The end of an election cycle leaves us with myriad questions: Who got fucked? Who did the fucking? Who fucked up? My favorite question is one that can be agonizing if you're asking it about your own side, but it's delicious when you're asking it about your opponents. "Who fucked themselves?" implies that a strategy not only failed; it worked to actively harm the strategizers. An even better version of this is when the strategy involves fuckers working intensely to fuck others but ending up fucking the fuckers.
And the GOP in 2022 fucked themselves hard. Oh, sure, they thought they were putting on a strap-on and humping away at voting rights and faith in the electoral process while forcing even more insane candidates, more Greenes and Gaetzes and Gosars (the three Gs of the asinine apocalypse), on their voters. But the way the election turned out, even with regaining the House (barely), it sure as hell looks like they put that strap-on on backwards and fucked their own asses, which is all well and good if you want your ass reamed, but not so pleasant if you weren't expecting or desiring anal penetration.
Starting after the 2020 election (and, really, before), Republicans waged war on voting in the United States. In their mad and/or willfully misleading belief, the election process in states where Republicans and/or Trump alone lost was fraudulent and/or fundamentally broken. It's not true. It simply isn't. But that part doesn't faze the anti-voting right. So you've got Trump and his denialists out there saying that early and mail-in voting are corrupt (except in states they like and when they do it) and that election workers are committing felonies while counting the votes (and thus your vote doesn't even matter). Over on Truth Toilet, Trump turded, "You can never have fair & free elections with mail-in ballots--never, never, never. Won't and can't happen!!!" (all exclamation points quoted, all caps not because it's just obnoxious and idiotic-looking).
Meanwhile you've got Republican-led states, where 2020 voting went perfectly fine, doing shit like adding restrictions to or curtailing mail-in and early voting or just insidious nonsense like limiting the number of ballot drop boxes. In Georgia, for instance, the new voting laws allow for only one drop box per 100,000 people. That's fucking cruel in metro areas. It also compels rural counties to have at least one drop box, so that makes life easier on them. And that's on top of the ongoing fuckery where there aren't enough polling places on the almighty election day for people in, say, majority Black districts.
All of this was a calculated effort to fuck Democrats on voting. Except it didn't. In fact, what happened that made Republicans fuck themselves had a couple of threads. The anti-voting messaging made Republican voters avoid early voting and mail-in ballots. Shit, it worked so well that some Republicans didn't vote because they thought it didn't matter or that Trump and his minions would just be installed by Supreme Court magic.
The lack of Republicans voting early or by mail is now a full-on crisis for the GOP, so much so that even Trump's tightly-suctioned ass remora, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, said, "Our voters need to vote early. There were many in 2020 saying, ‘Don’t vote by mail, don’t vote early.’ And we have to stop that." She said that on Fox "news," which has flogged the vote-by-mail conspiracy bullshit of 2000 Mules and the like. Other putative Trumpinistas, like Murdoch Nazi android Laura Ingraham, said that "everyone said, ‘Don’t vote early, it’s corrupt.'" Wonder where "everyone" got the microphone to do that? Fox "news" is filled with aching assholes from all the self-fucking.
The other thread is that even though Republican candidates got more votes than Democratic ones overall, Republicans couldn't convert that into bigger wins. The percentage difference should have given Republicans a 20-30 seat lead in the House and at least a tie in the Senate. Nope. Republican candidates ran up the numbers in some places, especially where there was no real Democratic opposition. But the slate of Trump-endorsed fucking insane candidates damaged the rotten Republican brand. Fucking Dr. Oz? Kari Lake? QAnon nutzoid J.R. Majewski? Democrats may have intentionally raised the profile of some of these unelectable lunatics, but Republicans voted for them in the primaries. In the general, independents said, "Yeah, fuck that" and even some Republicans couldn't hold their noses and vote for Herschel Walker, for fuck's sake.
So, yeah, it's kind of hilarious to see how fucked the GOP is after fucking itself. It used to be that Democrats were the ones who were shit at messaging and shit at getting out the vote. But at least Democrats never stopped believing that you should be able to vote easily and took advantage of opportunities to do so.
Sure, sure, Republicans can still fuck us with their control of the House, but even some Republicans foresee Republicans staying away from crazy Republican candidates or early voting for the next few cycles. You can't unfuck yourself after you've fucked yourself. And if you don't figure out why you fucked yourself (as in "Oh, the strap-on goes on that way"), you'll just keep doing it.
