On Election Day morning, Charlie Sykes predicted:

Whatever happens at the presidential level, conservatives in Wisconsin will be still be ascendant after today election: Scott Walker will still be governor and Republicans will have strong — maybe even stronger — majorities in both the Assembly and the Senate, ensuring continuing support for his agenda. …

In 2010, no state switched as decisively from Blue to Red as Wisconsin. Before the 2010 election, Democrats controlled the governorship, both houses of the Legislature and all the levers of power in state government. After that election, they controlled none. As a result, Walker was able to advance one of the boldest agendas of any governor in the country.

And on Wednesday — after two years of turmoil, protests and recall elections —  he will be positioned to move ahead aggressively. …

In other words, Wisconsin will continue to be ground zero in the conservative revolution.

The biggest reason, irrespective of the votes for Assembly or Senate, is that Wisconsin has the most powerful governor in the nation, thanks to the governor’s veto power. If Walker doesn’t want something to happen, it isn’t going to happen.

Tucker Carlson has another prediction independent of the presidential race:

… we already know the loser in this election cycle: political reporters. They’ve disgraced themselves. Conservatives have long complained about liberal bias in the media, and with some justification. But it has finally reached the tipping point. Not in our lifetimes have so many in the press dropped the pretense of objectivity in order to help a political candidate. The media are rooting for Barack Obama. They’re not hiding it. …

Remember his last press conference? On August 20, the president made a rare appearance in the White House briefing room. (Obama has held fewer press conferences even than George W. Bush.) The first question went to Jim Kuhnhenn of the Associated Press. Here’s what Kuhnhenn asked, in full and unedited:

“Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for being here. You’re no doubt aware of the comments that the Missouri Senate candidate, Republican Todd Akin, made on rape and abortion. I wondered if you think those views represent the views of the Republican Party in general. They’ve been denounced by your own rival and other Republicans. Are they an outlier or are they representative?”

In other words: Just how horrible are your opponents? That’s not a question. That’s an assist.

Most telling of all, nobody in the press corps seemed to find Kuhnhenn’s suck-up remarkable, much less objectionable. Reporters who push Obama for actual answers, meanwhile, find themselves scorned by their peers — as we discovered the hard way when our White House reporter dared ask Obama an unapproved question during a presidential statement in the Rose Garden. Months later, longtime Newsweek correspondent Jonathan Alter confronted us on the street and became apoplectic, literally yelling and shaking and drawing a crowd, over the exchange. His complaint: our reporter was “rude” to Obama. …

The point is that many in the press are every bit as corrupt as conservatives have accused them of being. The good news is, it’s almost over. The broadcast networks, the big daily newspapers, the newsweeklies — they’re done. It’s only a matter of time, and everyone who works there knows it. That may be why so many of them seem tapped out, lazy and enervated, unwilling to stray from the same tired story lines. Some days they seem engaged only on Twitter, where they spend hours preening for one another and sneering at outsiders.

By the next presidential cycle most of these people will be gone. They’ll have moved on to academia or think tanks or Democratic senate campaigns, or wherever aging hacks go when their union contracts finally, inevitably get voided. They’ll be replaced by a vibrant digital marketplace filled with hungry young reporters who care more about breaking stories than maintaining access to some politician or regulator.

I wrote in this space earlier that any reporter who sucks up to politicians, regardless of party, is committing journalistic malpractice. ABC-TV’s Sam Donaldson didn’t suck up to Ronald Reagan. CBS-TV’s Dan Rather didn’t suck up to Richard Nixon. I assume reporters didn’t suck up to Lyndon Johnson. The era of reporters massaging politicians was supposed to end with Watergate.

Investors Business Daily isn’t massaging Obama:

On issue after issue, in fact, the media haven’t covered Obama as much as they’ve covered up for him, whether it’s the dismal state of the economy, the failure of his policies or the increased troubles abroad. …

But whoever wins the White House, the fact remains that the country faces huge problems that must be addressed. And after the election, the press is sure to churn out what can charitably be called “now they tell us” stories about these matters, once any potential election impact has passed. …

Among other stories the media are likely to “discover” after the election is over:

• The economy really does stink. The press studiously ignored the ongoing economic catastrophe under Obama, while parading any “green shoot” they could find that suggested growth was around the corner.

