimate, without using a tiebreaker, Democrat governor and Democrat state legislature.

They are Rhode Island and Hawaii, both states you could put in a thimble, and Oregon and California. That’s it. Connecticut is number five, if you count the tiebreaker. Now, what constituted this defeat, or what led to it? The Democrats are doing their postmortems on this right now, and, folks, 2002’s repeating itself and the media is in full-fledged BS mode. Remember the story we had yesterday that the Trump campaign had no idea that they had to staff the West Wing?

Remember the story we had yesterday that Trump had no idea that 4,000 jobs had to be filled and that Trump was going to rely on Obama to help. Do you realize that story is a totally made-up lie? We’re just gonna have to start assuming this when every story in the Drive-By Media — and the New York Times has now come out and said that they essentially are going to be the voice of the opposition. They are once again throwing journalism aside, throwing it overboard in favor of being the loyal opposition.

We’re just gonna have steel ourselves here and the first, the default reaction to any media story that has anything incredulously stupid, dumb, or negative about Trump is to not believe it, folks. That has to become our default position. The default position cannot be, “Wow. That’s incredible. Wow, man, if that’s true,” and then go look for it. The default position, to be intellectually honest with ourselves, has to be rejection. Because it is still in full swing. The media’s doing everything they can to cast the Trump election as a mistake, as a temper tantrum, as an oddity, and it is anything but that.

It is substantive. This was an ideological election. They’re trying to say it was a change election. And by change election they mean the voters just wanted something different. It’s a cyclical thing, the analysts tell us. “Yeah, they just got tired of seeing the same faces and they want to go a different direction.” And don’t you believe that, either. This was the continuation of the people of this country rejecting liberalism and its sponsors, who happen to be the Democrat Party. There is no if, and, or but about it. There’s no maybe. There is no possibly.

It is a definite repudiation and rejection of everything liberal, including President Obama.

But I just want to again establish and have it said without any doubt whatsoever this was an ideological election and it was the third such ideological election where liberalism was repudiated and sent packing. And by liberalism, I mean the policies of Obama that were rooted in the expansion and growth of government. That’s what was sent packing, and that is ideological. If it has anything to do with Big Government, trade deals, Obamacare, immigration, whatever it was that the Democrat Party was seen as standing for was totally repudiated.

Liberalism was rejected like never before, and this needs to be taught. There are people on the winning side, people who voted for Trump, who need to hear, it’s a teachable opportunity, learning opportunity, teachable moment. It has to be done very carefully because most people are not, by nature, ideological.

One of my often-stated… Not complaints, but if I could change anything, it would be a massive education about liberalism so we wouldn’t have to go through this ever again, because it ends up always being rejected. Woodrow Wilson was rejected. FDR after a while. LBJ. Some of them never even got a chance like McGovern, Jimmy Carter. It always ends up being rejected. Now, you might say, “Well, conservatism is, too.”

I would say no to that because the only real conservative president we’ve had is Reagan, and he won two landslides, and he would have won a third could he have been on the ballot. But liberalism is rejected, and it’s not just because people grow tired of faces and not because people want to see something new and want to see change. It is specific. We have three elections to document it here. The Democrats are now out there claiming they get it, they understand, or they’re in the process of understanding.

They understand that they have ignored flyover country. They understand they ignored the white, working class vote. They understand. They did all this on purpose. They did all of this strategically. They threw in with a coalition of minorities, cultural and political minorities. And they banked on the fact that there would be a winning majority with that approach. And there isn’t, and that is heartwarming to realize as well.

The protesters, by the way, it has been stated by me because I know it; I have no doubt about it. I found the ads on Craigslist, but now it’s been documented. Protesters in Oregon who have been paid to protest didn’t even vote in Oregon or anywhere else. A whole slew of them have been interviewed and investigated. They didn’t even vote, and yet they’re out there protesting the outcome of an election. They’re bought and paid for. In some cases, they’re being paid $1500 a week, some cases 12 to $18 a day, some cases 24/7.

We have lived a mirage. We’ve been living as the objects of delusion for the last eight years. The depth of this defeat, five states with Democrat governor and Democrat state legislatures. Do you realize the meaning of that? Do you realize the power that has been lost, has been rejected by voters all over this country? Five states — and it’s actually four, if you throw out Connecticut because it only wins because of a tie in the senate with tiebreaker. But it’s just incredible. In 2010 we saw it.

