Kayleigh McEnany Says Tuesday-Night Bloodbath Was All the Pollsters’ Fault!

Conservatives reeled in shock and awe Tuesday night as traditionally red states voted blue in their off-year elections, defying polls over one key issue: abortion rights.

Abortion was a linchpin issue in states like Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia, where voters showed up en masse to steer their options toward access. Yet for many Republicans, the results came as a surprise. Despite a swath of polling results that indicated Americans increasingly view abortion access as an essential right, Republicans geared their hopes on polls hinting at sinking morale among Democrats under President Joe Biden’s leadership.

“Kentucky is a red state. Ohio is a red state,” Kayleigh McEnany said on Fox News’s Hannity. “Tonight, the midterm elections, the last few elections, we must recognize as a party, good polling does not always translate into resounding victory.”

“On the issue of abortion, in Ohio tonight, we continue a losing streak in the pro-life movement. Every ballot initiative has been lost post-Dobbs for the pro-life movement,” McEnany said.

McEnany also pointed out that conservatives won’t win women back on this issue until conservatives get behind initiatives to bolster young mothers.

“As a party, Sean, we must not just be a pro-baby party. That’s a great thing. We must be a pro-mother party,” McEnany said.

“There’s legislation we must put forward as a party to support women,” McEnany added. “We’ve got to get Trump behind it, the speaker of the House behind it, and have a national strategy to help vulnerable women because the results of next year’s election could be determined by that.”

Sean Hannity himself conceded that although he’s pro-life, he “recognize[s] that’s not where the country is.”

“Voters vote, polls don’t,” a Biden-Harris fundraising email noted after the results began to roll in.

Former Senator Rick Santorum complained that the major election losses Republicans suffered are actually a sign of how “pure democracies” are a bad form of government.

Republicans faced devastating losses on Tuesday, as voters in Ohio overwhelmingly chose to legalize marijuana and enshrine abortion rights in the state Constitution. In Virginia, Democrats flipped the state House of Representatives, taking control of the entire legislature. While abortion was not explicitly on the ballot, the future of reproductive rights in Virginia hinged on which party controlled the government.

“You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote. It was a secret sauce for disaster in Ohio,” Santorum whined Tuesday night on Newsmax.

“Thank goodness that most of the states in this country don’t allow you to put everything on the ballot, because pure democracies are not the way to run a country.”

Putting aside Santorum’s weird choice of descriptor (sexy, really?), his actual complaint is laughable. Santorum is upset that democracy is working.

As Republicans across the country try to push more extreme agendas, many issues such as protecting abortion, legalizing marijuana, and raising the minimum wage are being put forward for ballot referendums. Republicans lose those votes every time.

But rather than take the actual lesson here and start proposing policies that voters like, Republicans are digging their heels in. Take, for instance, Santorum’s other gripe, that young voters turned out because the issues were “sexy” (again, ugh).

Maybe young voters didn’t want to just hop on some social trend. Maybe young voters actually care about protecting their rights.

Abortion is officially enshrined in Ohio’s state Constitution, with residents voting overwhelmingly Tuesday to increase protections despite Republicans’ last-ditch attempt to thwart them.

The Associated Press projected the victory of the Issue 1 ballot measure at 9:02 p.m. As of 9:14 p.m., the “yes” vote was leading at 57 percent.

Issue 1 will create a new amendment allowing people to decide for themselves about all reproductive health. The state can restrict abortion access only after a doctor determines the fetus is viable or could survive outside the uterus. And even then, abortions can be performed if the patient’s health or life is at risk.

State Republicans tried multiple times to block the measure. In August, they tried to raise the threshold for constitutional amendments to a 60 percent vote instead of a simple majority. Although they insisted the move was to protect Ohio’s Constitution from special-interest groups, Secretary of State Frank LaRose later admitted the measure was “100 percent” about blocking the abortion referendum.

An overwhelming 57 percent of Ohioans rejected that change, so Republicans tried again. The Ohio Ballot Board voted 3–2, along party lines, to change the text of the amendment on Tuesday’s ballot. Instead of the full text, the ballot displayed a summary written by LaRose. LaRose’s version was littered with inflammatory and fearmongering language, such as using “unborn child” instead of “fetus,” likening abortion to infanticide, and making it appear as if state officials could still intervene.

Finally, LaRose ordered that 26,666 voter registrations be purged in late September. He did not publicly announce his decision at the time and only acknowledged it when local outlets began reporting it.

But even with all of their desperate attempts, Republicans could not prevent Ohioans from choosing abortion rights.

Representative Rashida Tlaib teared up while defending herself on the House floor in the face of numerous GOP attempts to censure and even expel her from the legislative body.

“I can’t believe I have to say this, but Palestinian people are not disposable,” Tlaib said Tuesday, gripping the lectern as her voice cracked.

“We are human beings, just like anyone else,” she said.

Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, has been the subject of intense debate since she spoke at a peaceful Jewish-led protest in D.C. last month that called for a cease-fire in Gaza. Since then, the Michigan Democrat has used her platform to amplify the plight and suffering of Palestine, where more than 10,000 people have perished while Israel’s military hunts for Hamas militants behind the October 7 massacre in which 1,400 civilians were killed.

In her speech, Tlaib argued that “no government is beyond criticism” and that the notion that criticizing a government could be antisemitic “sets a very dangerous precedent,” which is being used to “silence many diverse voices.”

“Speaking up to save lives, Mr. Chair, no matter faith, no matter ethnicity, should not be controversial in this chamber,” Tlaib added. “The cries of the Palestinian and Israeli children sound no different to me. What I don’t understand is why the cries of Palestinians sound different to you all.”

In the waning months of 2020, Fox was in a bind. It had helped peddle Donald Trump’s election lies and built a hungry audience for the unfounded conspiracy. Ultimately, though, the news network needed to concede that Joe Biden had won the presidency—so, how were they supposed to feed their frenzied audience?

While parts of the network reversed course on the Trump train, Tucker Carlson decided to feed into the mystery around Trump’s stolen election by promoting a list of dead voters touted by the Trump campaign, according to Brian Stelter’s latest book, Network of Lies, a dissection of thousands of pages of texts and emails obtained from the Dominion v. Fox lawsuit.

With show producers, Carlson privately complained that Trump’s lies were “disgusting,” but in order to maintain competitive ratings he knew he needed to extend the yarn.

“Obviously [the Trump campaign needs] to do whatever they can to help us,” Carlson messaged producer Alex Pfeiffer on the eve of announcing the dead voter conspiracy, according to Stelter’s book.

“Do we have enough dead people for tonight?” Carlson asked in another text.

When Carlson went on air that night, he announced several names of voters that he claimed to be dead but who were, in fact, alive—they simply shared names with the deceased.

“What we’re about to tell you is accurate. It’s not a theory. It happened, and we can prove it. Other news organizations could prove it, too. They’ve simply chosen not to,” Carlson told his hungry audience on a segment bannered, “Yes, Dead People Did Vote In The Election.”

Years later and long after other news organizations had knocked on doors and debunked the lie, Carlson would recall that moment as a turning point in his relationship with Trump, whom he later called a “demonic force.”

“And so I said to the Trump people, you know, ‘You’re saying the election was rigged. Send me some examples of it and I’ll put it on the air,’” Carlson told WABC’s Bo Snerdley’s Rush Hour.

“And one of them was these dead voters. Well, it turned out some of them were still alive. And I was so mad by the incompetence of that campaign, which was completely incompetent. I mean, completely, you know, I’m like the one guy who’s open minded about the election being unfair. And—and that’s what they send me? Anyway. Whatever. I was mad. That was a moment in time,” he added.