The 2024 Election Is a Fight Over America's Way of Life

Yeah. Isn't the next election always the one to save the American way of life? How's that been working out?

At WSJ, "GOP voters see a country corrupted by liberal ideals":

To win Jason Stewart’s vote, a presidential candidate should talk about stopping illegal immigration, taming inflation and keeping academic theories about race out of the classroom. But one overarching task is more important to the 51-year-old Republican than any single issue: rescuing American culture from liberals.

“Democrats and liberals have invaded every aspect of culture for the past 40 or 50 years, and we’re at a line-in-the-sand moment for conservatives,” said Stewart, a sales executive and Army veteran who lives outside Philadelphia. “What I’m looking for in a candidate is someone who can put up a fight across multiple fronts.”

The animating force in the Republican presidential primary, many voters and policy leaders say, is a feeling that American society—the government, the media, Hollywood, academia and big business—has been corrupted by liberal ideas about race, gender and other social matters. Democrats, in turn, feel that conservatives have used their political power in red states and in building a Supreme Court majority to undermine abortion rights and threaten decades of work to broaden equal rights for minority groups.

That has turned the next race for the White House into an existential election, with voters on both sides fearing not just a loss of political influence but also the destruction of their way of life.

“My biggest fear is about advancing that far-right agenda,” said Laurie Spezzano, 68, a Democrat and insurance agent in Louisville, Ky., who believes one of her own senators, Republican Mitch McConnell, subverted the legitimacy of the Supreme Court by using his leadership post to block a Democratic nominee to the court and to advance GOP nominees. Abortion rights have been diminished, she said, and gay rights in employment and marriage are at risk.

“I’ve never been against all Republicans, but it’s gotten to where they’re really scary now,” she said.

Republican Julie Duggan, by contrast, sees conservative values and traditional gender roles under attack amid social change that is moving too quickly. “It’s like half the country has lost their minds. People don’t even know what gender they are,” said Duggan, 31, a public safety worker in Chicago. If Republicans lose again, “it’s going to be the downfall of our society.” The Heritage Foundation, the conservative policy institute, has brought together 60 right-of-center organizations to compile a 900-page document of policy specifics to guide the next Republican president. But the group’s president, Kevin Roberts, says those specifics take a back seat to a broader goal. The next election, he says, “may be our last, best chance to rescue the nation from the woke, Socialist left.” “Their vision is to destroy everything that makes America America—our values, our history, our rights,” Roberts said recently at the group’s leadership summit. In an interview, he added, “We have lost our K-12 schools to radical-left activists. We’ve certainly lost our universities to the same, and other institutions,” including large businesses and even churches. “Everyday Americans,” he said, are being forced “to bend your knee to the rainbow flag.” Democrats and others say the GOP culture war is a backlash against greater acceptance of the nation’s growing diversity, which is long overdue in America, and that no one is being forced to bend a knee or otherwise get involved. Richard Blissett, 33, a Democrat and university staff member who lives in Baltimore, said that some Republican complaints are at odds with the party’s traditional faith in free markets. “There’s a big difference between government and Hollywood. If Republicans want more Republican movies, they can make them. No one is stopping them,” he said. The heightened feelings on both sides are reflected in a poll that found that about 80% of Republicans believe that the Democratic agenda, “if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.” About the same share of Democrats had the same fear of the Republican agenda, saying it would destroy the country, an NBC News survey found last fall. The GOP’s sense that U.S. culture has gone off-track snarled legislation in Congress this week, as House Republicans pushed through a set of contentious social-policy amendments to an annual defense bill. The measures stripped money for diversity initiatives in the military and added restrictions on abortion and transgender care for service members. GOP lawmakers said they acted because liberal ideology was weakening the military. But the amendments endanger the bill’s path in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Many Republican voters say the pace of social change has left them off-balance, with schools and businesses pushing for racial diversity and transgender Americans raising difficult questions for parents, schools and sports officials. In Wall Street Journal-NORC polling this year, three-quarters of Republicans said society had gone too far in accepting transgender people. More than half said society had overstepped in accepting gay and lesbian people, and that businesses and schools had gone too far in promoting racial and ethnic diversity. Far fewer Democrats held those views.

In an Ipsos poll this March, about half of Republicans agreed with the statement, “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country.” Fewer than 30% of Democrats agreed.

While past GOP primary races have turned in part on policy disputes, such as remaking Medicare or scrapping the current tax code for a flat tax, the differences among candidates this year over matters such as abortion policy and aid to Ukraine have been a more muted part of the discussion. “Very few people are talking about tax reform, and everybody is talking about the cultural issues,” said Jondavid Longo, a Republican and mayor of Slippery Rock, a borough outside of Pittsburgh. Within both parties, he said, “they see politics as almost a life-or-death situation. Many voters believe that if their candidate does not win, then doom will follow.”

Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster who recently conducted focus groups with GOP voters, said the feeling of cultural alienation among Republicans stretches well beyond issues of race and gender to include the economy. “It’s all one and the same—there’s a cultural glue that goes from taxes and inflation to transgender policy,” he said. “Our base believes that we’re losing our country, and that the left has become radicalized to a point that they no longer believe in America and want to burn it all down and remake it in their image.”

GOP voters, he said, are asking two main things of candidates: Do you understand that we’re on the verge of losing our country? And can we trust you to fight back?

ormer President Donald Trump’s defining characteristic as a politician is his eagerness to both challenge the norms of Washington and fight culture-war battles. He regularly uses heightened rhetoric to emphasize what he sees as a threat from the left, warning of “pink-haired Communists teaching our kids” and promising to “keep foreign, Christian-hating Communists, Marxists and socialists out of America.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is also responding to the hunger among Republicans to take up cultural battles...

Americans Expect Worsening U.S. Economy in 2023, WSJ Poll Finds

Well, Goldman-Sachs will layoff "thousands," and will deny bonuses to "underperforming employees," whatever that means (completely arbitrary?). 

So, it's not looking like a great holiday season for many American workers. 

I'm not getting laid-off, thank goodness. 

Be kind to your neighbors out there, and perhaps say a pray for the less fortunate (or hand 'em some cash while they're out panhandling on the median at the traffic light, *sigh*).

At the Wall Street Journal, "Over a third of voters say inflation is causing them major financial strain":

A majority of voters think the economy will be in worse shape in 2023 than it is now and roughly two-thirds say the nation’s economic trajectory is headed in the wrong direction, the latest Wall Street Journal poll shows.

The survey, conducted Dec. 3-7, suggests a recent burst of positive economic news—moderating gas prices and a slowing pace of inflation—haven’t altered the way many feel about the risk of a recession, something many economists have forecast as likely.

“I just think we are headed toward a recession and it could be a pretty big one,” said Republican poll participant David Rennie, a 61-year-old retired executive with the Boy Scouts of America who lives in Shelton, Conn. “Interest rates are skyrocketing and that’s going to take us down.”

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday approved an interest-rate increase of 0.5 percentage point and signaled plans to keep raising rates at its next few meetings to combat high inflation. The move reflected some moderation after four consecutive increases of 0.75 point.

Economic pessimism is strongest among Republicans, with 83% expecting the economy to worsen. Slightly more than half of independents feel that way, while 22% of Democrats do.

“Our economic diagnostics have become partisan,” said Democratic pollster John Anzalone, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio. “If there was a Republican president, we might see the reverse.”

Mr. Fabrizio said Democrats aren’t paying as much of a political price as one might expect for so many people having negative feelings about the economy. “You would normally see that translate into being bad news for the Democrats,” he said.

Democrats did better than expected in last month’s midterm elections, keeping control of the Senate while losing the House by a narrower margin than nonpartisan analysts forecast...

After this last election, it's pretty clear that the old standard of economic indicators is not what voters are basing the electoral decisions on. If it were otherwise, we'd see big Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress come January 3rd. Nothing that I can see foretells a weakening of the hateful partisanship that's driving the current political scene. If anything, things will get worse. While Elon's takeover of Twitter is great for owning the libs, if you look at the reaction on the left --- the fanatical, practically murderous reaction --- it's a safe bet that 2024's going to be as nasty as ever.

There's more at the link, in any case. 