Don’t be surprised if, after the election, they start to notice that three years of subpar growth have left the middle class further behind and more mired in poverty, and created a vast pool of long-term unemployed.

• Massive debt and entitlement crises loom. Despite four straight years of $1 trillion-plus deficits and a national debt that now exceeds total GDP, the media largely treated the debt crisis with a collective yawn.

Ditto the looming bankruptcy of Medicare and Social Security. These crises are nevertheless real and will have to be dealt with soon, a fact the press will almost certainly acknowledge after Nov. 6.

• The debt ceiling limit is fast approaching. Another story that went largely unremarked this campaign is the fact that the country is approaching the new debt ceiling limit. The Treasury Dept. warned last week that it expects the government to reach its borrowing limit before the end of the year.

Congress and the White House will have to deal with that just as they’re trying to avoid the fiscal cliff.

• ObamaCare isn’t what it was cracked up to be. After two years of ignoring health reform’s fundamental flaws, the press will likely admit that ObamaCare is fundamentally flawed.

Reports are sure to appear pointing out the law’s lack of cost controls, its adverse impact on doctors and hospitals, and the fact that, after spending $1.76 trillion, it will still leave 30 million uninsured.

• Obama’s deficit-cutting plan won’t work. The press let the president get away with one of the biggest whoppers yet — that his tax hikes on “the rich” would be enough to pay for his spending binge and bring down the deficit $4 trillion.

Obama’s own budget proved this wasn’t the case. And after the election, you can bet the media will be “shocked” to find that his numbers didn’t add up.

• Questions about Benghazi still demand answers. After almost two full months spent burying the Benghazi story, expect the mainstream press to wake up and notice that, as the Washington Post admitted in an editorial last Friday, “a host of unanswered questions” remains.

Michael Barone adds:

The culturally cohesive America of the 1950s that some of us remember, usually glossing over racial segregation and the civil rights movement, is no longer with us and hasn’t been for some time.

That was an America of universal media, in which everyone watched one of three similar TV channels and newscasts every night. Radio, 1930s and 1940s movies, and 1950s and early 1960s television painted a reasonably true picture of what was typically American.

That’s not the America we live in now. Niche media have replaced universal media.

One America listens to Rush Limbaugh; the other to NPR. Each America has its favorite cable news channel. As for entertainment, Americans have 100-plus cable channels to choose from, and the Internet provides many more options. …

We’re more affluent than we were in the 1950s (if you don’t think so, try doing without your air conditioning, microwaves, smartphones and Internet connections). And we have used this affluence to seal ourselves off in the America of our choosing while trying to ignore the other America.

We tend to choose the America that is culturally congenial. Most people in the San Francisco Bay area wouldn’t consider living in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, even for much better money. Most Metroplexers would never relocate to the Bay Area.

There are plenty of smart and creative and successful people in both Americas. But they don’t like to mix with each other these days. …

They especially don’t like to talk about politics and the cultural issues that, despite the prominence of economic concerns today, have largely determined our political allegiances over the last two decades.

One America tends to be traditionally religious, personally charitable, appreciative of entrepreneurs and suspicious of government. The other tends to be secular or only mildly religious, less charitable on average, skeptical of business and supportive of government as an instrument to advance liberal causes. …

Ronald Reagan, speaking the language of the old, universal popular culture, could appeal to both Americas. His successors, not so much. Barack Obama, after an auspicious start, has failed to do so.

As a result, there are going to be many Americans profoundly unhappy with the result of this election, whichever way it goes. Those on the losing side will be especially angry with those whose candidate won.

Americans have faced this before. This has been a culturally diverse land from its colonial beginnings. The mid-20th century cultural cohesiveness was the exception, not the rule. …

Cast an informed vote today.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear.

I did not vote for Barack Obama in 2008. A lot of people, even those who don’t normally vote for Democrats, did vote for Obama, and for understandable reasons.

When given this kind of choice, Americans, at least since World War II, prefer to vote for the optimistic, forward-seeming candidate. That candidate in 2008 was Barack Obama, not John McCain, at least in the minds of voters.

