The Red Wave Happened, Nothing Changed from It, Entertainment Poised to Fail from It

We are under mass delusion. Whatever the election results are for political representation, a giant change in American temperament was displayed and ignored. The direction of entertainment should, but likely won’t, take notice.

The following article is an examination of the culture of the United States and what it might mean for entertainment going forward. While this article deals with politics, its goal is not to push any particular political opinion. At first you may not understand how this article ties into entertainment… keep reading while I explain what happened so we can look at how this will impact entertainment going forward.

The red wave happened and nobody knows it.

There, I said it. And you probably can’t figure out why I would say such a thing. Yet there it is, and I, a theme park and entertainment analyst am apparently the only pundit ready to share this obvious fact with you. It’s shocking to me, honestly. Either the punditry and commentary classes of America are too obtuse to figure this out or they’re purposefully playing a game on both sides to hide the knowledge from Joe and Joanne Average. So then it comes down to me to show you that the red wave absolutely occurred. Are you ready? Read two more paragraphs down and prepare to have your mind blown. Seriously.

The 2022 @CookPolitical House Vote Tracker is now live! The craziest thing: Republicans are winning the House popular vote by 6.4% so far but just scraping by in the race for control. https://t.co/YOAzUtsM9F pic.twitter.com/pGICoSCNv9

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 9, 2022

It has been mind-numbing to me to watch the so-called smartest people in our society flap about like bobble-headed bird toys all giving us their expert hot takes on what is going on in America. Dissatisfaction with the country’s direction is at levels not seen since the seventies. Inflation has wiped out the purchasing power of everybody in red, blue and purple America. Nuclear war is a possibility for the first time in decades. World War III could be on the horizon. Yet the election happened and nothing changed. Except it did… just not in the way you’re accustomed.

Republicans won the popular vote by 6.4% so far. In any other election, that would have produced a tidal wave of new political representation. Remember all the chatter about how Democrats have to win the popular vote by 2% just to hold their own? Well, turns out while that is historically accurate, it’s bullocks this go around. In 2010, Barack Obama was far, far more popular than Joe Biden and his party had a tremendously better standing going into the midterm elections. Obama’s party lost 63 House seats despite Republicans in 2010 having a smaller percentage of the overall vote in 2022. Let me say that again: Republicans in 2010 won 51.7% of the vote and gained 63 House seats, Republicans in 2022 won 52.3% of the vote and gained almost nothing. That is a cataclysmic shift in how election results impact representation. I could theorize why that is but that would take us into the political… a place I’m not interested in exploring on a theme park website. So let me just put this in the most practical statement I can and leave the explanations to others:

The red wave happened but no serious representation change occurred because of it.

Once you understand that the red wave swept across America but there was almost no change in representation, you can then suddenly begin to map reality in a more accurate way. There’s no way in the world you’re going to understand the country you live in, including culture and entertainment, if all you’re doing is listening to is a bunch of squawking on television and on the internet where they fail to look at the popular vote and realize what just occurred. However it came to be, the country moved significantly more conservative and then nothing really happened as a result of it. Joe Biden is still unpopular, inflation is still rampant, woke ideology is still despised by most of the country… only unlike every other election in history, that didn’t change who is in government. It doesn’t mean that Republicans are super popular, it just means that the far left is seriously disliked across the country. But society currently has little solution to absolve itself from the type of governing and cultural movement that it is captured by.

Again, I’m not here to explain why the situation is what it is. I’m not here to carry water for either party. I’m not here to support any political movement. I’m only here to tell you what’s going on because clearly nobody else is going to do it, for whatever reason that might be.

Now why all of that matters in entertainment is because we’ve just entered into an era of mass confusion. I’d argue that it’s purposeful, but maybe all of our elites are just so dumbfounded that even they don’t know what happened. For the entertainment industry, with Democrats holding onto the best midterm election performance of a party in power for fifty years, you’d think that would mean the culture is holding strong with all things progressive. You’d think pumping out a bunch of race and gender swapped films with postmodern, socialist tropes would be money in the bag. And that’s going to be all you hear from every side of the media for the next six months. The analysts on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Daily Wire… all of them are in synch that a red wave didn’t happen when it really did. Surely the status quo remains then, if you’re an entertainment CEO looking for what to do with content. So then that means there’s a society disconnect between reality and the narrative that is being fed to everyone. Here’s how this will play out now:

When it comes to entertainment, companies are going to feel emboldened to push more and more into progressive narratives because they’re basing their decisions on a completely incorrect narrative. We will see more ultra-DEI and postmodern scripts getting pushed through. That’s not stupid if you look at the way 20-30 year olds are voting in 2022… but it may be stupid if you look at how everyone else voted and recognize that the 30-60 year old crowd parenting the teens are going to keep their tweens and teens away from woke content. Thus, those movies will continue to annoy audiences, fail at the box office, and studios will continue to be flummoxed as to what in the world is going on. That makes sense — they’ve just been handed a fully-accepted-by-all-sides dose of horrible data.

Disney in particular is positioned to be damaged greatly by a false narrative that they are almost guaranteed to believe. Disney might wonder why exactly why, if the elections turned out the way they did, why they’re going to be losing money on woke content for the next two years? They might wonder why their company declines in popularity continually? After all, the progressive side of the culture war just had the best midterm results in a century! Yet it’s all a mirage.

The problem for entertainment companies is that if they base their sociocultural decisions off of the election results instead of the overall vote percentages, they stand to lose vast amounts of money. Unlike whatever is going on in American government, companies must have an accurate representation of their market or else money will not materialize. Votes may no longer shift the balance of power in the USA but those same voters will pick and choose entertainment content using their dollars. Failing to recognize that voters repudiated the progressive push of the country in 2022 more than they did in 2010 will leave companies vulnerable to mismatching the type of content with what the market truly wants.

Whatever happens with democracy, voting, elections and the American electorate’s mood, companies would be wise to pay attention to a shift in voting patterns as it pertains to the type of content they produce. The danger in not understanding what just happened extends far beyond politics and the news channels — so many other segments of society are impacted when we fail to know what’s actually going on. For companies that think this last week is a greenlight to push for a woke, ESG, reimagining tomorrow future, a rude awakening is forthcoming.

The truth really, really matters. If you don’t know it, you can’t map out the future ahead of you.

For all the latest news that should be fun, keep reading That Park Place. As always, drop a comment down below and let me know your thoughts!