Ron DeSantis Holds Early Lead Over Donald Trump Among GOP Primary Voters, WSJ Poll Shows (VIDEO)

He's seen on Laura Ingraham's last night, below, and at the Wall Street Journal, "The former president’s standing among Republican voters has fallen after candidates he promoted lost in midterm elections":

Republican primary voters have high interest in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a potential 2024 presidential nominee and view him more favorably than they do former President Donald Trump, a new Wall Street Journal poll shows.

In a hypothetical contest between the two, Mr. DeSantis beats Mr. Trump, 52% to 38%, among likely GOP primary voters contemplating a race in which the first nomination votes will be cast in just over a year.

The poll found that Mr. DeSantis is both well-known and well-liked among Republicans who say they are likely to vote in a party primary or nominating contest, with 86% viewing the Florida governor favorably, compared with 74% who hold a favorable view of Mr. Trump. One in 10 likely GOP primary voters said they didn’t know enough about Mr. DeSantis to venture an opinion of him.

Among all registered voters, Mr. DeSantis is viewed favorably by 43%, compared with 36% for the former president. Favorable views of Mr. Trump were the lowest recorded in Journal polling dating to November 2021 and have been pulled down by a decline in positive feelings among Republicans. Since March, his favorable rating among GOP voters has fallen to 74% from 85%, while the share who view him unfavorably has risen to 23% from 13%.

The decline in Mr. Trump’s standing among GOP voters follows midterm election losses that some in the party have attributed to his significant involvement in candidate endorsements and promotion during the primary process.

Democrats had a net gain of two governorships and one Senate seat, while limiting their House losses to single digits, despite high inflation and with an unpopular president leading their party. The result bucked a historical pattern in which the party that holds the White House almost always suffers a double-digit loss of seats in the House during a president’s first term.

Mr. Trump is the only Republican who has announced a 2024 presidential bid, although others are expected to do so in the coming months. If Mr. DeSantis decides to run, aides have said he isn’t likely to announce a White House campaign until after Florida’s legislative session ends in May.

Mr. DeSantis has become a formidable force in politics, winning a second term last month in a landslide—by 19 percentage points—reflecting big gains in support in Florida since his first election, by less than half a percentage point, to the governor’s office in 2018...

 

The Normie Center Strikes Back

Do what you will with this.

From Andrew Sullivan, "Democracy works, survives, and can surprise us (including me). A great night":

Let’s first herald the truly good news. Democracy surprised almost all of us, as it sometimes does. It made some of us look a bit foolish (more on that in a bit). It defied most predictions and historic analogies. The election ended up with a super-close race for both House and Senate — highly unusual for a midterm when inflation is soaring and most people are super bummed about the country.

More good news: Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” failed to materialize in Georgia. And most important of all: there are (currently) no widespread allegations of fraud or illegitimacy, despite many close races; and the candidates who made election denial their platform lost decisively. The thumping defeat of nutjob Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and the way he helped drag down other Republican candidates in the states — is just fantastic. According to the exit polls, “79 percent said they were very (47 percent) or somewhat (33 percent) confident that elections in their state were being conducted fairly and accurately.” Huge and encouraging news.

And it behooves me to note that Biden’s speech on democracy last week was in retrospect right in its priorities. Voters are worried about democracy’s survival and Biden’s distinction between MAGA Republicans and the rest obviously worked with some, including Republicans. Voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s record nonetheless broke for the Dems when the alternative was a MAGA loony.

Yes, as I anticipated, there was pushback to Democratic extremism. Republicans look set to win the popular vote overall. Where CRT was on the ballot — in school board races, where it belongs — it lost badly everywhere. The Latino vote kept trending GOP, making even Miami-Dade a Republican bastion. In New York City especially, Asian-Americans’ support for the GOP soared. We even have the first openly gay MAGA congressman. The Squad members of Congress all saw their support slide in their safe districts.

On the “LGBTQIA+” question, “26 percent said our society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the better, 50 percent for the worse.” That’s a huge backlash against “queer” and trans extremism, and it’s hurting gays and lesbians. And in the face of media insistence that America is an objectively white supremacist country, 45 percent said racism was either not a problem at all or a minor one. (Fifty-three percent said major.)

This is striking: around a third of non-white, non-college voters went Republican. According to exit polls, Asian-Americans went from 77 percent Democrat in 2018 to around 60 percent now. Latinos went from 70 to 60. (One irony is that Republicans gained many minority votes in solid red states, which didn’t have much of an effect on the outcome, but bolsters their raw numbers.)

But these trends were overwhelmed by other issues, and did not amount to the kind of decisive rejection of Democratic leftism I favored and suspected would happen. I was wrong. I remain convinced that wokeness is terribly destructive to liberal society, but my obsessions are obviously not everyone’s. And my fault was in not seeing how MAGA extremism — the sheer anti-democratic crazy of the GOP — was seen by independent voters as far more dangerous than the crazy left. I actually agree — see this recent piece, for example — and if I didn’t live in a super-blue city, I might have felt differently about my protest vote. But from the broadest perspective, I was simply wrong to emphasize the impact of the far left as much as I have. You’ve told me this many times. I should have listened more, and I will.

Let’s first herald the truly good news. Democracy surprised almost all of us, as it sometimes does. It made some of us look a bit foolish (more on that in a bit). It defied most predictions and historic analogies. The election ended up with a super-close race for both House and Senate — highly unusual for a midterm when inflation is soaring and most people are super bummed about the country.

More good news: Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” failed to materialize in Georgia. And most important of all: there are (currently) no widespread allegations of fraud or illegitimacy, despite many close races; and the candidates who made election denial their platform lost decisively. The thumping defeat of nutjob Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and the way he helped drag down other Republican candidates in the states — is just fantastic. According to the exit polls, “79 percent said they were very (47 percent) or somewhat (33 percent) confident that elections in their state were being conducted fairly and accurately.” Huge and encouraging news.

And it behooves me to note that Biden’s speech on democracy last week was in retrospect right in its priorities. Voters are worried about democracy’s survival and Biden’s distinction between MAGA Republicans and the rest obviously worked with some, including Republicans. Voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s record nonetheless broke for the Dems when the alternative was a MAGA loony.

Yes, as I anticipated, there was pushback to Democratic extremism. Republicans look set to win the popular vote overall. Where CRT was on the ballot — in school board races, where it belongs — it lost badly everywhere. The Latino vote kept trending GOP, making even Miami-Dade a Republican bastion. In New York City especially, Asian-Americans’ support for the GOP soared. We even have the first openly gay MAGA congressman. The Squad members of Congress all saw their support slide in their safe districts.

On the “LGBTQIA+” question, “26 percent said our society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the better, 50 percent for the worse.” That’s a huge backlash against “queer” and trans extremism, and it’s hurting gays and lesbians. And in the face of media insistence that America is an objectively white supremacist country, 45 percent said racism was either not a problem at all or a minor one. (Fifty-three percent said major.)

This is striking: around a third of non-white, non-college voters went Republican. According to exit polls, Asian-Americans went from 77 percent Democrat in 2018 to around 60 percent now. Latinos went from 70 to 60. (One irony is that Republicans gained many minority votes in solid red states, which didn’t have much of an effect on the outcome, but bolsters their raw numbers.)

But these trends were overwhelmed by other issues, and did not amount to the kind of decisive rejection of Democratic leftism I favored and suspected would happen. I was wrong. I remain convinced that wokeness is terribly destructive to liberal society, but my obsessions are obviously not everyone’s. And my fault was in not seeing how MAGA extremism — the sheer anti-democratic crazy of the GOP — was seen by independent voters as far more dangerous than the crazy left. I actually agree — see this recent piece, for example — and if I didn’t live in a super-blue city, I might have felt differently about my protest vote. But from the broadest perspective, I was simply wrong to emphasize the impact of the far left as much as I have. You’ve told me this many times. I should have listened more, and I will...

 

After Midterm Election Disappointment, GOP Faces Leadership Choices

McConnell might be out.

At WSJ, "Trump is set to launch another presidential bid as party considers McCarthy’s and McConnell’s roles on Capitol Hill":

WASHINGTON—Republicans face a week that will be crucial in deciding the future direction and leadership of the party in the wake of disappointing midterm elections.