Nine hundred seats in the 2010 election, 700 more seats in the 2014 election. We add to it that the media making up the fact that Trump didn’t know you had to staff the West Wing, that Trump needed Obama’s assist, made up stories. They’re actually the result of leaks, people… Oh, like the Trump kids demanding or Trump demanding security clearance for his kids. Grab sound bite number 22. Kellyanne Conway was on Fox & Friends today. Ainsley Earhardt said, “We’re getting reports that the Trump team seeking top security clearance for the children. I want to know if that’s true.”

CONWAY: That was an informal question that was posed by someone. It doesn’t sound like it was a formal request. And again, somebody leaked it, I don’t know if to embarrass or stir up trouble. But, look, the Trump children will be very supportive of their father and his presidency.

RUSH: Right. It’s understandable that Trump would want security clearances for them because he wants their counsel. He wants their advice. They have been advising him throughout, and not only here, but in his businesses. It makes total sense. And again the people that reject this are people from the old school who have the existing playbook that the establishment’s used, and if it’s not in there, well, then you can’t do it. I mean, there’s so many great things that have happened in this election.

The whole donor class had it thrown back in their face. The professional political consultants class, they had it thrown right back in their faces, and they were so much of what was wrong on the Republican side by refusing to treat the Democrats as the opposition. Anyway, that’s old ground. I want to plow new ground, and there is continuing new ground with the depth of this Democrat defeat. I want you to think now about all that you heard before the election regarding Trump and demographics and how it all added up to he had no prayer.

Let’s review — and not everything, but let’s touch some of the high points. I don’t care where you went. You could go to Fox News, you go to CNN, MSNBC, you could go to ABC, NBC, CBS, you could New York Times, Washington Post, wherever you went, they told you that Trump was gonna lose big with women, that women, they were not gonna put up with Trump. Particularly educated, college educated white women. Ditto Hispanics. There was no way!

Trump had come down the escalator at Trump Tower and he’d called illegal aliens from Mexico rapists and murderers, and they weren’t gonna put up with that. And besides, because women all vote alike, we were told, and Hispanics all vote alike, they’re all monolithic thinkers. They all think alike, all women do and all Hispanics. They all think alike and they all vote alike and they were all universally said to hate and despise Trump.

And even on election night noted experts on Fox News kept reminding us of the late voting and early voting Hispanic population. It was way, way up and it spelled doom for Trump. And although this was stated with a smile on the face by the various analysts and strategists and commentators and pundits who are treating us to their expertise. Not only that, blacks. Oh, man, it was gonna be brutal! African-Americans just hated Trump ’cause they loved Obama, and they loved Hillary.

And all women. Didn’t matter what race, didn’t matter sexual orientation, women were totally all on board and devoted to the idea of the first female president. Break that glass ceiling! Hillary schedules her election night victory at the Javits Center that has a glass ceiling. I mean, it was never ending. I’m sure you remember all of it. I’m sure that you believed some of it. I’m sure that some of it alarmed you, because on the surface it seemed to make sense. I mean, Trump was out there. They had the Access Hollywood video. They had all of this.

But you want to hear some actual demographic results as compared to 2012? Well, I have them right here, my friends, in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. (shuffling papers) By the way, Brian has added a thicker stock of paper to the printer, which helps me, by the way, in separating pages, but it has a different sound. Not that different. But, anyway. By demographic, men versus women. In 2012… Well, no. Let’s go with this year first. In 2016, Trump got 54% of the male vote, up 5% from 2012.

I know numbers are hard to follow, but try, folks. This is the gender demographic breakdown. In 2016, Trump got 54% of the male vote, an increase of 5% over Mitt Romney. Trump got 42% of the female vote. That is minus 1% from 2012. That’s nothing. Trump was not supposed to get over 20% of the female vote. That’s what polling told us. That’s what the experts and the analysts told us. But Trump got 42% of the female vote. Race. Trump got 1% additional white vote over 2012, but in the black vote Trump added 7% more black support this year than in 2012.

