With the crucial midterm elections just four days away, CNBC is reporting that October saw a gain of 250,000 jobs and average hourly earnings inching up at “the best pace since 2009,” and Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters are virtually salivating over the prospects that they will be in the majority after Tuesday.
But as congressional hopeful Dino Rossi, the veteran Republican running to fill Washington State’s 8th District seat vacated by Rep. Dave Reichert’s retirement, put it Friday morning to Seattle talk jock John Carlson. “If our people show up (to vote) we win…But they’ve got to show up.”
According to CNS News, October saw 32,000 more manufacturing jobs open up, bringing a total of 434,000 new manufacturing jobs since Donald Trump took office. And CNBC noted in its Friday economic report, “The ranks of the employed rose to a fresh record 156.6 million and the employment-to-population ratio increased to 60.6 percent, the highest level since December 2008,” according to the Labor Department.
If voters think with their heads and pocketbooks Pelosi and Waters, and their fellow Democrats will be left standing in the dust of a continuing economic surge.
In the background of what many conservative pundits suggest amounts to a Democrat threat to the economy is the promise Pelosi made to a crowd in Florida about putting gun control on top of the agenda if her party regains control.
That’s certainly on the minds of Washington gun owners, who are facing the only gun control measure on the ballot anywhere in the United States this year. Initiative 1639, which is opposed by all five major law enforcement organizations, would make Evergreen State gun laws among the most restrictive in the country.
That fact is being deliberately downplayed by media supporters of the initiative, a 30-page anti-gun wish list. Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, ripped media bias the other day in a scathing news release that pegged reporting on the gun control measure in the Puget Sound region.
“It’s deplorable and dishonest,” Gottlieb observed, “but it exemplifies why people no longer trust the media. The public is not as dumb as the press thinks, and the proof is shrinking newspaper circulation and declining ratings. The press needs credibility, but on the gun issue, that was sacrificed a long time ago.”
Two years ago, the dominant press unintentionally revealed its bias by shedding alligator tears at the end of a long evening when it became clear Trump had won the presidency and Hillary Rodham Clinton would not be prancing to inauguration as nearly all of the talking heads had anticipated.
Pelosi expects to regain the Speaker’s gavel. Waters—who encouraged the public harassment of Trump cabinet members and has advocated impeachment since Trump took office—reportedly expects to be the next chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Joining them in leadership positions would be Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), a foursome that Fox News described as the “Democrat Dream Team.” For everyone else, according to conservatives, they would be a nightmare.
Washington’s grassroots effort to reject I-1639 has been largely flying under the liberal media’s radar, much like Trump conservatives worked in 2016 in the right states to sway the Electoral College vote.
Friday morning, Rasmussen Reports noted in its daily presidential tracking poll that Trump’s job approval has risen to 51 percent. That may be just one small sign that Democrats might be overplaying their hand.
Indeed, Tuesday’s outcome may boil down to Republican Rossi’s remark Friday morning: “If our people show up, we win.”
If they don’t show up, will the country, with its surging economy and job growth, lose?