Former President Donald Trump is expected to announce another bid for the White House at 9 p.m. Tuesday in Palm Beach, Fla. House Republicans are scheduled to vote the same day on whether to choose House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) as their candidate for speaker. Some Senate Republicans are pushing to delay beyond this week a decision on whether to hand Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) another term as their leader.

Those moves will come after elections that many Republicans believed would deliver the party a sizable majority in the House and control of the Senate. Instead, they failed to capture the Senate majority and appear headed for only a slim edge in the House.

Some Republicans contend that Mr. Trump’s influence and endorsement choices cost the party winnable races in key states, partly by repelling some independent voters. Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, a Republican who previously supported Mr. Trump, said on Fox Business that she couldn’t do so again after the midterm results.

“The voters have spoken, and they’ve said that they want a different leader,” she said. “And a true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage.”

In response, a spokesman for Mr. Trump said: “Winsome Sears rode a wave of President Trump’s voters to election victory in 2021. Her comments are a slap to the face to all of the grass-roots Republicans that worked so hard to get her elected. They won’t forget this, and there will be a reckoning.” ...

A reckoning? Or a crackup? 

Stay tuned. Trump's expected announce his 2024 presidential bid on Tuesday.

More at the link.

 

How the 2022 Midterms Became a Squeaker

At the New York Times, "Interviews with more than 70 current and former officials show the outside forces — and miscalculations and infighting — that led to an improbable, still-undecided election":

Late one mid-September evening, the leaders of the House Democratic campaign arm were in the middle of a marathon meeting, grappling with an increasingly hostile midterm landscape. Two choices were on the table: a more defensive posture to limit their losses in the face of a potential red wave or a more aggressive approach in hopes of saving their paper-thin majority.

Leftover Chinese food was strewn about. The hour approached midnight. The decision was made. They would go all in for the majority — the pundits, polling and punishing political environment be damned. Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the group, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, walked to the whiteboard and scrawled a single word.

BELIEVE.

The man who made that Ted Lasso-style exhortation went down to defeat on Tuesday. And Democrats are still facing the likelihood of ceding control of the House of Representatives to Republicans, no matter their morale-building exercises.

Yet Democrats turned in the strongest midterm showing in two decades for a party holding the White House, keeping the House on such a razor’s edge that control is still up for grabs days after the polls closed. In the Senate, Democrats have a path not only to keeping power but even to expanding their majority if the remaining races go their way, including a Georgia runoff. And the party won several key governorships, too.

The breadth of success caught even the most optimistic corners of the party by surprise. House Republicans had planned a big victory party on Tuesday, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi was hunkered down behind closed doors at a Democratic headquarters.

All the conditions appeared to have been set for a Democratic wipeout: inflation at 40-year highs, concerns about crime, elevated gas prices, the typical thrust for change.

How the midterms turned out so improbably was, in many ways, a function of forces beyond Democrats’ control. A Supreme Court decision that stripped away a half-century of abortion rights galvanized their base. A polarizing, unpopular and ever-present former president, Donald J. Trump, provided the type of ready-made foil whom White Houses rarely enjoy.

But interviews with more than 70 people — party strategists, lawmakers and current and former White House officials — also revealed crucial tactical decisions, strategic miscalculations, misreading of polls, infighting and behind-the-scenes maneuvering in both parties that led the G.O.P. to blow its chance at a blowout...

Keep reading.

 

Why Independent Voters Broke for Democrats in the Midterms

Trump's radioactive, it turns out. 

If he's not now, we'll know for sure after he makes his big announcement on November 15th. See how the Democrat Media Complex responds to that.

At the Wall Street Journal, "GOP candidates closely aligned with Trump turned off some centrists and in-play Republicans":

Lisa Ghelfi, a 58-year-old registered Republican in Arizona, voted for Donald Trump for president two years ago but has grown tired of his election-fraud claims. It is the main reason she voted for Democrats for governor, senator, secretary of state and attorney general this fall and plans to change her registration to independent.

“Not allowing the election to be settled, it’s very divisive,” Ms. Ghelfi, a semiretired attorney from Paradise Valley, said of the 2020 race. “I think the election spoke for itself.” She said she voted for Republicans down-ballot who weren’t as vocal about election fraud or as closely tied to Mr. Trump, yet couldn’t support Arizona’s four major Republican candidates because they echoed Mr. Trump’s false claims.

Republicans succeeded in one of their top goals this year: They brought more of their party’s voters to the polls than did Democrats. But in the course of energizing their core voters, Republicans in many states lost voters in the political center—both independents and many Republicans who are uneasy with elements of the party’s focus under Mr. Trump.

Control of the House and Senate, which had seemed poised to land with the Republican Party, is coming down to a handful of races that so far are too close to call, though the GOP remains on track to winning a narrow majority in the House. Republicans have won nearly 5.5 million more votes in House races than have Democrats, a tally by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report finds, as many voters were motivated by anxiety over high inflation and a low opinion of President Biden’s response.

At the same time, Republican analysts said their unexpectedly weak showing in the election indicated that they had failed to press hard enough on those issues. In Michigan, the Republican Party’s state committee said a failure to talk to voters in the political center was a central reason that Tudor Dixon, the party’s Trump-endorsed nominee for governor, was crushed in a 10 percentage point defeat by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“Tudor’s efforts focused largely on Republican red-meat issues, in hopes of inspiring a 2020-like showing at the polls,” a memo from the GOP committee said. “There were more ads on transgender sports than inflation, gas prices and bread-and-butter issues that could have swayed independent voters.”

More than 30% of the midterm voter pool, by one measure, were independent voters, or people who don’t affiliate with either political party. David Winston, a Republican pollster who consults with the party’s House and Senate leadership, said polling showed that they were unhappy with the country’s direction and assigned blame for high inflation to President Biden.

“So, the door was open for Republicans to have a good interaction,” Mr. Winston said. “If everyone was focused on turnout of their base, they missed almost a third of the electorate—and basically the third of the electorate that’s in play.”

Mike Cernovich, a conservative blogger and supporter of Mr. Trump, said in an online analysis of the election outcome, “I would say the single biggest issue was, if your focus in 2022 was the 2020 election, then you were going to have a bad night with independents.”

Nationally, Republican candidates this year had the advantage of a favorable voter mix. Some 49% of midterm voters were Republicans, and 43% were Democrats, a 6-point GOP advantage, AP VoteCast, a large survey of the midterm electorate, found.

The GOP edge was similar or larger in states with competitive Senate races: 5 points in Pennsylvania, 8 points in Georgia and 11 points in Arizona. Despite those advantages, Republicans lost the Senate races in Pennsylvania and Arizona and will compete again in Georgia, where the race goes to a runoff next month.

Undercutting the GOP advantage was that independents favored Democrats by 4 points nationally, the survey found, and by a far more substantial 18 points in Pennsylvania, 28 points in Georgia and more than 30 points in Arizona.

Polling shows that independent voters have little enthusiasm for either party. Both parties were viewed favorably by less than 30% of independents and unfavorably by 50% or more, the AP VoteCast survey found.

“It’s picking the lesser of two evils sometimes,” said Micki LePla, 65, a retired respiratory therapist near Port Huron, Mich., who backed Ms. Whitmer for governor...

Trumpism Is Toxic

From Tim Alberta, at the Atlantic, "And three other lessons of the midterm elections":

The Republican Party swaggered into Tuesday’s midterm elections with full confidence that it would clobber President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party, capitalizing on voters’ concerns over inflation and the economy to retake majorities in both chambers of Congress. The question, party officials believed, was one only of scale: Would it be a red wave, or a red tsunami?

The answer, it turns out, is neither.

As of this morning, Republicans had yet to secure a majority in either the House or the Senate. Across the country, Democrats won races that many in the party expected to lose. Millions of votes are still to be counted, particularly in western states, but this much is clear: Even if Republicans eke out narrow congressional majorities, 2022 will be remembered as a triumph for Democrats, easily the best midterm cycle for an incumbent president’s party since 2002, when the country rallied around George W. Bush and his GOP in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Given the tailwinds they rode into Election Day—a fragile economic outlook, an unpopular president, a pervasive sense that our democracy is dysfunctional—Republicans spent yesterday trying to make sense of how things went so wrong. There was a particular focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, three battleground states that went from red to blue on Election Day 2020, and states where Democrats won major victories on Tuesday.

