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CSotD: Looking below the lid

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Mike Peterson November 10, 2022 1 minute 8 comments

I find myself scooped once again by my associate, DD Degg, who covered this large collection of political cartoons, but I had already planned to feature Clifford Berryman’s piece from October 19, 1948, as part of today’s celebration of prognostications gone awry.

All the pollsters had the election in the bag for the New York governor, and, as Berryman has Dewey say, the results were such a foregone conclusion that it was hardly worth going through the charade of voting.

But this famous photograph captured the results, in a classic example of why we should go ahead and vote despite the voices of experts.

You don’t need to be a history buff to know that. We’ve just done it again over the past few weeks, and, while we wait for a few more cartoons to pour in on the topic of what happened, we’ll take a look at cartoons about what didn’t.

Two points: One is that these misses come from both sides of the aisle, and the other is that being lumped in with Clifford Berryman is far from an insult.

Okay, a third point: I told you so.

But so did Dana Milbank, who offers a detailed explanation that is good reading but boils down to a single point:

Laura Ingraham found a more refined way of spouting that old political phrase, “The people have spoken, damn them!” but she got her message across: Telling people where you stand and making it easier for them to vote screws up the system.

However, despite her odd interpretation and that of the election deniers who began framing their assaults on the system before voting even began, the majority of wrong predictions were errors, perhaps naive, and certainly not helpful, but, for the most part, not deliberate attempts to undermine democracy.

Scott Stantis (Counterpoint) disputed the likelihood of a Blue Wave, which I hadn’t heard anyone predict anyway, but he gets credit for producing one of the first Sad Surfer cartoons, a motif which has since swollen to the level of a plague. His prediction that voters would reject Democrats for championing inflation, failing to stem crime and fighting against unsafe back alley abortions simply didn’t pan out.

Similarly, Morten Morland depicted Biden being crushed by the explosion of angry GOP voters, which would be a safe enough prediction in most years, because, as has been beaten into our ears for the past six weeks or more, it is an historical tradition for the incumbent to lose heavily in the midterms.

Phil Hands also predicted based on history rather than by reading the current tea leaves, and thereby missed the rising activism of Gen Z, who justified their grandparents’ push for that 26th Amendment in ways that their parents never quite did.

I don’t know why grandparents and grandkids seem to form such strong bonds across that much-vaunted “generation gap,” but somehow Eddie Cochran’s lyrics caught fire with this younger group …

Well, I told my congressman
And he said, quote,
I’d like to help you, son,
But you’re too young to vote.

… despite the fact that they never faced the age-based dilemma PJ Sloan explained

You’re old enough to kill
But not for voting
You don’t believe in war
But what’s the gun you’re toting?

For whatever reason, they turned out in massive numbers, god bless’em, and, like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the leaking dike, they may not have been able to reverse things, but they prevented a flood.

I don’t know how accurate David Rowe’s vision was, because I have no idea how many people stayed up to watch the results crawl in.

Given how early I’m up doing this in the morning, all-nighters are rare for me and I gave up and went to bed when I realized the people on TV didn’t know who was winning, either, and were just filling time while they waited to get some substantive numbers.

Around midnight, I got back up and flipped on the television and saw that, while they had numbers, the numbers didn’t add up to a definitive trend one way or the other, so I went back to bed secure in the knowledge that nothing was going to happen worth losing sleep over.

I’m guessing a lot of other people came to the same conclusion.

As for that man trump-trump-trumping on her chamber door, suffice it to say that, while Biden held the line, the Orange God King may turn out to be the biggest loser, unless we hear that Rupert Murdoch fired all those responsible for this morning’s NYPost cover.

That little box at lower right reads

Analyst John Podhoretz has two words why Tuesday was a “red trickle”: Donald Trump. His terrible candidates dragged Republicans down. And now, writes columnist Piers Morgan, it’s time for Trump to move on from politics.

As George Takei would say, “Oh my.”

Gary Varvel (Creators)’s bold prediction hardly proved out, not only because Biden’s administration wasn’t a factor that kept Democratic voters home — even those who reportedly disagree with his policies turned out to support the basic premise — but because, obviously, Republicans are not thanking him, and, more to the point, they’re now turning on each other.

Juxtaposition of Herself

And, indeed, the politburo purge may be under way. Lisa Benson (Counterpoint) followed up her off-the-mark red wave prediction with a follow-up that adds to the emerging vision of whose fault it was.

But we’ll deal with the aftermath tomorrow.

For now, as Lalo Alcaraz says, the media and the polling groups have some cleaning up of their own to do.

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