The Victorious Blue Tsunami You Made Happen

Friends, 

Pause for just one minute to think about what our Blue Tsunami accomplished as of early Wednesday morning. 

Not once in nearly 90 years has a President had every single Senator in his party who was up for re-election in a midterm win his or her re-election! 

Biden and the Democrats were able to hold on to every Senate seat they had. With the re-election of Senator Warnock in Georgia this week, this is the first time that any president or any party in any midterm has swept every Senate seat their party had that was up for re-election since Franklin Roosevelt’s midterm in 1934!! So not only did Biden and the Dems hammer every single Republican challenger to a Democratic Senate seat — the score? A tsunami landslide: 14-0! — the Dems also picked up a new seat that they took away from the Republicans! The last time that happened in a Democrat’s first midterm? President Kennedy in 1962!

This kind of overwhelming midterm victory for the party in power and its sitting president simply never happens. And this one happened while the President had a horribly low “approval rating” (an anachronistic and bullshit “poll” if there ever was one), while “inflation was at a 40-year record high” (which as Rep. Katie Porter revealed was simply corporate greed and the rich jacking up prices to take advantage of the pandemic), and all the while the media and the pollsters and the pundits — including the liberal ones! — pounded the public for months with the mantra that the Dems were about to be slaughtered by a “Red Wave” where the Republicans were going to take the Senate by 3 to 5 seats, gain upwards of 60(!) seats in the House and flip at least a half-dozen governorships. 

We had to listen to this sick, debilitating, depressing — and false — drumbeat all summer and fall long, and millions on our side resigned themselves to believing Biden was our death knell, an albatross around our electoral necks. We were told over and over that a president’s first midterm is nearly always a disaster. We were told over and over that elections are always determined by the state of the economy and that this economy was in the toilet. The nightly news continually told us we were not safe, that crime was rampant, that you were next to be pushed off the subway platform and into the oncoming train! Trump still reigned supreme in America! The public hated Democrats so much, the liberal haven of New York was going to elect a Republican governor! And, my personal favorite: “Sure, women were upset back in June when the Supreme Court outlawed abortion, but they’re over that now. Women are more concerned in this election about the price of eggs.” 

Thank you male pundits, journalists, public radio and TV commentators and lame pollsters for telling us “how women feel” — over and over and over. Why, we had no idea they didn’t care about once again being further reduced to second and third class citizens! Thank you for clearing that up!! (Now go crawl in a hole and do whatever it is you do so we don’t have to hear it — or see you — again.)

This is the crap we have had to listen to — and, at first, many or most bought it. But not you and not I. Based simply on the facts, we knew the Republicans were about to get the whooping of a lifetime — and that Trump with his whackadoodle endorsements was about to be exposed as the toxic leech that he is. 

In the beginning of the election season, I was not allowed on the mainstream media to state my case that the red wave did not and would not exist (only HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher let me on back in September to counteract the accepted narrative; but by the last weekend before the election in November, three brave and decent souls on MSNBC (Alex Witt, Joy Reid and Ari Melber) let me explain on live TV exactly why there would not only be no “Red Wave“ on Nov. 8th, there would instead be an historic showing by a first term president in his first midterm).

So, on this great new media source called Substack, I began a 44-day project called “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth” — 44 daily fact-based essays giving every reason why things were actually looking great for liberals, progressives, Democrats, clear-headed independents, excommunicated Republicans, and yes, the Left (those of us who are not afraid to criticize the Democrats for everything from refusing to codify Roe v Wade for 49 years, to being funded by wealthy interests, to not getting rid of the filibuster) — because even we saw this election for the threat to Democracy that it represented. All of us on this “side of the aisle,” we are the vast majority who make up this country, and I was damned if I was going to let the right wing enablers of January 6th finally take it over for good. And so were millions of you.

In the end, thanks to our tsunami of door knockers, phone callers, postcard senders, small donors and those of you who made sure just five people got to the polls, we now have a larger Senate majority than before, we picked up more governorships than the Republicans did, four new states have now finally fully booted the Republicans out of power in the state House, the state Senate and the Governor’s chair — Michigan, Massachusetts, Maryland and Minnesota —  every ballot proposal centered on abortion landed on the side of pro-choice (including in Kentucky and Montana!), red state Nebraska voters raised the minimum wage by 67% — and yes, the Republicans have the House by the teeniest of margins. Look how happy they look. Not. They are angry, depressed and fighting each other. Their leader still doesn’t have enough votes to be elected Speaker. Any bill that our side wants to get passed — we only need FOUR of the 221 Republican members to vote with us. Many of them only won their election by a few votes. They know to get re-elected in 2024 they had better vote on the side of women’s rights, working families and against Donald Trump. We will pick up House seats in special elections in these two years (just like Alaska Native Democrat Mary Peltola did in Alaska in August), and the House will be ours again — maybe even before the 2024 election! Wait. What’s that? You calling me crazy? You talkin’ to me? I don’t see anyone else here!

So this is what I wanted you to hear me say today, in my own words, with my own voice, on my podcast right here in my Substack email to you. Please give it a listen, even if you’re not a normal podcast listener. I think it will give you a well-deserved big smile and it will lift your spirits. 

(A note to those of you who dwell — for good reason, I understand — in your cynicism and pessimism. Don’t change. We need you and your important critical voice. The Democrats will not do the job we need them to do unless YOU — and us — stay on top of them. But, please — do not try to deny we just pulled off a Blue Tsunami simply because Tim Ryan lost in Ohio or Mandela Barnes lost in Wisconsin or you are stuck living in a red state for now. The trend is in our favor. The youth and women and people of color are making this happen. The House? We have thrown it into disarray! The Republicans there are so discombobulated, they are in a civil war with each other! We still hold the real power because the majority of Americans are with us. Hang in there! We’re all in this together!)

— Michael Moore (with more Tsunamis to come!)

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