Based on my reporting throughout the year, as well as data from Tuesday’s exit polling and conversations with Republican officials in the immediate aftermath of Election Day, here are four lessons I believe the party must learn before the next election in 2024...

Still more.

With House Majority in Play, a New Class Takes Shape

It's just a matter of getting all the ballots counted. When it's done, the GOP majority will take over in the House, possibly with some Republican outliers.

At NYT, "The Republican ranks grew more extreme and slightly more diverse, while Democrats added several young liberals to their caucus":

WASHINGTON — Whoever holds the House majority in January, the new lawmakers will include a fresh crop of Republican election deniers, including a veteran who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; a handful of G.O.P. members of color; and a diverse group of young Democratic progressives.

As vote counting continued across the country on Wednesday, with Republicans grasping to take control and Democrats outperforming expectations in key races, the contours of a new class of lawmakers began to emerge.

It featured a sizable contingent of Republicans who have questioned or denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, many of them hailing from safely red districts, adding to an already influential extreme right in the House. At least 140 of the House Republicans who won election this week are election deniers, at least 15 of them new additions.

A handful of Black and Latina Republicans also won, adding a touch more diversity to a mostly white, male conference — though far less than leaders had hoped as many candidates they had recruited for their potential to appeal to a broader set of voters in competitive districts fell short.

For Democrats, the election ushered in younger, more diverse members to fill the seats of departing incumbents. Many of those candidates had held state offices or previously sought seats in Congress and are expected to back many of the priorities of the Democratic left wing.

Here are some of the new faces:

The Republicans

Jen A. Kiggans, a Navy veteran and state senator.

As a woman with military experience, Ms. Kiggans was regarded by Republicans as a prime recruit to put up against a centrist Democrat in a conservative-leaning area. She defeated Representative Elaine Luria on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, propelled in part by state redistricting that tilted the district more decisively to the right.

She focused her campaign narrowly on inflation and public safety, and was bolstered by top Republicans, including Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader who is running to become speaker should his party retake the House, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin. That suggested that she would be more likely to serve as an acolyte to Republican leaders than a thorn in their sides.

But though she ran as a mainstream candidate, Ms. Kiggans declined throughout her campaign to say whether she believed Mr. Biden was legitimately elected.

Derrick Van Orden, a veteran at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

A retired Navy SEAL who rallied at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Van Orden flipped a key seat for Republicans in western Wisconsin, in a largely rural district currently held by Representative Ron Kind, a 13-term centrist Democrat who did not seek re-election.

Much remains uncertain. For the second Election Day in a row, election night ended without a clear winner. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, takes a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate, and when we might know the outcome:

The House. Republicans are likelier than not to win the House, but it is no certainty. There are still several key races that remain uncalled, and in many of these contests, late mail ballots have the potential to help Democrats. It will take days to count them.

The Senate. The fight for the Senate will come down to three states: Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Outstanding ballots in Nevada and Arizona could take days to count, but control of the chamber may ultimately hinge on Georgia, which is headed for a Dec. 6 runoff.

How we got here. The political conditions seemed ripe for Republicans to make big midterm pickups, but voters had other ideas. Read our five takeaways and analysis of why the “red wave” didn’t materialize for the G.O.P.

Mr. Van Orden, who emphasized his military service on the campaign trail, largely ducked questions about his attendance at the Jan. 6 rally. He has said he did not go into the Capitol, and wrote in an opinion essay that he left the grounds outside the building when violence began, watching “what should have been an expression of free speech devolve into one of the most tragic incidents in the history of our nation.”

During his race, Mr. Van Orden leaned heavily into culture war messaging, accusing Democrats of “taking the nation rapidly down the path to socialism” and railing on a podcast against what he described as “woke ideology” seeping into the military.

John James, an Iraq veteran set to expand the House’s ranks of Black Republicans.

West Point graduate who commanded Apache helicopters in Iraq, Mr. James was personally lobbied for months to run by party leaders including Mr. McCarthy, who were convinced that his victory would keep this Michigan seat safely in Republican hands for years to come.

Mr. James, who unsuccessfully challenged Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, in 2020, ran a more moderate campaign than many of his colleagues in safe seats. He presented himself to voters as “an open-minded, freethinking conservative,” and focused on kitchen table issues like lowering prices and bringing back manufacturing.

His victory will nudge up the number of Black Republicans in the House to at least three from two.

Monica De La Cruz, the conservative from the Rio Grande Valley.

Ms. De La Cruz emphasized her conservative ideology in flipping a seat in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas abandoned by an incumbent who switched districts after the state legislature handed him an unfavorable gerrymander.

Ms. De La Cruz, who owns an insurance firm, had campaigned heavily on the influx of illegal migrants at the southern border, emphasizing how her family had immigrated legally to the United States from Mexico and pledging to “finish the wall” started by former President Donald J. Trump.

Republicans had enthusiastically pointed to her candidacy, as well as those of two other Latinas running in the Rio Grande Valley — Mayra Flores and Cassy Garcia — as evidence that they were finally making inroads with Latino voters. But both Ms. Flores and Ms. Garcia lost, according to The Associated Press.

Andy Ogles, a hard-right former mayor.

A former mayor, Mr. Ogles flipped a Democratic-held seat in central Tennessee thanks to a drastic redrawing of the district that all but guaranteed a Republican victory.

Outspoken, hard-right lawmakers like Mr. Ogles could cause headaches for Republican leaders as they try to keep the government funded and prevent the country from defaulting on its debt.

After triumphing in his primary election, Mr. Ogles called for the impeachment of Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as “treason” charges against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, over the administration’s handling of immigration at the southern border. And a video released by his Democratic opponent showed him at a G.O.P. candidate forum following the repeal of Roe v. Wade arguing that the “next thing we have to do is go after gay marriage.” ...

 

Ron DeSantis: The New Champion of Trumpism (VIDEO)

From Batya, at UnHerd, "The Florida Governor has found a winning formula":

Democrats were expected to suffer a crushing red wave in Tuesday’s midterm elections, but it never materialised. Despite polls and pundits predicting massive Republican gains, the results have been tepid at best, with control of the Senate leaning Democratic and the House teetering toward a slim Republican majority.

Many are breathing a sigh of relief, casting Trump’s election night losses as a sign that his influence over the party is waning. Indeed, candidates endorsed by former President Donald Trump fared especially poorly, with many routed by Democratic opponents in what were seen as winnable races.

But the real lesson of the 2022 midterm elections is slightly different: Trump might be over, but Trumpism had a great night. Trump the man is simply no longer the conduit of his own legacy.

The clearest sign of the health of Trumpism without Trump was the biggest blowout of the night: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s victory over Democratic challenger Charlie Crist. The Democrats and their allies in the media have done their best to cast DeSantis as a hate-mongering authoritarian, yet he won in a landslide against Crist, a notorious flip-flopper who infamously told a reporter that he did not want the votes of DeSantis supporters. DeSantis netted what may turn out to be a 15-point victory over Crist, and a 20-point lead over his own numbers from just four years ago. It was something DeSantis made a point of noting in his acceptance speech:

It’s clearly apparent that this election we will have garnered a significant number of votes from people who may not have voted for me four years ago, and I just want to let you know I am honoured to have earned your trust and your support over these four years. - RON DeSANTIS

How did he do it? Despite what the Democrats want us to believe, DeSantis is no Right-wing extremist; he cruised to victory thanks to a record of ruling over Florida for the past four years as a populist appealing to the middle and working class irrespective of their party affiliation. DeSantis has figured out something that’s lost on most politicians, that there are a lot of Americans who are culturally conservative and fiscally protectionist in both parties whom no one is speaking to. These voters are united on issues like Covid-19 lockdowns, sexualised messaging in early childhood education, and immigration, and on each of these issues, DeSantis took a big swing that signalled his willingness to represent this forgotten constituency and give them a voice.

In other words, he took Trump’s central insight, that the white working class has been abandoned by an elitist, Leftist cultural hegemony that looks down on working Americans, and he expanded it to include working-class Hispanics and working-class liberals...

