'The Red Wave Has Already Started': Riot-Ravaged Kenosha Elects First Republican Leader in Decades
It’s a local election that should be national news — but the mainstream media isn’t interested.
Voters in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, which became infamous for its 2020 riots and the 2021 prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse for defending himself during the violence of 2020, went to the polls Tuesday to elect a Republican who campaigned partially on linking her Democratic opponent to the failures of the Biden administration and “the liberal status quo.”
And Democrats have to hope it’s not a sign for how November’s going to look.
According to the Kenosha News, Republican state Rep. Samantha Kerkman defeated Democratic Clerk of Circuit of Courts Rebecca Matoska-Mentink with more than 51 percent of the approximately 29,000 votes cast. It was the first time since at least 1998 that a Republican has won the seat, according to Fox News. (The Associated Press reported it was the first time ever that the GOP had won.)
Republican-backed candidate, Samantha Kerkman, elected to be Kenosha County’s first female county executive. A swing county in a swing state: Donald Trump was the first Republican presidential nominee to win the county since Richard Nixon.https://t.co/U79b7n0nNp
— Jason Calvi (@JasonCalvi) April 6, 2022
The race is officially nonpartisan, but as noted by WITI-TV, the Fox affiliate in Milwaukee, both women had been identified with their political parties for years.
And, according to WGTD-FM, a public radio station in Kenosha, at least one flyer from the Kerkman campaign explicitly tied the race to Democratic President Joe Biden’s White House and Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers.
[firefly_poll]
Linking Motoska-Mentink with “the failed Biden-Evers agenda,” according to WGTD, the flyer accused the Democrat of being part of “the liberal status quo [that] has failed to keep us safe.”
The fact that both Biden and Evers disgraced themselves and their public offices with their handling of the Kenosha riots and the Rittenhouse criminal case could not have escaped the attention of Kenosha voters.
Considering the mayhem unleashed across the country by leftists in 2020, it’s easy for all the rioting to run together. But Kenosha exploded into violence after a police shooting involving a man named Jacob Blake during an Aug. 23, 2020, encounter that turned violent. Blake has been paralyzed since.
In the rioting that followed, Rittenhouse killed two men who attacked him, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, both with felony convictions on their records.
A third man, Gaige Grosskreutz, was wounded in the shooting. Also a man with a long criminal record, he testified at the Rittenhouse trial that the then-17-year-old did not shoot him until he pointed his gun in Rittenhouse’s face.
Biden, with absolutely no evidence to back it up, infamously depicted Rittenhouse as a “white supremacist” in a September 2020 Twitter post following his first debate with then-President Donald Trump.
A jury declared Rittenhouse innocent of all charges in relation to the shooting in November 2021.
Evers immediately issued a statement that all but denounced jurors for their decision and treated Huber, Rosenbaum, Grosskreutz and Blake as the real victims in the case.
‘“No verdict will be able to bring back the lives of Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, or heal Gaige Grosskreutz’s injuries, just as no verdict can heal the wounds or trauma experienced by Jacob Blake and his family,” Evers’ statement said. “No ruling today changes our reality in Wisconsin that we have work to do toward equity, accountability and justice that communities across our state are demanding and deserve.”
There’s no way from the outside to know how much Kerkman’s flyer changed voters’ minds, and the mainstream media has invested precious little time finding out.
But there seems little doubt that residents of a county that saw about $50 million in damage over the course of the rioting, not to mention national attention — much of it hostile — during the Rittenhouse trial, would not take it into account.
On Tuesday, they made their choice, and that has to have Democrats who are already looking at grim midterm elections in November very nervous. In addition to the county executive race, conservatives also picked up seats on the Kenosha school board, according to The Associated Press.
Many social media users celebrated the results. One wrote: “The red wave has already started!”
Kenosha goes RED–and goes national: Kenosha County ravaged by BLM riots flips red after decades of Dem leadership https://t.co/2iEZqqHztN
— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) April 6, 2022
Kenosha just elected its first republican County Executive ever. The tide has turned. Please keep voting and keep the momentum! https://t.co/sWAB4tUijj
— American Conservative (@JimSTruthBTold) April 6, 2022
It’s been just over one year and the world had had enough of the destruction from the #Democrats The red wave has already started!#DKenosha County ravaged by BLM riots flips red after decades of Dem leadershiphttps://t.co/upIImG9mhy
— ?? The Truth Pleaze?♀️ (@Gettr) (@thetruth_pleaze) April 6, 2022
At the end of the day, all politics is local, and extrapolating national results from individual races can be a dangerous business, however tempting it might be to see the Kenosha elections as a proxy for a national referendum on Democratic rule.
But there’s no denying that the manifold failures of the Biden administration and the national lurch of the Democratic Party are showing Americans just how dangerous today’s progressives have become — too dangerous to be trusted with political power again.
There’s no doubt that results like Tuesday’s in Kenosha are welcome, and there’s a good chance they are good signs for the November midterms, but the worst thing conservatives can do now is to become complacent.
The way the national news media outlets are ignoring the results in Kenosha, when they no doubt would have been trumpeted had the other side won, is a sign of how entrenched liberal bias is.
What conservatives and Republicans need to do is concentrate on producing the kind of victories in November that won’t be ignored, or forgotten, in whatever remains of the dismal Biden presidency.
That’s the national news the country needs.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