Trump plus-8 Hispanic votes this year versus 2012. So white, black, Hispanic, Trump increased Republican votes by 7 to 8%. Not supposed to happen. Age: 18 to 29, Millennials, were supposed to come out in droves for Hillary. They were just gonna bury Trump. Trump got 5% more votes in 2016 than Romney got in 2012 in the 18-to-29 demographic. Income… I’ve gotta take a break. I just looked at the clock. But this is pretty much it. Everything they told us where Trump was gonna die demographically just didn’t happen. In fact, for the most part, Trump improved over Republican performance Romney in 2012.

RUSH: The bottom line here, ladies and gentlemen, is this election is a mandate election unlike elections we have seen in the past. There aren’t many like this. There’s no doubt about this. There is no way the Democrats… They’re gonna try and the media’s trying to spin this as an accident, as a temper tantrum or whatever, but don’t fall for this. I want you people to be up. I want you to be happy. I want you to be confident. I want you to understand that you’re in the majority and you’re winning, and you never were in the minority.

And this is a golden opportunity the likes of which nobody expected and we haven’t seen in a while, and it was a mandate election. Trump has a mandate. Everything that we have undergone — every penalizing and punishing policy that we’ve been subjected to for the last eight years — was sent packing. It was rejected. It is a mandate election.

RUSH: Here are some hard numbers for you. What has happened to the Democrats under Barack Obama’s presidency? If you want to know what the Barack Obama legacy really is since Obama became president in 2008.

The Democrats have lost 11 seats in the Senate.
They have lost 60 seats in the House of Representatives.
They have lost 14 governorships. And as I previously stated, there are only four states in this entire country where the Democrats control the governorship and the state legislature, only four out of 50.

Since Obama became president, the Democrats have lost 900 state legislative seats all across the country.
They have lost mayor’s offices.
They have lost city council.

I mean, it’s all the way down the ballot. This repudiation is deep, and it is specific. It’s why Trump has a mandate. It is a rejection of what Barack Obama stood for. It is a rejection of every policy Obama put forth. It’s a rejection of the ideology of Barack Obama. There’s nothing happenstance. This decimating defeat took place over basically six years. Obama got a honeymoon the first two years, and to show you the depth of denial that Obama’s in, we got the sound bites coming in, pardon the sniffles here, folks, nothing’s wrong. It actually may be cigar smoke causing the sniffles. Nothing to worry about. Everything cool here.

I’m watching Obama in his press conference, joint press conference with the prime minister of Greece, who really — Obama would be asked a question and he would take 10 minutes answering it, and then they’d go to the prime minister of Greece for the follow-up, and he would just kind of throw his arms out and make a facial expression like, “I have no idea what to say to that,” because it was so absent and devoid reality.

Obama said that the reason this election had nothing to do with him, it had nothing to do with him. There were a bunch of liars out there in the Republican media and in media at large, and people did not have their facts straight. He said people loved the repairs made in infrastructure in the past eight years. I mean, folks, you know, it’s actually not denial. It’s classic Democrat liberalism. Just lie. Lie about your accomplishments. Lie about your achievements. What you do is, you take your intentions, what you hope to accomplish, what you think you’re gonna get done, and then just act like you’ve done it. That is liberalism in a nutshell. You pile all of your hopes and your expectations and your dreams into this little package called “it happened,” and then you run around talking about all the great things you did.

He’s in Greece talking about all the infrastructure improvements in America and how the American people have great appreciation for him, for having done it. You watch this, and you ask yourself serious questions about, what is this? Is this denial? Does this represent strategy? I mean, what is this? Because none of it, none of it was true. Listen to the New York Times writing about this. This is our old buddy Jonathan Martin, used to be over at Politico.

He said, “The Democrats’ stunning defeat in the presidential race and continued struggles in lower-level contests have jolted party leaders into concluding that their emphasis on cultural issues has all but crippled them by diverting voters’ attention from the core Democratic message of economic fairness.”

Translation: The Democrats got so absorbed in uprooting American culture by letting people of any gender use whatever bathroom they want and gay marriage and all this other stuff, that they forgot their attachment to the, quote, unquote, little guy.

“Over President Barack Obama’s two terms, Democrats have embraced a down-the-line cultural liberalism that energized his coalition of millennials, minorities and college-educated whites. But the growing nationalization of politics and the Democrats’ drift to the left doomed a number of candidates.” It goes on and on and on and it gets close, but it doesn’t quite get to the real reason all of this happened.