 

Midterm Election 2022 Takeaways

From Ira Stoll, at Future of Capitalism, "Some votes are still being counted and the final results are not clear, but I've seen enough to draw some conclusions from yesterday's election":

Republicans can delude themselves in a bubble, too. At the top of the Wall Street Journal editorial page on November 4 was an article touting Bolduc's chances under the headline "An Upset May Be Brewing in New Hampshire." Henry Olsen of the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center, generally a shrewd analyst, had a November 7 Washington Post column predicting the Republicans would emerge with 54 Senate seats. "Inflation, crime, progressive attempts at overreach and a general sense that President Biden is not up to the job will likely deliver a surprisingly large victory to Republicans," Olsen wrote. Michael Barone, one of the most brilliant election analysts on the center-right, had a column about "poll numbers trending toward a wave victory for Republicans." I myself was holding forth in private conversation this past weekend about Tesla-driving, college-educated coastal elites underestimating the fury felt by middle-American, non-college-educated voters at high gasoline prices and at Biden's unilateral forgiveness of student loan debt. It turns out that some voters care more about abortion rights than they do about cheap gas prices.

Still more at that top link.

 

Maybe America Hasn't Suffered Enough: "The responsibility of the American public was to deliver an utter rebuke to the Left and the Democrat Party that the Left runs, and the 2022 election was not a rebuke..."

From Scott McKay, at the American Spectator, "The red wave washed ashore as a ripple, though Republicans did make progress":

It’s late as I write this, though not late enough to know how things will turn out. But there are things we can safely say just after midnight Eastern time on Tuesday as the vote counts roll in and the races get called.

One of them is that for all the anger we’ve seen evidence of from Republican and independent voters, it seems pretty clear that channeling it into positive action is something beyond the reach of the GOP’s leadership and political class.

Is that a failure of that leadership? Well, yes. It is. And we’ll spend weeks and months analyzing the fact that what was supposed to be a red wave election was more like a sea spray that might be just enough to take majorities in the House and Senate by the tiniest margins … or perhaps not even that. And we’ll be analyzing it within the context of the opportunity the GOP had in 2022 — and the party simply blew it.

This should have been a massive wave election. Given the low job approval ratings of the sitting president in his first midterm election, and given the favorable generic congressional ballot numbers, this should have been a plus-five wave in the Senate and a plus-30 wave, or bigger, in the House. It also should have resounded down to statehouses, and yet the GOP turns out, apparently, not to have been able to beat abysmal Democrat gubernatorial candidates like Katie Hobbs, Kathy Hochul, and Gretchen Whitmer.

There are so many utterly horrid Democrats who will remain in office after this election that it should be offensive to average Americans. It’s tempting to fall into the trap of believing there must be wholesale corruption in American elections, but the problem with going there is that there must be proof before it’s actionable.

Until some is presented, we’ll have to deal with something very unpleasant. Namely, here’s the truth that we on the Right are going to have to accept: the American electorate in 2022 is awful.

And the axiom about the cycle that involves weak men and tough times is a real thing, and we are in the worst quadrant of that cycle. We are still in the time in which weak men make tough times. We have not gotten to the point where tough times make tough men...

 

Larry Sabato's Final Forecast for Election 2022

Sabato's Crystal Ball ate crow in 2020. 

These guys are good, but obviously not that good. My sense is they're a little gun shy on the Senate side. Sabato's team can only muster a prediction of 51 seats for Republicans in the upper chamber. Sure, they've got the data, but who can you trust nowadays? What pollsters? I will be surprised if Fetterman wins in Pennsylvania, and perhaps the enthusiasm for Kari Lake in Arizona will have spillover effects for the Senate race there, where Republican Blake Masters is said to be less competitive than his cohort next door in the Silver State. Native son Adam Laxalt will likely beat Democrat incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto in the Nevada Senate match-up.

As for the House, it's not a question of if but how big. I have no idea, but Republicans need a pickup of just fives seats to take back the chamber. Folks have thrown out all kinds of numbers, with former House Speaker even predicting Republicans picking up at least 40 seats!

God knows who will win, literally.

See, "Final Ratings for the 2022 Election" (via Memeorandum).

2022 May Come Down to Last Gust of Political Wind

From Charlie Cook, at the Cook Political Report:

One thing on which strategists in both parties agree is that next month’s elections will feature a very high turnout level, a continuation of the last two cycles: 2018 featured the largest midterm turnout in 104 years, 2020 the biggest presidential turnout in 120 years. In recent elections it’s become a cliché for partisans to talk about the importance of mobilizing their base, yet in neither of the past two elections have they had much to worry about. This midterm doesn’t figure to end the high-turnout trend.

A hallmark of midterm elections is that those in or leaning toward the party of a sitting president are lethargic, complacent, or at least a little disappointed, and less likely to vote in the general election. True to form, that is the situation Democrats had going into this past summer. Republicans were just more motivated. That gap closed during the second half of the summer and into September. Indeed, the Fox News poll released this week shows Democrats now just as motivated as Republicans.

The extreme partisan polarization in recent years has yielded fewer “true independents,” ones who do not identify with or even lean toward either party, and fewer people voting split tickets. Indeed, few Democrats will now even consider voting for a Republican for anything, nor Republicans cast a ballot for a Democrat. With the party lines so rigorously followed, we now have higher floors and lower ceilings, meaning that in most competitive states and districts, the margins are rarely more than low- to mid-single digits and the trailing candidate usually remains within striking distance of the leader, hoping that circumstances or a key event will enable them to close the gap and surge or just edge ahead.

But just because there are fewer true independents or undecided voters in key races doesn’t mean they are any less important. Indeed, with both parties’ bases so thoroughly motivated, any meaningful growth in support has to come from those non-aligned voters in the middle.

The two closest Senate races in the country are in Nevada and Ohio...

RTWT.

 

Republicans Won’t Promise to Accept 2022 Results

This is supposedly the biggest threat to the American democracy.

Though the New York Times comes up with just 6 Republican candidates who say they won't concede if they lose. 

Hype much?

See, "These Trump-Backed Candidates Won't Promise to Accept Election Results":

Six Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in key midterm states, all backed by Donald Trump, would not commit to accepting the November outcome. Five others did not answer the question.

WASHINGTON — Nearly two years after President Donald J. Trump refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 election, some of his most loyal Republican acolytes might follow in his footsteps.

When asked, six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this year’s election results, and another five Republicans ignored or declined to answer a question about embracing the November outcome. All of them, along with many other G.O.P. candidates, have pre-emptively cast doubt on how their states count votes.

The New York Times contacted Republican and Democratic candidates or their aides in 20 key contests for governor and the Senate. All of the Democrats said, or have said publicly, that they would respect the November results — including Stacey Abrams of Georgia, who refused to concede her 2018 defeat to Brian Kemp in the state’s race for governor. Mr. Kemp, now running against her for another term, “will of course accept the outcome of the 2022 election,” said his press secretary, Tate Mitchell.

But several Republicans endorsed by Mr. Trump are hesitant to say that they will not fight the results.

Among the party’s Senate candidates, Ted Budd in North Carolina, Blake Masters in Arizona, Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska and J.D. Vance in Ohio all declined to commit to accepting the 2022 results. So did Tudor Dixon, the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, and Geoff Diehl, who won the G.O.P. primary for governor of Massachusetts this month.

The candidates and their aides offered an array of explanations. Some blamed Democratic state election officials or made unsubstantiated claims that their opponents would cheat. In Alaska, a spokesman for Ms. Tshibaka pointed to a new ranked-choice voting system that has been criticized by Republicans and already helped deliver victory to a Democrat in a House special election this year.

An aide to Ms. Dixon, Sara Broadwater, said “there’s no reason to believe” that Michigan election officials, including Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state, “are very serious about secure elections.”

To some degree, the stances by these Republican candidates — which echo Mr. Trump’s comments before the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections — may amount to political posturing, in an effort to appeal to G.O.P. voters who do not believe the former president lost in 2020. An aide to one Republican nominee insisted that the candidate would accept this year’s results, but the aide declined to be publicly identified saying so.

And unlike Mr. Trump two years ago, the candidates who suggest they might dispute the November results do not hold executive office, and lack control of the levers of government power. If any were to reject a fair defeat, they would be far less likely to ignite the kind of democratic crisis that Mr. Trump set off after his 2020 loss.

But they do have loud megaphones in a highly polarized media environment, and any unwarranted challenges from the candidates and their allies could fuel anger, confusion and misinformation.

