The 2022 campaign isn’t happening on the streets. It’s happening in the suites.
You won’t be able to follow it by looking at campaign ads or finance reports. You must dig deeper, smell it out.
It’s most visible when a party suddenly changes course, when it goes “whoopsie” or “I didn’t mean that.” That’s a sign key support is dissipating, reflected less in money on the campaign balance sheet and more in a certain silence come next summer and fall.
The issue is vaccinations.
Suddenly, after going further and further out on a limb for months in their condemnations of Dr. Fauci and the Biden vaccination plan, after telling 1,000 lies that their supporters believed (microchips), Republicans are seeing that limb chopped off behind them. They are quietly falling all over themselves, telling constituents to get the shot.
Businesses spend money on politicians so they will have their ear. They use that ear to get their policy needs met. They want a rezoning, they want a factory plat, they want a mine or a skyscraper or a pipeline, and they don’t wany any delays that cost money. It’s called business. It’s why incumbents usually win re-election. (Selling good books is also business.)
Every so often, however, there’s an “in case of emergency break glass” moment. That’s where business feels its interests seriously threatened by the actions of politicians it supports. That’s when phone calls are made, quietly, sometimes through third parties. The message goes out to cool it, to shut it down, to change course. The politics of America, after all, is business. Politicians take these calls. They bend the knee.
That’s what has been happening over the last week. Big supporters of Republican Governors and Senators have gotten through to these jamokes, who have dutifully gone in front of cameras and said, “You know all that stuff I was saying before? Well, huh huh, just kidding!”
This is going to leave a mark, among the voters who had been told one thing and are now being told its opposite. But the politicians had no choice. Money has them by the balls. Their hearts and minds must follow.
By the time reporters see U-turns on issues like infrastructure, or the insurrection, or climate, they will have missed the story. The story is happening right now, right in front of them.