And then there’s this. “Now, without rebuking the still-popular president directly, many Democrats share a growing recognition that Obama’s way may not be the best course in a country where many voters have experienced little income growth and where high-paying jobs can be scarce.”

You think? You think? So what happened to the Democrats? Why did they abandon the, quote, unquote, little guy? And this happened back in November of 2011. Why did they? And it was actually stated in a column in the Washington Post as campaign strategy for the upcoming 2012 campaign. They announced that they were going to abandon the pursuit of the votes of the white working class in America. Thomas B. Edsall wrote the piece. Why would they do this? One answer, one name, Barack Hussein Obama.

The people the Democrat Party abandoned are the people Obama doesn’t like and the people Obama blamed for America being the way it is: racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, the bitter clingers, white, working-class Americans. And Obama took his party to where he believed the victims of white, working-class Americans were wallowing away in misery and obscurity, and that would be minority populations of one type or another. Basically what you have when you have an angry, irritated community agitator and community organizer as chief exec.

And this man remains the titular head of the Democrat Party, by the way, and he’s going to see to it that he does. He’s not leaving Washington after his presidency. He’s going to stay there. He’s going to be the face, he’s going to be the top dog in the Democrat Party. He’s gonna be on TV rejecting, stopping, obstructing, whatever Trump tries to do. Make book on it. Is gonna happen. He’s gonna do it from his only venue of experience, and that’s community organizing and agitation. So we may be looking at four years.

We might now have an actual new Big, as in Big Protest. Big Protest might become a never ending, ongoing movement bought and paid for by the Democrat Party, made to look organic and natural. This is what community agitators do. It’s what community organizers do. They get people riled up and protesting. And where they don’t do it on their own, they pay for it. They hire them to go do it, and that’s going to be the titular head of the Democrat Party. And as long as that happens, the Democrat Party is gonna continue to lose elections big.

That’s why I say it’s incumbent on as many people as in a position to do so to explain to people, what you don’t like about America is liberalism. What you voted against, that’s what liberalism is. When you hear us describe liberals and liberalism, it’s what you just rejected. It’s what you just repudiated. Liberalism is what happened to your health care. Liberalism is what happened to your economy. Liberalism is what happened to open borders and immigration. Liberalism is what happened to the education of your kids. Liberalism is what happened that put this country into decline.

The thing is, you need to understand, it was on purpose. Liberals did what they did on purpose. It wasn’t because they thought it would make America great. It wasn’t because they thought it would make America greater, because they don’t believe America deserves to be great. Their protest signs even say so. Colin Kaepernick even says so. America never has been great as far as he’s concerned. And to the Democrat Party and your average, ordinary liberal and leftist around the world, America has never been great but, furthermore, doesn’t deserve to be because of all of the mistakes America has made since its founding, and those are basically cultural.

They are racism, sexism, bigotry, discrimination, all of that. America deserves to be in decline. The powerful in America deserve to pay the price unless they are aligned with Democrats as cronies, and then they will be exempted. So Wall Street was exempted, Big Bank was exempted, certain Big Retail was exempted, but if you weren’t crony aligned with the Democrat Party, you were going to feel the full force of the power of the federal government. America, as far as liberals are concerned, doesn’t deserve to be great, it deserves to be in decline. That is the only way, in their view, that the grievance industry can get justice.

Social justice mandates that America be in decline because that’s the only way the guilty can be punished. And with liberalism, it’s about punishing, it’s not about rewarding, it’s not about elevating, it’s not about raising people, it’s not about taking people from the lower middle class to the upper middle class and beyond. Liberalism is about punishing achievers, punishing success, and blaming them for the plight that everybody else is in or feeling. And by that definition, the country must be in decline. It’s no different than liberals telling you they’re gonna go raise taxes on the rich, and you saying, “Well, how’s that gonna help me?”

And the liberal says, “It’s not gonna help you, but it’s gonna punish the people taking your money.”

“Oh, oh, okay, well, you punish them, damn right, you go punish them.”

But understand now it’s not gonna elevate your standard of living.

“Yeah, that’s fine, that’s fine, punish ’em, I’ll feel better.” That’s liberalism. America deserves to be in decline. America never was great and doesn’t deserve to be great the way it was founded and the way it’s constituted. America deserves to be punished. That’s Barack Obama. That’s his agenda. That’s what was rejected, because a majority of Americans doesn’t buy into that at all.