“The danger of a Trumpist coup is far from over,” said Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who in early 2020 convened a group to brainstorm ways Mr. Trump could disrupt that year’s election. “As long as we have a significant number of Americans who don’t accept principles of democracy and the rule of law, our democracy remains in jeopardy.”

The positions of these Republican candidates also reflect how, over the last two years, some of those aligned with Mr. Trump increasingly reject the idea that it is possible for their side to lose a legitimate election.

“You accept the results of the election if the election is fair and honest,” said John Fredericks, a syndicated talk radio host who was a chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaigns in Virginia in 2016 and 2020. “If it’s not fair and honest, you don’t.”

Still, many Republican candidates, including several who have cast doubt on the 2020 outcome, said they would recognize this year’s results. Darren Bailey, the Republican nominee for governor of Illinois — who said in a June interview that he did not know if the 2020 election had been decided fairly — responded that “yes,” he would accept the 2022 result.

In Nevada, the campaign of Adam Laxalt, the Republican nominee for Senate, said he would not challenge the final results — even though Mr. Laxalt, a former state attorney general, helped lead the effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat in the state, spoke last year about plans to file lawsuits to contest the 2022 election and called voter fraud the “biggest issue” in his campaign.

“Of course he’ll accept Nevada’s certified election results, even if your failing publication won’t,” said Brian Freimuth, a spokesman for Mr. Laxalt.

How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.

And Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, who said during his successful Republican primary campaign for Senate that “we cannot move on” from the 2020 election, promised to uphold voters’ will.

“Yes, Dr. Oz will accept the result of the PA Senate race in November,” Rachel Tripp, an Oz spokeswoman, wrote in a text message.

Three other Republican Senate candidates — Herschel Walker in Georgia, Joe O’Dea in Colorado and Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska — committed to embracing their state’s election results. So did several Republicans running for governor, including Mr. Kemp, Joe Lombardo in Nevada and Christine Drazan of Oregon.

Aides to several Republican nominees for governor who have questioned the 2020 election’s legitimacy did not respond to repeated requests for comment on their own races in November. Those candidates included Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania, Kari Lake of Arizona, Tim Michels of Wisconsin and Dan Cox of Maryland.

Ms. Lake was asked in a radio interview this month whether she would concede a defeat to Katie Hobbs, her Democratic rival and Arizona’s secretary of state. “I’m not losing to Katie Hobbs,” Ms. Lake replied...

The Backlash Politics of Dobbs May Come to Haunt Republicans in November

I have to own up to it: At the time of the Court's decision in June inflation and the economy were so bad I thought the Dobbs decision would fade as an important issue for voters in the midterms. Actually, not at all. Inflation's now easing a bit --- and gas prices especially --- and we certainly aren't falling into the much predicted recession amid Federal Reserve rate hikes.

Republicans are still expected to take the House majority, but it's not likley to be a tsumami wave election.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Abortion issue has deflated Republicans’ hopes for November; question now is how badly":

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade and ending the nationwide guarantee of abortion rights achieved a goal the Republican Party had pursued for more than four decades. Now, the bill has come due, at a price much higher than many Republicans expected.

Since the ruling in June, Democrats have done significantly better than expected in special elections, culminating Tuesday with a victory in a race for a vacant congressional seat in upstate New York that strategists on both sides thought the Republican would win.

Combine those results with polls that show Democratic Senate candidates leading in a half dozen swing states plus a surge of women registering to vote this summer in several states, and you have the evidence that has caused nonpartisan analysts to drastically scale back their expectations for GOP victories this fall.

Democrats, despondent over President Biden‘s dismal job approval ratings, had feared a wipeout this fall. Now, they have a strong chance of keeping narrow control of the Senate, perhaps even adding a seat to their majority. The House still seems likely to flip to the GOP, but the prospect of Republicans sweeping to a big majority has dissipated.

The possibility of Democrats saving their current tiny majority is “not out of the question,” David Wasserman, whose forecasts for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report have a wide following in both parties, said Wednesday on Twitter.

None of that means Democrats can start popping Champagne corks — Biden remains unpopular, inflation and the economy still top voters’ list of concerns and the political climate could shift again before November. For now, however, the evidence for a resurgence of Democratic fortunes is strong.

A closer race for the House

For the House, few polls look at specific races this far in advance of the election. Instead, surveys frequently ask people which party’s candidate they would vote for if the election were held now. That question, referred to as the generic ballot, has provided a fairly reliable tool to forecast elections for many years.

Before the Supreme Court decision, Republicans had just over a two-and-a-half point lead on that question, according to the average of polls produced by the FiveThirtyEight web site. The GOP’s standing began to decline shortly after the court’s ruling, and Democrats now lead the average by about a half point. In many recent polls, the Democratic lead has been larger, ranging as high as eight points among registered voters in a recent survey by the Republican firm Echelon Insights.

Caveats: Because of gerrymandering, the overall House map tilts slightly Republican. Because of that, if the two parties were to split the nationwide vote for the House evenly, Republicans would be almost certain to take the majority. In 2020, Democrats won the overall House vote by about three percentage points, which yielded their current four-vote majority.

Moreover, the generic ballot is just that, generic. It can give a rough guide to the vote for the House nationwide, but isn’t designed to say anything about specific congressional districts. Out of the country’s 435 congressional districts, only about 50-60 are competitive. Republicans need only increase their numbers by five seats to take the majority, and Democrats are defending a lot more competitive turf than the GOP this year. The political forecasting site run by Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia lists 27 House races as tossups, including three in California. Of those, Democrats now hold 21.

Special elections this summer have bolstered the polling evidence. Before the Supreme Court decision, Republican candidates in special elections ran well ahead of the mark that former President Trump had set in their districts in 2020 — results that boosted GOP hopes for a big wave.

Since the abortion decision, the picture has flipped. In four contests this summer, Democrats consistently have out-performed what Biden did in their districts two years ago.

Abortion isn’t the only issue helping Democrats: Inflation likely peaked in June, and gas prices have dropped all summer. Biden’s job approval has rebounded a bit. Democrats succeeded this month in passing major legislation on climate change and healthcare, which could help mobilize their voters. Biden’s announcement of debt relief for millions of student-loan borrowers could similarly motivate a large Democratic constituency, although it could also rile up Republican opponents.

But abortion rights were the center of the campaign waged by Pat Ryan, the Democratic candidate in Tuesday’s New York special election, and Democratic candidates nationwide likely will copy what he did. Meantime, some Republican candidates have begun scrubbing their websites to remove previous statements supporting abortion bans.

The issue could have its strongest effect in 22 competitive districts in six states — California and Michigan, where abortion referendums will be on the ballot, and Texas, Wisconsin, Georgia and Ohio, where sweeping bans have been enacted that a majority of the state’s voters oppose, according to Natalie Jackson, director of research at the Public Religion Research Institute, who has closely studied public opinion on abortion.

Democratic advantage in the Senate

Individual candidates matter more in Senate races than in the House because voters tend to know more about them. That’s added to Republican difficulties this year.

“Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome” in Senate contests, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell ruefully noted in recent comments in his home state of Kentucky in which he sought to lower expectations for what his side could accomplish.

In Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, Republicans have picked Senate candidates backed by Trump who have significant problems.

They’re likely to do the same in New Hampshire when that state holds its primary in mid-September. The leading Republican candidate in the state, retired Gen. Don Bolduc, has defended Confederate emblems as a “symbol of hope,” fanned anti-vaccination theories and repeatedly made false claims about the 2020 election...

 

Outrage! Biden to Cancel $10,000 in Student Debt for Those Making Less Than $125,000 or Less Per Year

This is fucking outrageous.

My grad school loans are just now nearly paid off --- 23 years after I finished my Ph.D. at UCSB. Is Old Joe going to make the debt relief retroactive, for the millions upon millions of judicious and hard-working Americans who made good on the debt they took out? 

Completely un-American, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell slammed debt cancellation as "socialist."

At the Los Angeles Times, "Biden will cancel $10,000 of student debt for many borrowers":

Individuals earning less than $125,000 annually would qualify for relief and those who received Pell grants could receive an additional $10,000.

