From Karl Rove to the Big Lie: GOP loves to claim victory when they feel insecure

[marmar]

From Karl Rove to the Big Lie: GOP loves to claim victory when they feel insecure
It's nothing new for Republicans to promise a blowout victory. The real question is why the media falls for it

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
Columnist
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 7, 2022 9:00AM (EST)


(Salon) One more day until the voting is done. Hallelujah! When the polls are so tight and the campaigning so intense you reach a point where you almost don't care who wins anymore and just want it to be over. But of course you do care, as we all must in this age of authoritarian right-wing, lunacy.

I wrote on Friday that nobody really knows anything about this election. It could go either way. It might be a close result or one side could sweep both houses of Congress with big wins. But if you just read the headlines and listen to the pundits and strategists on TV, you'd think the evidence showed clearly that Republicans were running away with it. There's a reason for that: Republicans plant this notion in the press and the sad-sack Democrats play into it by prematurely assembling the circular firing squad whenever a race is close.

You see headlines like "Democrats fear midterm drubbing as party leaders rush to defend blue seats," but the fact that Donald Trump held big rallies just days before the election in Florida and Pennsylvania, where the GOP is defending numerous seats, isn't framed the same way. There's "CNN panelist predicts 'bad night,' says Democrats didn't 'listen' to voters throughout the election" while the New Yorker publishes a widely-read article headlined "Why Republican Insiders Think the G.O.P. Is Poised for a Blowout."

Maybe it's all true. Maybe it will turn out that Democrats have blown the election (even though all the fundamentals and historical precedents suggest defeat was more or less preordained) and maybe the Republicans played a masterful hand (in winning an election everyone assumed was already in the bag). We will see. But let's not kid ourselves about what is going on in these final days. Republicans are playing the press for chumps, as they do every single time. Of course they may win, but this election is close and they're not soothsayers. It's a deliberate strategy.

....(snip)....

We're in a new landscape these days with election denial prominently featured on the menu. (Karl Rove is actually getting booed as a RINO sellout at GOP rallies.) The bandwagon effect is still in play but they now have a back-up: the Big Lie. It's not overly cynical to suspect that a whole lot of the happy talk coming from Republican strategists whispering in reporters' ears about how great their private polling looks is just a set-up for the possibility that they won't do as well as they would like. As we already know, their voters are fully indoctrinated to believe that Democrats can only win if they cheat, and Republicans have created a full-scale election denial operation to challenge any negative results they don't like. In some instances, they have challenged election systems in counties Trump won by double digits! Election denial has become the party's primary organizing principle. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/11/07/from-karl-rove-to-the-big-lie-loves-to-claim-victory-when-they-feel-insecure/

[czarjak]

1. Conservative Victory always makes 'em giddy.

[republianmushroom]

2. tell the lie long enough and they will believe it.