“The jar of flour shall not go empty,
nor the jug of oil run dry,
until the day when the LORD sends rain upon the earth.”
-1 Kings 17:14
Houston, Texas – Even in my heyday I never used polls as a primary indicator in campaigns. In fact, in my first statewide primary race (where we started off 61-2 underdogs) we did not commission a single poll the entire campaign. We won. I DID use polls for crafting a path to victory through results of the issues questions – which I often wrote…and usually signed off on before the poll went into the field. The horse race question which obsesses so many was just not interesting – or much useful – to me. My primary means was listening. I talked to volumes of people. I preceded the candidate into an area – and spoke with its activists first. I watched what popped with them. I went to busy coffee shops and just listened to people talking with each other while pretending to read a paper. I paid attention to what arguments and framing could successfully change people’s hearts on an issue. I even had canvassers ask people they spoke with knocking on doors what the biggest current need was in their area – and the captains of such efforts report patterns to me (many professional pols will laugh at that one – but it delivered much grist for late-breaking haymakers that were never even on the opponent’s radar.)
Everything was designed to get to the fundamental core of what a particular election cycle was about. If I knew the fundamental mindset of the electorate and could legitimately validate it in our public communications, we would usually win, whatever the stated odds (provided I had successfully put together the human infrastructure before the last six weeks. Everything up until those last six weeks was probing themes – and infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. Our friend, Steve Baker (or BC, if you prefer) correctly noted that my primary method is called a “power curve” in some of his work. It caught me off guard because I had never heard that term – but when he described it, it caught the essence of how I work.
And it worked. In all races you are involved in, there is fear – or jitters – at the end, however well you think you are doing. In all those cases, we won. In some races, there is serious doubt in those last weeks. In all those races, we lost. With that matrix, I have successfully called all presidential elections since 1976 – even that of 2020 when I wrote here days before the election that I expected Donald Trump to win and then have the election stolen from him through fraud. I have successfully called who would pick up the most legislative seats in all but two of the races since 1976. But those two are worrisome, because they were in 2018 and 2022. A local race in 1974 and the two off-year elections I mentioned are the only ones I have ever been caught completely flat-footed on. Frankly, I attribute ’18 and ’22 to fraud. Could be that I just can’t bear to think my instincts have gone cold or that the electorate has changed so much those instincts are no longer representative of it…but I don’t think so.
Those instincts tell me this time that Trump is going to come roaring from the east with victory after victory, carrying a ton of down-ballot candidates with him. It will be so bad that Kamala Harris will be tempted to concede before the west coast has finished voting. But predicting a cycle where vote fraud is massively rife is like facing the best knuckle ball ever thrown. You swing where its trajectory is taking it, but it can make a wild wobble and be someplace completely different when your bat goes through the zone. I KNOW what would happen with an honest count. I don’t know how to apply the fraud factor anymore. When I was primarily in Illinois and fraud was merely retail rather than wholesale, I easily adapted, integrating a two to four point fraud factor into statewide races. Now it’s like betting in a fixed poker game: if you bet shrewdly and honestly, you still lose. So the critical thing this election is how successfully Republicans have dampened down vote fraud. Those states relying on voting machines (which are very vulnerable to mischief) are a huge problem. Those with all mail-in voting are a very big problem, and those who count votes after election day are just a fraud pestilence center, like swamps to the mosquito population. This win may be so big as to overcome all of that even if Republicans have not substantially tamped the fraud down, but if so, Republicans had better make election integrity a top priority from the day they are sworn in or this will only be a transient victory.
In a larger sense, the challenge before us after the election is the same however it turns out: to rebuild a wholesome, healthy, Godly culture that protects and celebrates faith, family and freedom in which the people are sovereign and the rule of ordered law prevails for all. That is a big task, as we have gotten so very far away from those concepts – both nationally and at the local level. We are going to have to return the country to self-governing principles of liberty under God town by town, county by county, state by state, and city by city. When petty tyrants are routinely thrown out on their ear and become objects of scorn and derision, it will be hard – and eventually impossible – for larger tyrannical behavior to flourish. And ignorant, petty tyrants have taken hold in our towns like kudzu in the southeast. We can start with county health departments, which LOVED bossing people around with mindless edicts during Covid.
If Trump wins we can begin our work with an ally at the helm of the national government. I like that a lot. But we must do the work, repatriating every inch of soil in the country. If we neglect it, all that will come of this is a brief rest before continuing the plunge to national oblivion.