WASHINGTON — President Biden moved Wednesday to cancel $10,000 in student debt for individuals earning less than $125,000 annually while extending a pause on loan repayments for all borrowers through the end of the year, all as part of a broader effort to overhaul the federal system and ease financial burdens for the middle class.

Biden’s action will also make people who received Pell grants to help cover the cost of college eligible for up to $20,000 in loan relief. And a new income-based repayment cap will ensure borrowers pay no more than 5% of their monthly income toward their undergraduate loans as long as they aren’t behind on payments. Some analysts believe that change may prove even more significant than the debt forgiveness.

Lamenting that “an entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt” because the cost of higher education has skyrocketed in recent years, Biden described his action as a matter of economic fairness that will “provide more breathing room for people” and boost America’s competitiveness.

“My plan is responsible and fair. It focuses the benefit on middle-class and working families. It helps both current and future borrowers and it will fix a badly broken system,” Biden said. “It’s about opportunity. It’s about giving people a fair shot.”

The overall package, which Biden said will benefit 43 million Americans, is a win for activists who have pushed for such action as a matter of economic fairness. But the amount of debt Biden has decided to erase is less than many activists had sought, complicating an issue the White House hopes will boost Democrats in the midterm election and drawing criticism from both parties. While progressives had hoped Biden would go even further, Republicans and some moderate Democrats bristled at the price-tag, asserting that spending an estimated $400-600 billion to cover the forgiven loans would exacerbate inflation.

“This announcement is gallingly reckless — with the national debt approaching record levels and inflation surging, it will make both worse,” said Maya McGuinness, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington organization that opposes the student loan forgiveness program.

Biden, who returned from a two-week vacation Wednesday morning, had vowed to act before Aug. 31, when the latest pandemic-driven moratorium on federal student loan payments runs out. He said this extension would be the last one and that payments would resume in January 2023.

“It’s time for the payments to resume,” he said.

President Trump first suspended payments in March 2020, and Biden has granted four extensions. So far, the suspensions have cost the federal government more than $100 billion. More than 40 million Americans owe a collective $1.6 trillion in federal student loans.

A fight over student loans could slow the Democrats’ recent momentum and threaten their coalition’s cohesion. The president and his party have seen their poll numbers rise in recent months, buoyed by a series of events that have altered the political landscape in their favor.

The Supreme Court’s late June decision overturning Roe vs. Wade alienated women across political lines. The high-profile hearings further illuminating Trump’s key role inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection received broad television coverage and hardened perceptions of Republicans as the more extreme party. And Democrats’ passage of three major bills — a climate, prescription drug and tax overhaul, new funding to boost domestic manufacturing of microchips and enhanced healthcare for veterans exposed to toxic chemicals on the battlefield — has shown the public that Biden is far from a do-nothing president.

Before the abortion decision, the Jan. 6 hearings and the flurry of new legislation, some senior Biden aides believed significant student loan debt forgiveness was one of the few measures that could excite the Democratic base and help the party survive a tough election cycle. Despite public and private pressure from Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Biden has long questioned whether forgiving as much as $50,000 in debt would be prudent.

Schumer spoke by phone with Biden on Tuesday night “to make a final push to the president to cancel as much student loan debt as he can,” according to a Democrat familiar with the conversation. On Wednesday, Schumer and Warren sought to quell criticism from the left, issuing a joint statement heralding Biden’s final decision as a historic first step.

“With the flick of a pen, President Biden has taken a giant step forward in addressing the student debt crisis by cancelling significant amounts of student debt for millions of borrowers. The positive impacts of this move will be felt by families across the country, particularly in minority communities, and is the single most effective action that the President can take on his own to help working families and the economy,” their statement said. “No president or Congress has done more to relieve the burden of student debt and help millions of Americans make ends meet. Make no mistake, the work — our work — will continue as we pursue every available path to address the student debt crisis, help close the racial wealth gap for borrowers, and keep our economy growing.”

Some activists also cheered the announcement. “Today, with President Biden’s announcement, 12 million American borrowers have had their educational debts erased,” said Melissa Byrne, executive director of We the 45 Million, a group that advocates for student debt forgiveness. “This is a historic first step — establishing the clear authority that the president has to cancel student debt — but this should just be the beginning.”

But key Democratic constituencies, including young voters, Black Americans and civil rights groups like the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, have pushed hard for more forgiveness, and may be disappointed.

Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, had blasted Biden in a statement Tuesday, stating that if reports of the president having settled on $10,000 in debt forgiveness are correct, “we’ve got a problem,” likening the decision to past federal policies that have been detrimental to Black people...

I took out zero loans for my Bachelor's degree. I worked, and hard. At Fresno State, where I took my B.A. political science, I worked 35 hours a week pumping gas at the local Chevon station, not far from my dad's house. It was 2:00 to 9:00pm Sundays through Thurdays, and 4:00pm to Midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. I started that job at $4.25 miniumum wage, only getting bumped once with a raise to $4.75. On my days off I'd stay on campus all day, after classes, going to the cafeteria, the library, and the student union to hang out and study. My time was completely taken up and I had little for nightlife. I met my future wife in my last year, and she moved to Santa Barbara with me (before we were married) after I was accepted into the Ph.D. program. 

I paid my dues. 

In graduate school I ended up taking out about $65,000 to $70,000 total. I could have borrowed much, much more, but I was careful. I worked weekends (again at a Chevron station in downtown Santa Barbara) my first year in the program. I could've borrowed more, but my (future) wife and I didn't want to get too deep into debt. We had no idea I'd get a full four-year ride starting in my second year, the U.C. Regents Fellowship, which paid for everything. That was merit based, by the way. I fucking earned that fellowship by kicking ass that first year. I have great memories and wouldn't take back a thing.

I know, though, my story is like so many others, folks who themselves and their families scrimped and saved just for the chance to attend college, much less a Ph.D program. *That's the American way.* If Republicans don't campaigh the hell out of this issue they're bloody stupid. LOTS of folks will be pissed that their working- and middle-class tax dollars are going toward debt bailouts for college graduates who make more than they do, and will make way more in the future. 

It's class warfare. It's a fundamental violation of society's social contract, and bitterly unfair. 

Still more at that top link.

In Wyoming, Likely End of Cheney Dynasty Will Close a Political Era (VIDEO)

Stick a fork in her. She's done.

At the New York Times, "If Representative Liz Cheney loses her primary on Tuesday, as is widely expected, the Cowboy State’s conservative tilt will take on a harder edge":

CODY, Wyo. — At an event last month honoring the 14,000 Japanese Americans who were once held at the Heart Mountain internment camp near here, Representative Liz Cheney was overcome with emotions, and a prolonged standing ovation wasn’t the only reason.

Her appearance — with her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as former Senator Alan Simpson and the children of Norman Mineta, a Democratic congressman turned transportation secretary who was sent to the camp when he was 10 — was part of a groundbreaking for the new Mineta-Simpson Institute. Ms. Cheney was moved, she said, by the presence of the survivors and by their enduring commitment to the country that imprisoned them during World War II.

There was something else, though, that got to the congresswoman during the bipartisan ceremony with party elders she was raised to revere. “It was just a whole combination of emotion,” she recalled in a recent interview.

As Ms. Cheney faces a near-certain defeat on Tuesday in her House primary, it is the likely end of the Cheneys’ two-generation dynasty in Wyoming as well as the passing of a less tribal and more clubby and substance-oriented brand of politics.

“We were a very powerful delegation, and we worked with the other side, that was key, because you couldn’t function if you didn’t,” recalled Mr. Simpson, now 90, fresh off being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and as tart-tongued as ever about his ancestral party. “My dad was senator and a governor, and if I ran again today as a Republican I’d get my ass beat — it’s not about heritage.”

He was elected to the Senate in 1978, the same year that Mr. Cheney won Wyoming’s at-large House seat, and they worked closely together, two Republicans battling on behalf of the country’s least populated state in an era when Democrats always controlled at least one chamber of Congress.

It’s not mere clout, however, that traditional Wyoming Republicans are pining for as they consider their gilded past and ponder the state’s less certain political and economic future. Before Tuesday’s election, which is likely to propel Harriet Hageman, who is backed by former President Donald J. Trump, to the House, the nostalgia in the state is running deeper than the Buffalo Bill Reservoir.

