As you might expect in any of my blogs, I’m going to do a quick update about this blog and some other things to include before getting to the point of this blog post. I shouldn’t have just stuck with two random things because I might have to wait until after the midterms to finally finish the post on the results of the 2020 presidential election.
If
I had an extra post, I knew that I could cover everything that I would want to
regarding the secretary of state elections, but may not be able to cover that
one this year like I want to due to time constraints. I will thus only post
these quick links to cover it here.
https://ballotpedia.org/Secretary_of_State_elections,_2022
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Secretary_of_State_Coalition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_secretary_of_state_elections
Now
I’m going to get to actually posting about the 2022 gubernatorial elections.
This might be the only place where the Democrats might actually do well in the
midterms. Although, they might not do terribly in the senate races with only
Pennsylvannia really in play and no seats seeming likely to flip in either
party. And they might be better off then they should be in the House races.
This thought about Democrats doing poorly because they are in the White House
right now might not happen at all, although I’m still pretty sure that
gerrymandering is going to hurt them in the long run in the end.
The
states with elections for governor this year are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona,
Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho,
Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota,
Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvannia,
Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tenessee, Texas, Vermont,
Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
Who
is term limited or otherwise not staying in office? I won’t name names, but
they are the governors of Arizona, Arkansas, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts,
Nebraska, Oregon, and Pennsylvannia. When it comes to the races that I care
about, I would want to review largely the governor’s respond to the covid
pandemic. I’m thus not sure that I care about most of these races in the end. I
might care a bit some about the Pennsylvannia due to the crazy MAGA who won
that primary. And if the current attorney general of Arizona wins that primary,
then I won’t want him winning higher office as well.
Despite
Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, being a Republican, I think that he’s had the
best response to the pandemic of all of the governors in any state in this
country. This is why I want him to run for president in 2024. I also think that
the Republican governors of New Hampshire, Vermont, and possibly even Alabama
(I’ll get to this later) have had good responses.
People
have seem to have been giving Gretchen Whitmore of Michigan a lot of crap. And that
hasn’t been anyone on the left like me who knows about all of the crap that she’s
been through. People did the anti-lockdown protests which involved a potential
take over of that state’s capitol that was more than likely a precursor for the
storming of the US captiol. Alternatives to her don’t seem good since a lot of
them were found to have done voter fraud.
Texas
has a terrible governor who is terrible in all sorts of ways. While one of
these links will be about something in Texas other than their governor, there
are a whole lot of reasons why we should be worried about him. It’s bad enough
that so many Republicans make a name for themselves by being controversial. But
they actually become popular with their base as a result of this. That’s why I’m
worried about him being the front runner in the presidential race.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF6k_GcBGDw
(Greg Abbot booed)
Now
while I talked some about the Illinois race, I should get into more about
Pritzker. Some feel that he hasn’t had a good reaction to the pandemic with
most people thinking that he went to far when it is possible that he might not
have gone far enough. He had a mask mandate in this state after the delta
variant started and had to fight misinformation about it. His opponent is an
anti-mask social justice warrior.
Pritzker response to misinformation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO5MVsAkdHg
An
exceptionally poor governor in all of this has been Kristi Noem of South
Dakota. Her state has some of the highest per capita dead of covid. And she
seems to know nothing about how to be a good leader. Tim Walz of Minnesota has
critized her as he should.
The
worst governor of any state right now could only be Ron DeSantis. I fear him
being the GOP nominee for president in 2024 more than I fear Trump getting the
nominee again. He has had such a terrible pandemic response that it is shocking
that people like him.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcssKK1dMno (Ron DeSantis bad covid treatment)
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/29/politics/desantis-concealed-firearms/
One
of the people that I wanted to donate against in 2018 but didn’t due to money
constraints and other reasons was Kim Reynolds of Iowa. I really regret not
trying to get her out of office more than I did. I believe that she shouldn’t
stay in office and here’s at least two links as to why she has failed to serve
Iowa.
I
tend not to give to politicians more than once. While I like Tony Evers and
want him to stay in office, my donations might instead have to go to fixing
that state’s Supreme Court in the end. They have fought his good measures like
trying to change the primary date in 2020 which other states allowed in the end.
More good could have happened, but didn’t because of this.
While
I don’t know how I feel for sure about Alabama’s governor, Kay Ivey, I do know
that she seems to understand the basic idea about how vaccines for covid work
and that they should be used. I don’t know if she’s backing up any of what she’s
saying with what she’s doing, but I will say that she at least has this one
thing right.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/23/alabama-governor-covid-vaccinations-500638
Some
other states are worth mentioning briefly. It is my belief that the governor of
Georgia unfairly got his job. I don’t feel that the governor of Tenessee has
handled covid well. I have mixed feelings about the governor of Ohio, but am
otherwise okay with him staying in office right now. He did, after all, speak
at the Democratic National Convention on behalf of why we should elect Trump,
perhaps the only predominate person of any party to speak at the other one’s
convention. I currently like the governors of Oregon, Nevada, Minnesota, New
Mexico, and California, even though the first one won’t stay around.
One
last thing to note before I end this post with some trivia is how some
governors are treating refugees from Afghanistan. I don’t know how much of this
is outdated. I can tell you that at least one of the two who doesn’t want them,
the already mentioned Kristi Noem, has a very racist reason as to why they
shouldn’t be accepted.
It
was 2014 when any Democratic governor last lost reelection to a Republican
governor. While seats have flipped from Democrat to Republican in the years
since then, not one of them was one who lost reelection. All of them either
didn’t or couldn’t run for another term in office. Is that streak likely to end
this year? We’ll see. It seems likely to happen in Kansas, but that might be
about it this time around. I wish that the streak would continue.