Two years into his term in office, voters got a chance to opine on what they thought of Obama’s first two years of work. The grade in the 2010 election was a solid F, which is why a huge House of Representatives majority and filibuster-proof Senate majority for Obama’s party disappeared like Brewers relief pitching at the end of a 2012 baseball game.

Obama completely misinterpreted the results of the 2008 elections, the first, but not last, evidence of his arrogance. Voters not blinded by party identification want improvement, not change. Voters vote for the candidates they think will make things better, not merely change things. (That’s a message for both the Obama and Romney campaigns.) Obama promised change, and failed to deliver improvement. Instead of focusing on the economy, Obama delivered ObamaCare, which will improve the economy to the extent of one-fourth of small businesses’ dropping employee health insurance by 2014, and health insurance premiums going up 30 percent.

The question of every presidential election is …

There is no sense — none — in which this country is better off today than it was four years ago. (For starters, consider this list.) Osama bin Laden dead? The American ambassador to Libya is unavailable for comment, because he’s dead. Is the United States more respected internationally? No. Gas prices are only twice as high as they were when Obama took office, and that was during a recession, remember. The weak dollar policy Obama’s Federal Reserve has enforced has worked as well as inflation in reducing Americans’ purchase power. So have Obama’s “investments” in much-more-expensive green energy, which have resulted in a string of bankrupt “green energy” firms, while working to make conventional energy more expensive.

Speaking of bankrupt, there are GM and Chrysler, whose bailouts (started in the George W. Bush administration) resulted in zero benefit to Wisconsinites. Disagree? Ask the workers at GM’s Janesville plant and Chrysler’s Kenosha plant.

Four years after the recession Obama inherited, the economy is imperceptibly growing. Nearly 15 percent of Americans are unemployed, underemployed, or no longer looking for work because they can’t find any. The remaining 85 percent experienced average family income drops nearing $4,000 in the Obama presidency. (So much for supporting the middle class.) And much of the reason has to do with the Obama administration’s official intolerance of business, with logical results.

And, by the way, the Obama administration managed in four years to accumulate half as much federal debt as the previous 43 presidents managed in 220 years. That’s right — 220 years of depressions, two world wars, and presidents who claimed they were fiscal conservatives but weren’t accumulated $10.3 trillion of debt, while Obama accumulated $5.3 trillion of debt by himself.

The problem whenever you vote for a candidate for president is that you get that candidate’s party’s hangers-on, who end up surrounding the winning candidate. For Obama, that means Valerie Jarrett, who said (without refutation from the Obama (mis)Administration):

“After we win this election, it’s our turn. Payback time.
“Everyone not with us is against us and they better be ready because we don’t forget. The ones who helped us will be rewarded, the ones who opposed us will get what they deserve.
“There is going to be hell to pay. Congress won’t be a problem for us this time. No election to worry about after this is over and we have two judges ready to go.”

If Obama is reelected Tuesday, a recession worse than the 2008 recession is guaranteed, starting in less than two months. On Jan. 1, the George W. Bush-era tax cuts, extended after the 2010 elections, end. Instantly, American paychecks will be smaller when the payroll tax cut ends.

The only thing that focuses politicians’ minds is the prospect of losing. Let’s say Obama wins Tuesday. (I’m a pessimist, remember.) What will stop him for the next four years? If you vote for Romney and he does a bad job, you can vote for Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections and someone else for president in 2016. (Perhaps Obama, for all we know.)

If Obama wins Tuesday, our petulant president will be so angry, and immune to voter challenge, that out of spite he will not compromise with Congress, at least half of which (the House of Representatives) is likely to be in the hands of the GOP. (Keep that in mind in deciding whether to vote for Democratic candidates Ron Kind in the Third Congressional District or Mark Pocan in the Second Congressional District. The House, remember, is a dictatorship of the majority.)