Mr. Cheney and Mr. Simpson were not only in the leadership of their respective chambers in the 1980s; they, along with Senator Malcolm Wallop, a Yale-educated cold warrior whose grandfather served in both the British House of Lords and the Wyoming Legislature, got along well and often appeared together as a delegation in a sort of road show across the sprawling state (“A small town with long streets,” as the Wyoming saying goes).

Even headier was the administration of President George Bush. Mr. Cheney became defense secretary, and his wife, Lynne, served as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, while Mr. Simpson was both the second-ranking Senate Republican and one of the president’s closest friends. On top of that, the secretary of state at the time, James A. Baker III, spent summers on his Wyoming ranch, meaning two of the country’s top national security officials could be found doing unofficial promotional work for the state’s tourism industry.

“You’d have Army choppers snatching Cheney and Baker from fishing holes,” recalled Rob Wallace, who was Mr. Wallop’s chief of staff.

As conservative as the state was on the national level — Lyndon B. Johnson is the only Democrat to carry Wyoming in the past 70 years — the Wyoming Republican delegation worked effectively with two well-regarded Democratic governors in that same period, Ed Herschler and Mike Sullivan.

Now, Ms. Cheney hardly even speaks to the two other Wyomingites in Congress — Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, both Republicans — and has little contact with Gov. Mark Gordon. Ms. Lummis has endorsed Ms. Hageman. But Mr. Barrasso and Mr. Gordon, who are mainline Republicans in the Cheney tradition, have sought to maintain neutrality in hopes of avoiding Mr. Trump’s wrath.

“They’ve got to make their own choices and live with the choices that they make,” Ms. Cheney said about the two men, before adding: “There are too many people who think that somebody else will fix the problem, that we can stay on the sidelines and Trump will fade.”

Asked about the Cheney legacy in Wyoming, Mr. Barrasso and Mr. Gordon both declined to comment...

 

Search of Trump’s Home Roils 2022 Midterms, 2024 Presidential Race

Yeah, it's big. There was virtually unanimous outrage on Twitter last night (follow scroll down here). Even some Democrats see the threat to republican democracy. 

At the Wall Street Journal, "Many Republicans denounce FBI raid on former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence as politically motivated":

WASHINGTON—The FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home rallied many prominent Republicans around the former president and could shift the political course of both the midterm elections for control of Congress and the 2024 presidential race.

While many details of the FBI’s investigation remain unknown, the developments both challenge and underscore Mr. Trump’s hold on the GOP, just as he is publicly considering a third run for the White House. Many Republicans, including potential presidential rivals, denounced the search, casting it as a politically driven action by the Biden administration, while others demanded more details from the Justice Department but stopped short of criticizing its motives.

“This is a brazen weaponization of the FBI by Biden’s DOJ against his political opponent,” tweeted Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.), a member of the GOP leadership, reflecting the stance of many House Republicans.

People familiar with the matter said the search was part of an investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified information. Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, who was present during the search, said that federal agents “seized paper.”

The White House didn’t get any advance notice of the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, an administration official said.

The Justice Department has been looking into the former president’s handling of official records and his actions around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Monday’s search is separate from the Jan. 6 investigation, the people familiar with the probe said. Mr. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and casts the investigations as part of a long-running campaign by Democrats.

People close to Mr. Trump said the search could further motivate him to announce a run for president in 2024 before the midterm elections.

Shortly after midnight, Mr. Trump posted a campaign-style video on his TruthSocial account that teased a possible campaign. “We are a nation that has become a joke … but soon we will have greatness again.” It ends with an on-screen message: “The best is yet to come.”

Some GOP lawmakers, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) have been pushing Mr. Trump to hold off on any announcement until after the election, to not upset the party’s chances of taking back the House. While Mr. Trump remains a powerful motivator of Republican voters, he repels many swing voters, and party leaders have focused their midterms pitch on the economy and inflation. Republicans are seen as heavily favored to win back the House, while the Senate is seen as a tossup.

Polls show Mr. Trump as the top GOP candidate in a hypothetical 2024 presidential field, and he easily won a straw poll at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference. “We may have to do it again,” he said in a speech Saturday at the gathering.

Mr. McCarthy said late Monday that “the Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization” and pledged to investigate Attorney General Merrick Garland and the department if Republicans take power.

Democrats have defended the raid. “No person is above the law, not even a former president of the United States,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) on NBC’s “Today Show.”

House Republican leaders will have a chance to take the temperature of the conference at a previously scheduled members-only call on Tuesday that was set up to discuss the Senate-passed climate and health bill. Members of the Republican Study Committee, made up of House conservatives, are scheduled to have dinner with Mr. Trump on Tuesday night at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club.

The members-only call is shaping as a proving ground for Mr. McCarthy, who is in line for the House speakership next year if Republicans regain control. Mr. McCarthy needs to show that he can be tough on the issue to respond to the restive conservative wing of his base, a House Republican said. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.) suggested this week on “The War Room” podcast, broadcast by Trump ally Stephen Bannon, that Mr. McCarthy shouldn’t be speaker.

A Republican takeover of the House in the November midterm elections would give them subpoena powers in 2023 and the ability to create committees and lead investigations. Many Republicans were already planning to investigate Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and said following the search of Mr. Trump’s home that they would hold hearings on the FBI’s actions as well.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is increasingly seen by many Republicans nationally as a potential Trump alternative, joined in the condemnation. The raid “is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regime’s political opponents,” he said.

While some rivals were quick to defend Mr. Trump, the developments also underscored what they see as his vulnerability as a deeply divisive figure in American politics. He drew a record number of votes for an incumbent U.S. president in 2020, but lost by about seven million votes to President Biden.

“Other Republican leaders will see him as vulnerable,” said GOP donor Dan Eberhart. “There is now blood in the water.” He said that could give added reason for potential 2024 candidates, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Vice President Mike Pence and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, to look at the race...

John Eastman Was Always Looking for Election Fraud, and Looking to Get Paid

I've met this guy, years ago at the David Horowitz retreat at the Terranea, on the Palos Verdes pennisula.

He's not as he first appears, not be a long (money) shot.

At the New York Times, "Trump Lawyer Proposed Challenging Georgia Senate Elections in Search of Fraud":

SCOOP: John Eastman sent an email to Giuliani two weeks after Jan. 6 arguing they should sue in Georgia to keep searching for the fraud his email acknowledged they had failed to find - and also sought $270k in payments @lukebroadwater https://t.co/z88H3qqUef

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 4, 2022

On the day of President Biden’s inauguration, John Eastman suggested looking for voting irregularities in Georgia — and asked for help being paid the $270,000 he billed the Trump campaign.

John Eastman, the conservative lawyer whose plan to block congressional certification of the 2020 election failed in spectacular fashion on Jan. 6, 2021, sent an email two weeks later arguing that pro-Trump forces should sue to keep searching for the supposed election fraud he acknowledged they had failed to find.

On Jan. 20, 2021, hours after President Biden’s inauguration, Mr. Eastman emailed Rudolph W. Giuliani, former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, proposing that they challenge the outcome of the runoff elections in Georgia for two Senate seats that had been won on Jan. 5 by Democrats.

“A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud, and this would be a way to gather proof,” Mr. Eastman wrote in the previously undisclosed email, which also went to others, including a top Trump campaign adviser. “If we get proof of fraud on Jan. 5, it will likely also demonstrate the fraud on Nov. 3, thereby vindicating President Trump’s claims and serving as a strong bulwark against Senate impeachment trial.”

The email, which was reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who worked on the Trump campaign at the time, is the latest evidence that even some of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters knew they had not proven their baseless claims of widespread voting fraud — but wanted to continue their efforts to delegitimize the outcome even after Mr. Biden had taken office.

Mr. Eastman’s message also underscored that he had not taken on the work of keeping Mr. Trump in office just out of conviction: He asked for Mr. Giuliani’s help in collecting on a $270,000 invoice he had sent the Trump campaign the previous day for his legal services.

The charges included $10,000 a day for eight days of work in January 2021, including the two days before Jan. 6 when Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump, during meetings in the Oval Office, sought unsuccessfully to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to go along with the plan to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6. (Mr. Eastman appears never to have been paid.)

A lawyer for Mr. Eastman did not respond to a request for comment...