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Don't count your chickens yet—but get the coop ready

Still from an ad for the Wisconsin gubernatorial race

Yesterday, our own Alma98 posted this tweet:
Now, I have written at length about how this election will not be the panacea which will roll up the criminal regime in Washington. To quote Winston Churchill, it's not the beginning of the end, but may be the end of the beginning. However, we still have to maintain realism and circumspection. We have to realize that too many on "our side" think that voting once should solve all problems, and will turn on Democrats when ponies and unicorns are not forthcoming. This is a long, twilight struggle against forces arrayed from both the right and the left against liberal democracy.

However, the OP is correct. Hopeless political campaigns don't pour money into a contest three weeks out from Election Day unless they're seeing a sea change in their fortunes. Big guns like Barack Obama don't get pulled out for futile races. Especially in Mississippi. The last Democratic senator from that benighted state was John C. Stennis. He retired in 1989. The last Democratic governor of the state, Ronnie Musgrove, left office in 2005. Mississippi, like much of the South, has been a one-party state for decades, with the Republican Party having a deathgrip on elective office.

To quote the poet: 

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear

If you had told me even a month ago that Barack Hussein Obama, Esquire, would be cutting an ad for a senatorial race in Mississippi, I would have told you to pour out your bourbon into the sink. The idea that a race from Mississippi would be competitive enough to pour in money with less than a month to go was absolutely farcical. It still seems so. And yet here we are. As I said, political parties don't waste money; compare this to the GOP pulling resources out of North Carolina as a lost cause. 

And now? Now it'll have to counter this Democratic attack. Now it will have to expend time, energy, and money in a state which in no conception should be in play. If Mississippi is up for grabs, other, more winnable states must be falling by the wayside for Republicans.

Again. Mississippi. Forget about Texas; if Mississippi falls to Democrats, the Republican Party is facing a death knell. No, it's not guaranteed; parties bounce back from disaster. But the idea that Mississippi is winnable indicates that these midterms are not shaping up to be merely disastrous; instead, that's an indication that the midterms are shaping up to be an existential moment for the right.

The war we are in now did not begin with Donald Trump's descent down the escalator. It did not begin with George W. Bush. It did not begin with Ronald Reagan, the Civil Rights Act, or Brown v. Board of Education. It did not begin with the Civil War. This war in which we are engaged has been raging since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. It's a war to determine what kind of nation we will have, what kind of people we will be. Will we be a Republic of Liberty, or an Empire of Domination? In America's history, it has been a republic for some, but a dictatorship for others. And our enemies want to restore that imbalanced order. But if even Mississippi is saying "enough", this will be a seismic shift. 

Mississippi goddamn, indeed.
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