One reason I rarely vote for Democrats is their cult-like devotion to their candidates. (Anyone who says “Ooooh! Obama is so cool!” in my presence is not going to like what will happen next.) Democrats have the Cult of Obama and before that the Cult of Bill Clinton and before that the Cult of John F. Kennedy. Wisconsin had the Cult of Russ Feingold and has the Cult of Tammy Baldwin. By any moral standard, that is not merely wrong, but loathsome and evil. (In contrast, I generally hate politicians.) If you are voting for candidates based on how cool they are, or how cool their hangers-on are (for instance, Katy Perry this past weekend and Bruuuuuuuuuce Springsteen in Madison today), you should not be able to vote.

Votes should be based on performance. It is impossible to reconcile the majority of Americans who believe the country is going in the wrong direction with a vote for Obama, or any of his Democratic supporters. Those who complain that it’s unfair to saddle Obama with the results of his four years of malignant incompetence (1) would never think of extending the same courtesy to a Republican president and (2) ignore the fact that Obama asked to be president to (so he claimed) fix the economy, heal the planet, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Wisconsin voters also get to decide the U.S. Senate race between Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, the state’s longest serving governor, and U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D–People’s Republic of Madison). It’s ironic that Thompson, considered not conservative enough among some Republicans both during his 14 years as governor and his primary run earlier this year, is up against the most socialist Wisconsin politician there is. Non-liberal Wisconsinites spent 18 years being unrepresented in Washington, with Herb Kohl, nobody’s senator but his, and phony maverick Feingold in Washington. At least conservatives have Sen. Ron Johnson, but a vote for Baldwin is a vote for someone who makes Feingold look like a Reagan Democrat.

Wisconsin voters will also be deciding 17 Senate seats and all 99 Assembly seats. Control of both houses of the Legislature flipped after the 2010 elections thanks to the disaster that was the 2009–10 Legislature, which managed to follow a $2 billion tax increase with a $3.6 billion deficit. Democrats’ answers were (1) the deficit didn’t exist, but (2) the state needed to raise taxes again.

Wisconsin Democrats have given no indication they have learned a single lesson from their 2010 election disaster. Find one Wisconsin Democrat willing to criticize public employee unions. Find one Wisconsin Democrat looking to dump Milwaukee Public Schools, one of the worst school systems in the entire country. Find one Wisconsin Democrat who doesn’t take his or her marching orders from the most radically left-wing environmentalists.

Republicans haven’t done enough to improve the state’s economy. Democrats made the Wisconsin economy worse when they were last in power. An incomplete grade can be upgraded; an F cannot.

We close with the words of blogger Tim Nerenz, who is not a Romney fan:

And I say that not as a Republican, because I am not one; nor as a Romney guy, because I am not one of those either; and not even as a libertarian because he is not one of us.  It is the suggestion of a businessperson with a pretty good grasp of what the effects of an Obama re-election will have on small to medium-sized firms – the ones who provide the majority of jobs in this country and whose owners pay the lions’ share of taxes.  The big dogs like GE and Goldman Sachs win no matter what; they’d get theirs even if Vlad the Impaler wins on a write-in.

But the rest of us have to earn our way in this world.  There is no reason not to believe President Obama when he says he will allow the tax increases on business owners to go into effect January 1, will proceed with the next round of national health care mandates, will further restrict energy production, and will use sequestration as the means to cut DoD procurement.  Those policies are the four horses of the economic apocalypse.

And there is also no reason not to believe the brave business owners who have come out and told us how they will be forced to respond to those higher imposed costs – by reducing headcount, cutting back hours, scaling back pension and retirement contributions, paring or eliminating health care benefits altogether, consolidating operations, and shifting capital investment and job creation to countries with more favorable tax and regulatory climates. …

As much as it pains me to say it, neither Gary Johnson nor Ron Paul is going to be our next President of the United States.  And neither is Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Superman, Jesus, Aaron Rodgers, or the Good Witch of the North.  Our next President will be either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama – pick one.

And remember who comes along for the ride – Biden, Clinton, Geithner, Holder, Panetta, Salazar, Sebelius, Solis, Duncan, LaHood, Chu, Napolitano (the wrong one), Rice,  2 more Supreme Court Justices likely, dozens of federal judges, and the whole fleet of federal prosecutors.  Do you trust your liberty in their hands?  Not me.

The libertarian’s second biggest fear is that Romney won’t do what he says; but our biggest fear is that Obama will.