Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in a sobering post-midterm election assessment, implored viewers not to solely blame former President Donald Trump for the GOP’s lack of a ‘red wave,’ as many critics have started to do.
“The downsides are marbled in with the upsides, but in this case, he’s certainly not the single cause of anything,” Carlson began during his Wednesday monologue. “Whether you like Trump or not, and many don’t and a lot do, it’s a lot more complicated than just him.
He noted that while some suburban women were upset by the reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, other high-profile Republicans won their races despite the decision and despite the fact that the Democratic Party focused on it in national campaigns.
“That’s certainly plausible in some places, probably true. On the other hand, a number of resolutely, pro-life Republicans thrived statewide. They would include Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Brian Kemp in Georgia, Ted Budd in North Carolina, a pro-life result. So abortion may have been a factor, but it’s not the whole answer,” Carlson continued.
He also rejected Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) complaint that some Republicans were not “quality candidates.”
“The quality of a candidate does matter, but really, how much does it matter? Well, let’s see. Joe Biden got elected president two years ago from his basement. John Fetterman became a U.S. senator last night. Does anyone think John Fetterman was a quality candidate? Is that why he won, because they had quality candidates on the left? Do the voters of Pennsylvania really want a brain-damaged candidate who’s never had a real job? Did they think he was more impressive than the guy who spent his career doing heart transplants? Probably not…” Carlson said.
“The rest of the American media amounts to a gigantic filter designed to distort what Republicans are saying. It’s a campaign apparatus, and only the Democrats have it,” he added.
“[In] some cases, candidate quality is not actually the most important thing. What is? Well, the mechanics of an election. They matter. In fact, they matter sometimes more than any individual running in the election. The way people vote makes a big difference to the outcome,” he continued.
“As of tonight, Democrats have far more control of the election machinery and almost total control of the American media and Republicans don’t,” Carlson continued. “These are not ideological problems. It’s not a question of who’s right on the issues. That’s settled, certainly in our mind, but probably in the minds of even people who would vote Republican if it occurred to them, but it doesn’t because they don’t know what they stand for,” he said.
“Two and a half years ago, the last administration, its Republican allies in Congress, watched passively, seemingly in glassy-eyed sedation as the Democratic Party used the pretext of COVID to rewrite election laws around the country in order to get its own candidates into office,” Carlson noted further. “They didn’t do it by accident. They knew what they were doing. Last night those laws, many of which are still on the books, paid off generously.”
For example, Democrat John Fetterman “bombed” in the one debate against Dr. Mehmet Oz, and “he won without speaking a single, coherent sentence for the entire campaign.”
But in the end, Carlson said, that did not matter.
“Thanks to early voting, Fetterman’s margin was already in the bank. Nearly 70 percent of Democrats had voted early in the Pennsylvania races. Only 20 percent of Republicans did. Okay, it’s over, but it doesn’t need to be repeated. These are fixable problems. You can get your message out. You can force the other side, if you try hard enough, to agree on fair election rules, but you can’t do any of that unless you acknowledge these problems exist,” said Carlson.