And all of these eight years were such a shame. It’s nothing more… It’s a shame how many of us were on the verge of believing we’d lost our country and that we were vastly outnumbered and that we had lost the country to them, to this. But it wasn’t true, and it isn’t true. America came through. PJ Media: “At Every Level of Government, the Democratic Party Is Dead.” They do not deserve to be revived by a Republican Party feeling guilty, magnanimous, or even obsessed with the notion of unity.

The way to achieve unity is not by incorporating a little bit of what the Democrats want with our agenda. The way to achieve unity is not by reaching out to the protesters and saying, “What can we do to make you happier?” The way to achieve unity here is to firmly and finally establish that we are a growth nation that is devoted as our founding proclaimed to liberty and freedom and the pursuit of happiness for everybody, and you are more than welcome to join us as we head back in that direction.

But we’re not going to incorporate what you have believed as a means of being fair, as a means of being nice. It’s too serious. This has been the Republican Party’s problem. With every victory came a certain amount of guilt and a desire to almost apologize for the victory by including Democrats in whatever we were going to do. Now, you might be noticing the Republican leadership not doing anything like that right now.

They had their big meeting today, first press conference, all wearing Make America Great hats. They’re wearing Trump hats. These guys are fired up like I’ve never seen them. They’re enthused like I’ve never seen ’em. They’re out there; they’re ready to roll up their sleeves. They’re ready to get going today to implement the Trump agenda.

RUSH: Email during the break: “Why are you spending so much on what we already know? The Democrats lost.” Because I want it to sink in. I want everybody to have confidence how big this is. I want everybody to know. I said before the election and in the immediate aftermath, when you take away the things I have to do here because this is a radio program and it’s the broadcasting business, radio specifically, there are retirements there to succeed. And since we’re in the free market and capitalism we don’t have donors and we don’t have funders.

The program has to succeed. If that doesn’t happen all the rest of this is academic. So beyond that, beyond trying to meet those demands that I place on myself and how I define professional success, the purpose of this radio program has been to defeat the left. I mean, there are many other things as well, but the overarching objective here has been to educate and to inform people about the pitfalls and the dangers of liberalism. And folks, this election is it. Whether people realize it or not, and that’s what I hope to build upon is people realizing why this happened, liberalism, leftism, whatever you want to call it, was rejected, repudiated big time.

So many people don’t want this to be seen as an ideological election, primarily Democrats, ’cause they don’t want you to know that that’s what happened. They want you to think it’s something else, just a change election, people tired of the same old faces, want to go a different direction. No, no, no. It’s much more specific than that, and even maybe some of the people that contributed to this big victory and defeat of the Democrats may not have done so because they wanted to stamp out liberalism, but they ended up doing it.

And it’s a big, big deal. It is an overwhelmingly, massively successful thing. It’s one of the things I was hoping for when we got the victory in the House in ’94. So, to me, in a personal sense, folks — I’m sure you can indulge me one little personal desire here — this is huge. It is overwhelming and it’s joyous, this massive defeat. So that’s why. ‘Cause you want everybody listening to the sound of my dulcet tones to understand exactly why this happened. And I’m gratified. There were people, all the smart people, all the learned pundits and commentaries, even on Fox News and CNN, wherever, who, before the election, in addition to saying Trump had no prayer, were saying that the Republican Party was practically nonexistent, it was about to be wiped out, and that conservatism was the reason.

They wanted us to believe that conservatism equaled Republican landslide losses. Conservative nominee, that’s why we couldn’t have Ted Cruz, that’s why we couldn’t have Rubio because it would have been nothing more than another Barry Goldwater landslide defeat. And that ticked me off. Conservatism’s been our only way out of this mess. And Trump has learned it as this campaign has gone on. You can tell it by the people he’s thinking about putting in his cabinet. You can tell it by Supreme Court nominees. It matters.

Conservatism is ascendant and is triumphant. And there are even conservative publications who don’t want to admit this or say this because they’re afraid to, but it’s true. There is a lot to be ecstatically happy about in this election, and I’m trying to just remind everybody what it is. And the media isn’t going to report it this way. They’re not going to cast this election in anywhere near the truthful light that it is. Once again, it falls upon me to do so, and I happily am here to do it.