If Harris prevails, her handlers will quickly make open war on the Bill of Rights, particularly attacking religion and family. Your kids won’t be safe – and if you try to protect them, authorities will arrest you if they can manage it. We will have to neutralize the police state her people will mount, while simultaneously weathering economic collapse and the world exploding into comprehensive wars. Frankly, we may have to deal with such external dystopia if Trump wins – the Biden years have so badly undercut things. But Trump, at least, will attack the problems competently instead of just pouring gas on the raging fires.
What does not change is our work, which is a hero’s vocation written in a million ordinary – and often crooked – lines. We must simultaneously be warriors, diplomats, and evangelists. It is tough stuff, but it is our indifference to God, honor, and fundamental principles that led us to this pass. It pleases God to make it hard – but not impossible – to enact effective renewal that we don’t soon forget how incredibly precious it is and how fragile our indifference makes it.
The bottom line is that, whatever happens today, all it really changes are what tactics we must use to secure our liberty under God. The gulf between the two possibilities and how hard it will be, though, is wider than the Grand Canyon. Only taking the next right step with resolve, fortitude, courage, love and unshakeable determination will avail us in the battle ahead.
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What an election cycle this has been! First Democrats were flooding the zone with illegal aliens who were eating the cats, eating the dogs. Now Democrat apparatchiks in New York are killing pet squirrels and raccoons. You know I gotta take that personally (I actually can’t help but wonder if God is making some sort of sly prompt to CORAC here).
The story here is flat out astounding. New York sent out a SWAT team of 10 armed agents who kicked the family out of the house for five hours while they did a comprehensive search and seized the two docile pets. That’s almost as many armed agents as Kamala Harris sent out to raid David Daleiden’s home when he exposed that Planned Parenthood was selling baby body parts – and this raid went on longer. Harris ordered the raid because Daleiden’s work threatened her pet allies, abortionists, and exposed the depravity of their work and Harris’ cheerleading of it. New York raided and then killed the pets just because some petty bureaucrats were feeling their power and wanted to show those smelly citizens who is boss. When government becomes so incompetent it can do nothing about spiking violent crime, a tanking economy, an illegal alien invasion and such, it tries to show its relevance and power by increasingly petty and cruel demonstrations. New York Democrats did this because they are incompetent, insecure, cowards who want to bring you to heel – since they can’t bring serious problems to heel.
The story has become a viral metaphor for the banality and brutality of the overreach of incompetent government bureaucrats. I have to give our regular reader, SanSan, a hat tip for sending me this piece by Jeff Childers from his Coffee and Covid Blog. I thought it best summed up why this has hit such a visceral nerve with so many people. I check out the Coffee and Covid Blog from time to time. It is consistently good – and this gives me the chance to give it a plug.
One of the few things I will take pleasure in if Harris prevails in this election will be the screams from her harridan supporters when they step out of line and she sends SWAT teams after them, too. And she will. In fact, you can expect New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to be so inspired by a Harris win that they dramatically ratchet up their stormtroopers to stamp out dissent in their states. They will probably be the worst, if not the only, offenders in our Brave New World.
And a big chunk of the country still lines this road to hell cheering on its own destruction…and with remarkable smugness about it, at that. Oh, the wood we have to chop!
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Our old friend, west coast songwriter Kay Clarity, released a shrewdly-timed album on her Pax Paloma label the first of this month. These are the Songs For the Apocalypse. Now I think it would be more accurately titled “Songs for Armageddon,” but who am I to quibble with an accomplished artist’s vision?
In any case, the fine wine of Kay’s voice is getting better with time – and so is the deep insight of the themes she explores. These songs may come in right handy in these times…this generation’s version of whistling while we work. Good stuff.
So, when someone asks if anything good can come out of California, you might point to Kay and her body of work.
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Our newsletter founder and editor, Sheryl Collmer, just published the most bracing article I think she has ever written in Crisis Magazine. The insight into what we have done – and what we have failed to do – is simply staggering.
I often speak of all the wood we have to chop. Collmer lays a lot of it out quite effectively. Many people will be surprised at the challenges we yet must surmount even under a Trump victory. Many will also be surprised at what we can accomplish together even under a Harris regime.
God will win. It is not ours to call Him to our side, but to work with passion and fortitude to be on His. When we do, life will get much more basic and fundamental – but the flour will not go empty, nor the oil run dry before the Lord sends His merciful rain for those who serve Him with vigorous resolve.
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“Is the seed yet in the barn?
Do the vine, the fig tree, the pomegranate, and the olive tree still yield nothing
From this day on I will bless you.”
Haggai 219
If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.
Find me on Twitter at @JohnstonPilgrim
The Corps of Renewal and Charity (CORAC)
18208 Preston Rd., Ste. D9-552
Dallas, Texas 75252
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