I voted D for Senate and Congress and R for everything else. Our races were not competitive but they are representative of wider trends. I couldn’t vote for the R candidates for Senate and Congress and barely managed to vote for the Republican challenger for the governorship because they weren’t serious people. They were bug-out crazies who weren’t trying to win. In all 3 cases, there was no campaign. No online presence, no yard signs (or, in Bailey’s case, a tiny number of the most poorly designed yard signs I’ve ever seen), no effort only to howl at the moon at night and not in public.

And the issues, my God. School closures, the forced masking of toddlers, the destruction of school sports and school programs for the developmentally disabled kids – which were some of the worst in the nation – were not mentioned. At all. The endless executive orders by the Dem governor, the destruction of small businesses – none of it was mentioned. My 6-year-old understands that in Illinois you need to run on the mismanagement of COVID. But Republicans ignored this surefire winning issue completely. In Illinois!

Inflation, another big issue. What kind of a suicidal move is it to recruit a bunch of heiresses to pose as “working mothers worried about paying bills”? These were the Republican candidates. Heiresses. You run an heiress against an actual mom from next door that we all know, and who do you think will sound more convincing on economic woes? Who do you think we are to love heiresses so much? Democrats?

The heiresses don’t seem to have noticed COVID, so it wasn’t mentioned in their mailers.

As we’ve seen with DeSantis, issues are what matters. Hard work, results – this is what brings victory. Random bleatings by fake working moms don’t work.

This was a well-deserved drubbing for the GOP. I hope it will finally serve as a lesson. We need a real party of the working people. That space is wide open in the US. Somebody needs to step into it.